English 622: Classical Rhetoric

When reading Plato I constantly see parallels and likenesses between Socrates and Christ. I was going to pursue this as my first conference paper, but I realized after conducting some preliminary research that this has been done to death. However, one aspect of Phaedrus did interest me, and it relates to power and representation. In the Prologue to Phaedrus, John Michael Cooper argues, "Socrates criticizes severely those who take their own writing seriously—any writing, not just orators’ speeches. Writings cannot contain or constitute knowledge of any important matter.

In the pieces we have read up to this point in the semester, there seems to an ongoing discussion about creating distinctions between sophistic argumentation and platonic dialectic and conflicting attitudes toward pure rhetorical mastery. On the one hand you have the sophists, who claim to be masters at arguing any point of a given situation or topic with the desire to persuade an audience into accepting what they have presented as the most appealing argument through situational ethics.

Like many devoted readers of Plato, I think this is his best dialogue. Here in this dialogue, we see Plato at his rhetorical best, as well as his enigmatic prime. This dialogue is the one in which Plato seems to be stepping clearly out of the shadow of Socrates. Socrates becomes more human with more obvious flaws than in prior dialogues.

As I was reading the speech about the chariot and its two horses in _Phaedrus_, I noticed that there were a great many numbers being mentioned:

~ "no soul returns to the place from which it came for ten thousand years" (524).

~ The exception to this is the philosopher. "If, after the third cycle of one thousand years, the last-mentioned souls have chosen such a life three times in a row, they grow their wings back, and they depart in the three-thousandth year" (524).

~ There are four kinds of divinely given madness (522-3).