Abstract

Plato’s Phaedrus is a famously intriguing dialogue. It employs a wide range of writing styles, such as myth, dialectic discussion, rehearsed and spontaneous speeches, and lines of verse. It makes a sharp transition from speech-making and storytelling, which make up the first half of the dialogue and deal with love, to dialectical discussion and an analysis of rhetoric in its second half. Socrates himself claims erotic madness is man’s greatest blessing. How seriously can we take such a strange dialogue? How serious can we be regarding its message?