Phaedrus by Plato: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Phaedrus
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The first three speeches, outside the walls
SOCRATES: My dear Phaedrus, whence come you, and whither are you going?
PHAEDRUS: I come from Lysias the son of Cephalus, and I am going to take a walk outside the wall, for I have been sitting with him the whole morning; and our common friend Acumenus tells me that it is much more refreshing to walk in the open air than to be shut up in a cloister.
SOCRATES: There he is right. Lysias then, I suppose, was in the town?
The excerpt below is the opening of the dialogue, after the persons and the scene have been named. Socrates asks Phaedrus where he comes from and where he is going; Phaedrus answers that he has spent the morning with Lysias the son of Cephalus and is walking outside the wall on the advice of Acumenus, who holds that open air is better than a cloister; and Socrates agrees that Lysias, then, must have been in the town. Nothing has yet been said of the speech under the cloak, the plane-tree, or the stream of the Ilissus.
Download Full EPUBc. 370 BC
Dialogue
~41,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 2.3 hours
Standalone
Under a plane-tree by the banks of the Ilissus, outside the walls of Athens, at midday in summer; Socrates, who never leaves the city, is drawn out by the promise of a speech.
Jowett’s introduction and seven parts of the dialogue
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0.13 MB (EPUB) · 0.20 MB (AZW3) · 0.14 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1636
Plato’s Phaedrus is a dialogue about love and about speech, and the two turn out to be one subject. Socrates meets Phaedrus outside the walls of Athens, walks with him along the Ilissus to a plane-tree, hears the speech Lysias has written in praise of the non-lover, and answers it with a speech of his own in the same manner. Then the sign that always forbids him stops him, and he recants in the great myth of the soul as a charioteer with two winged horses. The second half asks what makes a speech a work of art, and ends with the tale of Theuth and Thamus, the invention of writing, and a prayer to Pan.
The dialogue falls into two halves. In the first, Phaedrus reads out the speech of Lysias, Socrates answers it in the same vein, and then, checked by the sign that forbids but never bids, he makes his recantation: the winged soul, its fall, and the madness of love. In the second, the two speeches serve as examples for an enquiry into rhetoric, dialectic and the written word. The Wikipedia article on the Phaedrus gives the outline of the whole. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1636.
Phaedrus by Plato: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This page offers a summary and analysis of the Phaedrus, with Jowett’s introduction and the dialogue itself kept apart, each described in the order the edition prints it. The translation is Benjamin Jowett’s, published in 1871, and the volume opens with his long essay on the dialogue, which carries a separate note on the decline of Greek literature. Plato is named as the author; Jowett places the dialogue late in his life, in the neighbourhood of the Republic, and argues the point from the maturity of the thought rather than from the ages of the speakers. The text prints the persons of the dialogue and the scene at its head and then runs unbroken to the last prayer, and the page follows that order rather than rearranging it. It sits with the rest of the Philosophy Classics on the site.
The story is simple: Phaedrus has been sitting all morning with Lysias, the rhetorician, and has come out to walk, and Socrates meets him, guesses that the speech on the non-lover is hidden under his cloak, and will not let him go until he has heard it. Phaedrus is delighted at the prospect of a second speech and promises a golden statue of Socrates at Delphi if he keeps his word. They follow the Ilissus to a plane-tree, and there Phaedrus reads, while Socrates, half in jest, answers the speech with a better one in the same manner; that is the first speech, and he is then stopped by the sign that always forbids and never bids, and makes his recantation, the palinode, in which the argument turns from blame to praise.
The palinode is the centre of the book. Socrates sets out four kinds of divine madness, of which love is the fourth, and then argues that the soul is immortal because it moves itself. Its nature is figured as a charioteer with two winged horses, one noble and one ignoble; the gods drive a pair of noble breed, and Zeus leads the procession in heaven, while Hestia stays at home to keep house. Beyond the heavens lies the plain of truth, colourless and formless and visible only to mind, where the soul is fed on justice and temperance and knowledge absolute. A soul that loses its wings falls into a human life, and the rank it takes depends on how much of the truth it saw; the two horses are given their natures only when the struggle begins, and the beloved is said to be more affected than the lover when the friendship is consummated.
