An Immortal, Godlike Writer
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Socrates — Λυκούργου ἢ Σόλωνος ἢ Δαρείου δύναμιν ἀθάνατος λογογράφος ἐν πόλει… ἰσόθεον ἡγεῖται αὐτός ζῶν… νομίζουσι θεώμενοι τὰ συγγράμματα;
Socrates seals the case with the biggest claim available: writing can make a man immortal and godlike. Think of a writer, he says, whose composed laws or works give him the enduring 'power' of a Lycurgus, a Solon, or a Darius — the Spartan and Athenian lawgivers and the Persian king, all of whom shaped their peoples through what they set down and are remembered for it centuries on. Such a man, Socrates suggests, counts himself isotheon, 'equal to a god,' even while still alive — and, more strikingly, generations not yet born will regard him the same way, 'gazing at his writings,' theōmenoi ta syngrammata, as at something divine. The word isotheos is the very one used a few pages earlier of the beloved, worshiped as a god by the true lover; here it is claimed by the author of lasting works. Writing is not the shameful trade Phaedrus's politician sneered at. It is, potentially, the nearest thing a mortal has to divinity.
Socrates delivers the clinching argument for why no one truly despises writing. Consider a man whose written laws or works give him the lasting power of a Lycurgus, a Solon, a Darius — the great lawgivers whose writings outlive them by centuries. Does such a writer not count himself godlike even while alive, and do not later generations, reading his works, regard him the same way? Writing, far from being shameful, is a path to immortality.
Socrates has been dismantling the pretense that serious men look down on writing, and here he names the real reason they are drawn to it: the hope of immortality. To be an athanatos logographos — an 'immortal speechwriter' — is to have your words outlast your body and go on shaping a city long after you are gone, the way Solon's laws still governed Athens and Lycurgus's still governed Sparta. The writer who achieves this, Socrates says, feels himself isotheos, godlike, while he yet lives, and posterity confirms the feeling by gazing at his works as at a sacred object. This is a genuinely double-edged observation, and Plato means both edges. On one side, it exposes the vanity that has been the target all along: the craving to write is at bottom a craving to escape death and be worshiped, a hunger for one's own godhood dressed up as public service. That is the same self-love, aimed at eternity, that the whole passage has been unmasking. But on the other side, Plato is genuinely gripped by the thought that words can confer a kind of immortality, and he explores it seriously elsewhere. In the Symposium, Diotima teaches that mortals reach for immortality by begetting — some through children of the body, the higher sort through 'children of the soul,' the poems, laws, and ideas that keep a person's name and mind alive across generations; she names Lycurgus and Solon there too, as men who became immortal through the offspring of their wisdom. So the immortality of the writer is not simply a delusion of vanity. It is a real and lofty desire that can be well or badly directed — turned toward self-display and applause, it is the disease the dialogue keeps diagnosing; turned toward truth and the genuine good of a city, it is one of the noblest things a human being can want. Which of the two it is cannot be settled by whether a man writes, since the immortal lawgiver and the vain decree-monger both write. It can only be settled by what he writes for. And that is exactly the question Socrates is now, at last, ready to raise directly: not whether to commit words to writing, but what it would mean to do so well.
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