Page:The works of Plato, A new and literal version, (vol 1) (Cary, 1854).djvu/311

Rh winged and so carry off no trifling prize of impassioned madness.

When Socrates had ended his recantation to Love, Pheedrus expresses great admiration of his speech; and adds that he doubts whether Lysias will ever venture to write speeches again. But Socrates shews him that such an expectation is altogether groundless; and after a charming little episode on the origin of grasshoppers, proposes to consider in what a correct mode of speaking and writing consists.

The first essential is that the speaker should know the truth of the subject on which he is about to speak. And though it is commonly said that an orator need not know what is really just, but only what will appear so to the multitude, yet Socrates with great force destroys this fallacy, and shews that such rhetoric is not an art but an inartistic trick; for a genuine art of speaking neither does nor can exist without laying hold of truth. Rhetoric must be an art that leads the soul by means of argument. Now in courts of justice and popular assemblies men succeed by making things appear similar to each other so far as they are capable of being made appear so; and deception will more frequently occur in things that nearly resemble each other, so that a person who means to persuade or deceive another must be able to distinguish accurately the similarity and dissimilarity of things, and so lead his hearer by means of resemblances. Taking this as his principle, Socrates proceeds to shew that the speech of Lysias is altogether inartistic, for that he ought first of all to have defined Love and divided it into its different species and shewn of which class he was going to speak, whereas he begins where he should have ended, and throughout speaks at random with out any definite design. He then proceeds to comment on his own two speeches. In one he argued that favour ought to be shewn to one that is in love, in the other to a person that is not in love. In one he said that love was a kind of divine