We're Not Leaving
Read the full text in our reader
Phaedrus — ἀλλὰ διανοήθητι ὅτι ἐντεῦθεν οὐκ ἄπιμεν πρὶν ἂν σὺ εἴπῃς ἃ ἔφησθα ἐν τῷ στήθει ἔχειν. ἐσμὲν δὲ μόνω ἐν ἐρημίᾳ,
Phaedrus refuses to let Socrates off the hook. Speak, he insists — get it out however you can, and don't force me to start making threats like a character in a comedy. We are not leaving this spot, he says, until you deliver what you said you had 'in your breast.' And then, half teasing, half conspiratorial: remember, we're completely alone out here, just the two of us in the middle of nowhere. It is a lover's coaxing as much as a friend's — the seclusion by the stream framed, lightly, as the setting for a seduction of words.
Phaedrus turns playfully menacing. You must speak, however you can, he tells Socrates — and don't make me resort to threats. We're not leaving this spot until you say what you claimed to be carrying 'in your breast.' And notice: we're all alone out here.
The comedy of the frame keeps doing serious work. Phaedrus plays the insistent lover, pinning Socrates down 'in a solitude,' en erēmiāi — the very word Lysias used for the friendless desert the possessive lover creates, now turned warm and conspiratorial: two friends alone by the water. And what Socrates is said to carry 'in his breast,' en tōi stēthei, picks up the earlier joke about being filled like a vessel with the poets' streams — the speech treated as something stored in the body, waiting to be drawn out. Phaedrus even reaches for dianoēthēti, 'bear in mind,' from dianoia, the reasoning mind — asking Socrates, of all people, to be reasonable about being coerced. Beneath the banter, Plato is quietly staging what the dialogue keeps circling: speech as an erotic transaction between two people in a private place, one drawing the other out. The seduction here is of a logos, and the question the whole work asks is whether such a drawing-out serves truth or only pleasure.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 236c in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 236c — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/236c/