Reading room

Phaedrus

Plato

Outside the walls, on the banks of the Ilissus, Socrates and Phaedrus read a speech by Lysias on love and Socrates answers with two: one in shame and a palinode that celebrates divine madness and presents the soul as a winged chariot driven by a charioteer. The second half deals with the art of rhetoric and ends with the Egyptian myth of Theuth and the critique of writing as dead memory. It is Plato's most poetic dialogue.