You are a darling and truly golden, Phaedrus, if you think I mean that Lysias has failed in every respect and that I can compose a discourse containing nothing that he has said. That, I fancy, could not happen even to the worst writer. For example, to take the subject of his speech, who do you suppose, in arguing that the non-lover ought to be more favored than the lover,
could omit praise of the non-lover’s calm sense and blame of the lover’s unreason, which are inevitable arguments, and then say something else instead? No, such arguments, I think, must be allowed and excused; and in these the arrangement, not the invention, is to be praised; but in the case of arguments which are not inevitable and are hard to discover, the invention deserves praise as well as the arrangement.
I concede your point, for I think what you say is reasonable, So I will make this concession:
I will allow you to begin with the premise that the lover is more distraught than the non-lover; and if you speak on the remaining points more copiously and better than Lysias, without saying the same things, your statue of beaten metal shall stand at Olympia beside the offering of the Cypselids.
Have you taken my jest in earnest, Phaedrus, because, to tease you, I laid hands on your beloved, and do you really suppose I am going to try to surpass the rhetoric of Lysias and make a speech more ingenious than his?
Now, my friend, you have given me
a fair hold; for you certainly must speak as best you can, lest we be compelled to resort to the comic you’re another; be careful and do not force me to say O Socrates, if I don’t know Socrates, I have forgotten myself, and he yearned to speak, but feigned coyness. Just make up your mind that we are not going away from here until you speak out what you said you had in your breast. We are alone
in a solitary spot, and I am stronger and younger than you; so, under these circumstances, take my meaning, and speak voluntarily, rather than under compulsion.
But, my dear Phaedrus, I shall make myself ridiculous if I, a mere amateur, try without preparation to speak on the same subject in competition with a master of his art.
Now listen to me. Stop trying to fool me; for I can say something which will force you to speak.
Then pray don’t say it.
Yes, but I will. And my saying shall be an oath. I swear to you by—
by what god? By this plane tree? I take my solemn oath that unless you produce the discourse in the very presence of this plane tree, I will never read you another or tell you of another.
Oh! Oh! You wretch! How well you found out how to make a lover of discourse do your will!
Then why do you try to get out of it?
I won’t any more, since you have taken this oath; for how could I give up such pleasures?