Phaedrus Themes

In Phaedrus, the ancient philosopher Socrates uses an extended metaphor to describe the human soul as “a winged pair of horses and their charioteer.” He explains that, while gods’ horses are of good stock, everyone else’s “horses” are of mixed stock—one of the horses is noble and good, while the other has the opposite nature. “Perfectly winged” souls sail above the earth and govern the cosmos, but souls who have lost their wings fall…

Phaedrus, a young student of rhetoric, has just come from hearing famous speechwriter Lysias deliver a speech at a friend’s house. When he and philosopher Socrates later cross paths, Socrates asks to hear Lysias’s speech from Phaedrus. In his speech, Lysias makes a sensible, straightforward argument that young men should resist the advances of men who are in love with them, preferring relationships with men who don’t love them, since the latter aren’t driven…

Near the end of Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus have a short but fascinating exchange on the subject of the “propriety and impropriety [of] … writing.” Writing things down wasn’t common even among learned circles in classical Greece; in this discussion, in fact, it’s regarded as an ambivalent new technology. While Plato doesn’t mean to dismiss writing as a worthless practice, he uses Socrates’s arguments to show that, in the pursuit of wisdom, writing has…