A Lover of Words
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Socrates — βαβαῖ ὦ μιαρέ ὡς εὖ ἀνηῦρες τὴν ἀνάγκην ἀνδρὶ φιλολόγῳ ποιεῖν ὃ ἂν κελεύῃς.
Phaedrus finds the perfect threat — never another speech, ever — and Socrates surrenders laughing. 'Bravo, you scoundrel,' he says: you've hit on exactly the compulsion that works on 'a man who loves words.' He can call it coercion, but the truth is he was never going to resist; a few lines later he asks how anyone could keep away from such a feast. Phaedrus hasn't so much forced Socrates as named him. The lever that moves him is his own nature.
Phaedrus clinches it: swear by the plane tree, he says, or I'll never bring you another speech again. Socrates throws up his hands — 'you rascal!' — and admits defeat with a grin: Phaedrus has found the one lever that works on a man who loves words. How could such a man walk away from a feast like this?
Socrates surrenders by confessing what he is: a philologos, a 'lover of logos' — and the word is doing more than the banter lets on. Logos means word, speech, argument, and reason all at once, so to love it is at once the philosopher's calling and the speech-fancier's weakness, and Socrates is deliberately blurring the two. Phaedrus, another lover of logoi, collects fine speeches the way a gourmet collects dinners — which is why Socrates's next image is a feast, a thoinē he cannot keep away from. The whole dialogue lives in the gap between these two loves of the logos: one that devours beautiful speeches for their flavor, and one that follows the argument wherever it leads, toward the truth of things. By naming himself philologos at the very threshold of the speeches, Socrates flags the question the reader should carry through all of them — what is it to love words rightly? — and admits, disarmingly, that he is as susceptible to their pull as anyone. The word survives into English as 'philology,' the love of words gone scholarly; here it is still warm, still an appetite.
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