Arranged Toward a Fixed End
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Socrates — συνταξάμενος πάντα λόγον διεπεράνατο… ἀναγνῶμεν τὴν ἀρχὴν.
The point here is about where a speech's order comes from. Lysias, Socrates says, syntaxamenos — 'having arranged' or marshaled (the word gives us 'syntax') — his whole speech toward a predetermined aim, then dieperanato, 'carried it through' to the end. The two verbs describe a speech built like a wall laid course by course toward a decided height, not one that grew from a living root. Because Lysias never defined love, nothing internal to the subject could dictate his order; the arrangement had to be imposed from without, aimed at a conclusion chosen in advance. Socrates proposes to reread the opening to confirm this, and Phaedrus, loyal but honest, gives the game away with a shrug: 'what you're looking for isn't there.' He means the definition. Phaedrus already senses that Socrates is hunting for the anchoring first move — the marking-out of the subject — and that in Lysias's speech there is simply no such thing to find.
Socrates presses the contrast about method. Because Lysias never defined love, whatever order his speech has was imposed from outside: he fixed on a conclusion he wanted, then arranged his whole speech to march toward it, and carried it through to the finish. To test the point, Socrates asks Phaedrus to read the opening once more — even as Phaedrus warns that the thing Socrates is looking for (a definition) simply isn't there.
This brief passage sharpens the diagnosis into a claim about organization, and it is worth drawing out because it connects the abstract demand for definition to the concrete matter of how a speech hangs together. Socrates's charge is that Lysias's speech has only an external order, not an internal one. He 'arranged' it — syntaxis, the marshaling of parts — toward an end he had fixed before he began; the sequence of the speech answers to Lysias's wishes, not to the nature of its subject. Compare a speech that begins from a real definition. Once you have marked out what love is, the definition itself starts to generate an order: this kind of madness has these sources, these effects, this place among the others, and the speech unfolds by following those real articulations. The structure grows from the subject the way a plant grows from a seed, each part called for by what came before. That is what Socrates means, a few lines later, when he says a speech should be like a living animal. Lysias's speech is the opposite: assembled, not grown. Its parts are marshaled toward a goal, but nothing in the subject requires them to come in the order they do — which is exactly why, as the next passage will show, they could be shuffled without harm. And notice Phaedrus's little concession, 'what you seek isn't there.' It is a small moment of real education. Phaedrus began the day dazzled by Lysias's cleverness, ready to reread the speech for the pleasure of its phrases; now he can already anticipate what Socrates is looking for and register its absence. He has started to read as a philosopher reads — asking not 'is this clever?' but 'is this built on knowledge of its subject?' The rereading of Lysias is thus not just a critique of one speech; it is Phaedrus being taught to see, and the change in how he hears his beloved speech is one of the quiet dramas of the dialogue's second half.
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