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PINDAR'S CHARIOTEER IN PLATO'S PHAEDRUS (227B9–10)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2014

Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore*
Affiliation:
Penn State University
*
c.moore@psu.edu
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Extract

In his second question of the Phaedrus, Socrates asks Phaedrus how he spent (διατριβή) his morning with Lysias. Phaedrus answers: ‘You'll learn, should you have the leisure (σχολή) to walk and listen.’ Socrates responds:

What? Don't you think I would judge it, as Pindar puts it, a thing ‘surpassing even lack of leisure’ (καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον), to hear how you and Lysias spent your time?   (227b6–10)

Socrates quotes from First Isthmian 2. In this victory ode, Pindar celebrates, uniquely in his extant oeuvre, a charioteer winner who has driven his own team. The epinician poem and the dialogue, especially the myth in Socrates’ second speech, have remarkable systematic parallels. This suggests that Pindar's victor serves as model for the palinode's philosophical lover, and Pindar's song for Socrates’ conversation.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , December 2014 , pp. 525 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

INTRODUCTION

In his second question of the Phaedrus, Socrates asks Phaedrus how he spent (διατριβή) his morning with Lysias.Footnote 1 Phaedrus answers: ‘You'll learn, should you have the leisure (σχολή) to walk and listen.’ Socrates responds:

What? Don't you think I would judge it, as Pindar puts it, a thing ‘surpassing even lack of leisure’ (καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον), to hear how you and Lysias spent your time?   (227b6–10)

Socrates quotes from First Isthmian 2. In this victory ode, Pindar celebrates, uniquely in his extant oeuvre, a charioteer winner who has driven his own team.Footnote 2 The epinician poem and the dialogue, especially the myth in Socrates’ second speech, have remarkable systematic parallels. This suggests that Pindar's victor serves as model for the palinode's philosophical lover, and Pindar's song for Socrates’ conversation.

By having Socrates quote a Pindaric poem of praise, Plato primes his audience to read this dialogue as praise of a kind of life. In the case of the Phaedrus, it is the life of erôs and philosophical discussion, of striving and forethought, into which Socrates aims to induct Phaedrus. Plato further wants us to see that such praise and induction is good for Athens. A reader may forget to consider civic benefit when studying the celestial travels and eternal verities that Socrates imagines for Phaedrus. But people familiar with epinician poetry would know that such poems are for victors and their hometowns. Pindar, in his epinicia, does not use myth to establish historical or theological claims.Footnote 3 He uses it instead to make palpable the ideals of outlay and rigour that he sets before the victor's fellow citizens for their own local success. The Phaedrus depicts Socrates talking to an Athenian, for the benefit of that Athenian and of those with whom he will come into contact.Footnote 4 The myths and other ideals that he articulates make vivid the sort of passionate, self-controlled, and reflective life for which Phaedrus, living among his Athenian neighbours, should strive. Although the conversation takes place beyond Athens’ city walls, it has deep political relevance.

That the Phaedrus depicts, in the first instance, an instance of praise-persuasion and shows a Socrates concerned about Athens is not itself an unfamiliar thesis. But that Socrates telegraphs this with his first quotation of many has not been appreciated.Footnote 5 Most recently, Yunis has taken the quotation as simply ‘lend[ing] mock grandeur’ and thus irony to Socrates’ pledge of leisure.Footnote 6 Others have thought that it contrasts the importance of certain conversations, or of uses of leisure, or of ‘the serious and the unserious’.Footnote 7 Griswold recognizes that ‘the whole of the ode contains interesting differences with and parallels to sections’ of the Phaedrus, but focusses on the differences alone.Footnote 8

