her the most sacred pledges, and they may not
break them and fall into enmity. At last they pass out of the body,
unwinged, but eager to soar, and thus obtain no mean reward of love and
madness. For those who have once begun the heavenward pilgrimage may not
go down again to darkness and the journey beneath the earth, but they
live in light always; happy companions in their pilgrimage, and when the
time comes at which they receive their wings they have the same plumage
because of their love.

Thus great are the heavenly blessings which the friendship of a lover
will confer upon you, my youth. Whereas the attachment of the non-lover,
which is alloyed with a worldly prudence and has worldly and niggardly
ways of doling out benefits, will breed in your soul those vulgar
qualities which the populace applaud, will send you bowling round the
earth during a period of nine thousand years, and leave you a fool in
the world below.

And thus, dear Eros, I have made and paid my recantation, as well and as
fairly as I could; more especially in the matter of the poetical figures
which I was compelled to use, because Phaedrus would have them. And now
forgive the past and accept the present, and be gracious and merciful to
me, and do not in thine anger deprive me of sight, or take from me the
art of love which thou hast given me, but grant that I may be yet more
esteemed in the eyes of the fair. And if Phaedrus or I myself said
anything rude in our first speeches, blame Lysias, who is the father
of the brat, and let us have no more of his progeny; bid him study
philosophy, like his brother Polemarchus; and then his lover Phaedrus
will no longer halt between two opinions, but will dedicate himself
wholly to love and to philosophical discourses.

PHAEDRUS: I join in the prayer, Socrates, and say with you, if this
be for my good, may your words come to pass. But why did you make your
second oration so much finer than the first? I wonder why. And I begin
to be afraid that I shall lose conceit of Lysias, and that he will
appear tame in comparison, even if he be willing to put another as fine
and as long as yours into the field, which I doubt. For quite lately one
of your politicians was abusing him on this very account; and called
him a 'speech writer' again and again. So that a feeling of pride may
probably induce him to give up writing speeches.

SOCRATES: What a very amusing notion! But I think, my young man,
that you are much mistak