Phaedrus 279b · 279b
The Prayer to Pan
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Socrates — οὐκοῦν εὐξαμένῳ πρέπει τοῖσδε πορεύεσθαι;
Phaedrus — τί μήν;
Socrates — ὦ φίλε Πάν τε καὶ ἄλλοι ὅσοι τῇδε θεοί, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν· ἔξωθεν δὲ ὅσα ἔχω, τοῖς ἐντὸς εἶναί μοι φίλια.
The whole long day of speeches ends in a prayer. Socrates asks whether it is not fitting, 'having prayed,' to set off home now that the noon heat has eased, and Phaedrus agrees — and then Socrates turns to the gods of the place: 'O dear Pan, and all you other gods who are here, grant that I may become beautiful within (kalō genesthai tandothen); and that whatever I have outside may be at friendship with what is inside,' exōthen … tois entos einai moi philia. It is the most quoted sentence in Plato, and rightly. After hundreds of Stephanus pages spent examining how words persuade, define, divide, and mislead, the dialogue's last use of speech is not an argument or a lesson but a request — that the man who has been talking might himself become good. The prayer runs on into the next breath (279c): let me hold the wise man to be the rich one, and let my gold be no more than a temperate person could carry.
Word by word
The setting
The dialogue ends where it began: on the bank of the Ilissus, under the plane tree, in the heat of noon. Their messages entrusted to Isocrates and Lysias, Socrates asks whether it is not fitting to pray before they leave — and speaks the most famous prayer in all of Plato. He asks not for wealth or reputation, but to become beautiful within, and for his outer life to be at peace with his inner one.
A note on this passage
The prayer is the answer the whole dialogue was reaching for, and it works by turning every one of its themes inward. The <em>Phaedrus</em> opened with a written speech, procured and hidden under a cloak, arguing coolly that one should gratify the man who does <em>not</em> love — desire pointed outward at a beautiful body and calculated for advantage. It closes with desire pointed the other way: 'grant that I become beautiful <em>within</em>.' The <em>kalon</em>, beauty, that the palinode saw blazing on its plain of truth — the one Form whose earthly copy strikes through the eyes and grows the soul's wings — is no longer something to pursue in another; it is asked for as a state of one's own soul. The dialogue's obsession with beauty has become a moral aspiration, and its long anatomy of <em>eros</em> resolves into a wish to be, oneself, worth loving in the only way that lasts. The second half of the prayer — that the outer and the inner be 'friends,' <em>philia</em> — is the Socratic ideal of integrity in a single image: a life with no seam between what a person seems and what he is, the exact opposite of the <em>doxosophos</em>, the seeming-wise man the writing-critique exposed. It is the same unity the <em>Gorgias</em> defends when it says it is better to be at one with oneself than, being one, to be out of tune and at odds within; and the same harmony the <em>Republic</em> calls justice, each part of the soul keeping its place. That Socrates prays it to <em>Pan</em> is a last, quiet grace. Pan is the goat-god of this wild riverbank, the presiding spirit of the very spot where the two men lay talking all afternoon — so the dialogue is sealed in its own place, the local gods Socrates greeted on arriving now thanked on leaving. There is a further resonance the ancients loved: Pan is a son of Hermes, the god of <em>logos</em> and of writing, and his name sounds like <em>pan</em>, 'all' — a prayer to the All. And there is the deepest turn of all: after the long case that living speech surpasses the dead letter because it can answer, defend, and address the right soul, the final words of this written dialogue are a spoken prayer — the one kind of speech that seeks to persuade no audience and refute no opponent, but only to make the speaker good. Phaedrus answers by asking Socrates to pray it for him too, 'for friends hold all things in common,' and on that word — <em>philia</em>, the friendship that has framed the whole conversation — they rise and go.
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