This view of myths and their origin is criticised by Plato in the Phaedrus ( 229d ), in which Socrates says that this approach is the province of one who is " vehemently curious and laborious, and not entirely happy.

Yet many of Plato's criticisms are hard to substantiate in the work of Isocrates, and at the end of his Phaedrus Plato even has Socrates praising Isocrates, though some scholars take this to be sarcastic.

Thus, Strauss agrees with the Socrates of the Phaedrus, where the Greek indicates that, insofar as writing does not respond when questioned, good writing provokes questions in the reader — questions that orient the reader towards an understanding of problems the author thought about with utmost seriousness.

* Phaedrus ( speech begins 178a ): was an Athenian aristocrat associated with the inner-circle of the philosopher Socrates, familiar from Phaedrus and other dialogues.

In another instance Socrates talks about ekphrasis to Phaedrus thus:

In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates examine a speech by Lysias to determine whether or not it is praiseworthy.

Further, Plato's Phaedrus opens with Phaedrus coming from conversation with Lysias at the house of Epicrates of Athens: he meets Socrates, with whom he will read and discuss the speech of Lysias he heard.

With the exception of Aristophanes, all of Socrates ' named friends from the Symposium are in attendance: Eryximachus the doctor, and Phaedrus are there, and so are the lovers Pausanias and Agathon ( who is said to be a mere boy at this point ), and Alcibiades.

The Phaedrus (), written by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's main protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues.

Socrates runs into Phaedrus on the outskirts of Athens.

Socrates, stating that he is " sick with passion for hearing speeches ", walks into the countryside with Phaedrus hoping that Phaedrus will repeat the speech.

The dialogue is given unmediated, in the direct words of Socrates and Phaedrus, without other interlocutors to introduce the story or give it to us ; it comes first hand, as if we are witnessing the events themselves.

As they walk out into the countryside, Socrates tries to convince Phaedrus to repeat the speech of Lysias which he has just heard.

Phaedrus makes several excuses, but Socrates suspects strongly that Phaedrus has a copy of the speech with him.

Phaedrus and Socrates walk through a stream and find a seat in the shade, and Phaedrus commences to repeat Lysias ' speech.

Socrates, attempting to flatter Phaedrus, responds that he is in ecstasy and that it is all Phaedrus ' doing.

Socrates comments that as the speech seemed to make Phaedrus radiant, he is sure that Phaedrus understands these things better than he does himself, and that he cannot help follow Phaedrus ' lead into his Bacchic frenzy.

While he is not very good at it, he is good enough for his purposes, and he recognizes what his offense has been: if love is a god or something divine, as he and Phaedrus both agree he is, he cannot be bad, as the previous speeches have portrayed him.

The speech seems to parody or pastiche the erotic speeches in both Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus.

Phaedrus claims that to be a good speechmaker, one does not need to know the truth of what he is speaking on, but rather how to properly persuade, persuasion being the purpose of speechmaking and oration.

When Socrates and Phaedrus proceed to recount the various tools of speechmaking as written down by the great orators of the past, starting with the " Preamble " and the " Statement Facts " and concluding with the " Recapitulation ", Socrates states that the fabric seems a little threadbare. He goes on to compare one with only knowledge of these tools to a doctor who knows how to raise and lower a body's temperature but does not know when it is good or bad to do so, stating that one who has simply read a book or came across some potions knows nothing of the art. One who knows how to compose the longest passages on trivial topics or the briefest passages on topics of great importance is similar, when he claims that to teach this is to impart the knowledge of composing tragedies ; if one were to claim to have mastered harmony after learning the lowest and highest notes on the lyre, a musician would say that this knowledge is what one must learn before one masters harmony, but it is not the knowledge of harmony itself. This, then, is what must be said to those who attempt to teach the art of rhetoric through " Preambles " and " Recapitulations "; they are ignorant of dialectic, and teach only what is necessary to learn as preliminaries.

The Phaedrus also gives us much in the way of explaining how art should be practiced.

" And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good -- Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

But Achilles fought bravely at the death of his lover Patroclus though he knew that the fight would bring his own death closer ; Phaedrus here takes Aeschylus to task for making Achilles the " lover " ( 180a ), claiming instead that Achilles was the beautiful, still-beardless, younger " beloved " of Patroclus and citing Homer in his support.

In Phaedrus Plato aligns the Twelve with the Zodiac and would exclude Hestia from their rank.

Saying that while Lysias is present, he would never allow himself to be used as a training partner for Phaedrus to practice his own speech making on, he asks Phaedrus to expose what he is holding under his cloak.

However the character of Phaedrus in Plato's Symposium asserts that Homer emphasized the beauty of Achilles which would qualify him, not Patroclus, as “ eromenos ”.

Anecdotally, the Roman fabulist Phaedrus attributes to Aesop a simple etiology for homosexuality, in Prometheus ' getting drunk while creating the first humans and misapplying the genitalia.

