By the Dog — a Fellow-Corybant
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Socrates — ὡς μὲν ἐγὼ οἶμαι, νὴ τὸν κύνα, ἐξεπιστάμενος τὸν λόγον, εἰ μὴ πάνυ τι ἦν μακρός. ἀπαντήσας δὲ τῷ νοσοῦντι περὶ λόγων ἀκοήν, ἥσθη ὅτι ἕξοι τὸν συγκορυβαντιῶντα
As I'd guess — by the Dog! — he had the speech memorized, unless it was really quite long. And walking out past the wall he met a man sick with passion for hearing speeches, and rejoiced at the sight: here was someone to share the frenzy with.
Socrates, refusing to be played, narrates exactly what Phaedrus has been up to all morning — telling the story of their own meeting in the third person, as if he'd watched it from above.
Socrates narrates Phaedrus's morning back to him in the third person — including their own meeting, seen as if from above — and skewers himself in the same breath: he is 'the man sick with passion for hearing speeches' (<em>nosôn</em>, the tragedians' word for lovesickness as literal disease). The oath is his signature: <em>nḕ tòn kýna</em>, 'by the Dog,' the evasive non-god Socrates swears by all over Plato — in the <em>Gorgias</em>, 'by the Dog, god of the Egyptians!' — an oath that can never be impious because it never names an Olympian.<br><br>The last word is the buried treasure: Phaedrus rejoices to find a <em>synkorybantiônta</em> — a 'fellow-Corybant,' a partner in the whirling, drum-driven possession-dances of Cybele's priests, Athens's stock image of ecstatic mania. Plato seems to have coined the compound for this sentence, and it is a time-bomb: two friends teased as cult-crazies over fashionable prose, twenty pages before Socrates argues in dead earnest that the greatest goods come by god-sent madness. The joke plants what the palinode will harvest. He uses the same Corybantic image for poets in the <em>Ion</em> — possession, for Plato, is never only a joke.
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