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Socrates — Ἀττικὴν φαίνῃ περιάξειν ἅπασαν. νῦν δʼ οὖν ἐν τῷ παρόντι δεῦρʼ ἀφικόμενος ἐγὼ μέν μοι δοκῶ κατακείσεσθαι, σὺ δʼ ἐν ὁποίῳ σχήματι οἴει ῥᾷστα ἀναγνώσεσθαι, τοῦθʼ ἑλόμενος ἀναγίγνωσκε.
You look ready to lead me all around Attica, and anywhere else you please! But for now, having come here, I intend to lie down; and you — take whatever posture you think easiest for reading, and read.
The wandering is over. Socrates has praised the spot, teased Phaedrus, confessed he can be led anywhere by a book — and now, arrived at the shade by the water, he settles down and hands the moment to Phaedrus and his scroll.
The frame closes exactly as it opened: with movement resolving into stillness, and the whole elaborate approach — the walk out past the wall, the wading up the stream, the praise of the plane tree, the teasing — settling at last into two men on the grass and a scroll about to be unrolled. Socrates's opening jibe caps a joke he made moments earlier (230d): being a 'lover of learning' (<em>philomathḗs</em>), he can be led anywhere by the promise of a speech, the way a hungry animal is led by a branch held before its nose. So Phaedrus, book in hand, could 'lead him around (<em>periáxein</em>) all of Attica.' The verb quietly anticipates the dialogue's own central discovery — that rhetoric is <em>psychagōgía</em>, a 'leading of souls' (261a), built on the same <em>ágō</em>, 'to lead.' Phaedrus is about to lead Socrates's soul with Lysias's words; the whole second half will ask by what right, and toward what, a soul may be led.<br><br>And then the staging, which in Plato is never idle. Socrates will 'lie down' (<em>katakeísesthai</em>) — the relaxed, receptive posture of the listener, the reclining body of the symposium and the noon rest — while Phaedrus takes 'whatever posture' (<em>schêma</em>) suits him to read. The reader stands or sits with the text; the philosopher lies back and takes it in through the ear. It is a small tableau of the very contrast the dialogue will end on: the written speech, held and performed, against the living listener who receives, questions, and answers. This is the last calm breath before the storm of speeches: the place chosen (a spot sacred to the nymphs and to Boreas, beside cool water, under the singing cicadas), the bodies arranged, the scroll drawn out. Everything the <em>Phaedrus</em> will become — the anatomy of love, the flight of the soul, the trial of rhetoric, the critique of writing — begins in the next breath, with a man lying on the grass saying, simply, 'read.'
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