ave been
learned of Anaxagoras by Pericles, and which in the midst of poetry does
not forget order, is an illustration of the higher or true rhetoric.
This higher rhetoric is based upon dialectic, and dialectic is a sort
of inspiration akin to love (compare Symp.); in these two aspects of
philosophy the technicalities of rhetoric are absorbed. And so the
example becomes also the deeper theme of discourse. The true knowledge
of things in heaven and earth is based upon enthusiasm or love of
the ideas going before us and ever present to us in this world and in
another; and the true order of speech or writing proceeds accordingly.
Love, again, has three degrees: first, of interested love corresponding
to the conventionalities of rhetoric; secondly, of disinterested or
mad love, fixed on objects of sense, and answering, perhaps, to poetry;
thirdly, of disinterested love directed towards the unseen, answering
to dialectic or the science of the ideas. Lastly, the art of rhetoric
in the lower sense is found to rest on a knowledge of the natures and
characters of men, which Socrates at the commencement of the Dialogue
has described as his own peculiar study.

Thus amid discord a harmony begins to appear; there are many links of
connection which are not visible at first sight. At the same time the
Phaedrus, although one of the most beautiful of the Platonic Dialogues,
is also more irregular than any other. For insight into the world, for
sustained irony, for depth of thought, there is no Dialogue superior,
or perhaps equal to it. Nevertheless the form of the work has tended to
obscure some of Plato's higher aims.

The first speech is composed 'in that balanced style in which the wise
love to talk' (Symp.). The characteristics of rhetoric are insipidity,
mannerism, and monotonous parallelism of clauses. There is more rhythm
than reason; the creative power of imagination is wanting.

''Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.'

Plato has seized by anticipation the spirit which hung over Greek
literature for a thousand years afterwards. Yet doubtless there were
some who, like Phaedrus, felt a delight in the harmonious cadence and
the pedantic reasoning of the rhetoricians newly imported from Sicily,
which had ceased to be awakened in them by really great works, such as
the odes of Anacreon or Sappho or the orations of Pericles. That the
first speech was really written by Lysias is improbable. Like the poem
of Solon, or the story o