The second half turns the two speeches into evidence. Rhetoric, Socrates argues, is not a knack of the courts but an art of enchanting the soul, and it cannot be practised without knowing the truth of the matter and the natures of the souls addressed. Lysias’ speech is taken apart: it begins at the end, has no order in its topics, and could be read backwards, like the epitaph on the tomb of Midas. Against the handbooks of Theodorus, Evenus, Tisias, Gorgias, Prodicus and Polus he sets the method of definition and division, the dialectic that the two speeches, playful as they were, had already used. The word dialectic, Socrates says, may or may not be the right name for it, but the power of seeing a one and a many in nature is the thing he follows.
The close is about writing. Socrates tells the Egyptian tale of Theuth, who offers letters to Thamus king of Egypt as a cure for memory, and is told that they will produce forgetfulness instead, and the show of wisdom without the reality. A written speech is like a painting that cannot answer a question and has no parent to defend it; the living word graven in the soul of the learner can defend itself. The dialogue ends by reserving the name of wise for God alone and calling the man who can defend what he has written a philosopher, with a prophecy for Isocrates and a prayer to Pan. The Project Gutenberg #1636 text is the one this page follows, and the Symposium and The Republic take the same questions further.
Historical Context
The edition prints Jowett’s introduction first, in its own long run of sections, one of them headed On the Decline of Greek Literature; then come the persons of the dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus, and the scene, under a plane-tree by the banks of the Ilissus. The dialogue itself carries no book or chapter divisions, and the speeches are not given Greek titles. Jowett’s notes stand in parentheses in the text, on the game of the oyster-shell, on the line from the apocryphal Homer about the winged one, and on the philosopher, who alone is not subject to judgment. The essay that closes the introduction is on another scale from the rest: Jowett asks why Greek literature declined after the great age, and whether such a decline can be averted.
The names in the text belong to the Athens of the fourth century: Lysias and his brother Polemarchus, Isocrates, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Tisias, Prodicus, Hippias, Polus, Protagoras, Theodorus and Evenus among the teachers of rhetoric; Anaxagoras, from whom Pericles is said to have taken his philosophy; Hippocrates, who held that the nature of the body can only be understood as a whole; and the Delphian inscription that bids a man know himself. Socrates swears by the plane-tree, quotes Stesichorus and Ibycus and Pindar, and sets Sappho and Anacreon above the rhetoricians.
Jowett raises two controversies, about the subject of the dialogue and about its date. On the subject he argues that rhetoric is the thread and that love and dialectic are worked into it, so that the Phaedrus is not a failure of unity but a looser composition than the Republic. On the date he reports the older argument from the ages of the speakers, Lysias born in 458 and Isocrates in 436, and sets it aside: the maturity of the thought and the finished style weigh more than the fiction of the characters, and he would put the dialogue near the Republic. Neither question, as he treats it, is closed beyond argument, and his own conclusion is stated with caution. The essay on the decline of Greek literature follows as a separate piece of his own.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- The non-lover: The case Lysias writes, and Socrates repeats in the first speech: the non-lover is free and has no cause to repent, there are more of them to choose from, and he will not be jealous of the friends of the beloved, whereas the lover is a flatterer who wants his friend kept inferior. Socrates later calls the argument blasphemous, since love is a god. The speech is read out under the plane-tree, and its topics follow one another without a principle of order; Socrates notices the repetitions while he listens.
- Divine madness: The four kinds Socrates names: prophecy, which is Apollo’s; initiation, which delivers men from old calamities by prayers and rites; poetry, which the Muses send into a delicate soul; and the madness of love, the best of the four. The argument is that madness can be a gift of heaven, and the sane man is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the mad.
- The charioteer and the two steeds: The figure of the soul: a charioteer, one noble horse and one ignoble. The right-hand horse is white, upright, a lover of honour and modesty, moved by word alone; the left is dark, crooked, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur, the mate of insolence and pride. The charioteer is the reason, the black horse the desires, and the struggle between them is the drama of the palinode. Jowett notes that the horses of the gods are both white, since every impulse in them is in harmony with reason, and that the image gives what may be the first threefold division of the soul.
- The wing and recollection: The wing is the bodily part most akin to the divine, and is fed by beauty, wisdom and goodness. Souls once saw the plain of truth in the train of a god; what men call learning is the recollection of that sight, and beauty alone of the ideas kept a visible image on earth, which is why sight is the keenest of the senses and the lover trembles at a godlike face.
- Dialectic: The two principles Socrates draws out of his own second speech: the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea, as love was defined at the start, and division into species where the joint is, without breaking any part as a bad carver might. This is the art of the dialectician, and it is not the rhetoric that Thrasymachus and the rest taught for money. Socrates says he follows the man who can see a one and a many as if he walked in the footsteps of a god.
