The Cicada Chorus
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Socrates — τὸ εὔπνουν τοῦ τόπου ὡς ἀγαπητὸν καὶ σφόδρα ἡδύ· θερινόν τε καὶ λιγυρὸν ὑπηχεῖ τῷ τῶν τεττίγων χορῷ. ὥστε ἄριστά σοι ἐξενάγηται, ὦ φίλε Φαῖδρε.
Phaedrus — σὺ δέ γε, ὦ θαυμάσιε, ἀτοπώτατός τις φαίνῃ
And the breeze — how welcome it is, how sweet: summery and clear, it hums beneath the chorus of the cicadas. Add the grass, sloped just right for a reclining head, and you have guided your stranger perfectly, dear Phaedrus. — And you, you astonishing man, seem like the strangest creature alive: exactly as you say, a tourist being shown the sights, not a local.
Socrates finishes his surprisingly connoisseur-like inventory of the spot under the plane tree — breeze, cicada-song, a grass slope pitched exactly right for the head — and Phaedrus marvels: the man is like a tourist in his own countryside.
Socrates the aesthete is a deliberate surprise: the man who owns one cloak inventories the spot like a connoisseur — breeze, acoustics, even the pitch of the grass for a reclining head. In the middle sits the dialogue's soundtrack, named once: the <em>chorus of the cicadas</em>. The word is <em>téttix</em> — say it aloud and you hear the insect — and Plato will not let it stay scenery: at 259b Socrates invents a myth in which cicadas are former men who died of song-mania and now report to the Muses on which mortals honor them. The background noise of this conversation is an audience taking notes.<br><br>The exchange of vocatives at the end is the scene's real joke. Socrates: 'you have guided your <em>stranger</em> (exenágētai — the tour-guide verb, from <em>xénos</em>) beautifully.' Phaedrus: 'you, ō <em>thaumásie</em> — you wonder — are <em>atopṓtatos</em>,' most out-of-place, most unclassifiable. Wonder and placelessness: Plato elsewhere calls wonder the beginning of philosophy (<em>Theaetetus</em> 155d), and <em>átopos</em> became the standing word for Socrates himself (Alcibiades uses it of him in the <em>Symposium</em>). A man with no place, marveled at, being guided by his own student into territory where — two pages from now — the strangest speech of his life will seize him.
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