The Old and Wise Will Refute Me
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Socrates — παλαιοὶ γὰρ καὶ σοφοὶ ἄνδρες τε καὶ γυναῖκες περὶ αὐτῶν εἰρηκότες καὶ γεγραφότες ἐξελέγξουσί με, ἐάν σοι χαριζόμενος συγχωρῶ.
Phaedrus digs in: the speech is exhaustive, he says, and no one alive could add a thing to it. Socrates refuses to sign off on that. If he went along with it just to please his friend, he warns, the old and wise — men and women alike — who have spoken and written about love down the ages would rise up and refute him. It is a mock-solemn dodge, but a pointed one: against the brand-new, self-satisfied cleverness of Lysias, Socrates sets the long memory of a whole tradition, and prepares to draw on it.
Phaedrus insists the speech left out nothing worth saying — no one could better it. Socrates won't grant it. If he agreed just to please Phaedrus, he says, the old and wise men and women who have spoken and written about love would rise up and cross-examine him. He is about to name a few of them.
Three threads of the dialogue are gathered into one short sentence. First, exelenxousi, 'will refute me' — the verb of the elenchos, Socrates's signature cross-examination, the testing that separates real knowledge from confident opinion. Lysias's speech was admired, never tested; Socrates invokes the one thing it could not survive. Second, the pointed pairing of 'spoken and written,' eirēkotes kai gegraphotes, quietly seeds the theme the dialogue will close on: the difference between living speech and dead letters. Third, and easy to miss, Socrates counts women as well as men among the wise who have understood love — and he means it. In a breath he will name Sappho, and the deepest teaching about erōs in all of Plato, in the Symposium, is placed in the mouth of a woman, Diotima. Against Lysias's freshly lathed cleverness, Socrates ranges the accumulated wisdom of a tradition that includes the poets, the sages, and the women who knew what desire was — the 'full breast' he is about to say he has drunk from.
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