No Small Task
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Phaedrus — οὐ σμικρόν ἔργον…
Socrates — τοὺς λόγους μεταστρέφοντα… ῥᾴων ὁδός.
Having laid out the full demands of a true art of rhetoric — the science of souls, the classification of speeches, the causal correlations, the perception of the particular, the sense of timing — Socrates pauses on Phaedrus's honest reaction. It is, Phaedrus says, 'no small task,' ou smikron ergon. The understatement is comic: what Socrates has described is essentially the labor of becoming a philosopher and a scientist of the soul, and Phaedrus feels the weight of it. Socrates does not deny it. On the contrary, he says, precisely because the road is so long and steep, 'one ought to keep turning all the arguments up and down,' anō kai katō metastrephonta, examining them from every angle, to see whether there might be 'some easier and shorter road,' rhāiōn kai brachytera hodos, to the same destination. It is a fair-minded move: before accepting so arduous a path, look honestly for a shortcut. And it sets up the next stretch, in which Socrates will let the opposition — 'the wolf,' the sophistic side — make its case that there is a shortcut, that all this philosophy is unnecessary and the plausible is enough.
Socrates and Phaedrus agree that the art of rhetoric, truly described, can be nothing less than what they have laid out — the whole science of souls and speeches and their fitting. Phaedrus grants it, but with a sigh: it looks like no small task. Socrates agrees, and says that just because it is so demanding, one ought to keep turning all the arguments over, up and down, examining whether there is not some shorter, easier road to the same goal.
This brief exchange does something Plato does often and well: it acknowledges the force of the objection it is about to answer. Phaedrus's 'no small task' is not a throwaway complaint; it is the reasonable resistance any practical person feels when told that to speak well one must first master a science of the soul. The sophists' whole appeal rests on the promise of a shortcut — learn these devices, pay this fee, and you will win in court and assembly without the crushing labor of philosophy. And Socrates, rather than simply dismissing that appeal, honors it enough to test it. His proposal to 'turn the arguments up and down' looking for an easier road is genuine intellectual fairness: he will not accept the hard path merely because it is his own, without first checking whether the shortcut works. This is the method of a real inquirer as opposed to a dogmatist, and it models the very difference between philosophy and sophistry that the dialogue is drawing. The sophist asserts; the philosopher examines, turning the matter over. And the metaphor of the road, hodos, is quietly loaded, since hodos is the root of methodos, 'method,' the very word for systematic inquiry. The question 'is there a shorter road?' is the question 'is there a cheaper method?' — and the answer the following pages will give is subtle. There is no shortcut to the true art; but the sophistic 'shortcut' is not even a road to the same place. When Socrates lets the sophists argue that truth is unnecessary and the plausible suffices, and then dissects their star example — Tisias's argument from probability — he will show that their shortcut does not reach the destination of a genuine art at all, and that even to be reliably persuasive in their own narrow terms, one needs the knowledge they claim to bypass. The 'easier road' turns out to lead somewhere else entirely, or off a cliff. So this passage frames the final movement of the argument as an honest test: the demanding true art has been described; now let the tempting shortcut make its best case; and let us see, by turning the arguments up and down, whether it delivers what it promises. The fairness is real, and it makes the coming refutation more powerful, because the sophistic position will be defeated not by dismissal but on its own chosen ground.
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