The Most Perfect of Orators
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Socrates — εἰκότως Περικλῆς τελεώτατος ῥητορικὴν… πᾶσαι μεγάλαι τῶν τεχνῶν προσδέονται.
Socrates answers Phaedrus's question about the genuine rhetorician not with a definition but with a name: Pericles, whom he calls, with a superlative, pantōn teleōtatos, 'the most perfect of all' in rhetoric. The choice is a deliberate provocation. Pericles is the one orator whose greatness no one could dispute — the man who led Athens at its height, whose speeches Thucydides preserved as the summit of political eloquence. If Socrates is going to say what real rhetoric is, he does well to start from the acknowledged master. But the point is not to praise Pericles's technique; it is to ask what made him great, and Socrates's answer begins to unfold at once: 'all the great arts,' he says, prosdeontai — 'need in addition,' need over and above their proper techniques — something further. The sentence breaks off mid-thought, but its direction is already clear and startling. The greatest orator was not made great by mastering the devices the handbooks sell. He was made great by something those devices know nothing of, something the truly great arts all require, which Socrates is about to name.
To Phaedrus's question about the truly rhetorical man, Socrates gives a first, surprising answer by pointing to the supreme example. It is likely, he says, that Pericles became the most perfect of all in rhetoric. Why? Because — as he is about to explain — all the great arts require, over and above talent and technique, something more: a grasp of the largest matters, high speculation about nature.
This short passage is the turn from criticism to construction, and it makes its move with a single well-chosen example. Throughout the demolition, Socrates has argued negatively: the handbook art is not the real art, the devices are only preliminaries, the practitioners could not even define their subject. Now he needs to say positively what the real art is — and rather than begin with an abstract definition, he points at the one indisputable instance and asks what accounts for it. This is itself a piece of method: to understand what makes any art an art, look at its acknowledged master and find what he has that the pretenders lack. And the answer Socrates is setting up overturns the entire assumption of the handbook tradition. The pretenders assumed that rhetorical greatness is a matter of accumulating more and better techniques — a thicker manual of devices. Socrates is about to say that Pericles's greatness came from the opposite direction entirely: not from more rhetorical technique but from something outside rhetoric altogether, from philosophy — the high study of nature and mind that he absorbed from Anaxagoras. The claim that 'all the great arts need something in addition' is the general principle; Pericles is the proof. Every art that rises to greatness, Plato is suggesting, does so by drawing on a knowledge larger than its own technical rules — a grasp of the whole within which its particular work makes sense. Medicine at its height rests on a understanding of the nature of the body and, beyond that, of nature itself; rhetoric at its height rests on an understanding of the soul and, beyond that, of truth and the cosmic order. The technician who stays within his techniques stays small; the master reaches outside his art into philosophy and comes back elevated. That is why Pericles was teleōtatos, most perfect, and why the road to real rhetoric, as the next lines will make explicit, does not run through a longer handbook but through the study of the highest things.
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