What Would Pericles Say?
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Socrates — Περικλέα… τῶν παγκάλων τεχνημάτων… ὑπʼ αὐγὰς σκεπτέα.
Socrates runs the verdict up the ladder of prestige. First he generalizes: Sophocles would call the pretender's knowledge 'the things before tragedy,' ta pro tragōidias, not the tragic art; Acumenus, 'the things before medicine,' not medicine. Then he invokes the highest names available. What would 'honey-voiced Adrastus' — a legendary king famed for eloquence — or, better still, Pericles himself, the most powerful orator Athens ever produced, make of the 'all-fair little devices,' pankala technēmata, that he and Phaedrus have just paraded and held 'to the light'? The word technēmata, 'contrivances' or 'gadgets,' is dismissive by design, and it is aimed at exactly the coinages the survey mocked — the brachylogies, the image-makings, the whole box of named tricks. By setting Pericles over against this box of tricks, Socrates prepares his most surprising claim: that the greatest of all orators was great not because he mastered these devices but because he possessed something the device-mongers entirely lack.
Socrates generalizes the verdict across the arts: Sophocles would tell the pretender he has the preliminaries to tragedy, not the tragic art; Acumenus, the preliminaries to medicine, not medicine. Then he raises the stakes with two supreme names. What would honey-voiced Adrastus — or Pericles himself — think, if they heard the 'fine little devices' Socrates and Phaedrus have just been cataloguing, the brachylogies and image-makings and all the rest held up to the light?
The name Socrates drops here, Pericles, is the hinge of the dialogue's constructive turn, and the choice is pointed. Pericles was the supreme Athenian statesman-orator, the man whose speeches (as Thucydides recorded them) shaped the policy and self-understanding of the greatest city of the age — the very embodiment of rhetorical power. If anyone earned the title of master rhetorician, it was he. And so the question 'what would Pericles say to our little devices?' carries an implicit challenge: was Pericles great because he had mastered the handbook's brachylogies and figures? Socrates is about to answer, in the following lines, with an emphatic no — and with a claim that must have startled Phaedrus. Pericles, he will say, became the most perfect of rhetoricians because, beyond native talent, he fell in with Anaxagoras, the philosopher of cosmic Mind, and filled himself with 'high-mindedness' and speculation about nature and the nature of mind, and drew from that philosophy what was useful for the art of speech. In other words, Pericles was a great orator because he was, in the relevant way, a philosopher: his rhetoric was grounded in a deep understanding of large truths and of the human soul, and the technical devices were, at most, the preliminaries he had long since transcended. This is the positive counterpart to the whole preceding demolition. Having shown, through medicine, tragedy, and harmony, that the handbook devices are mere preliminaries, Socrates now points to the one orator no one could dismiss and locates his greatness precisely in what the handbooks lack — knowledge, elevation of mind, philosophy. The 'fine little devices' held up to the light are revealed, against the backdrop of a real master, as the trinkets they are. And the deeper suggestion, which the rest of the dialogue will unfold, is that there is no shortcut: the road to genuine rhetorical power does not run through a thicker handbook of techniques but through philosophy — through the knowledge of truth and of the soul that made Pericles Pericles. The device-mongers are selling the preliminaries as the art; Socrates points at Pericles and says, there is what the art actually looks like, and it is built of something you do not sell.
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