Phaedrus

A dialogue about love and about speaking well, set on a summer day under a plane tree by the river Ilissus outside Athens. Phaedrus reads out a speech by the orator Lysias arguing that a boy should favour a man who is not in love with him. Socrates first matches it with a speech of his own, then repents and gives a second speech in praise of love as a form of divine madness. Here he argues that the soul is immortal because it moves itself, and pictures it as a charioteer driving two winged horses, one noble and one unruly; the sight of beauty reminds the soul of the forms it once saw and makes its wings grow again. The second half asks what makes speech good or bad, arguing that a true art of rhetoric needs knowledge of the truth and of souls. Near the end comes the myth of Theuth, which questions whether writing helps memory.

It joins Plato's most vivid account of love and beauty to a serious discussion of rhetoric, and its doubts about writing anticipate modern worries about technology and memory.