A Terrible Speech
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Socrates — δεινόν ὦ Φαῖδρε δεινὸν λόγον αὐτός τε ἐκόμισας ἐμέ τε ἠνάγκασας εἰπεῖν.
What was the sin? Socrates answers with a recoil, the word 'terrible' doubled for emphasis: a terrible speech, Phaedrus, that you brought here and made me give. He spells out the charge in the lines that follow: the speech was silly and, worse, impious. And the reason it was impious is simple and, once said, obvious — Love is a god, or something godlike, a child of Aphrodite. To have described such a being as a mere disease, a tyrant-appetite that harms whomever it touches, is blasphemy. The whole cold analysis of the first two speeches rested on forgetting that its subject was divine. Now Socrates remembers, and is appalled.
Phaedrus asks what the offense was, and Socrates names it with a shudder. A terrible speech, he says — twice terrible — that Phaedrus brought along and forced him to give. It was foolish, and, worse, impious: for Love is a god, the child of Aphrodite, and the two of them have just spent the afternoon slandering him.
The turn is theological, and it changes the terms of everything. Socrates does not say his first speech was merely mistaken or unkind; he says it was asebēs — impious — and that is a far graver charge. The premise he had suppressed, and now recovers, is that Erōs is a god, or at least something daimonic, the child of Aphrodite. If that is so, then reducing love to appetite, tyranny, and harm was not a cynical error but a slander against a divine being — the kind of offense that incurs real pollution and demands real expiation. This is why the daimonion stopped him, and why what follows must be a recantation and not just a rebuttal. It also quietly announces the method of the great speech to come. Because its subject is a god, the palinode cannot proceed as the first two speeches did, by cool definition and cost-accounting; it must proceed by myth, by praise, in the language proper to the divine. Plato is telling us how to read the myth of the soul that is coming: not as a quaint story dressed over an argument, but as the only fitting way to speak of something that exceeds argument — a god, and the love that is his gift. The doubled 'terrible' is Socrates measuring the distance between what love is and what he just said it was.
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