Seized by the Nymphs
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Socrates — δοκῶ τι σοί, ὥσπερ ἐμαυτῷ, θεῖον πάθος πεπονθέναι;
Phaedrus — πάνυ μὲν οὖν, ὦ Σώκρατες, εὔροιά τίς σε εἴληφεν.
Socrates — θεῖος ἔοικεν ὁ τόπος εἶναι, ὥστε ἐὰν ἄρα πολλάκις νυμφόληπτος προϊόντος τοῦ λόγου γένωμαι, μὴ θαυμάσῃς· τὰ νῦν γὰρ οὐκέτι πόρρω διθυράμβων φθέγγομαι. τούτων μέντοι σὺ αἴτιος
Tell me, Phaedrus — do you see it too? Something divine is happening to me. … It's true, Socrates: a fluency quite unlike you has taken hold. … The place really must be sacred. So don't be surprised if, as the speech goes on, I turn nymph-seized — I'm already this close to breaking into dithyrambs. And you, my friend, are the cause of it.
Mid-speech, Socrates breaks off. Something is happening to his prose — it is running too well. He names the local hazard: this riverbank belongs to the nymphs, and they are known to take people.
Socrates interrupts his own speech to report that something has him. His phrase is exact: a <em>theîon páthos</em>, a 'divine undergoing' — and <em>páthos</em> is the word that refuses to separate 'experience' from 'suffering': what you feel is what is done to you. Phaedrus's answer keeps the grammar of seizure: a fluency 'has TAKEN you' (<em>eílēphen</em>). No one in this scene is the agent of his own eloquence.<br><br>Then the diagnosis: <em>nymphólēptos</em> — nymph-seized. Not a figure of speech in Attica: nympholepsy was a recognized visitation, with real shrines (one survives in a cave at Vari, kept by a man the nymphs took), conferring prophecy and eloquence at the cost of self-possession. Socrates is sitting beside the nymphs' own stream — he saluted their shrine at 230b — and 'dithyrambs,' Dionysus's whirling hymn, is what his prose is tipping into. The comedy is precision-built: while DELIVERING the anti-love speech, the case for cold self-command, the speaker is visibly losing his. His body refutes his argument before the palinode gets the chance. And the last line hands the whole dialogue its love-plot in miniature: 'you are the cause' — <em>sù aítios</em> — the beloved blamed, affectionately, for the state of the speaker's soul.
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