- The written word: The tale of Theuth and Thamus makes writing an aid to reminiscence rather than to memory, and its products a show of wisdom without the reality. A written speech cannot answer a question or defend itself; it is the image of the living word, which is graven in the soul of the learner and knows when to speak and when to be silent.
Core Arguments & Influence
- One subject or two: Jowett’s introduction is largely an answer to the old objection that the Phaedrus wanders. He finds rhetoric the continuous thread, with love, dialectic and the true art of speaking worked into it, and he points out that Plato never bound himself to one idea per dialogue, since the Republic and the Parmenides and the Gorgias have double titles and double subjects. Love itself is given three degrees in the introduction, the interested, the mad, and the disinterested love of the unseen, and the movement of the dialogue follows those degrees from Lysias to the palinode.
- Madness as a blessing: The palinode opens by reversing the first speech. Madness, which the non-lover’s case held against the lover, is shown to be the source of the chiefest goods: the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona did their work out of their senses, the man who has no touch of the Muses’ madness is not admitted to their temple and his poetry is not admitted with him, and love itself is a madness sent by the gods. The etymology of mantike and manike is offered in earnest and in jest at once, which Jowett treats as characteristic of the Socratic irony that mixes sense and nonsense. The palinode is also a hymn to Love, and it closes with a prayer that the god forgive the earlier speeches and not take away the art of love.
- The soul’s fall and return: The myth answers the question why the soul loses its wings. Fed on beauty and goodness it soars; fed on their opposites it wastes away and drops to earth, where it takes a human life whose rank matches the truth it once saw, from the philosopher down to the tyrant. Ten thousand years are needed before it can return, though the soul of a philosopher or of a lover who is not without philosophy may grow wings in the third thousand. Each life is chosen, and the soul that has never seen the truth cannot take human form at all.
- Art, its preliminaries and the test of truth: The second half keeps asking whether rhetoric is an art. The teachers can supply an exordium, a statement of facts, proofs and probabilities, and a recapitulation, but they mistake the preliminaries for the art itself, as a man would who claimed to be a physician because he could give a purge, or a tragedian because he could make a long speech about a small matter. Pericles is the counter-example, since he took his eloquence from Anaxagoras, and rhetoric is like medicine because it must know the nature of the soul as medicine knows the body. Jowett says that Plato touches the real error of the teachers as with the point of a needle: they confuse the preliminaries of the art with the thing itself.
- The living word and the written: Jowett calls the preference of speech over writing a paradox in which Plato may seem to do himself an injustice, since the dialogue is itself a written work, and yet a truth is contained in it: what is truly written is written in the soul, as what is taught grows from within. Socrates uses writing as a pastime and a memorial against old age, and the husbandman who sows in the garden of Adonis in eight days of summer is set beside the man who sows in fitting soil. The dialogue ends with the modest title of philosopher.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Phaedrus?
The download is the whole book, not a digest of it. Jowett’s introduction is here with its sections on the unity of the dialogue, the two controversies, the mythology passage, the grasshoppers and the mysticism of Plato, and with the long essay on the decline of Greek literature that the edition prints after it. Then comes the dialogue entire, from the first question outside the walls to the prayer to Pan, with the persons and the scene named at the head and Jowett’s notes left where he put them.
The page is arranged to be read beside the text. Nine groups cover the ground, two for the introduction and seven for the dialogue, and each stops where its movement stops: the walk and Lysias’ speech, the first speech, the palinode, the two steeds and the beloved, the argument about rhetoric, the tale of Theuth, and the closing prayer. Six notes explain the ideas the argument turns on, and five themes follow it from the unity of the subject to the living word.
The files come in three formats with the same text and the same divisions. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed for any of them, and nothing in the downloads is locked or time limited. The translation is Jowett’s throughout, so a passage found here can be looked up in any printing of it.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1636 — the complete text in Jowett’s translation, with the introduction, the persons and the scene, and the dialogue from the first question to the last prayer.
- Jowett’s introduction entire The essay on the dialogue, the two controversies over its subject and its date, the notes on the mythology and the grasshoppers, and the separate piece on the decline of Greek literature are printed as the edition has them, not summarised away.
- Nine groups, one for each movement Two groups follow the introduction and seven follow the dialogue, from the walk outside the walls to the prayer to Pan, and each stops where the movement it covers stops. Nothing is merged, and each group says what the reader will find in that stretch of the text.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the movement divisions intact and nothing to install beyond the reading app you already use.
