Phaedrus 264d · 264d

Socrates quotes these famous verses to make good on the principle he just laid down — that a speech must be a living creature, whole and articulated (264c). This little poem is the perfect counterexample: it is a heap, not a body. As he points out immediately after, its four lines can be read in any order — first, last, middle — and nothing changes; 'it makes no difference which is said first or last.' There is no head, no feet, no necessary middle: shuffle the limbs and the animal is unharmed, which proves it was never an animal. The epitaph is charming precisely because it is <em>dead</em> in the way writing is dead — it says the same thing forever (as the very next section, 275d, will say of all written words), announcing Midas eternally to anyone who passes.<br><br>There is a quiet joke in the choice, too. The poem is spoken by a bronze statue — an artwork that 'stands as if alive' but is metal — set over a tomb (<em>sêma</em>, the word that is also 'sign,' and one vowel from <em>sôma</em>, body: the body a tomb). It promises to speak 'as long as water flows and trees bloom,' claiming the permanence of nature for a thing that is merely fixed. That is exactly writing's false boast: not living endurance but frozen repetition. Plato has arranged his materials with a novelist's economy — the maiden of bronze, the tomb, the mechanical verses — so that the example of bad form is also a little emblem of everything the coming critique of writing will say. The living word answers; the bronze maiden only recites.

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