This is a book about Plato's Phaedrus, nothing more; but that is quite a lot. I shall dispense with a long preamble as to its contents. Rather, my way of orienting readers to Plato's concerns in this dialogue, and to my own in writing about it, will be to take them (in my opening chapter) for an extended tour of the dialogue's scenic beauties. Like all readers of this work, we shall learn something about love, and something about rhetoric, and will consider how the two are connected. In addition, I shall have much to say about Plato's use of myth, his writing of philosophic dialogues, and his mode of psychology – topics which the dialogue strikingly exemplifies.

However, I shall not – or not often – be concerned in this book to map the position of the Phaedrus against the landmarks provided by other dialogues, nor to consider its place in Plato's philosophic development. I am out to achieve something different: to live for a while within the environment of a single dialogue; and not just to survey its acres and mend its stiles, but to sit on the grass and breathe its special atmosphere. By this means I hope to gain a better understanding of the man's philosophy – a better feel for it – at least in so far as it shows through this dialogue; and so to bring back a souvenir for others that they may think worth keeping. But readers must judge this for themselves.

Socrates' preamble

The first thing I wish to note about Socrates' mythic hymn is that it does not begin mythically. Rather, Socrates opens with a catalogue of the benefits historically attributed to madness, in order to controvert a premiss on which the nonlover's argument crucially depends: that madness is simply bad (244a5–8). Socrates, by contrast, has now seen that in certain circumstances madness can achieve beneficial results that would be beyond the reach of sobriety. In particular, he will contend that a philosophic life can best bloom when rooted in what he calls the ‘divine’ madness of love, as opposed to a merely ‘mortal’ self-control (256e3–5). It is to support this contention that he will call upon the resources of myth; but first he enumerates three established examples, in domains other than the erotic, of what he means: the prophetic madness of the Delphic Pythia and the priestesses at Dodona, among others, by whose inspired counsel all Hellas has often regulated its decisions for the better (a madness to be contrasted with the sober interpretation of bird-flight and other signs taken as portents of the future) (244a8–d5); the ‘telestic’ madness of those officiants who, we are told, ritually purified great families in the past of their ancestral crimes and ‘diseases’: what we might call ‘faith-healing’ (244d5–245a1); and the poetic madness of those who are seized by the Muses and truly inspired to glorify the deeds of past heroes – as contrasted with the uninspired hack who thinks technique alone will make a poet of him (245a1–8).

Back to the orators

In the preceding chapter, I began considering Lysias' speech as a sample of rhetoric but ended by looking on Socrates' speeches as a swatch of philosophic rather than rhetorical method, and setting it against the whole cloth of the dialogue rather than of its critique of rhetoric alone. In this I followed in Socrates' footsteps. But this course strikes Phaedrus as beginning to drift. He agrees that Socrates has given a fair account of dialectical method; but is unsure of what has happened to the account of rhetorical method which they originally set out to provide (266c7–9). He is right, in a sense, to bring Socrates up short in this way; for Socrates has apparently digressed from examining the love-speeches purely for their rhetorical qualities in order to dwell on a dialectical technique that his own speeches exemplified, and even that only ‘by chance’ (265c9).

But what Phaedrus misses is, as it were, the drift of Socrates' drifting; for Socrates has been illustrating the fact that whereas the rhetorician has two voices – that of teacher, and that of practitioner – the philosopher has only one. In other words: despite the stylistic disparity of his poetic speeches on love and their subsequent appearance as examples in his sober account of dialectical method, Socrates speaks on both occasions with a view to assessing what is important for the proper conduct of the philosophic life.

The place of beauty

Socrates' declared purpose in telling his eschatological myth, as we have just seen, is to make a place for the passion of love – hence for the contingency of physical beauty – in the philosophic life. But it is important to see that he does not, as it were, clear a space for it on a neglected shelf in philosophy's larder; rather, he portrays the life of philosophic lovers as the fullest realisation – or at the very least as one of the fullest realisations – of the philosophic life in general. Thus we recall that he described the highest of the nine ranks of life as that of ‘a seeker after wisdom or beauty, a follower of the Muses and a lover’ (248d3–4) – a life he subsequently glosses as that of ‘one who has practised philosophy without guile, or combined his love for a boy with the practice of philosophy’ (249a1–2). And at the close of the speech he asserts that his exemplary pair of philosophic lovers have gained a good ‘than which neither human moderation nor divine madness can furnish a greater for mankind’ (256b5–6). In chapter four I indicated that in his palinode, by contrast with the speeches of the non-lovers, Socrates achieves an integrated account of the conflicting impulses in the soul, learning from and harmonising all its voices. That psychic harmony should be the philosophic ideal comes as no surprise to any reader of the Republic; yet all the same, the integration is here achieved within the limits of a purely erotic context.

