After the recantation
SocratesThese, my boy, are the great and divine gifts that the friendship of a lover will bring you. Closeness to a man who is not in love, mixed with mortal self-control, manages only mortal and meagre gains and plants in the friend’s soul a slavish meanness, praised by the crowd as virtue. It will make him spend nine thousand years wandering about the earth and under it without understanding.
This, dear Eros, is the finest and best recantation we were able to offer you. Phaedrus compelled us to speak poetically in places, above all in our choice of words. Forgive what we said before and graciously accept what we say now. Do not in anger take away or maim the art of love you gave me; grant that I may be held in still greater honour than I am now among the beautiful. If Phaedrus and I said anything displeasing to you earlier, blame Lysias, the father of that speech. Stop him from composing such speeches and turn him towards philosophy, as his brother Polemarchus has already turned. Then this admirer of his will no longer waver between the two paths as he does now, but will devote his life wholeheartedly to love together with philosophical discourse.
PhaedrusI join you in that prayer, Socrates: if this is better for us, may it come to pass. I have long admired your speech, so much finer than the first one you made. I fear Lysias will seem feeble beside it, even if he agrees to set another speech against it. And just recently, my remarkable friend, a politician reproached him for precisely this. Throughout his tirade he kept calling him a speechwriter. Perhaps pride will make Lysias hold back from writing for us.