Let Tisias Tell Us
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Phaedrus — οἱ λόγους τεχνικοὶ προσποιούμενοι…
Socrates — Τεισίαν ἀκριβῶς.
Socrates rounds off the wolf's speech — attend to the plausible through the whole of your speech, and 'the entire art is supplied' — and Phaedrus confirms the identification precisely: this is just what is said by 'those who pretend to be experts in speeches,' hoi peri tous logous technikoi prospoioumenoi einai. The verb prospoioumenoi, 'pretending' or 'laying claim,' quietly does its work: these are men who claim the title of expert without the substance, and Phaedrus, schooled by the whole preceding argument, now hears their doctrine with a critical ear rather than an admiring one. He recalls that they touched on this briefly before, and that the people in the trade treat it as a very great matter. Socrates then moves to pin the doctrine to its source. Phaedrus has 'trodden Tisias thoroughly,' pepatēkas akribōs — walked through the pages of Tisias's handbook until he knows them by heart. So let Tisias himself be summoned to say exactly what he means by this all-conquering 'plausible' — and Socrates is about to take Tisias's own star example and turn it inside out.
Socrates finishes voicing the sophists' case: attend to the plausible throughout the whole speech, they say, and you have the entire art. Phaedrus recognizes the doctrine exactly — it is what the self-styled experts in speeches maintain, a matter they treat as supremely important. So Socrates turns to the source. Phaedrus has trodden Tisias's book thoroughly; let Tisias himself, then, tell them precisely what he means by this 'plausible.'
This transitional passage does two small but telling things as it moves the argument from the general doctrine to its concrete test case. The first is the note struck by Phaedrus's word prospoioumenoi, 'pretending' or 'laying claim.' Earlier in the day Phaedrus was Lysias's devoted admirer, ready to treat the speechwriter's cleverness as the height of the art; now, without any prompting in this line, he refers to the self-styled experts as men merely pretending to expertise. The change is a quiet index of how far the conversation has carried him. He has been led, by the long argument, to the point where he can hear the sophists' confident doctrine and register it not as authority but as pretension — which is exactly the education the dialogue enacts, the turning of a lover of fine speeches into someone who can tell the counterfeit from the real. The second thing is the vivid verb Socrates uses for Phaedrus's relation to Tisias: pepatēkas, 'you have trodden' or 'trampled' him — you have walked through his book so often that you have worn a path in it. It is affectionate mockery, both of the handbook (a thing to be tramped through and memorized) and of Phaedrus's bookishness. And it sets up the method of the coming refutation, which is characteristically Socratic and characteristically devastating: rather than argue against Tisias in the abstract, Socrates will summon Tisias's own most famous example — the argument from probability in the assault case — and dismantle it from the inside, showing that it collapses on its own terms. This is the fairest and most lethal form of refutation, defeating a position not by opposing doctrine but by following the opponent's own reasoning to its self-undoing. The wolf has been allowed to state his case at full strength; his star witness, Tisias, is now called; and the trap that has been building since the discussion of deception — that even to traffic in the plausible you must know the truth — is about to close on the plausible's own champion.
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