The Refinements of the Handbooks
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Socrates — λειπόμενον τῆς ῥητορικῆς…
Phaedrus — τὰ βιβλίοις…
Socrates — προοίμιον πρῶτον τοῦ λόγου ἐν ἀρχῇ… τὰ κομψὰ τῆς τέχνης?
With dialectic secured, Socrates turns to the thing Phaedrus feels is still missing — the 'rhetorical' art as the handbooks teach it. He asks what is really 'left over,' to leipomenon, of rhetoric once collection and division are set aside, insisting graciously that they must not 'dishonor' it. Phaedrus points to the obvious: there is a great deal, at least in 'the books,' ta en tois bibliois, written 'about the art of speeches' — the technical manuals of the trade. Socrates begins the inventory, and his tone is already faintly amused. First, he says, the manuals prescribe the prooimion, the 'proem' — from pro, 'before,' and oimē, a song or path, the 'fore-song' that opens a speech — which must come at the very beginning. Is this, he asks, what Phaedrus means: ta kompsa tēs technēs, 'the refinements of the art,' the clever, dainty bits? The word kompsa carries a curl of mockery. He is about to run through the whole apparatus of the handbooks — proem, narrative, testimony, proofs, recapitulation, and all the fancy named parts — and the label 'refinements' already tells us how much he thinks they amount to.
Dialectic has been named and honored; but Phaedrus feels the 'rhetorical' art proper still eludes them. Socrates agrees they should not dishonor whatever is left of rhetoric once dialectic is set aside, and asks what that leftover actually is. Phaedrus points to the fat contents of the handbooks — the books written 'about the art of speeches.' Socrates begins to run through them: first, they say, comes the proem, at the very opening. Are these the clever refinements of the art you mean?
This passage opens the dialogue's sustained, mostly comic demolition of the rhetoric handbooks, and it is worth seeing exactly what Socrates is and is not saying. He is not saying the handbook material is worthless or false. The rhetoric manuals of his day — by Tisias, Theodorus, Gorgias, and others — really did catalogue the parts of an oration and the devices of persuasion, and much of it was genuine observation about how speeches are put together. What Socrates denies is that this catalogue amounts to an art, a technē, in the demanding sense the dialogue has established. And his chosen word for the handbook contents, kompsa, 'refinements' or 'clever bits,' makes the charge precisely. These are refinements — external adornments and procedural tricks — not the substance of anything. Knowing that a speech should open with a proem, that the proem should be followed by a narrative, that a peroration should recapitulate, is knowing the names and order of a speech's parts; it is not knowing how to make those parts into a living whole, still less how to arrive at the truth they should convey. The analogy Socrates is building toward, and will state outright a few pages on, is medical: a man who knew which drugs produce heat and which produce purging, and could recite them all, would not thereby be a doctor — he would be someone who has to be told, 'you are mad; you have read a book, or stumbled on some remedies, and think that makes you a physician, though you know nothing of when and to whom and how much to apply them.' The handbook rhetorician is exactly this: he has memorized the ingredients of persuasion without the knowledge that would tell him how to compose and administer them. And the deep point, already visible here, is that the handbooks teach the preliminaries to an art while omitting the art itself. What makes a real rhetorician is not knowing the parts of a speech but two things the manuals cannot supply: knowledge of the truth of the subject, which is dialectic, and knowledge of the different kinds of soul and which kind of speech moves which — the science of the audience that the rest of the dialogue will describe. The proem and the peroration are the furniture; the art is knowing which soul to seat in which chair. Socrates's gentle mockery of 'the refinements' is thus not anti-rhetorical. It is the setup for his own, far more demanding account of what a genuine art of rhetoric would require — an account in which the handbook tricks find their small, subordinate place, useful once, but only once, the real knowledge is in hand.
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