sting a
slur upon his own favourite pursuit.

SOCRATES: Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of
writing.

PHAEDRUS: Certainly not.

SOCRATES: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.

PHAEDRUS: Clearly.

SOCRATES: And what is well and what is badly--need we ask Lysias, or any
other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or
any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach
us this?

PHAEDRUS: Need we? For what should a man live if not for the pleasures
of discourse? Surely not for the sake of bodily pleasures, which almost
always have previous pain as a condition of them, and therefore are
rightly called slavish.

SOCRATES: There is time enough. And I believe that the grasshoppers
chirruping after their manner in the heat of the sun over our heads are
talking to one another and looking down at us. What would they say if
they saw that we, like the many, are not conversing, but slumbering at
mid-day, lulled by their voices, too indolent to think? Would they not
have a right to laugh at us? They might imagine that we were slaves,
who, coming to rest at a place of resort of theirs, like sheep lie
asleep at noon around the well. But if they see us discoursing, and
like Odysseus sailing past them, deaf to their siren voices, they may
perhaps, out of respect, give us of the gifts which they receive from
the gods that they may impart them to men.

PHAEDRUS: What gifts do you mean? I never heard of any.

SOCRATES: A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the
story of the grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in
an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared they
were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating
and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness they died. And now
they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the
Muses make to them--they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour
of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking; and
when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who honours them on
earth. They win the love of Terpsichore for the dancers by their report
of them; of Erato for the lovers, and of the other Muses for those who
do them honour, according to the several ways of honouring them;--of
Calliope the eldest Muse and of Urania who is next to her, for the
philosophers, of whose music