Plato mentions Thrasymachus as a successful rhetorician in his Phaedrus, but attributes nothing significant to him.

Plato's explores the problematic moral status of rhetoric twice: in Gorgias, a dialogue named for the famed Sophist, and in The Phaedrus, a dialogue best known for its commentary on love.

The love story of Rhadine made her supposed tomb on the island of Samos a pilgrimage site for star-crossed lovers in the time of Pausanias and Erato was linked again with love in Plato's Phaedrus ; nevertheless, even in the third century BCE, when Apollonius wrote, the Muses were not yet as inextricably linked to specific types of poetry as they became.

Phaedrus concludes his short speech in proper rhetorical fashion, reiterating his statements that love is one of the most ancient gods, the most honored, the most powerful in helping men gain honor and blessedness, and sacrificing one's self for love will result in rewards from the gods.

Pausanias, the legal expert of the group, begins by taking Phaedrus up on his chosen examples ( 180c ), asserting that the love that deserves attention is not the kind associated with Aphrodite Pandemos ( Aphrodite common to the whole city ) whose object may equally be a woman or a boy, but that of Aphrodite Urania ( Heavenly Aphrodite ), which " springs entirely from the male " and is " free from wantonness "; the object of this kind of love is not a child, but one who has begun to display intelligence and is close to growing a beard ( 181e ).

* 385 BC – Plato publishes Symposium in which Phaedrus, Eryixmachus, Aristophanes and other Greek intellectuals argue that love between males is the highest form, while sex with women is lustful and utilitarian.

Phaedrus has just come from the home of Epicrates of Athens, where Lysias, son of Cephalus, has given a speech on love.

However, the Symposium is a dialectical exploration of the nature of true love, in which Phaedrus ' views are soon found to be inadequate compared to the transcendent vision of Socrates, who:

Taking his bearings from his study of Maimonides and Al Farabi, and pointing further back to Plato's discussion of writing as contained in the Phaedrus, Strauss proposed that the classical and medieval art of exoteric writing is the proper medium for philosophic learning: rather than displaying philosophers ' thoughts superficially, classical and medieval philosophical texts guide their readers in thinking and learning independently of imparted knowledge.

Plato ( 427-347 BC ) famously outlined the differences between true and false rhetoric in a number of dialogues ; particularly the Gorgias and Phaedrus wherein Plato disputes the sophistic notion that the art of persuasion ( the sophists ' art which he calls " rhetoric "), can exist independent of the art of dialectic.

In Book II, Quintilian sides with Plato ’ s assertion in the Phaedrus that the rhetorician must be just: “ In the Phaedrus, Plato makes it even clearer that the complete attainment of this art is even impossible without the knowledge of justice, an opinion in which I heartily concur " ( Quintilian 2. 15. 29 ).

Near the beginning of the 18th century, a manuscript of Perotti ( 1430 – 1480 ), archbishop of Siponto ( Manfredonia, in Apulia ), was discovered at Parma containing sixty-four fables of Phaedrus, of which some thirty were previously unknown.

In the Middle Ages Phaedrus exercised a considerable influence through the prose and verse versions of his fables, which were current, even though his own works ( and even his name ) were apparently forgotten.

Of the sixty-seven fables which it contains, thirty are derived from lost fables of Phaedrus.

The largest, oldest known and most influential of the prose versions of Phaedrus is that which bears the name of Romulus.

These three prose versions contain in all one hundred distinct fables, of which fifty-six are derived from the existing fables and the remaining forty-four presumably from lost fables of Phaedrus.

The largest, oldest known and most influential of the prose versions of Phaedrus is that which bears the name of an otherwise unknown fabulist named Romulus.

"-Pirsig's line plays off a line in the Platonic dialogue " The Phaedrus " which reads: " 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?

" Plato distinguished two types of mania in the Phaedrus: one arising from human disease, and the other from a divine state, " which releases us from our customary habits.

Late alterations carried out in the third century CE by the archon Phaedrus included the re-use of earlier Hadrianic reliefs, which were built into the front of the stage building.

This differs from the stance taken by Aristophanes in the Symposium and is in stark contrast to the Phaedrus, which presents pederasty in a positive light.

By comparison, the Phaedrus version has six pentameter lines, of which two draw the moral and Gabriele Faerno's Latin reworking has five lines and two more drawing the moral.

; Phaedrus: There are shade and gentle breezes, and grass on which we may either sit or lie down.

; Phaedrus: I should like to know, Socrates, whether the place is not somewhere here at which Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia from the banks of the Ilissus?

Book VII briefly deals with the relationship of the moved to his mover, which Aristotle describes in substantial divergence with Plato's theory of the soul as capable of setting itself in motion ( Laws book X, Phaedrus, Phaedo ).

The folly of trying to keep up with the Jones ' is the conclusion drawn by La Fontaine's Fables from the Phaedrus version of the tale, applying it to the artistocratic times in which La Fontaine lived (" The frog that wished to be as big as the ox ", Fables I. 3 ):