Phaedrus 229b · 229b
Where Boreas Seized the Girl
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Phaedrus — εἰπέ μοι, ὦ Σώκρατες, οὐκ ἐνθένδε μέντοι ἀπὸ τοῦ Ἰλισοῦ λέγεται ὁ Βορέας τὴν Ὠρείθυιαν ἁρπάσαι;
Socrates — λέγεται γάρ.
Phaedrus — χαρίεντα γοῦν καὶ καθαρὰ καὶ διαφανῆ τὰ ὑδάτια φαίνεται, καὶ ἐπιτήδεια κόραις παίζειν παρʼ αὐτά
Tell me, Socrates — wasn't it somewhere along here, by the Ilissus, that Boreas is supposed to have snatched Oreithyia away? … So the story goes. … It must have been here: the water is so lovely, so clear and transparent — exactly the sort of place girls would play beside.
Word by word
The setting
Wading upstream, Phaedrus remembers whose riverbank this is: somewhere near here, the story goes, the North Wind carried off the Athenian princess Oreithyia. He wants to know if Socrates believes it.
A note on this passage
Every Athenian knew the story: the North Wind — a violent god from Thrace — swept the princess Oreithyia off this riverbank while she played, and Athens later thanked him for wrecking the Persian fleet, building him an altar as a kind of son-in-law. The verb is <em>harpásai</em>, the seizure-word of Greek myth: Hades takes Persephone, Zeus takes Ganymede, and the Harpies — the 'Snatchers' — share its root. English inherits its Latin twin in both 'raptor' and 'rapture,' and the palinode will trade on precisely that doubleness: the soul, too, gets seized.<br><br>Phaedrus's evidence is pure charm: the water is clear, therefore girls must have played here, therefore the myth happened here. Notice how the dialogue's imagery quietly assembles itself — a beautiful young person at play beside pure water, and a sudden overwhelming force from above. That is the shape of the whole palinode, prefigured as a tourist's question. Even <em>kórē</em>, 'girl,' has a second life in this dialogue: it is also the Greek word for the pupil of the eye, the little reflected figure in which — at 255d — the beloved will discover himself in his lover's gaze.
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