Called a Speechwriter
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Phaedrus — ὁ Λυσίας ταπεινὸς φανῇ… τῶν πολιτικῶν λοιδορῶν ἐκάλει λογογράφον… ὑπὸ φιλοτιμίας… τοῦ γράφειν.
With the palinode over, Phaedrus turns the talk toward Lysias, and in doing so hands Plato the theme of the whole second half. He fears Lysias will now 'appear lowly' — tapeinos, the very word used a page ago for the humbled horse, here meaning cut down to size, made to look small beside Socrates's soaring speech. Then he relays a piece of gossip that will prove decisive: a politician, one of hoi politikoi, was 'reviling' Lysias, loidorōn, and kept calling him a logographos — a 'speechwriter.' The insult stings because it is half true: Lysias made his living composing courtroom speeches for other men to deliver. And Phaedrus guesses that, 'out of philotimia' — love of honor, the wounded pride of a man who cannot bear to be sneered at — Lysias might give up writing entirely. A whole conversation about the worth of the written word is being set in motion by a single contemptuous label.
The palinode is finished, and the dialogue's second half begins. Phaedrus, still marveling at how much finer Socrates's speech was than the first, worries aloud that Lysias will look 'lowly' by comparison. He mentions that a politician recently reviled Lysias by calling him a mere 'speechwriter' — a slur that, out of wounded pride, might make Lysias give up writing altogether. The word 'speechwriter' launches the whole coming discussion of rhetoric and writing.
The Phaedrus has a famous two-part structure that can look like two different dialogues stitched together: a first half of gorgeous speeches about love, and a second half of dry technical discussion about rhetoric and writing. This little passage is the seam, and it repays attention because it shows how deliberately Plato joins the halves. The bridge is a single word used as an insult — logographos, 'speechwriter.' In democratic Athens this was a real and slightly shady profession: since litigants had to plead their own cases, a man like Lysias would write a persuasive speech for a client to memorize and deliver as if it were his own, for a fee. To the political class it smacked of selling words, and so 'speechwriter' could be thrown as a sneer, exactly as Phaedrus reports. Plato seizes on the sneer to open his real inquiry. The whole rest of the dialogue will ask what, if anything, is wrong with writing speeches — whether the written word is a legitimate instrument of truth or merely a device for persuasion and display, and whether a person who commits his thoughts to writing is a serious thinker or a peddler of clever effects. Notice, too, the motive Phaedrus assigns: philotimia, love of honor. It is the same word that named the second-best lovers a page earlier, the ones who lived by esteem rather than wisdom, and it is not idle repetition. Plato is drawing a quiet line under the transition. The lover who lives for honor and the writer who fears the loss of it are the same human type — people governed by how they appear to others rather than by what is true. The first half diagnosed that motive in love; the second half will diagnose it in rhetoric. Both speeches and love-affairs, Plato is suggesting, go wrong in the same way: when the desire to be admired replaces the desire for what is real.
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