Theme or epilogue?

In this final chapter I return to the vantage-point of the first and assess the dialogue as a whole, knitting together its various concerns and indicating where and why the seams are meant to show. In my opening chapter I approached this task by considering Socrates' and Phaedrus' attention to their physical environment, which inaugurates both halves of the work, and by this means I oriented the reader towards what was to follow. In this chapter I will look back on the ground traversed through the filter of the critique of writing which is the final topic of their conversation. Apart from its connection with the dialogue as a whole, Socrates' devaluation of the written word in relation to the spoken in the closing pages of the dialogue has special relevance for the entire Platonic corpus, because he finds fault with all forms of written discourse, the philosophic included; therefore, apparently, with Plato's dialogues also (see 276bl–277a5). And this passage of the Phaedrus (together with a stretch of the less securely Platonic Seventh Letter, 341b3–345a1) is the major source for Plato's view on the matter.

We recall that Socrates announced his critique of rhetoric as an investigation into the conditions not only of good speaking but also of good writing (259e1–2). His general recommendations for rhetorical reform would apply to both; but with the main argument of his critique complete he broaches the special characteristics of writing as an additional matter (at 274b6). What Socrates says about writing is less clearly an indictment than a warning of potential danger; he stamps its packing-case not ‘radioactive’ but ‘volatile’ – to be handled with care.

From rhetoric to erotics

In my account of Socrates' critique of rhetoric, I have been at pains to show that the limitations of his arguments are as thematically important to the concerns of the dialogue as what can positively be claimed for them. We have seen – most especially in chapter two – that although Plato can argue the orators into formally adopting dialectical method in order to attain the grasp of truth required for their art, he cannot by discursive argument alone compel their commitment to that structure of goals, and that choice of life, which gives dialectical method its meaning for him. At some point, they must find it in themselves to either follow or reject the example that he sets. Not, however, that Plato is powerless to influence this impulse of attraction or disgust in those whom he would bend towards the philosophic life; rather, he must call upon resources other than those of formal argument, and paint a picture of the alternative choices of life from the full palette of colours at his imaginative disposal.

Now, I would be working against everything I have argued so far if, in turning from the critique of rhetoric to the speeches on love, I were to make it seem that I am about to forsake the black-and-white of philosophy for the technicolor of poetry.

Methodology

Cicero, Academica 1.43–6

(1) Then Varro said: ‘It is now up to you, as one who deviates from the philosophy of the ancients and approves the innovations of Arcesilaus, to explain what the schism was and why it took place, so that we can see whether your desertion is adequately justified.’ (2) I [Cicero] then said: ‘It was with Zeno, so we have heard, that Arcesilaus began his entire struggle, not out of obstinacy or desire for victory – in my opinion at least – but because of the obscurity of the things which had brought Socrates to an admission of ignorance; and before him already, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and almost all the ancients, who said that nothing could be grasped or cognized or known, saying that the senses are restricted, the mind weak, the course of life short, and that (to quote Democritus) truth has been submerged in an abyss, with everything in the grip of opinions and conventions, nothing left for truth and everything in turn wrapped in darkness. (3) So Arcesilaus was in the practice of denying that anything could be known, not even the one thing Socrates had left for himself – the knowledge that he knew nothing: such was the extent of the obscurity in which everything lurked, on his assessment, and there was nothing which could be discerned or understood.

Scepticism

Diogenes Laertius 9.61–2 (Caizzi 1A, 6, 7, 9)

(1) Pyrrho of Elis was the son of Pleistarchus, as Diocles also records. According to Apollodorus in his Chronicles, he was first a painter, and was instructed by Bryson son [or pupil?] of Stilpo, as Alexander says in his Successions. Later he studied under Anaxarchus and accompanied him everywhere, with the result that he even associated with the Naked Philosophers in India and with the Magi. (2) In consequence he seems to have practised philosophy in a most noble way, introducing that form of it which consists in non-cognition and suspension of judgement… (3) For he would maintain that nothing is honourable or base, or just or unjust, and that likewise in all cases nothing exists in truth; and that convention and habit are the basis of everything that men do; for each thing is no more this than this. (4) He followed these principles in his actual way of life, avoiding nothing and taking no precautions, facing everything as it came, wagons, precipices, dogs, and entrusting nothing whatsoever to his sensations. But he was looked after, as Antigonus of Carystus reports, by his disciples who accompanied him. Aenesidemus, however, says that although he practised philosophy on the principles of suspension of judgement, he did not act carelessly in the details of daily life. He lived to be nearly ninety.

