Page - 532 - in The Complete Plato

SOCRATES: At any rate, you will allow that every discourse ought to be a living creature, having a body of its own and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one another and to the whole? PHAEDRUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: Can this be said of the discourse of Lysias? See whether you can find any more connexion in his words than in the epitaph which is said by some to have been inscribed on the grave of Midas the Phrygian. PHAEDRUS: What is there remarkable in the epitaph? SOCRATES: It is as follows:— ‘I am a maiden of bronze and lie on the tomb of Midas; So long as water flows and tall trees grow, So long here on this spot by his sad tomb abiding, I shall declare to passers-by that Midas sleeps below.’ Now in this rhyme whether a line comes first or comes last, as you will perceive, makes no difference. PHAEDRUS: You are making fun of that oration of ours. SOCRATES: Well, I will say no more about your friend’s speech lest I should give offence to you; although I think that it might furnish many other examples of what a man ought rather to avoid. But I will proceed to the other speech, which, as I think, is also suggestive to students of rhetoric. PHAEDRUS: In what way? SOCRATES: The two speeches, as you may remember, were unlike; the one argued that the lover and the other that the non-lover ought to be accepted. PHAEDRUS: And right manfully. SOCRATES: You should rather say ‘madly;’ and madness was the argument of them, for, as I said, ‘love is a madness.’ PHAEDRUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And of madness there were two kinds; one produced by human infirmity, the other was a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention. PHAEDRUS: True. SOCRATES: The divine madness was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the first was the inspiration of Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros. In the description of the 532