Poet, Speech-Writer, Law-Writer
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Socrates — … κολλῶν τε καὶ ἀφαιρῶν, ἐν δίκῃ που ποιητὴν ἢ λόγων συγγραφέα ἢ νομογράφον προσερεῖς;
Phaedrus — τί μήν;
The verdict is delivered as a naming. The writer whose most valuable possession is nothing but the text he has 'turned up and down over time, gluing phrases together and stripping them away' (kollōn te kai aphairōn) — this man, Socrates says, 'you will justly call a poet, or a composer of speeches, or a writer of laws,' poiētēn ē logōn syngraphea ē nomographon. The three titles cover the whole literary world of the Greeks: verse, prose oratory, and legislation — Homer, Lysias, and Solon by their trades. And they are, in this context, deflations. To be named by your craft is to be marked by its ceiling; it is the opposite of the name Socrates has just reserved for the one who knows and can defend what he knows — not poet, not writer, but philosophos. Phaedrus assents with a crisp 'What else?'
Socrates finishes the counter-portrait: the man who has nothing more precious than the text he shuffled together over time — turning it up and down, gluing phrases on and stripping them away — deserves only the craft-name. Call him, justly, a poet, a speech-writer, or a law-writer. Phaedrus agrees at once.
The deflation is carried by a single verb of making: <em>kollaō</em>, to glue. The mere writer is a gluer — he sticks phrases together and pries them apart, arranges and rearranges, 'up and down' as the previous line put it, the way a cobbler fits leather or a mosaicist sets tiles. It is craft, <em>technē</em> in the humblest sense: assembly. And it is set in silent opposition to the verbs that governed the living word a page earlier — <em>phyteuō</em> and <em>speirō</em>, to plant and to sow, and <em>phyomai</em>, to grow. The dead word is <em>glued</em>; the living word <em>grows</em>. One is put together from outside, part on part; the other unfolds from a seed within a soul. That contrast — mechanical assembly versus organic growth — is the same one that runs under the whole critique of writing, and Plato lets the ordinary vocabulary of two crafts, gluing and gardening, carry it without a word of explanation. The naming itself is also a philosophical act, not just a put-down. Throughout Plato, giving a thing its right name means locating it correctly among the kinds — the work of dialectic, of division 'at the joints.' To call this man a <em>nomographos</em> and not a statesman, a <em>syngrapheus</em> and not a sage, is to place him precisely: high enough, a real craftsman, but not among those who know. And the three trades named are pointed. They are the estates Plato most contended with — the poets he would exile, the orators he despised, the lawgivers he would one day try to rival in the <em>Laws</em>. Each is offered the same measure and, by implication, the same escape: the title is a ceiling only for those who cannot rise above their own writing to the truth it was meant to serve.
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