A dialogue on love, madness, and rhetoric between Socrates and Phaedrus, set beside a riverbank, that turns into an argument for spoken dialectic over written speech.
The Phaedrus opens with a chance meeting outside the walls of Athens: Phaedrus has just heard a speech by the orator Lysias arguing that a boy should favor a non-lover over a lover, and Socrates persuades him to recite it as they walk to a shady spot by the Ilissus river. What follows is not a single argument but three speeches on love and desire, framed by a broader inquiry into rhetoric, the soul, and writing itself.
Socrates first improvises a speech matching Lysias's cynical premise, then abruptly reverses himself, calling that view impious, and delivers a second, mythic speech in praise of erotic madness. This is the dialogue's most famous stretch: the soul is likened to a charioteer driving two horses, one obedient and one unruly, and the whole company of souls is pictured following the gods in a heavenly procession before falling to earth and forgetting what they once beheld. Love, on this account, is the soul's recollection of beauty itself, glimpsed before birth, and the lover's task is to master the unruly horse rather than be dragged into shameful desire.
The second half of the dialogue turns from love to rhetoric. Socrates and Phaedrus examine what makes a speech good, concluding that a real art of persuasion requires knowing the truth of the subject and the nature of the soul being persuaded, not merely tricks of probability of the sort taught by Tisias and Gorgias. The dialogue closes with the Egyptian myth of Theuth and King Thamus, in which writing is condemned as a drug that produces the appearance of wisdom and weakens memory, because a written text cannot answer questions or defend itself the way a living exchange between two people can. The Phaedrus matters because it fuses a psychology of desire, a theory of divine madness and poetic inspiration, and a sustained critique of writing into one conversation, making it one of Plato's most literary and self-reflective works.
“My dear Phaedrus, where are you off to, and where have you come from?”
— Phaedrus · read this chapter →
“Every body that is moved from outside itself is soulless, but a body moved from within, from itself, is ensouled, since this is the nature of soul.”
— Phaedrus · read this chapter →
“Now Zeus, the great leader in heaven, drives a winged chariot and goes first, setting all things in order and taking care of them.”
— Phaedrus · read this chapter →
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, through neglect of memory, since, trusting in writing, they will call things to mind no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks”
— Phaedrus · read this chapter →
It is a dialogue between Socrates and the young Phaedrus that examines love, the nature of the soul, and the art of rhetoric, moving from a critique of a speech by Lysias into Socrates's own mythic account of erotic madness and finally into a discussion of writing versus spoken dialectic.
Socrates pictures the soul as a charioteer driving two horses, one obedient to reason and one unruly and driven by appetite, to explain the inner struggle a lover feels between shame and desire when he sees a beautiful boy.
In the myth of Theuth and King Thamus near the end of the dialogue, Socrates argues that writing is a false remedy for memory: because a written text cannot answer questions or defend itself, it produces only the appearance of wisdom, whereas living dialectic planted in a soul can grow and respond.
Phaedrus is the young Athenian companion of Socrates who has just heard and admired a speech by the orator Lysias; his enthusiasm for that speech is the occasion for the whole conversation.
Socrates first matches Lysias's argument that a non-lover is preferable to a lover, then reverses course, calling the view impious, and delivers a mythic speech defending erotic madness as potentially divine rather than a mere disorder.
Love of a beautiful person is treated as the soul's recollection of beauty itself, seen before birth, so that erotic desire, properly disciplined, can turn a person toward philosophy rather than away from it.
Alcibiades 1 · Alcibiades 2 · Apology · Charmides · Cleitophon · Cratylus · Critias · Crito · Epinomis · Euthydemus · Euthyphro · Gorgias