What Is It but a Written Speech?
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Socrates — ἔδοξέ τῇ βουλῇ ἢ τῷ δήμῳ… ἐγκωμιάζων ὁ συγγραφεύς… ἐπιδεικνύμενος τοῖς ἐπαινέταις τὴν ἑαυτοῦ σοφίαν… ἢ λόγος συγγεγραμμένος;
Socrates completes the picture by quoting the opening of a real Athenian decree. Every public measure began with the sovereign formula of the democracy — edoxe tēi boulēi ē tōi dēmōi, 'it seemed good to the Council or the People' — after which came the name of the man who proposed it. And there, Socrates says, the proposer inscribes himself 'very solemnly,' the syngrapheus, the author, quietly 'praising' — enkōmiazōn — his own role, and then setting out his wisdom at length for the admirers he is really writing to. Strip away the official trappings, and the pompous decree is exactly what the despised speechwriter produces: a logos syngegrammenos, a 'written-up speech.' The rhetorical question at the end does all the work. What is such a document, Socrates asks, but a written speech? — the very thing the powerful pretend to be above.
Socrates spells out the joke about self-praising politicians. At the head of a statesman's written decree stands the formula of Athenian democracy — 'It seemed good to the Council or the People' — followed by the proposer's own name, set down 'very solemnly,' with the author praising himself. Then he lays out his wisdom at length for his admirers. And Socrates asks: what is a thing like that, if not simply a written speech?
Socrates is doing something quietly radical here: he is collapsing a distinction his whole society took for granted. To an Athenian, there was all the difference in the world between a dignified public decree, drawn up by a statesman and ratified by the Council and Assembly, and a mercenary courtroom speech ghost-written by a logographos for pay. The first was the noble business of the polis; the second was the shady trade Phaedrus's politician sneered at. Socrates dissolves the difference in a sentence. The grand decree, with its solemn 'it seemed good to the Council or the People' and its self-important naming of the proposer, is a logos syngegrammenos, a written speech — the same species as the speechwriter's product, differing only in its costume. And he catches the vanity underneath the dignity with a sharp verb: the statesman is enkōmiazōn, delivering an encomium — a praise-song — for himself, and epideiknymenos, showing off his wisdom to his audience of admirers. The Greek for 'showing off' here, epideixis, was a technical term for exactly the display-oratory the sophists were famous for; Socrates has just quietly filed the respectable statesman under the same heading as the sophist. The move matters because it clears the ground for the real question of the dialogue's second half. If everyone writes — the sophist, the speechwriter, the lawgiver, the proud politician — then the question 'should one write at all?' is idle; writing is simply what people in a literate city do. The interesting question is the one Socrates is steering toward: not whether it is shameful to compose a written speech, but whether it is shameful to compose one badly — that is, without knowing the truth of what you speak about, aiming only to be admired. The vanity Socrates keeps exposing, the craving to display one's wisdom to one's praisers, is the mark of writing gone wrong. And the standard he is about to propose will turn entirely on that: good writing, like good speaking and good loving, is measured by its relation to truth, not by the applause it collects.
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