The Word-Daedalus of Byzantium
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Socrates — δεύτερον διήγησίν μαρτυρίας… τρίτον τεκμήρια τέταρτον εἰκότα… τόν λογοδαίδαλον Βυζάντιον ἄνδρα…
Phaedrus — Θεόδωρον.
Socrates keeps reciting the handbook schema with a straight face that is doing a great deal of comic work. After the proem: 'second, a narration,' diēgēsin, with 'testimonies,' martyriai, attached; 'third, evidences,' tekmēria; 'fourth, probabilities,' eikota. And then the flourish — 'proof,' pistōsis, and, he thinks, 'supplementary-proof,' epipistōsis — terms coined, he says with elaborate courtesy, by 'the finest logodaidalos, the man from Byzantium.' The word logodaidalos is the joke crystallized: it means a 'word-Daedalus,' after the legendary master-craftsman Daedalus, who built the Labyrinth and the wax wings. It casts Theodorus as an ingenious engineer of speech, forever bolting on another named part — 'proof' and then, absurdly, 'supplementary-proof' — as a mechanic adds gears. Phaedrus, half-defensive, half-amused, fills in the name: 'you mean the excellent Theodorus.'
Socrates runs down the handbook checklist of a speech's parts, deadpan. After the proem comes, second, the narration with its testimonies; third, the evidences; fourth, the probabilities. And then — with mock reverence — 'proof' and 'supplementary-proof,' the coinages of the finest word-artificer, the man from Byzantium. Phaedrus supplies the name: you mean the excellent Theodorus.
The comedy of this catalogue is precise, and it is aimed at a specific intellectual vice: the mistaking of terminology for knowledge. Socrates is not making up the handbook parts; narration, evidence, probability, proof were the real technical furniture of fourth-century rhetorical instruction, and Theodorus of Byzantium really did make his name by refining the taxonomy, coining names for ever-finer subdivisions of a speech. What Plato finds absurd is the assumption that this proliferation of labels constitutes an art. The tell, he suggests, is the very elaboration: when you find someone who has a term for 'proof' and then a further term for 'supplementary-proof,' and no doubt a term for the supplement to that, you are watching not a science deepening but a pseudo-science multiplying — machinery added to machinery to disguise the absence of an engine. And the name he coins for the type, logodaidalos, carries the critique in its bones. Daedalus was the supreme mythical craftsman, maker of contraptions so clever they seemed alive — but a contraption, however ingenious, is exactly not a living thing, and the two speeches earlier gave us the standard by which to judge: a real speech must be a living animal, an organism whose parts are internally necessary to one another. Theodorus's rhetoric is the opposite: an assemblage of detachable, separately-named parts, a mechanism rather than an organism. It has joints where a body has joints, but no life running through them. There is even a delicate irony in Plato's choice of Daedalus, because Daedalus's most famous invention was a pair of wings — and wings are the master-image of this very dialogue, where the soul grows real wings, feathered by the vision of truth and beauty, and flies. Theodorus is a maker of wings too, but wax ones, verbal contraptions strapped on from outside; and we know from the myth how wax wings end. The point beneath the joke is the one the whole passage serves: knowing the named parts of a speech is a preliminary, a bit of useful bookkeeping, but it is not the art of rhetoric any more than knowing the names of the body's organs is the art of medicine. The real art, still to be described, requires two kinds of knowledge no handbook can supply — knowledge of the truth of one's subject, and knowledge of the soul one is addressing. The word-Daedalus, for all his gears, has neither, and so his elaborate machine, like Icarus's wings, cannot bear the weight of actual flight.
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