Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prelude (227-230)
The Speech of Lysias (231-234)
Interlude—Socrates’s First Speech (234-241)
Interlude—Socrates’s Second Speech (242-245)
The Myth. The Allegory of the Charioteer and His Horses—Love Is the Regrowth of the Wings of the Soul—The Charioteer Allegory Resumed (246-257)
Introduction to the Discussion of Rhetoric—The Myth of the Cicadas (258-259)
The Necessity of Knowledge for a True Art of Rhetoric—The Speeches of Socrates Illustrate a New Philosophical Method (258-269)
A Review of the Devices and Technical Terms of Contemporary Rhetoric—Rhetoric as Philosophy—The Inferiority of the Written to the Spoken Word (269-277)
Recapitulation and Conclusion (277-279)
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaInterlude—Socrates’s First Speech (234-241)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: “Interlude—Socrates’s First Speech”
Socrates praises the writing and wording of Lysias’s speech but can’t take the subject matter seriously. He praises only the style and not the content of the speech, taking it to be a rhetorical exercise rather than a serious argument in favor of the non-lover. Though Phaedrus believes that the speech is indeed a thorough treatment of the subject, Socrates hints that there are other writers who have written far better arguments opposing Lysias’s point of view in the past.
Socrates concedes that the lover is in a less “healthy” mental state than the non-lover, but that such ideas (e.g., “love is a sickness”) are commonplace, and that to be persuasive one must argue less obvious positions. Phaedrus urges Socrates to deliver such a speech, and while Socrates is playfully reluctant at first, he agrees.
He delivers the speech with his face covered, beginning with an invocation to the Muses. He asks the reader to imagine a young man with many admirers, including one who argues, as did Lysias’s speech, that he should be favored, since he is not in love. Socrates then speaks in the 
Related Titles
By Plato
