A Prayer to Turn Lysias
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Socrates — Λυσίαν τὸν τοῦ λόγου πατέρα αἰτιώμενος παῦε τῶν τοιούτων λόγων, ἐπὶ φιλοσοφίαν δέ, ὥσπερ ἁδελφὸς αὐτοῦ Πολέμαρχος τέτραπται, τρέψον, ἵνα καὶ ὁ ἐραστὴς ὅδε αὐτοῦ μηκέτι ἐπαμφοτερίζῃ καθάπερ νῦν, ἀλλʼ ἁπλῶς πρὸς ἔρωτα μετὰ φιλοσόφων λόγων τὸν βίον ποιῆται
Blame Lysias, the father of the speech, and make him cease from speeches of that kind; turn him toward philosophy, as his brother Polemarchus has turned — so that this lover of his may no longer waver, as he does now, but simply direct his whole life toward Love, in the company of philosophical discourse.
The recantation finished, Socrates prays to Eros himself — asking the god to reform not just his own fault but the speechwriter who started it all, and to steady the wavering young man beside him.
The recantation ends not in argument but in prayer: Socrates speaks directly to Eros, asking the god to convert the man who began the trouble. And the request is specific enough to be real gossip — Lysias should turn to philosophy 'as his brother <em>Polemarchus</em> has turned.' Plato's first readers knew Polemarchus: he hosts and argues in the opening book of the <em>Republic</em>, and would later be murdered by the Thirty Tyrants. Naming him is a wink across dialogues, and a claim that philosophical conversion is a thing that actually happens in Athenian families — one brother to the speechwriter's trade, the other to the love of wisdom.<br><br>The pivot of the prayer is a pair of opposed words. Phaedrus — 'this lover' of Lysias's speeches — is asked to stop 'wavering' (<em>epamphoterízein</em>, from <em>amphóteros</em>, 'both': to face both ways, sit on the fence) and instead choose 'simply,' <em>haplôs</em> — the adverb of <em>haploûs</em>, single, undivided. Doubleness is the disease of the soul all through this dialogue: the divided lover, the speech that argues both sides, the writing that says the same thing to everyone. Its cure is always the single, the whole — the very <em>haploûs</em> that described the pure Forms at 250c. Socrates is praying that Phaedrus become one thing. And the fusion the prayer asks for — a life directed 'toward Love, with philosophical discourse' — is the dialogue's whole thesis in a phrase: eros and philosophy are not rivals but the same reaching, the soul winged toward beauty it does not yet possess.
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