They Mourn It Like a Death
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Socrates — ἐὰν δὲ ἐξαλειφθῇ ἄμοιρος γένηται λογογραφίας… πενθεῖ αὐτός… οὐχ ὡς ὑπερφρονοῦντες τοῦ ἐπιτηδεύματος ἀλλʼ ὡς τεθαυμακότες.
Socrates finishes unmasking the pretended contempt for writing, and he does it with a beautifully chosen verb. If the statesman's decree is adopted, he leaves the assembly 'like a poet' whose work has triumphed at the theater. But if it is 'erased,' exaleiphthē — rubbed off the wax, struck from the record — so that he is left amoiros, 'without a share,' of speechwriting and of any claim to be worth reading, then he 'grieves': pentheî. That word is not casual. Penthein is the verb of mourning the dead, the grave, wholehearted sorrow of the bereaved. The man weeps over his rejected decree, Socrates says, and his friends mourn with him — as at a funeral. And the conclusion is drawn plainly: this is manifestly not the behavior of people who 'look down on' the pursuit, hyperphronountes, but of people who have 'admired' it all along, tethaumakotes.
Socrates presses the point home. When a statesman's written measure is adopted, he leaves 'the theater' of the assembly rejoicing, like a poet whose play has won. But if it is voted down and erased from the record — leaving him with no share in speechwriting, no claim to be worth reading — he grieves, and so do his friends. And that grief, Socrates observes, betrays the truth: they do not disdain writing at all. They revere it.
The little argument Socrates completes here is a piece of moral psychology as sharp as anything in the dialogue, and it works by watching grief. Phaedrus had claimed that the powerful avoid writing because they think it beneath them. Socrates answers, in effect: then why do they mourn when a written work of theirs is destroyed? The key is the word penthei — they don't merely feel let down, they mourn, using the vocabulary reserved for grieving the dead. And grief is the one emotion that cannot lie about what we love. We can feign indifference, sneer, strike a pose of being above a thing; but when it is taken from us and we find ourselves in mourning, the mask comes off, because no one grieves for what he genuinely despised. The intensity of the sorrow measures the depth of the attachment. So the statesmen's penthos over a rejected decree exposes their supposed disdain for writing as exactly a pose — 'not as people who look down on the pursuit,' Socrates says, 'but as people who have admired it.' This is more than a debating point about hypocritical politicians. Plato is establishing something he needs for the whole coming discussion: that the human relationship to the written word is one of love, not contempt — everyone writes, everyone secretly reveres it, and the pretense of being above it is just that, a pretense. Once that is settled, the question 'is writing shameful?' evaporates, and the real question can begin. The problem was never writing as such; it is the kind of love the writers bear it. They love their compositions as extensions of themselves, mourn them as possessions lost, crave the applause they bring — a love turned inward, toward reputation and self-display. What Socrates will set against this, before the dialogue ends, is a different way of loving words: not clutching them as monuments to oneself, but using them, lightly and knowingly, in the service of a truth that outlasts any single speech. The diagnosis by grief clears the ground; it shows that the disease is not writing but vanity, the same vanity the first half found at the root of the wrong kind of love.
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