Gardens of Adonis
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — πότερα σπουδῇ ἂν θέρους εἰς Ἀδώνιδος κήπους ἀρῶν χαίροι θεωρῶν καλοὺς ἐν ἡμέραισιν ὀκτὼ γιγνομένους, ἢ ταῦτα μὲν δὴ παιδιᾶς τε καὶ ἑορτῆς χάριν δρῴη ἄν;
Would a sensible farmer, then, take seeds he cared about and wanted to bear fruit, and in earnest plant them in summer in gardens of Adonis, delighting to watch them grow beautiful in eight days — or would he do that sort of thing, when he did it at all, only for play and for a festival's sake?
To weigh whether serious words should be written at all, Socrates asks a homely question about a farmer — one whose answer will decide what writing is worth.
The 'gardens of Adonis' were a real thing every Athenian knew: for the festival of the dead youth Adonis, women forced pots of lettuce and fennel to sprout fast in the summer heat — up in a week, withered in another — as living emblems of his brief life. They were proverbial for anything showy, quick, and fruitless. Socrates makes them the image of writing. No serious farmer would <em>trust his real seed</em> to such pots; he plants those for delight, <em>paidiâs kai heortês chárin</em>, 'for the sake of play and festival.' His <em>spoudḗ</em>, his earnest, goes into the field, sown 'in fitting soil,' content to wait months for a true harvest. The metaphor is transparent and it is the dialogue's final verdict on the written word: charming, rapid, ornamental — and not where a wise man puts what he cares about.<br><br>Everything turns on the pair <em>spoudḗ</em> / <em>paidiá</em>, earnest and play — and Greek has loaded the dice, because <em>paidiá</em> (play) is one letter from <em>paideía</em> (education), both grown from <em>paîs</em>, child. Writing is play; the real education is the living dialectic that 'sows' (<em>speírō</em> — the same verb Plato uses for teaching, and the root of 'sperm' and 'diaspora') words in a soul that can answer and defend them, where they take root and bear fruit in their season. And here is the exquisite self-implication the whole <em>Phaedrus</em> has been building toward: this dialogue is a written thing. By its own argument it is a garden of Adonis — a beautiful pastime, not the serious crop. Plato brands his masterpiece <em>paidiá</em> and means it without false modesty: the book is the pot of quick greens that points you toward the field it can never be. To take the writing with total seriousness would be to miss exactly what it is trying, in writing, to say.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 276b in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 276b — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/276b/