The Recantation, Head Bare
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Socrates — πρὶν γάρ τι παθεῖν διὰ τὴν τοῦ Ἔρωτος κακηγορίαν πειράσομαι αὐτῷ ἀποδοῦναι τὴν παλινῳδίαν, γυμνῇ τῇ κεφαλῇ καὶ οὐχ ὥσπερ τότε ὑπʼ αἰσχύνης ἐγκεκαλυμμένος.
Socrates announces the cure for his offense: a palinode, a recantation, offered to Love as a debt owed. He models it on Stesichorus, the old poet struck blind for slandering Helen, who regained his sight only after singing a palinode taking it all back — Socrates means to be wiser, and recant before any such punishment falls. And he marks the change with a gesture that reverses the one that opened his first speech. That speech he gave with his head covered, muffled in his cloak, unable to meet Phaedrus's eyes for shame. This one he will give bare-headed, face open to the light. The veil was the costume of the lie; its removal is the sign that what comes now is meant to be true.
Socrates resolves to make amends. Before any harm can come to him for slandering Love, he will render the god a palinode — a formal recantation. And this time, tellingly, he will speak with his head bare, out in the open, not muffled in his cloak out of shame as he was for the speech he now repudiates.
Everything about the announcement is designed to undo the first speech point for point, and the master-stroke is physical: gymnē tē kephalē, 'with bare head.' When Socrates gave his speech against love, he covered his head and raced through it, unable, he said, to look at Phaedrus for aischynē — shame, the same word that named his offense. The veil was not a quirk; it was the body confessing that the speech was false, a thing to be said in the dark and gotten over with. Now he strips the covering off. To speak the truth about a god, you face the light with nothing hidden. Behind the gesture stands Stesichorus, whose story Socrates has just told — the poet blinded for defaming Helen, healed the moment he unsaid it in a palinode. Socrates casts himself as a Stesichorus who will recant before the blindness comes, and the analogy tells us what kind of thing a palinode is. It is not a correction but a healing, a restoration of sight; the man who slanders the divine goes blind to it, and only the taking-back opens his eyes. The bare head is Socrates about to see clearly. Everything soaring and strange in the speech that follows — the wings, the heavens, the Forms — is what a man sees when the veil of shame and false cleverness comes off, and he looks straight at love with his eyes open.
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