Tragedy Is the Composition
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Phaedrus — τραγῳδίαν… τὴν σύστασιν πρέπουσαν ἀλλήλοις τῷ ὅλῳ συνισταμένην.
The tragedy analogy makes the same cut and adds the decisive word. Someone who can produce the raw materials of tragic effect — long speeches and short, pitiful passages and terrifying ones — and who thinks that teaching these is teaching 'the making of tragedy,' tragōidias poiēsin, would be laughed at by Sophocles and Euripides, Phaedrus says, because everyone knows tragedy is 'nothing other than the systasis of these parts' — their 'composition' or 'putting-together' — 'fitting one another and the whole,' prepousan allēlois te kai tōi holōi. The knowledge of the parts is not the art; the art is the systasis, the structuring of the parts into a coherent, fitted whole. A pile of moving speeches is not a tragedy any more than a pile of effective drugs is a course of treatment or a pile of named devices is a speech. What makes each of them an art is the composition — the standing-together of the elements in an order where each belongs to the others and to the total design.
Socrates swings the same analogy to a second art. Suppose someone told Sophocles and Euripides that he knows how to make very long speeches about a small matter and very short ones about a great, pitiful speeches or, when he likes, terrifying and threatening ones — and that teaching these, he is teaching how to make tragedy. The tragedians, Phaedrus says, would laugh: everyone knows tragedy is nothing but the composition of these parts, fitted to one another and to the whole.
The word Phaedrus lets fall here, systasis, is one of the most consequential in the history of criticism, because it is the exact term on which Aristotle would build the Poetics — and hearing Plato place it, decades early, in the casual mouth of Phaedrus is like watching a river's source. Aristotle defines tragedy as the imitation of an action by means of the systasis tōn pragmatōn, the 'composition of the incidents' — the plot, understood not as a sequence of events but as a structure so organically ordered that displacing or removing any part would dislocate the whole. That is precisely what Phaedrus says here: tragedy is the systasis of its parts, fitted to one another and to the whole. The idea is the organic-unity principle from earlier in this very dialogue — the speech as a living animal whose members belong to one another — now applied to drama and given the technical name it would carry ever after. And the placement is deliberate on Plato's part. By having even Phaedrus, no philosopher, know instantly that tragedy is composition and not a heap of effects, Plato shows that the principle is not esoteric but obvious the moment it is stated — obvious for tragedy, obvious for medicine, and therefore, by the force of the parallel, obvious for rhetoric too, however much the handbook-makers obscure it. This is the analogy snapping shut. Three arts have been laid side by side — medicine, tragedy, and (implicitly throughout) rhetoric — and each has revealed the same two-level structure: below, the elements, the drugs or the emotional registers or the parts of a speech, which any pretender can list; above, the art proper, which is the knowledge of how to compose those elements into a whole fitted to its purpose and to the particular case. Knowing the elements is the preliminary; composing them is the art. And the word for that composition, systasis, is the antithesis of the diistamenon web Socrates saw a moment ago — the parts 'standing apart' versus the parts 'standing together.' Everything the second half of the Phaedrus has argued is now compressed into that opposition. The handbook gives you a warp with no weave, a set of parts standing apart; the real art is a systasis, a standing-together, a living whole. And what supplies the power to compose — to weave the parts, to fit them to one another and to the design — is the knowledge the handbooks lack: knowledge of the truth of the matter and, for rhetoric specifically, knowledge of the soul. Having established the standard through medicine and tragedy, Socrates is finally ready to describe that missing science directly: the art of rhetoric as psychagōgia, soul-leading, grounded in a real anatomy of the kinds of soul and the kinds of speech that move them.
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