Even the Wolf's Case
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Socrates — βοήθειαν Λυσίου… λέγεται δίκαιον λύκου εἰπεῖν.
Socrates, hunting for the promised shortcut, first asks Phaedrus whether he has any 'help,' boētheian, on the point — any counter-argument he recalls from Lysias 'or someone.' Phaedrus could scrape one together for the sake of trying, but has nothing to hand. So Socrates volunteers to present the opposing case himself, drawn from what he has heard from 'some of those concerned with these things' — the sophists and speechwriters. And he introduces it with a proverb that is a small gem of fair play: 'it is said to be just,' dikaion, 'to state even the wolf's case,' to tou lykou eipein. The saying comes from the fable-world where the wolf is the natural villain, the devourer of sheep; to 'speak the wolf's part' is to give even the obvious wrongdoer his hearing, to argue the side you are inclined to condemn. By invoking it, Socrates signals that he is about to make the sophists' argument as strong as he can, in fairness, before answering it — playing devil's advocate, or rather wolf's advocate, so that the position he means to refute gets its full and honest day in court.
Socrates looks for the shortcut and invites Phaedrus to supply any counter-argument he may have heard from Lysias. Phaedrus has none ready. So Socrates offers to voice one himself — an argument he has heard from those in the trade — introducing it with a proverb: it is only just, he says, to state even the wolf's side of the case.
The little proverb about the wolf is worth pausing on, because it enacts a principle of intellectual honesty that is central to how Plato writes and to what he thinks philosophy is. To 'state the wolf's case' is to give the opposing view — even the view you regard as predatory and wrong — its strongest possible expression before you answer it. This is the opposite of the sophistic habit the dialogue has been criticizing, where one learns to make the weaker argument appear the stronger in order to win, indifferent to the truth. Socrates does something that looks superficially similar — he argues a side he does not hold — but the spirit is exactly reversed. The sophist argues the other side to defeat truth; Socrates argues it to serve truth, by making sure the position he will reject is met at full strength rather than as a straw man. Only a refutation that overcomes the opponent's best case is worth anything. And there is a deeper propriety in the choice of the wolf specifically. The argument Socrates is about to voice is the doctrine of Tisias and the courtroom rhetoricians — that truth is irrelevant and only the plausible matters — and this is, in the moral zoology of the dialogue, genuinely the wolf's philosophy: the creed of the predator who cares nothing for the truth of the sheep's case but only for what will let him win. By calling it the wolf's case, Socrates both grants it its hearing and quietly names its nature. He will give it every advantage, present it as persuasively as its own authors could, and then show that even so it fails — that the wolf's shortcut does not even deliver the reliable persuasion it promises, let alone a genuine art. The fable frame also lightens the moment, as Plato's touches of humor so often do at the joints of the argument: we are about to hear the villain speak, and we are told in advance that he is the villain, so that his cleverness will not seduce us. It is a small masterclass in how to engage an opposing view — honestly enough to state it well, clearly enough to name what it is, and confidently enough to let it speak because you know it can be answered.
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