Phaedrus and his memory
PhaedrusWhat are you saying, my good Socrates? Do you suppose I, an amateur, could recite from memory, in a manner worthy of him, what Lysias, the most skilful writer of our day, composed slowly and at leisure? Far from it. Yet I would rather have that ability than a great deal of gold.
SocratesPhaedrus, if I do not know Phaedrus, I have forgotten myself as well. Neither is the case. I know perfectly well that when he heard Lysias’ speech, he did not listen just once. He made Lysias go over it again and again, and Lysias gladly obliged. Even that did not satisfy him. At last he got hold of the scroll and studied the passages he most wanted to master. He sat over it from dawn until he tired and went out for a walk. By the dog, I think he knew the speech by heart by then—unless it was very long. He went outside the walls to rehearse it. Then he met a man suffering from a hunger to hear speeches, and he was delighted—of course he was—to have found a fellow in his frenzy; he invited him along. But when the speech lover asked him to tell it, he played coy, as though he had no wish to speak. In the end he was going to recite it by force, even if nobody wanted to listen. So ask him, Phaedrus, to do right now what he will soon do anyway.
PhaedrusI had better give it as well as I can. You plainly will not let me go until I have told it somehow.
SocratesYou are quite right about that.
PhaedrusThen here is what I shall do. The truth is, Socrates, I certainly have not learned his exact words. But I can go through almost all the points by which he distinguished the case of the lover from that of the man who is not in love, each in outline and in order, beginning with the first.