Phaedrus

The Phaedrus is a Platonic dialogue from the middle-late phase of Plato's output, probably composed around 370 BC, roughly at the same time as the Republic and the Symposium. Although it seems mainly concerned with love, the conversation also turns to rhetoric and how it should be practised, to the nature of the soul, to madness and divine inspiration, and even to metempsychosis, the Greek belief in reincarnation.

The scene is set on the outskirts of Athens. Phaedrus has just heard a speech on love by the orator Lysias at the house of Epicrates, and Socrates, eager for discourse, walks out with him into the countryside so that he can repeat it. Beneath a plane tree beside a stream, the dialogue unfolds through speeches and replies. Unlike many other dialogues, there is no intermediate narrator: the voices of Socrates and Phaedrus come to us directly.

The argument begins with three speeches. The first, by Lysias, holds that it is better to favour a non-lover than a lover, since the lover is out of his mind. Socrates' first speech, presented as superior, distinguishes between desire guided by reason and desire that runs unchecked. After a pause in which Socrates insists that love is a god and cannot be bad, he delivers a second speech arguing that a certain madness, the kind that comes from the gods, is a source of great goods. He identifies four forms of divine madness: prophetic, from Apollo; ritual or initiatory, from Dionysus; poetic, from the Muses; and erotic, from Aphrodite and Eros.

From this emerges the famous allegory of the winged chariot: the soul is a charioteer driving two horses, one noble and one unruly. Winged souls follow the gods on their journey toward truth; those that lose their wings fall to earth and pass into different lives according to how much truth they have beheld, with nine possible destinies. Sustained philosophical living over three lives allows the soul to regain its wings.

The second half turns to rhetoric. Socrates argues that good speech requires knowing the nature of souls and of things, and he criticises rhetoricians who teach formulas without foundation. As an example he cites Pericles, who was trained by Anaxagoras. Finally the dialogue considers writing through the myth of Theuth and King Thamus: the written letter does not provide true wisdom but an external reminder that may weaken memory. This critique, put into Socrates' mouth, has often been read as one of the earliest reflections on written communication.

The Phaedrus has had lasting influence in philosophy, for its theory of the soul and of knowledge, and in literature, for its vivid descriptions of falling in love and its image of the winged chariot, much cited in the Western tradition.