More Elaborate Than His Wisdom?
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Socrates — ἐσπούδακας ὦ Φαῖδρε ὅτι σου τῶν παιδικῶν ἐπελαβόμην ἐρεσχηλῶν σε, καὶ οἴει δή με ὡς ἀληθῶς ἐπιχειρήσειν εἰπεῖν παρὰ τὴν ἐκείνου σοφίαν ἕτερόν τι ποικιλώτερον;
Socrates reads Phaedrus's sudden earnestness and puts his finger on it. You've gone all serious, he says, because I laid a hand on your 'darling' to tease you — casting Lysias, wryly, as the boy Phaedrus is besotted with. And do you honestly think, he goes on, that I'd even try to say something more elaborate, more intricately worked, than the great man's wisdom? The mock-humility is a setup. Socrates has no intention of competing on Lysias's terms — and the word he picks for those terms, 'more elaborate,' quietly tells us what he makes of them.
Socrates sees Phaedrus bristle and names what's happening: Phaedrus has taken it personally because Socrates poked at his 'darling' — meaning Lysias, whom Phaedrus adores like a beloved. And does Phaedrus really imagine Socrates could, or would want to, out-embroider Lysias's clever speech?
The joke has a barb. Socrates calls Lysias Phaedrus's paidika, the 'beloved boy' — turning the whole scene into a little erotic comedy in which Phaedrus is the smitten lover and Lysias the adored. It is affectionate teasing, but it also reframes the debate: Phaedrus's attachment to the speech is itself a kind of infatuation, exactly the sort of thing the speeches are about. The sharper word is poikilōteron, 'more elaborate' — from poikilos, one of Greek's most double-edged terms. It means dappled, many-colored, intricately embroidered, and, of speech, subtle to the point of being over-wrought; of a person, wily. To ask whether he could say anything 'more poikilon' than Lysias is not humble at all: variegated intricacy is precisely the merit Socrates does not grant. The word will return, unflattering, in the palinode as the marking of the soul's dark, unruly horse. Here it is a smiling insult wrapped in a compliment.
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