Could I Recite It Worthily?
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Phaedrus — Λυσίας ἐν πολλῷ χρόνῳ κατὰ σχολὴν συνέθηκε, δεινότατος ὢν τῶν νῦν γράφειν, ταῦτα ἰδιώτην ὄντα ἀπομνημονεύσειν ἀξίως ἐκείνου; πολλοῦ γε δέω.
Socrates — ὦ Φαῖδρε, εἰ ἐγὼ Φαῖδρον ἀγνοῶ, καὶ ἐμαυτοῦ ἐπιλέλησμαι.
Lysias, the cleverest writer of the present day, composed it at leisure over a long time — and could I, a mere amateur, recite it from memory in a way worthy of him? Far from it. … Phaedrus, if I don't know Phaedrus, then I have forgotten my own self as well.
Socrates suspects Phaedrus has Lysias's speech memorized and wants to hear it. Phaedrus feigns inability — the cleverest writer alive labored over it; how could a mere amateur do it justice? Socrates is not fooled.
The comedy of the coy scene continues, and it is built entirely on the theme the dialogue will end by pronouncing on: <em>memory</em>. Phaedrus protests that he could never 'recite from memory' (<em>apomnēmoneúsein</em>) Lysias's polished text — Lysias, after all, is the <em>deinótatos</em>, the 'most formidable/clever' writer alive (there is that double-edged word <em>deinós</em> again, praise braided with distrust), who 'composed' (<em>synéthēke</em>) the speech <em>katà scholḗn</em>, at leisure, over a long time. The contrast is exactly the one Socrates drew at 236d and the dialogue will settle at 275: the crafted written text, labored over in private, against the living power of memory and speech. And the protest is a lie, which is the joke — Phaedrus has the thing half by heart and a copy under his cloak besides. Socrates catches it instantly: 'if I don't know Phaedrus, I've <em>forgotten myself</em>' (<em>emautoû epilélēsmai</em>).<br><br>That retort is funnier and deeper than it first sounds, because it quietly braids the two great themes of the whole dialogue — self-knowledge and memory — into one clause. Socrates has just told Phaedrus (229e, moments earlier) that he still cannot obey the Delphic <em>gnôthi seauton</em>, 'know thyself'; now he jokes that <em>not</em> knowing Phaedrus would mean having 'forgotten himself.' To know another truly and to know oneself are folded together, and both are cast as acts of <em>memory</em> — the verb <em>epilanthánomai</em>, 'to forget,' carries the same <em>lath-</em> root as <em>lḗthē</em> (oblivion) and, negated, <em>alḗtheia</em> (truth). Under the banter runs the dialogue's whole architecture: the soul knows by remembering (recollection, 249c), forgets in the fall, and the written word — the very thing coyly hidden under Phaedrus's cloak — will be charged with breeding exactly the forgetting Socrates here treats as the loss of self. The lightest scene in the dialogue is already made of its heaviest materials.
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