Phaedrus

Introduction

This is the only Platonic dialogue set outside the walls of Athens. On a summer day Socrates and the young Phaedrus sit under a plane tree by the river Ilissus. They read a speech on love by the orator Lysias, and Socrates answers with two speeches of his own, including the famous myth of the soul as a chariot: reason as the driver of a noble and an unruly horse, rising towards the truth beyond the heavens. The second half turns to rhetoric, asking what good speaking and good writing are, and ends with Socrates' critique of writing itself.