Examples Not to Imitate
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Phaedrus — σκώπτεις τὸν λόγον…
Socrates — συχνά παραδείγματα… βλέπων ὀνίναιτʼ… μιμεῖσθαι μὴ.
Phaedrus, protective of the speech that charmed him this morning, complains that Socrates is skōpteis — 'mocking,' jeering at — 'our speech.' Socrates agrees to leave it alone, so as not to vex his friend, but he cannot resist a last, double-edged observation. Lysias's speech, he says, actually contains 'many examples,' polla paradeigmata, that one could 'profit' from, oninaito — by looking at them hard while 'trying not to imitate them at all,' mimeisthai mē. It is a beautiful piece of teaching disguised as a gibe. The bad speech is not worthless; it is worth close study — as a catalogue of exactly what to avoid. Every fault they have identified — the missing definition, the backwards start, the parts thrown together at random — is a paradeigma in the negative, a pattern to be recognized so it can be shunned. And with that, Socrates turns the conversation toward 'the other speeches' — his own two on love — where, he says, there is something genuinely worth seeing for anyone who wants to understand how speeches work.
Socrates has compared Lysias's shapeless speech to a nonsense-epitaph whose lines can be read in any order — and Phaedrus protests that he is making fun of their speech. Socrates agrees to let it drop, so as not to needle his friend, but adds a barbed compliment: the speech is actually full of instructive examples — things worth looking at closely, precisely in order not to imitate them. Then he turns them toward the other speeches, where something genuinely worth studying is to be found.
This little exchange makes a real pedagogical point and pivots the whole discussion, and both deserve notice. The point is that bad examples instruct. Socrates says one can profit from Lysias's speech precisely by studying it and not imitating it — which is a claim about how learning an art actually works. You do not learn to write, or to think, only by contemplating masterpieces; you learn also, and perhaps more sharply, by anatomizing failures, because a fault clearly seen becomes a rule negatively known. Every defect they have named in Lysias — no definition, no proper beginning, no necessary order, no organic unity — is now a piece of positive knowledge about what a good speech requires, learned by seeing its absence. The word paradeigma, 'example' or 'pattern,' does quiet double work here: earlier it named the good model one keeps in view while making something; now it names the cautionary model one keeps in view in order to steer away. Both are patterns to guide the craftsman's eye. There is also a charged word tucked into the sentence: mimeisthai, 'to imitate.' Mimēsis, imitation, is one of the great terms of Plato's thought, the concept at the center of his fraught relationship with poetry and art — in the Republic he will worry that most art is mere mimēsis, the copying of appearances at two removes from reality, and will treat imitation as something dangerous, to be watched and mostly restrained. Here the sense is ordinary — imitate a model — but the word carries its shadow: the question of what is worth imitating, and what only worth studying so as not to imitate, is exactly the question mimēsis always raises for Plato. And then the pivot. Socrates turns from Lysias to 'the other speeches,' his own two, where 'something worth seeing' awaits. This is not vanity; it is the structure of the argument. Having used Lysias as the negative paradeigma — the speech that shows what artless writing looks like — he will now use his own palinode as the positive one, the speech that had definition, a real beginning, a necessary order, an organic life. And in analyzing how his own speech achieved these things, he will finally name the method that produced them: collection and division, the gathering of scattered particulars into a single form and the cutting of that form at its natural joints. The critique of Lysias has cleared the ground and sharpened the eye; now the constructive lesson, the actual art of philosophical rhetoric, can be drawn from the better example. The joke about not imitating Lysias is the hinge on which the dialogue swings from diagnosis to method.
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