Perhaps it is Socrates’ critical attitude toward athletic praise (Ap. 36de) and toward praise in general that has made it hard to see how he could use Pindaric victory odes constructively. In the Lysis, for example, Ctessipus accuses Hippothales of composing virtual victory odes (ἐγκώμιον, 205d2) for his beloved Lysis, celebrating his ancestors, wealth, chariot victories in the Isthmian games, relation to Heracles, and so on. Socrates agrees with this charge, and adds that Hippothales is in fact eulogizing himself, counterproductively to his suit (205b6–206a6).Footnote 9 It is not hard to see, however, that Socrates wants to induce people to live lives of self-reflection and reciprocal criticism. Praise of those lives should seem a plausible way to persuade people to live them. Since a life is constructed largely around its use of leisure, there is no doubt that, as all commentators assert, Socrates is making a point about the best way to spend one's time (compare 229c–230a). But then the right use of leisure is not itself the point of Socrates’ conversation; it is the right way to live.Footnote 10

An overview of Pindar's poem reveals its parallels with the Phaedrus. I will go on to make explicit several of them. From there I will make an argument about how to read the Phaedrus as concerned with praising the philosophical life, acknowledging the joint ideals of striving and self-control, and asserting the political importance of such a life to Athens.

I. THE FIRST ISTHMIAN

Pindar's ode to Herodotus is probably from 458 b.c. Besides its unique celebration of a self-driving charioteer, it opens by saying that Pindar was working on something else.

Mother of mine, Thebe of the golden shield
I shall put your matter above even my
lack of leisure (ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον θήσομαι). Let not rocky Delos
be angry with me, on whose behalf I have been absorbed.
What is dearer to good men than their beloved parents?
Yield, O island of Apollo, for with divine help I shall combine the  completion of both poems …Footnote 11

Pindar begins by vaunting his service to the city Thebes he and the victor Herodotus share. He had been occupied (ἀσχολία) writing a paean for the Cycladic Ceans,Footnote 12 but, given his stronger natural obligation to his homeland, he must demote that task to part-time status. Herodotus brought praiseworthy glory to his city, and in this he is preceded by Heracles (12–13) and by Iolaus, one of ‘the mightiest charioteers of the heroes’ (16–31). These heroes’ ‘virtue shines clearly’ (λάμπει … σαϕὴς ἀρετά, 22) in their myriad victories and prizes.

Pindar concludes his praise of Iphicles’ son and then turns to another Theban, Herodotus’ father. This man had once been a victim of downturn. But his travails have now brought ‘forethought’ (προμάθειαν, 40). The reward of praise is due to anyone ‘devoted wholeheartedly to virtue with both expenses and hard work’ (ἀρετᾷ κατάκειται πᾶσαν ὀργάν, | ἀμϕότερον δαπάναις τε καὶ πόνοις, 41–2). The greatest of work, according to this poem, is athletic training, and so athletic championship brings the greatest reward (50–1). Pindar announces that his song maintains and reflects that glory (52–9), and then excuses himself from going into detail about Herodotus’ charioteering (62–3). He concludes with a wish for future victories for Thebes and a warning to the man who hoards his own, putting up nothing for the benefit of his city; such jealousy will do him little good in the grave (66–8).Footnote 13

II. PARALLELS BETWEEN PHAEDRUS AND THE FIRST ISTHMIAN

A series of similarities between Phaedrus and the First Isthmian ensures that the reader sees praise of the philosophical charioteer in terms of the praise of Pindar's charioteer: a civic accomplishment serving to advance shared ideals of motivation and temperance.

First, the dialogue and the poem both start with the primary speaker – Pindar's narrator and Plato's Socrates – committing himself to his new and urgent duty. Pindar's narrator (whom I will also call ‘Pindar’) had already agreed to write a paean but judges the epinician more important.Footnote 14 Socrates had been outside the wall for some reason, maybe walking back from or to a gymnasium, perhaps on a mission to acquire self-knowledge (229e6), but judges talking to Phaedrus as being worth stopping for. Pindar says that he will yoke together his two obligations.Footnote 15 Socrates seems undeterred in his search for self-knowledge even while hearing about Lysias and Phaedrus’ conversation. An interesting side note is that both Pindar's and Socrates’ prior and ongoing obligations are to Apollo: the song to Ceos was meant as a song to Apollo (3–4, 6–7), and Socrates’ self-knowledge obligation is specified as obedience to the (Apollonian) Delphic inscription (229e6).

