Invention and Arrangement
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Socrates — τῶν μὲν τοιούτων οὐ τὴν εὕρεσιν ἀλλὰ τὴν διάθεσιν ἐπαινετέον, τῶν δὲ μὴ ἀναγκαίων τε καὶ χαλεπῶν εὑρεῖν πρὸς τῇ διαθέσει καὶ τὴν εὕρεσιν.
Socrates concedes a fair point, in the language of the rhetoric schools. Where a topic's content is obvious and unavoidable — no one arguing for the non-lover could fail to praise his good sense and fault the lover's folly — the credit goes not to inventing the material but to arranging it well. Only where the matter is genuinely hard to discover does the discovery itself earn applause, on top of the arrangement. Judged this way, Lysias scores for disposition, not for insight. It is a reasonable ruling — and, Socrates will show, one made in a vocabulary that can't reach what really matters about a speech.
Socrates draws a craftsman's distinction. When the points are obvious and unavoidable — as in Lysias's theme — what earns praise is not finding them but arranging them well. Only when the material is genuinely hard to come by does the finding of it deserve credit too. It sounds like fair-minded rhetorical theory — and it is the vocabulary Socrates is about to leave behind.
Socrates borrows the two great craft-terms of the rhetoric handbooks: heuresis, the finding of material — from heuriskō, the 'eureka!' verb — and diathesis, its arrangement. In the Latin tradition these become inventio and dispositio, two of the five parts every schoolboy orator learned. On the surface he is being generous, granting Lysias competence at disposition. But the terms are a trap he is setting for himself to spring. The whole later argument of the Phaedrus refuses the handbook picture in which a good speech is well-found points well-ordered. A real logos, Socrates will insist, must be built like a living creature, with its own head and limbs and a middle that belongs to both — an order that grows from knowing the truth of the subject, not one imposed by a technician sorting his cards. Here he speaks the schools' language fluently. In a few pages he will explain why fluency in it is not nearly enough.
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