Phaedrus Book download in PDF, ePub & Mobi

Phaedrus is a dialogue written by Plato and originally published around 370 B.C., around the same time he published The Republic.

Phaedrus presents only two characters, Socrates and Phaedrus, but still develops a wide variety of themes so we could not highlight one as main or predominant. He deals with themes such as love, the art of rhetoric, the nature of the human soul or metempsychosis.

The dialogue begins with a conversation between Phaedrus and Socrates about a speech of Lysias that Phaedrus has. In it, they talk about to whom you should grant your favor: to the beloved or to the one he loves.

This serves as a context for the conversation between the two characters and Socrates asks Phaedrus for his opinion, to which he begins by defining what love is and how a beloved differs from a friend.

Subsequently he begins to focus on other topics among which he highlights his teachings on oratory. He states that what prevails is the appearance of the speech and how to tell the facts in a plausible way, being more important how it is told than the fact itself, whether it is true or not.

This edition of Plato's Phaedrus is based on the English translation by Benjamin Jowett.