Thrown Together at Random
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Socrates — οὐ χύδην βεβλῆσθαι τὰ λόγου… σὺ ἔχεις ἀνάγκην λογογραφικὴν… ἐφεξῆς?
Now Socrates tests the whole body of the speech for structure, and finds none. Do the parts of Lysias's speech, he asks, not seem beblēsthai chydēn — 'thrown together in a heap,' the adverb chydēn picturing grain poured at random from a sack? Is there any necessity by which the second thing said had to be said second, rather than at any other point? He frames it with mock self-deprecation: to him, 'as one who knows nothing,' the writer seems to have set down whatever came into his head, and done it 'not ignobly' — a real compliment to Lysias's local felicities. But then the needle: does Phaedrus know of some anankē logographikē, some 'logographic necessity' — a genuine rule of the speechwriter's art — that dictated why these points were placed 'in order,' ephexēs, beside one another? The phrase is a joke. There is no such necessity in Lysias's speech, and the challenge to name one is really a challenge to admit its absence. The parts sit in their sequence by accident; any of them could trade places with any other and nothing would be lost.
Socrates turns from the beginning of Lysias's speech to its whole arrangement. Do the parts, he asks, not seem simply thrown together at random? Is there any reason the second point had to come second rather than anywhere else? To an untrained ear, he says teasingly, the writer seems to have set down whatever occurred to him, well enough — so does Phaedrus know of some 'logographic necessity,' some rule of the speechwriter's craft, that governed the order?
The test Socrates applies here has become one of the standard tools of literary criticism, and it is worth naming: the test of necessity. A well-made whole is one whose parts are in the order they must be in — where you cannot move a piece without damage, because each part is called for by the ones around it. A mere aggregate, by contrast, is a collection whose order is arbitrary: a heap of grain is the same heap however you pour it, a list of unrelated facts reads the same in any sequence. Socrates is asking which of these Lysias's speech is, and the answer, dramatized by the very challenge to find a 'logographic necessity,' is that it is a heap. Its points about the non-lover could be rearranged at will; nothing in the second requires it to follow the first. And this is not a small stylistic complaint but the direct consequence of everything established before. A speech acquires necessary order only from a grasp of its subject: when you know what love is, the parts of an account of love fall into a required sequence, each generated by the last. Lysias, lacking the definition, has nothing to generate order from, so his order is imposed and therefore arbitrary — 'thrown at random.' The joke about 'logographic necessity' cuts deeper than it seems, too. Socrates is granting, with mock courtesy, that maybe there is some special rule of the professional speechwriter's craft that he, a mere amateur, doesn't know — some trick of the trade that made this order necessary. The implication is that no such craft-rule exists or could exist, because real necessity in a speech cannot come from craft-tricks at all; it can come only from knowledge of the subject, which is philosophy, not logography. The speechwriter as such — the hunter of opinions, the man with technique but no definitions — can never produce a necessary order, only a plausible heap. And this is why the positive image Socrates is about to give matters so much. Against the heap he will set the living animal, the organic whole whose every part is where it must be because the life of the thing requires it. The critique of Lysias clears the ground; the animal supplies the standard.
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