Not Your Practice-Dummy
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Socrates — ἐγώ σε πάνυ μὲν φιλῶ, παρόντος δὲ καὶ Λυσίου, ἐμαυτόν σοι ἐμμελετᾶν παρέχειν οὐ πάνυ δέδοκται. ἀλλʼ ἴθι, δείκνυε.
Phaedrus — παῦε. ἐκκέκρουκάς με ἐλπίδος, ἣν εἶχον ἐν σοὶ ὡς ἐγγυμνασόμενος. ἀλλὰ ποῦ δὴ βούλει καθιζόμενοι ἀναγνῶμεν;
I love you dearly, Phaedrus — but with Lysias himself present in that scroll, I am not at all inclined to lend myself to you as material to practice on. Come, show it. … Stop it. You've knocked out of me the hope I had of exercising on you. Well — where do you want us to sit and read?
The game is up: Socrates knows Phaedrus has the speech and means to hear it. But he refuses to be used as a rhetorical sparring partner — and Phaedrus, disappointed, gives in and looks for a place to read.
Socrates springs the trap with a joke that names precisely what Phaedrus was up to. Phaedrus did not really want Socrates to <em>hear</em> Lysias's speech; he wanted to <em>rehearse</em> it — to use Socrates as a sparring partner, a dummy on whom to practice the arguments, refining his own grasp of Lysias's cleverness by trying it out loud. Socrates declines to 'lend himself to be practiced upon' (<em>emmeletân</em>, from <em>melétē</em>, the very 'practice' that 269d will name as one of the three ingredients of mastery). And Phaedrus, caught, confesses the plan in the surrendering word: he had hoped to 'train himself upon' Socrates — <em>engymnasómenos</em>, from the <em>gymnásion</em>, the 'place of nakedness' where Greek males exercised unclothed. That word is doing quiet, characteristic work. The gymnasium was school, sports arena, and the great theater of pederastic courtship all at once — the place where lovers watched beloveds train. So even this throwaway line about rhetoric-practice hums with the dialogue's real subject: bodies, desire, and the pursuit of excellence, all tangled together, a joke about arguments carrying the charge of the palaestra.<br><br>And then the scene turns on its hinge — a small, ordinary, perfect question: '<em>where</em> do you want us to sit and read?' (<em>poû… kathizómenoi anagnômen?</em>). After all the coy maneuvering, the dialogue simply has to find a place to sit, and that practical need is what carries the two companions off the road, down to the Ilissus, and under the plane tree where everything else — the whole cosmos of the soul, love, and speech — will be unfolded. Plato is a master of these transitions: the loftiest dialogue in his corpus is set in motion by two men wondering where to plant themselves out of the noon sun. The physical staging is never idle; the reading they are about to do, and the place they choose to do it (a spot sacred to the nymphs and to Boreas, by cool running water), will color everything. The sacred grove and the seduction-scroll arrive together, and the question 'where shall we sit?' is the threshold between the city Socrates loves and the countryside where, for once, he will be seized.
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