He Will Not Sow in Water
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Socrates — οὐκ ἄρα σπουδῇ αὐτὰ ἐν ὕδατι γράψει μέλανι σπείρων διὰ καλάμου μετὰ λόγων ἀδυνάτων μὲν αὑτοῖς λόγῳ βοηθεῖν, ἀδυνάτων δὲ ἱκανῶς τἀληθῆ διδάξαι.
Phaedrus — οὔκουν δὴ τό γʼ εἰκός.
The seed-metaphor is now turned against the page in a cascade of deliberately trivializing images. The man who really knows what is just and beautiful and good, Socrates says, will not 'in earnest' (spoudē) commit that knowledge to writing — will not 'write it in water' (en hydati grapsei), 'sowing through a reed-pen with black ink' (dia kalamou … melani), producing 'words unable to defend themselves by argument and unable to teach the truth adequately.' Every phrase demeans the act: the ink is mere blackness, the pen a hollow reed, the medium as insubstantial as water, the offspring incapable of the two things a real teaching must do — answer for itself, and impart the truth. Phaedrus agrees: no, that is not likely.
Socrates has drawn the farmer's analogy: a sensible farmer sows his real crop with his art, and plants the quick, showy 'gardens of Adonis' only for a festival's play. So too, he now argues, a man who possesses knowledge of what is just, beautiful, and good has no less sense about his own seeds — and will not seriously commit them to the futility of ink.
The passage lives on a chain of proverbial contempt that a Greek ear would catch at once. 'To write in water,' <em>en hydati graphein</em>, was a common phrase for wasted effort — like our 'written on water,' a labor that leaves no trace; and behind the whole comparison stand the <em>Adōnidos kēpoi</em>, the 'gardens of Adonis' named just before, which the reader is meant to keep in view. These were shallow pots of quick-sprouting greens that Athenian women forced in the summer heat for the festival of Adonis, the beautiful youth mourned by Aphrodite: they shot up in eight days, glossy and green, and then withered, rootless and fruitless — a byword for anything showy, premature, and sterile. Writing, Socrates implies, is a garden of Adonis: it germinates fast and looks alive, but bears no fruit and dies. Set against it is the farmer's real sowing, done <em>spoudē</em>, in earnest, with the art of agriculture and the patience of eight months rather than eight days. The two disqualifications Socrates names — words that cannot 'defend themselves by argument' and cannot 'teach the truth adequately' — are precisely the powers the previous pages denied to the orphaned text and will, in a moment, grant to its 'legitimate brother,' the living speech 'written in the soul' (276a, 276e). And there is a quiet self-implication the dialogue never lets the reader forget: Plato is writing all of this with a reed and black ink, sowing in the very medium he calls a garden of Adonis — betting, perhaps, that a written dialogue built to provoke live argument can be the rare crop that puts down roots after all.
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