This commentary has been some time in the making, in part thanks to recurring administrative duties. That has perhaps been for the good, in that my thinking about the poems included has evolved in what I hope will prove to be productive ways. The Carmen saeculare and book 4 of the Odes are not easy to situate in their political and aesthetic contexts. Fundamental issues of tone, purpose and meaning are still under debate, in spite of the fact that the Horace of the 30s and 20s bce has seemed perhaps the most familiar of the Augustans. The poems of C.4 have seemed at the same time, to many readers, to represent a falling away from the first collection. It has therefore been useful to spend some time, while engaged on other projects to which inclination or duty consigned me, to reflect about these poems, which have to me become more interesting as I kept their company.

It has been my fate now for the second time to be completing a commentary on the same text on which other commentaries were imminent or recently published. I received the Italian commentary of Paolo Fedeli and Irma Ciccarelli (Q. Horatii Flacci Carmina: Liber IV, Florence 2008), after I had finished a penultimate draft of my commentary.

APPROACHING THE PHAEDRUS

Plato's dialogues are masterpieces of the literary representation of philosophical conversations. Yet the Phaedrus stands out even in Plato's corpus. The dialogue's formal structure makes evident the main topics.1 After the opening scene establishes Ph.'s enthusiasm for Lysias' rhetorical art and S.'s intention to examine it, Ph. reads Lysias' speech on erōs aloud to his companion, whereupon S. delivers extempore two speeches on erōs of his own. Then, just past the halfway point, the dialogue undergoes its most overt change in style and substance as S. shifts from the rhetorical presentations on erōs to a dialectical inquiry into the nature of good discourse. The inquiry is concerned mostly with the art of rhetoric, but concludes with a consideration of written texts and dialectic. Beyond the topics that are given formal prominence – erōs, rhetoric, dialectic, written texts – other important themes that arise in the conversation include philosophy, beauty, play, the soul, the gods, the sophists, and the nature of technē.

Beyond the forms of discourse that structure the dialogue – the rhetorical speeches of the first half, the dialectical inquiry of the second half – S. addresses Ph. in friendly and ironic conversation, in allegories and myths, in didactic argument, in studied artificial language. S. prays; he quotes and invents verse; he mocks sophistic pretenders to rhetorical art.

Like other great works of Greek literature, the Phaedrus comes to us laden with established views and previous interpretations. The dialogue has acquired the additional burden of being considered important, and interpreted accordingly, in accounts of Plato's thought, of the intellectual debates of fourth-century Greece, and of the development of Greek culture and Western metaphysics. There is no better remedy, it seems to me, than an encounter with the dialogue itself. I have attempted to loosen up a bit the constraints of received wisdom and to take a fresh look at what Plato says in this dialogue to his contemporary audience and how he chooses to say it. Furthermore, in the ongoing process of reading and interpreting the Phaedrus, an approach that returns to the dialogue itself would make a timely contribution.

Of the vast secondary literature on the Phaedrus, I cite only those items that seem most useful for understanding whatever point is at issue; this is an economy that should benefit readers of this edition. For questions of syntax, I refer to Guy Cooper's Attic Greek prose syntax (AGPS) because it contains a wealth of informative examples and recognizes significant subtleties that go unremarked in other reference grammars. A new edition of Hermias' commentary on the Phaedrus by C. Lucarini and C. Moreschini (De Gruyter) is still forthcoming as of this writing, and thus could not be used in this edition.

227a1–230e5: PROLOGUE

Two friends, S. and Ph., meet on the street by chance and S. discovers Ph.'s enthusiasm for a speech by Lysias that he has just heard. After S. good-naturedly prods Ph. into admitting that he has a copy of the speech in his possession, they decide to retire to the nearby countryside where they will find relief from the summer heat and Ph. will read the speech to his companion. They converse easily as they walk and when they find a cool pleasant spot underneath a tall plane tree, they assume comfortable positions, the one to read, the other to listen.

The lively and realistic narrative constitutes a prime example of Plato's remarkable literary art. As in the opening of the Republic, the effect is complex: knowing that Plato is in control, the reader is nonetheless lulled into accepting the momentous conversation that follows as arising naturally in consequence of a chance, everyday encounter. All the more remarkable is Plato's ability to convey simultaneously beneath the narrative surface of smooth banter and innocent meandering another quasi-narrative of potentially transformative drama. Taking the measure of Ph.'s character, S. feigns enthusiasm for Lysias' speech in order to entice Ph. into a dialogue on erōs and discourse that will challenge his values and might possibly change his life. Without his being aware of it, Ph. is maneuvered into a position where the attractions of philosophy will make themselves felt.

A professor of mine once opined that the best working experimentalists tended to have a good grasp of basic electronics. Experimental data often come in the form of electronic signals, and one needs to understand how to acquire and manipulate such signals properly. Indeed, in graduate school, everyone had a story about a budding scientist who got very excited about some new result, only to later discover that the result was just an artifact of the electronics they were using (or misusing!). In addition, most research labs these days have at least a few homemade circuits, often because the desired electronic function is either not available commercially or is prohibitively expensive. Other anecdotes could be added, but these suffice to illustrate the utility of understanding basic electronics for the working scientist.

On the other hand, the sheer volume of information on electronics makes learning the subject a daunting task. Electronics is a multi-hundred billion dollar a year industry, and new products of ever-increasing specialization are developed regularly. Some introductory electronics texts are longer than introductory physics texts, and the print catalog for one national electronic parts distributor exceeds two thousand pages (with tiny fonts!).

Finally, the undergraduate curriculum for most science and engineering majors (excepting, of course, electrical engineering) does not have much space for the study of electronics. For many science students, formal study of electronics is limited to the coverage of voltage, current, and passive components (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) in introductory physics.