Phaedrus by Plato. - HTML preview

87

Plato

SOCRATES: What a very amusing notion! But I bow of theirs is also a long arm. For there is noth-think, my young man, that you are much mis-ing of which our great politicians are so fond as taken in your friend if you imagine that he is of writing speeches and bequeathing them to frightened at a little noise; and, possibly, you posterity. And they add their admirers’ names think that his assailant was in earnest?

at the top of the writing, out of gratitude to them.

PHAEDRUS: I thought, Socrates, that he was.

PHAEDRUS: What do you mean? I do not under-And you are aware that the greatest and most stand.

influential statesmen are ashamed of writing speeches and leaving them in a written form, SOCRATES: Why, do you not know that when a lest they should be called Sophists by posterity.

politician writes, he begins with the names of his approvers?

SOCRATES: You seem to be unconscious, Phaedrus, that the ‘sweet elbow’ (A proverb, PHAEDRUS: How so?

like ‘the grapes are sour,’ applied to pleasures which cannot be had, meaning sweet things SOCRATES: Why, he begins in this manner: ‘Be which, like the elbow, are out of the reach of the it enacted by the senate, the people, or both, on mouth. The promised pleasure turns out to be a the motion of a certain person,’ who is our au-long and tedious affair.) of the proverb is really thor; and so putting on a serious face, he pro-the long arm of the Nile. And you appear to be ceeds to display his own wisdom to his admirers equally unaware of the fact that this sweet el-in what is often a long and tedious composition.