Second, the two works share narrative structure. Pindar tells a continuous myth, about the legendary athletic champions Iolaus and Castor, in the second quarter of the poem. He stops abruptly, marking the myth's end with both a ‘farewell’ (χαίρετ᾽, 32) and an explicit turn to Herodotus and, importantly, his father (34–40).Footnote 16 The Phaedrus likewise tells a continuous myth, about the soul-charioteer, in the second quarter of the dialogue (246a3–257a2). Socrates finishes up unambiguously by referring to it in a word, αὕτη (257a3), and turns back to Phaedrus and, importantly, Lysias, Phaedrus’ elder in logographia (262d8–264e3). After both speakers engage in some non-mythical analysis (Isthmian 1: 41–51; Phaedrus: 257b7–258e5, 259d9–274c4), they return to myth (Isthmian 1: 52–60; Phaedrus: 274c5–275c4).

Third, what might seem the most salient piece of information is, in both works, elided. Pindar says that his poem gives him no space to dilate on Herodotus’ particular accomplishments (63). Socrates says that he cannot go into all the details about the nature of the soul, which the conceit of the mythic charioteer personifies (256a5). Neither work aims principally to give factual information about the concrete nature of its respective charioteer, even if they avoid it for different reasons. Both aim principally to elevate him.

Fourth, both works express systematic concerns about elevation in immortality. Pindar assimilates Herodotus to the immortal song of legendary heroes (15); he closes the poem by stating the conditions for fame after death (68). Socrates’ palinode starts with a proof of immortality (245c6–246a2) and continues with the immortality of wingedness (246c1, 256d10–e2). Outside the central myth, Socrates criticizes the immortality-seeking epitaph inscribed on Midas’ tomb (264d3–6). In a similar way, the statues at Delphi and Olympus that Phaedrus intends to give in honour of Socrates are meant to immortalize those to whom they are dedicated.Footnote 17 Lawmakers become immortal through law-writing and thus having their works engraved on stelae or moulded into a city's constitution (258c1–4). The capable farmer, or farmer of dialectic, plants seeds and harvests the ensuing seeds, preserving the species forever (277a2). The power of Sappho or Anacreon to speak through Socrates suggests the immortality of the poets (235c3).

Fifth, and most importantly, the ode and the palinode share self-driving charioteers and associated language. The ode teems with the vocabulary of competition and glory.Footnote 18 The palinode also abounds with racing language. Chariots turn laps around the Earth (περιϕορά, ‘revolution’: 247c1, d5, 248a4; περιόδου, ‘circuit’: 248c4; περιεπόλουν, ‘going around’: 252c5; cf. ἐπιστρέϕεται, ‘turning around’: 247a5), an image hinted at in the dialogue's opening, where Socrates references Herodicus’ advice about running laps up and back from the wall of Megara (227d4), and in the overall plot of the dialogue, where Socrates and Phaedrus walk from the Athenian walls to their plane tree by the Ilyssus, and back.Footnote 19 Divine chariots ‘drive easily’ (ῥᾳδίως πορεύεται, 247b2), being ‘balanced, tractable’, and ‘taking the outside lane’ (ἰσορρόπως εὐήνια … ἔξω πορευθεῖσαι, 247b7). Mortal chariots, on the other hand, by the ‘badness of their pilots’ (κακίᾳ ἡνιόχων, 248b2), ‘tread on and trample one another, each one trying to be before the others’ (πατοῦσαι ἀλλήλας καὶ ἐπιβαλλουσαι, ἑτέρα πρὸ τῆς ἑτέρας πειρωμένη γενέσθαι, 248a8–b1). They shout, exert, and contest (248b1–2).