- The Symposium, the dialogue Jowett keeps beside this one: love and philosophy join hands in both, and the ladder of beauty there answers the chariot and the wings here. Read the two together, since Jowett’s introduction begins by comparing them. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Republic, where the divided soul, the philosopher as a stranger on earth and the critique of imitative art are worked out at length. Jowett would place the Phaedrus near it in date, and the threefold soul of the chariot is compared with the thumos of the longer dialogue. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf where this edition sits, with the rest of the free philosophy on the site in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, from Plato’s dialogues to the treatises and essays that followed them. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The nine groups below follow the edition in its own order: the first two cover Jowett’s introduction, including the separate essay on the decline of Greek literature, and the remaining seven follow the dialogue from the walk out of the city to the prayer to Pan. The dialogue has no divisions of its own, so the boundaries here fall where the argument shifts.
- Part 1 — Jowett’s introduction, the argument of the dialogue: Jowett begins from the Symposium, with which the Phaedrus shares the philosophy of love, and then walks through the dialogue itself: the walk outside the wall, the speech of Lysias, the first speech, the palinode of the chariot and the wings, and the second half on rhetoric and writing. He argues that rhetoric is the continuous thread.
- Part 2 — Jowett’s introduction, the date and the decline of letters: The two controversies come next, over the unity of the subject and over the date. Jowett reports the older argument from the ages of Lysias and Isocrates and sets it aside for the maturity of the thought. Then follow the notes on the mythology and the grasshoppers, a page on Plato’s mysticism, and the essay on the decline of Greek literature.
- Part 3 — The walk out of the walls and the speech of Lysias: Outside the wall Socrates meets Phaedrus, who has spent the morning with Lysias and carries his speech under his cloak. They walk along the Ilissus; Socrates declines to explain the carrying off of Orithyia, saying that he must first know himself; they sit under a plane-tree, and Phaedrus reads the argument that the non-lover should be preferred to the lover.
- Part 4 — Socrates’ first speech, the non-lover’s case: Socrates veils his face and speaks in the character of the non-lover. Love, he says, is a desire that overrules opinion; the lover keeps his beloved inferior and ignorant, cuts him off from parents and friends and money, and grows ridiculous in his old age. When the passion ends he becomes an enemy, and the beloved learns too late that as wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves.
- Part 5 — The palinode, madness and the immortal soul: Checked by the sign that forbids him to go, Socrates recants. Prophecy, purification, poetry and love are the four kinds of divine madness, and love is the best of them. The soul is immortal because it moves itself; its nature is figured as a charioteer and two winged horses, and beyond the heavens lies the plain of truth, where it is fed on justice and knowledge before it falls to earth.
- Part 6 — The two steeds and the beloved’s answering love: The right-hand horse is white and upright and moved by word alone; the left is dark and crooked and deaf, and drags the pair towards enjoyment. The charioteer pulls him back, covers his jaws with blood and tames him. The beloved then feels the stream of beauty return through his eyes and loves without knowing what he feels; if philosophy prevails, the two are winged for the three Olympian victories.
- Part 7 — Rhetoric, dialectic and the true art of speaking: The speeches are now examined as rhetoric. Lysias begins at the end and has no order, and a discourse should be a living creature with head and feet. Definition and division are the two principles Socrates prizes; the handbooks give only the preliminaries of the art. Rhetoric is like medicine, the soul must be known as the body is known, and Pericles learned his eloquence from Anaxagoras. The true orator must also know the times and seasons for each kind of speech.
- Part 8 — Theuth, Thamus and the written word: Writing comes last. Theuth offers letters to Thamus as a cure for memory and is told that they will produce forgetfulness and the show of wisdom without the reality. A written speech is like a painting that cannot answer a question, and has no parent to defend it. The husbandman sows in fitting soil, and the dialectician’s serious sowing is in the soul of a learner.
- Part 9 — The philosopher’s name, Isocrates and the prayer: The dialogue closes by naming. The name of wise is too great for men; those who can defend what they have written are lovers of wisdom, philosophers, and the rest are poets, speech-makers or law-makers. Socrates prophesies that Isocrates will rise above rhetoric, and after the message to Lysias the two offer a prayer to Pan for beauty in the inward soul, and go.
Phaedrus: Frequently Asked Questions
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Part of: Philosophy Classics · Plato
