An Amateur Beside a Poet
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Socrates — ἀλλʼ, ὦ μακάριε Φαῖδρε, γελοῖος ἔσομαι παρʼ ἀγαθὸν ποιητὴν ἰδιώτης αὐτοσχεδιάζων περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν.
But my dear Phaedrus, I shall make a fool of myself — a mere amateur, improvising off the cuff beside a good poet, and on the very same subjects.
Phaedrus, playfully threatening to withhold all future speeches, has all but forced Socrates to deliver a rival to Lysias. Socrates protests with his usual ironic modesty.
Socrates's protest is a small comic gem built on two loaded words, and it sets up the deepest reversal in the dialogue. He casts himself as an <em>idiṓtēs</em> — a 'layman,' an amateur — <em>autoschediázōn</em>, 'improvising,' making it up on the spot, against the polished professional Lysias, 'a good poet.' The self-deprecation is pure Socratic irony: this rank amateur is about to deliver two speeches so overpowering that he has to stop himself, break into verse, and be halted by a god. But the contrast he draws is exactly the one the whole dialogue will adjudicate — <em>live, unrehearsed speech</em> against a <em>crafted written text</em>. Lysias's speech is a made thing, a <em>poíēma</em>, carried in on a scroll, perfected in advance, always saying the same words. Socrates's will be improvised, alive, responsive to the moment and the listener. And by the end (276a), it is precisely the living, improvised word — spoken soul-to-soul, able to adapt and answer — that Plato crowns over the frozen written one. The 'amateur' has the thing the professional lacks: presence.<br><br>The word <em>idiṓtēs</em> carries its own quiet joke, too. It means the 'private man' (from <em>ídios</em>, one's own) — and to the Athenians, who prized the public life of the citizen, the man who kept to his own affairs was thereby a lesser, unskilled figure; the word drifts down the centuries into 'idiot.' Socrates, who famously <em>did</em> stay out of politics, is an <em>idiṓtēs</em> in the most literal sense — a private man whose private philosophizing turned out to matter more than every public oration of his age. So the mock-modesty hides a double claim: not only will the amateur out-speak the professional here and now, but the whole shape of a life — the 'private' one given to talking under plane trees rather than the 'public' one given to writing speeches for pay — is being quietly defended. The fool beside the poet is the philosopher beside the sophist, and we already know who wins.
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