Sixth, this language of competition is capped by more language of athletic success. Socrates speaks of ‘triumphs’ (τὰ νικητήρια, 245b5), ‘award’ (ἆθλον, 256d5), and true Olympic victory (τῶν ὡς ἀληθῶς Ὀλυμπιακπῶν ἕν νενικήκασιν, 256b5). This terminology of success resonates through the dialogue. In the second sentence after Socrates concludes his palinode, Phaedrus says that ‘I'm afraid Lysias will appear wretched to me in comparison, if he really does consent to put up another in competition (ἀντιπαρατεῖναι) with it’ (257c4). Socrates had already doubted that Lysias’ speech could hold up in contest against entries by the old poets (235c3). He seems to be speaking to Phaedrus’ interest in competition: Phaedrus twice says that he himself will award trophies to the victor (235e1, 236b4).

III. A MODEL FOR LIVING

The similarities accreting around the two ideal charioteers – Pindar's Herodotus and Socrates’ philosophical lover – suggest seeking similarities in the ideals of their practice. A chariot-driver wins a race by exercising self-control and thoughtfulness. The risks in poor racing are falling out of one's lane (Ar. Nub. 25) and consequently crashing (Pythian 5.50). The clever (δεινός) charioteer will, like the palinode's divine drivers, pull his horses to an outside lane (ἔξω παρασπᾷ) to wait out the chaos (S. El. 731–2), and even ‘drive last, holding his horses back, bearing in mind only the finish’ (ἤλαυνε δ’ ἔσχατος μέν, ὑστέρας δ’ ἔχων | πώλους …, τῷ τέλει πίστιν ϕέρων, 734–5). This had been known since Homer. He has Nestor advise his son:

He who has trusted in his horses and chariot carelessly swings wide around the post and veers from side to side, and his horses wander over the racecourse and he does not control them (κατίσχει). But he who understands the tactics of racing, even though he may be driving inferior horses, always eyes the turn, rounds it tightly, and does not fail to consider how much he should urge his horses with their ox-hide reins, but he holds them in safety (ἔχει ἀσϕαλέως) and watches the leading driver.   (Il. 23.318–25)Footnote 20

Good driving requires patient focus on the ultimate goal – looking ahead, careful planning, waiting – and sacrifice of short-term gratification. Exhilaration cannot be allowed to take the wheel. Only the good of the goal ought to determine one's actions.

We see this lesson in the charioteer's eventual success with his beloved. For humans, driving is difficult and troublesome (χαλεπὴ … καὶ δύσκολος, 256b4; cf. 247b3–4, 248a4–c8). The course is determined by the god one follows (247a6, 248a2); the goal is the nourishment by the eternal forms (247c6–e4, 278a4–5, b6–c2). When the charioteer sees a beautiful boy, the worse of his two horses tries to take charge, leaping incautiously to its assumed goal. To keep level, the charioteer must exercise ‘foresight’ (προνοίᾳ, 254e7), practically the virtue of ‘forethought’ vaunted in Pindar's gnome (προμάθειαν, 40). Once the charioteer has tamed his bad horse and won the boy's love, he has a new temptation. To avoid sleeping with the boy, he must allow

the better elements of his mind [to] get the upper hand by drawing them to a well-ordered life, and to philosophy, [so that] they pass their life here in blessedness and harmony, masters of themselves and orderly in their behaviour, having enslaved that part through which evil attempted to enter the soul, and freed that part through which goodness enters it.    (256a7–b3, tr. Rowe)

Just as the successful horse-racer must keep his goal always in mind, thinking about the long run, the successful philosophical lover must keep his goal always in mind, thinking about what would be best overall. It is possible that the champion's success depends on a certain mania or non-rational intensity (cf. 245c1, 256d6), but this is perhaps no more obvious, or anyway no more important, than its dependence on self-control.Footnote 21

