Phaedrus

The Phaedrus is one of the two great Platonic dialogues on love (the other is the Symposium), but it is also far more — a sustained argument on the nature of the soul, on the conditions of genuine rhetoric, on the place of writing in human knowing, and on the relation between erotic desire and the contemplation of the eternal Forms.

The setting is famously informal. Socrates and the young Phaedrus walk out of Athens together on a hot summer afternoon, find a shady plane-tree by the stream Ilissus, and lie down to talk. The conversation includes the celebrated image of the soul as a winged charioteer driving two horses, and a long final discussion of rhetoric and the limits of the written word.