The Cicadas Are Watching
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Socrates — εἰ οὖν ἴδοιεν νὼ ἐν μεσημβρίᾳ μὴ διαλεγομένους ἀλλὰ νυστάζοντας, δικαίως ἂν καταγελῷεν, ἡγούμενοι ἀνδράποδʼ ἄττα ὥσπερ προβάτια περὶ τὴν κρήνην εὕδειν.
So if they saw us too, at noon, not conversing but nodding off, they would be right to laugh at us — taking us for a couple of slaves who'd wandered into their haunt to sleep, like little sheep drowsing by the spring at midday.
The noon cicadas are singing overhead, and Socrates warns Phaedrus they are not just scenery: they watch, and they judge. To doze through their song would be to earn their scorn.
Socrates turns the noon-day cicadas from scenery into a moral audience. They watch, he says, and they judge — and to be caught <em>dozing</em> at midday, when one might be <em>conversing</em>, would earn their scorn. The whole warning turns on the opposition of two verbs: <em>dialégesthai</em>, 'to converse,' and <em>nystázein</em>, 'to doze.' To talk together — <em>dialégomai</em>, the root of both 'dialogue' and 'dialectic' — is to keep the mind awake and moving; to nod off is to let it go slack. And the comic image escalates the stakes with cruel precision. The dozers would be taken for <em>andrápoda</em> — 'slaves,' but the word literally means 'man-footed,' coined on the model of <em>tetrápoda</em>, 'four-footed things,' i.e. livestock. It files a human being under cattle. And then they are 'little sheep' (<em>probátia</em>) drowsing by the spring. In three words Socrates traces the fall: a man who sleeps through the hour of conversation slides from <em>anḗr</em> (man) to <em>andrápodon</em> (human chattel) to <em>próbaton</em> (sheep). Wakeful dialogue is what keeps you human; the drowsy herd by the water is what you become without it.<br><br>This is the setup for the myth Socrates tells next (the cicadas as former men who died of song-love and now report to the Muses, 259c), but the point stands on its own and it is the dialogue's ethic in miniature. The <em>Phaedrus</em> is, formally, a <em>diálogos</em> — a 'talking-across' — and here it names the very activity it consists of as the thing that redeems the drowsy noon and dignifies the human animal. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine you can doze over; it is an <em>activity</em>, the wakeful exchange of two minds, and the alternative is not neutral rest but a real descent into the sub-human. The cicadas' laughter would be <em>just</em> (<em>dikaíōs</em>) — because sleep, when speech was possible, is a kind of moral failure. It is worth remembering, when Socrates a page later crowns the living spoken word over the silent written one, that the dialogue has already told us why: only the living conversation keeps the sleeper awake. A book cannot laugh at you for dozing over it. The cicadas can.
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