Dear friend,
The International Symposium I shall attend in November in Prague is going to be on Plato's Phaedrus. I should like to give you an idea about this dialogue in a series of emails.
Socrates opens the dialogue with the words: "Dear Phaedrus, where are you going and from where are you coming?" Phaedrus explains that he is going for a walk outside the city walls; he spent the whole morning in the company of Lysias and his friends. Socrates muses: "Obviously, Lysias was entertaining you with his speeches." Phaedrus tells him that the speech was erotic, but in a strange way: “Lysias described how a handsome boy was tempted, but not by a lover; he should surrender to one who is not in love with him rather than to one who is."
Socrates is eager to hear it.
They walk along a little stream, called Ilissus, looking for a place to sit.
Phaedrus asks whether the spot they just reached isn't the one from which
Boreas [the northern wind, worshipped as an anthropomorphic god] is said to
have seized Oireithuia [a daughter of the Athenian king Erechtheus]. Socrates
replies that the spot from which Boreas seized her is a little further down the
stream. Phaedrus asks: "Socrates, do you believe this mythical story to be
true?" Socrates replies that if he disbelieved it, he might conjecture
that a blast of Boreas pushed Oireithuia from the nearby rocks, and when she
fell dead, it was said that she had been seized by Boreas: "I don't have
time for such things, and I'll tell you why. I can't yet 'know myself'', as the
inscription at Delphi enjoins. Instead of investigating such things, I investigate
myself: Am I a beast more complex and more puffed up than Typhon [a
hundred-headed monster, the son of Gaea, the Earth, and Tartarus, the Underworld,
the Hell], or am I a gentler, simpler being, having a share in some divine and
un-Typhonic nature?"
Best wishes,
Julius
No comments:
Post a Comment