the difference of times and manners; and we lose the better half of
him when we regard his Dialogues merely as literary compositions. Any
ancient work which is worth reading has a practical and speculative as
well as a literary interest. And in Plato, more than in any other Greek
writer, the local and transitory is inextricably blended with what is
spiritual and eternal. Socrates is necessarily ironical; for he has to
withdraw from the received opinions and beliefs of mankind. We cannot
separate the transitory from the permanent; nor can we translate the
language of irony into that of plain reflection and common sense. But we
can imagine the mind of Socrates in another age and country; and we can
interpret him by analogy with reference to the errors and prejudices
which prevail among ourselves. To return to the Phaedrus:--

Both speeches are strongly condemned by Socrates as sinful and
blasphemous towards the god Love, and as worthy only of some haunt of
sailors to which good manners were unknown. The meaning of this and
other wild language to the same effect, which is introduced by way of
contrast to the formality of the two speeches (Socrates has a sense of
relief when he has escaped from the trammels of rhetoric), seems to
be that the two speeches proceed upon the supposition that love is
and ought to be interested, and that no such thing as a real or
disinterested passion, which would be at the same time lasting, could
be conceived. 'But did I call this "love"? O God, forgive my blasphemy.
This is not love. Rather it is the love of the world. But there is
another kingdom of love, a kingdom not of this world, divine, eternal.
And this other love I will now show you in a mystery.'

Then follows the famous myth, which is a sort of parable, and like other
parables ought not to receive too minute an interpretation. In all such
allegories there is a great deal which is merely ornamental, and the
interpreter has to separate the important from the unimportant. Socrates
himself has given the right clue when, in using his own discourse
afterwards as the text for his examination of rhetoric, he characterizes
it as a 'partly true and tolerably credible mythus,' in which amid
poetical figures, order and arrangement were not forgotten.

The soul is described in magnificent language as the self-moved and the
source of motion in all other things. This is the philosophical theme or
proem of the whole. But ideas must be given throu