Neither Long Nor Short
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Socrates — Πρόδικος… δεῖν οὔτε μακρῶν οὔτε βραχέων ἀλλὰ μετρίων.
The catalogue tips into comedy, and Prodicus supplies the punchline. Where every other teacher has staked out some device as the key to the art, Prodicus — the sophist famous for hair-splitting distinctions between near-synonyms — laughed at the whole crowd and announced that he alone had discovered what speeches really need: that they be 'neither long nor short,' oute makrōn oute brachēōn, 'but measured,' metriōn. It sounds like wisdom, and Phaedrus salutes it as such with a grin — 'most wise, Prodicus!' But the joke is that 'measured' is exactly the kind of empty formula the whole survey is mocking. To say a speech should be the right length is true and useless; it tells you nothing about how to find the right length in a given case, which is the only thing a real art would supply. Prodicus has crowned himself for restating the problem as if it were the solution.
The parade of rhetoricians turns farcical, each master hawking his own recipe. Socrates reports that when he once rehearsed all these techniques, Prodicus laughed — and declared that he alone had found what the art of speech requires: speeches that are neither long nor short, but measured. Phaedrus plays along ('most wise, Prodicus!'), and Socrates keeps the roll going, adding Hippias and the others.
Beneath the farce, this little vignette makes a sharp point about the difference between a slogan and a science. Prodicus invokes one of the most cherished ideals in Greek thought — the mean, to metrion, the right measure between excess and deficiency, the same principle that Aristotle would later build his whole ethics upon and that the Delphic 'nothing in excess' had enshrined. And he is not wrong that a good speech is measured, any more than Aristotle is wrong that courage is a mean between cowardice and rashness. The trouble is that the principle, stated as a rule, does no work. 'Be measured' cannot tell you whether this speech, to this audience, on this occasion, should run long or short; only judgment informed by knowledge of the subject and the listeners can tell you that. By having Prodicus congratulate himself for the discovery, Plato exposes the characteristic vice of the whole handbook tradition: mistaking the name of a virtue for the possession of it. Each sophist in the parade has seized on something real about speech — hints and side-praises, probability, correct diction, moderate length — and frozen it into a proprietary doctrine, a slogan to sell. What none of them has is the thing that would make these observations into an art: knowledge of the truth of the matter and of the nature of the soul being addressed, from which alone the right choices about length and figure and proof could actually flow. This is why Socrates can be so lightly dismissive of them all, waving them past like a procession — not because their observations are false, but because a heap of true observations, each puffed into a school, is precisely not an art. The comedy of the catalogue is the comedy of a discipline that has fragmented into competing brand-names because it never found its single grounding principle. And the reader, by now, knows what that principle is: the dialectic and psychology that Socrates is about to describe, which would gather all these scattered devices into their proper, subordinate places within a real science of persuasion.
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