Why to suspend judgement

Diogenes Laertius 9.106–7

(1) Aenesidemus, in the first of his Pyrrhonist discourses, says that Pyrrho determines nothing in doctrinaire fashion, because of the opposition of arguments, but follows appearances. He says the same in his Against wisdom and On inquiry … (2) Hence according to the Sceptics it is what appears that serves as a criterion, as Aenesidemus also says … (3) As end the Sceptics name suspension of judgement, upon which freedom from disturbance follows like a shadow, as the followers of Timon and Aenesidemus put it.

Diogenes Laertius 9.78

Pyrrhonist discourse is a kind of recollection of appearances, or of ideas of any kind, on the basis of which they are all brought into confrontation with each other and, when compared, are found to present much disparity and confusion. This is what Aenesidemus says in his Outline introduction to Pyrrhonism.

Photius, Library 169b 18–170b3

(1) I read Aenesidemus' eight Pyrrhonist discourses. The overall aim of the book is to establish that there is no firm basis for cognition, either through sense-perception, or indeed through thought. (2) Consequently, he says, neither the Pyrrhonists nor the others know the truth in things; but the philosophers of other persuasions, as well as being ignorant in general, and wearing themselves out uselessly and expending themselves in ceaseless torments, are also ignorant of the very fact that they have cognition of none of the things of which they think that they have gained cognition.

THE SCHOOLS

If Aristotle could have returned to Athens in 272 b.c., on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he would hardly have recognized it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and researched for much of his life. He would have found there new philosophies far more diverse and more self-consciously systematic than those on offer in his own day. Some of the central issues, and much of the technical terminology in which they were being discussed, would have seemed unfamiliar.

How had this change come about? Aristotle might have perceived it as one aspect of the radical transformations effected throughout the greater part of the known world by the conquests of his delinquent pupil Alexander the Great. Alexander's hellenization of the east Mediterranean and beyond had generated a new excitement about Greek culture among people with primarily non-Greek backgrounds. For those who were attracted by Greek philosophy in particular, Athens was their natural Mecca, both because it still housed the schools founded by Plato and Aristotle, and because such literary masterpieces as Plato's Socratic dialogues, which will have afforded many their first taste of the subject, lent Athens an unfading glamour as the true home of philosophical enlightenment. Thus in the new Hellenistic age philosophy flourished at Athens as never before. And many of her new breed of philosophers hailed from the eastern Mediterranean region.

The philosophical curriculum

Aetius 1, Preface 2 (SVF 2.35)

The Stoics said that wisdom is scientific knowledge of the divine and the human, and that philosophy is the practice of expertise in utility. Virtue singly and at its highest is utility, and virtues, at their most generic, are triple – the physical one, the ethical one, and the logical one. For this reason philosophy also has three parts – physics, ethics and logic. Physics is practised whenever we investigate the world and its contents, ethics is our engagement with human life, and logic our engagement with discourse, which they also call dialectic.

Diogenes Laertius 7.39–41

(1) They [the Stoics] say that philosophical discourse has three parts, one of these being physical, another ethical, and another logical. This division was first made by Zeno of Citium in his book On discourse, and also by Chrysippus in his On discourse book 1 and in his Physics book 1 … and by Diogenes of Babylon and Posidonius. (2) Apollodorus calls these parts ‘topics’, Chrysippus and Eudromus ‘species’, and others ‘genera’. (3) They compare philosophy to a living being, likening logic to bones and sinews, ethics to the fleshier parts, and physics to the soul. They make a further comparison to an egg: logic is the outside, ethics what comes next, and physics the innermost parts; or to a fertile field: the surrounding wall corresponds to logic, its fruit to ethics, and its land or trees to physics; or to a city which is well fortified and governed according to reason.

This work is a collection and discussion of the primary sources for Hellenistic philosophy. By presenting the material both in its original languages and in translation, we aim to give classicists and philosophers direct access to the surviving evidence on the Stoics, Epicureans, Pyrrhonists and Academics, whose thought dominated philosophy in the three centuries after the death of Aristotle in 322 b.c. There has been a remarkable upsurge of interest in these philosophies over the last few decades, but up to now the original texts have not been collected in any single book with the comprehensiveness and detail we have sought to provide.

In its scope and purpose our book closely resembles G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (ed. 2, 1983), but we divide the material between two volumes. Vol. 1 is entirely in English, offering translations of texts, accompanied by philosophical commentary. It is presented in a manner which we hope will make it usable by those with no historical background in the classical world. With its glossary and set of indexes, it is designed to be entirely self-sufficient. But the expectation is that our classical readers will use it in conjunction with vol. 2. This latter supplies (sometimes in longer excerpts) the texts translated in vol. 1, together with critical apparatus, information on their original contexts, supplementary commentary on technical matters and points of detail, and some additional texts.