Page:The works of Plato, A new and literal version, (vol 6) (Burges, 1854).djvu/433



This is supposed to be the first dialogue which Plato wrote, according to Diogen. Laert. iii. 38. Dionysius Halicarnassus (ii. 270, ed. Hudson) calls it one of his most celebrated discourses; and from it he produces examples both of the beauty and of the blemishes of Plato s style, which is all purity, all grace, and perspicuity; and he remarks that he sometimes rises to a true sublimity, and sometimes falls into an ungraceful redundancy of words and of ill-suited figures, ungraceful and obscure.

There is a good analysis of the Phædrus by the Abbé Sallier, wherein he shows its true subject and intention. It is upon eloquence, and is designed to demonstrate, that no writer, whether legislator, orator, historian, or poet, can do any thing excellent without a foundation of philosophy. The title prefixed to it, "On the Beautiful," cannot be genuine. It has no other relation to it, than that beauty is accidentally the theme of Socrates's second little oration, which is contained in this dialogue; not that it is, directly, even the subject of that, for the tendency of it is to prove, that a person ought to gratify rather the party who loves, than the one who does not, as the two preceding orations were to show the contrary. These are what Diogenes Laertius calls questions of a juvenile kind, though he may mean it of the whole dialogue, which is something juvenile and full of vanity, and such, Dionysius very justly says, was the character of Plato.

The Socratic dialogues are a kind of drama, wherein the time, the place, and the characters are almost as exactly marked as in a true theatrical representation. Phædrus here is a young man particularly sensible to eloquence and to fine writing, and thence a follower and an admirer of the famous Lysias, whose reputation was then at its height in Athens. He had been sitting the greatest part of the morning at the house of Epicrates, near the Olympium, to hear Lysias recite a discourse; and, having procured a copy of it, is meditating upon it with pleasure, as he walks without the city walls, where Socrates meets him. To avoid the heat of the day they retire to the shade of an ancient plane-tree, that over shadows a fane of Acheloüs and the Nymphs on the banks of a rivulet, which discharges itself at a little distance into the Ilyssus. The spot lay less than a quarter of a mile above the bridge, which led over the river to the temple of Diana Agræa. Here they