A change of course

In the pattern of my exegesis so far I have been guided by Plato's sense of drama. He begins both acts of the Phaedrus by fixing the reader's attention on the scenic background, and I have begun my interpretation with an analysis of this topographic ploy. But the time is ripe for emancipation from Plato's script.

I have shown, in a preliminary way, how important to the overall concerns of the dialogue is the effect of sudden downshift from the high rhetorical gear of the speeches on love to the comparatively sedate account of the rhetorical art they exemplify. However, an exegesis of this effect is not obliged to duplicate its jolt on the reader (for all that it cannot wholly escape the expository problems which, I have argued, that jolt brings alive: this we have just seen, in the final section of the previous chapter). Indeed, the order of understanding will be better served if at this point I reverse Plato's order of exposition, and tackle the account of rhetoric in the second part of the dialogue before the love-poetry of the first; for, to anticipate, a grasp of Plato's criticisms of the rhetorical art practised and taught in his society turns out to be an essential step towards our appreciating the following three crucial points about the actual samples of rhetorical art which precede those criticisms. The first concerns the very content of the speeches on love: it will turn out that the character and the message of the fictional speakers of each of those speeches are partly determined by the contrast between the rhetorical and the philosophic approach to the art of speaking.