IV. READING THE PHAEDRUS AS AN EPINICIAN

Socrates’ palinode is a praise of the philosophical lover. Socrates prays at its end that Phaedrus direct himself toward a life of erôs accompanied by philosophical talk (257b5–6). Indeed, Socrates’ entire conversation with Phaedrus is praise of, and persuasion to, the philosophical life. A few pages after the palinode, he asks some personified arguments to persuade Phaedrus that if he wants to be an adequate speaker he must first be an adequate philosophizer (261a4–5). Socrates vaunts the ‘philosopher’ both in general (278c4–d6) and in his expectations for Isocrates (279a3–b3). His closing prayer, to which Phaedrus assents, hopes that one becomes fine inside, and by implication, proper, wise, and temperate (279b8–c6).

Taking the conversation as Socrates’ epinician (or praise) to the philosophical lover resolves some puzzles in the dialogue. It explains the argumentative inadequacies in, for example, the claims about the immortality of the soulFootnote 22 and the supposedly reformed system of rhetoric.Footnote 23 It makes sense of Socrates’ diffidence in describing the soul, both in the palinode and in the speech to the rhetoricians (271c10–272b4). It does both by letting the reader treat these putatively doctrinal matters as instruments of persuasion. It unifies what might seem disparate or disjoined themes and sections of the dialogue under the rubric of grand praise.Footnote 24 It justifies Socrates’ long half-day spent with a friend who does not contribute significantly to the dialectical portions of the conversation. Every element of the dialogue goes toward enticing and inducing Phaedrus into a new kind of life, and helping him both to see that he needs to adopt this life and to practice the skills of that life.Footnote 25 Socrates introduces Phaedrus into the ways of genuine love, of self-control, of justice, of trying to work with people until they care for the same virtues as he does.Footnote 26

Taking the conversation as Socrates’ encomium, and especially the kind represented by the First Isthmian, helps us see something further. Socrates is working for Athens.Footnote 27 His very first criticism of Lysias involves his disappointment that his speech was neither ‘of the city’ nor ‘for the city’ (ἀστεῖοι καὶ δημωϕελεῖς, 227d1–2).Footnote 28 Civically minded speeches would yield benefits for more of the people than the clever cynics represented in Lysias’ speech and the upstarts fond of such speeches. A little later Socrates says that he cares much more for the city than for the countryside since only the inhabitants of the former are willing to teach him (230d3–5). Law-writing and speech-making, both democratic institutions, are the key beneficiaries of skilled speech (257e1–258c4). The language of the norms of good social upbringing (243c1–d1) and of friendship (279c5) adds to the political sound of this dialogue.

The conversation takes place outside the walls of Athens. But it is not far; it is on the way to the suburbs frequented by Socrates, and is indeed on land that is part of Athens. It is populated by legendary events, such as the abduction of Oreithuia (229b1–c3), central to the Athenian national imagination.Footnote 29 Both Phaedrus and Socrates are Athenians citizens, unlike Lysias (227ab2–5), and will be returning to the town imminently (279c8; cf. 242a1). The myth of the palinode seems to range far from local or individual concerns;Footnote 30 but looking to the transcendent does not force abdication from one's city. The beauties one seeks, the partners with whom one philosophizes, are in the city.

Pindar gives the First Isthmian for Thebes. Its glory is his own. Socrates wants to benefit Phaedrus. Phaedrus’ excellence in speaking will redound to Socrates.

Footnotes

*

I gratefully acknowledge the help of Elizabeth Belfiore, Zoe Stamatopoulou, Christopher Long, and two anonymous referees.

References

1 His first was: ‘Dear Phaedrus, where to and where from?’ (ὦ ϕίλε Φαῖδρε, ποῖ δὴ καὶ πόθεν, 227a1); in response, Phaedrus tells him that he had been with Lysias, and is now taking a refreshing walk out of the city.

2 It is not the only record of a self-driving winner; a Peloponnesian inscription from about 440 b.c. records a multi-victoried Damonon who drove his own team (IG V.1.213 = IAG 16).

