Phaedrus
Plato c. 370 BCE
A conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus examines love and the art of speaking well. Beside a stream outside Athens, Socrates pictures the soul as a chariot pulled by two very different horses.
135 pages 2h 38m reading time
- One of Plato's best-loved dialogues, and one of the founding works of Western thinking about love, beauty, and good speaking.
- Argues that love can be a kind of divine madness, a gift that stirs the soul to remember the true beauty it glimpsed before birth and to grow back its wings.
- Argues that writing weakens memory and cannot answer questions the way a living teacher can, an early warning that still comes up in debates about new technology.
- Its picture of love as a path upward toward beauty and truth shaped later ideas of spiritual love, from thinkers of the Renaissance to the Romantic poets.
- Its critique of writing became a key text for modern philosophers, most famously Jacques Derrida in his essay "Plato's Pharmacy."
Socrates leaves the city
It is the only Plato dialogue set in the countryside, where Socrates admits trees teach him nothing.
A speech by a rival
It opens with a love speech credited to Lysias, a famous speechwriter, though Plato may have written it himself.
Wrongly called his first
Ancient readers thought it was Plato's first dialogue, but scholars now date it to his middle or later years.
Lost to the West
Western Europe could not read it for centuries until Renaissance scholars translated it from Greek into Latin.
Translated from Greek by Benjamin Jowett