The Phaedrus is – like so many other dialogues of Plato's – one of a kind. It appears to reach its climax with one of the most memorable pieces of Platonic writing (the great myth of the chariot of the soul), only to go on to treat it as a starting-point for a dry discussion of what Socrates calls the ‘art of words (logoi)’. What emerges at the end of this discussion, between Socrates and Phaedrus, an amateur enthusiast for rhetoric, is a critique of writing as a medium of communication, and a strong statement of preference for the spoken word, in the particular form of dialectic between master dialectician and student. It is the critique of writing, together with the description of a new, philosophical rhetoric that frames it, that will be the main subject of the present short (and last) chapter.

The basic lines of a coherent interpretation of the Phaedrus were laid down by W. H.Thompson in the introduction to his edition of the dialogue, published in 1868. The dialogue starts, after some preliminaries, with Phaedrus reading an exhibition speech by – the person we know as – the great Attic orator Lysias on the theme ‘a boy should grant (sc. sexual) favours to the man who is not in love him rather than one who is’.