3 Bundy, Elroy L., ‘Studia Pindarica II: the First Isthmian Ode’, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 18.2 (1962), 35Google Scholar.

4 That Phaedrus is an Athenian is clear from his patronym Myrrhinus, his knowledge of Athenian geography, and other details known about his family (on which see Nails, Debra, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics [Indianapolis, IN, 2002], 232–4Google Scholar).

5 It often gets no comment except the reference, as in Hackforth, Reginald, Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar and Thompson, W.H., The Phaedrus of Plato (London, 1868)Google Scholar.

6 Yunis, H., Plato: Phaedrus (Cambridge, 2011), 87Google Scholar.

7 White, D., Rhetoric and Reality in Plato's Phaedrus (Albany, NY, 1993), 12Google Scholar; Ferrari, G.R.F., Listening to the Cicadas (Cambridge, 1987), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rowe, C., Plato: Phaedrus (Warminster, 1986)Google Scholar, ad loc. See also Burger, R., Plato's Phaedrus: A Defense of a Political Art of Writing (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1980), 9–10Google Scholar, 127 n. 4: ‘Socrates ironically suggests that hearing the diatribê between Lysias and Phaedrus is for him the equivalent of those interests of the city which transcend personal pursuits of leisure. In betraying his love of speeches for the sake of amusement, Phaedrus comes to light as an individual who thrives on freedom and leisure without redeeming those conditions through the practice of philosophy. Socrates, in contrast, reveals his love of speech as an urgent and most serious matter; but the playfulness of Socrates’ attention to the serious importance of sharing Lysias's feast even Phaedrus discerns (cf. 234d). The irony of Socrates’ elevation of his encounter with Phaedrus to a matter “higher than business” he betrays in concluding their discussion by identifying it as mere amusement (paidia, cf. 278b).'

8 Griswold, C., Self-knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (New Haven, CT, 1986), 250Google Scholar n. 11: Pindar emphasizes his and the victor Herodotus’ shared Theban identity; ‘by contrast, the chariot and driver that Socrates ends up praising do not belong to any city; Socrates puts the command of the Delphic god (or, in the palinode, of Zeus) above even the concerns of his city’. The athletic champion makes time for exercise, but ‘Socrates has leisure only for self-knowledge’. And, whereas ‘Pindar suggests here that the supreme prize is the immortality obtainable when one is praised in speech by citizen and stranger alike’, Socrates does not take such fame as the highest accomplishment.

9 Note that the theme of charioteering comes up again at Lysis 208a1–b1: Lysis admits that his parents will not allow him to drive the chariots himself because he does not yet know how. On Socrates’ critical attitude toward praise speeches, see Nightingale, A.N., ‘The folly of praise: Plato's critique of encomiastic discourse in the Lysis and Symposium’, CQ 43 (1993), 112–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Demos, M., Lyric Quotation in Plato (Lanham, MD, 1999)Google Scholar, takes Plato to have a more sympathetic view toward lyric praise; Pender, E., ‘Sappho and Anacreon in Plato's Phaedrus’, LICS 6.4 (2007), 1–57Google Scholar, discusses Plato's various uses of lyric in the dialogue.

10 Silk, M., ‘Pindar meets Plato: theory, language, value, and the Classics’, in Harrison, S. J. (ed.), Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature (Oxford, 2001), 26–45Google Scholar, provides another example of the depth of Plato's reading of Pindar on matters of central human concern, in his case comparing Pyth. 8.76–100 and Resp. 10.617d–e.

11 The translations are modified in several places from Race, W.H. (ed. and tr.), Pindar II: Nemean Odes, Isthmian Odes, Fragments (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 135Google Scholar. I have also been influenced by Nisetich, F.J., Pindar's Victory Songs (Baltimore, MD, 1980)Google Scholar.

12 According to Race (n. 11), 253 (cf. 132, 242), ‘Pindar undoubtedly refers to [Paean 4] at Isth. 1.7–9.’ In this attribution he was preceded by Kirkwood, G., Selections from Pindar (Chico, CA, 1982), 277Google Scholar, and followed by Rutherford, I., Pindar's Paeans: A Reading of the Fragments with a Survey of the Genre (Oxford, 2001), 284Google Scholar, who accepts this inference as natural but not necessary.

13 For some general remarks on this poem, see Instone, S. (ed. and tr.), Pindar: Selected Odes: Olympian One, Pythian Nine, Nemeans Two & Three, Isthmian One (Warminster, 1996)Google Scholar.

14 Which distinctions obtain between an author and his primary speaker (narrator or protagonist) – contentious matters in both Pindaric and Platonic studies – do not materially effect the argument of this paper.

15 Kirkwood (n. 12), 281, says that the word Pindar uses when he says that he will do both tasks, ζεύξω, suggests a harmonious combination of the two tasks, but does not speculate on what this would amount to.

16 Pindar speaks twice of his protagonist (in the dative) as Ἡροδότῳ; Socrates dedicates his Palinode in this way: Ἔρως … δέδοταί (‘Love, this has been given’, 257a3–4). If we ignore the perfective reduplication do we see a pun?

17 Cf. Morgan, K., ‘Socrates and Gorgias at Delphi and Olympia: Phaedrus 235d6–236b4’, CQ 44.2 (1994), 375–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For example, crowns (10, 21), games (11, 18, 50), victory (22), gold (20), reward (τέλος: 27, μισθός: 47), glory (12, 50), being well praised (εὐαγορηθείς: 51, 52), good cheer (εὐθυμίαν: 63), honour (66).

19 On Herodicus’ advice see Yunis (n. 6), 88, citing Hermias 24.25–30. I thank Christopher Long for conversation about the parallels between the dialogue's opening and the palinode.

20 Cf. Stat. Theb. 6.255; Sid. Apoll. To Consentius 23.317–427.

21 Scott, D., ‘Philosophy and madness in the Phaedrus’, OSAPh 41 (2011), 169–200Google Scholar, argues that Socrates’ purported claim that philosophy involves irrational madness depends on a deliberately invalid argument.

22 See Bett, R., ‘Immortality and the nature of the soul in the Phaedrus’, Phronesis 31 (1986), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See Moore, C., ‘Deception and knowledge in the Phaedrus’, AncPhil 33 (2003)Google Scholar; Scott (n. 21).

24 See Werner, D., ‘Plato's Phaedrus and the problem of unity’, OSAPh 32 (2007), 91–137Google Scholar, for a good summary of the attempts to unify the dialogue.

25 See Yunis (n. 6), 2–14.

26 Socrates does not fall here to the criticism of praise he made in the Lysis because he is not praising Phaedrus himself; he is praising an ideal form of life, specifically an ideal which involves examining one's ideals.

27 He has neither ignored the Delphic, Panhellenic imperative to ‘know himself’ nor abandoned his usual business of definitional inquiry, but he has come to focus on something more human, his own city, and speaks with more encomia, rhetoric, and myth than perhaps usual.

28 Speaking of speeches as ‘dêmôphelic’ may pun contrastingly on ‘dêmophilic’ speeches, those that worked by flattering the audience; consider Grg. 481d and passim, on what a speech that truly displayed love for the people to which it speaks would be like. On dêmophilia, see Scholtz, Andrew, Concordia Discors: Eros and Dialogue in Classical Athenian Literature (Washington, DC, 2006), 46–70.Google Scholar

29 Agard, W.R., ‘Boreas at Athens’, CJ 61.6 (1966), 241–6.Google Scholar

30 Cassiod. Var. 3.51 analogized the stadium for chariot races with the cosmos: the emperor at the centre, the twelve gates the signs of the zodiac, two-horse chariots as moon and four-horse chariots as sun, and so forth. See Reid, H.L., Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World: Contests of Virtue (London, 2011), 9, 100–3Google Scholar, for the development of this idea.