Two questions

Socrates' conversation with Phaedrus is rich in references to its own setting. As the dialogue opens Phaedrus is about to take the air outside the city walls when he happens upon Socrates, who readily agrees to accompany him in return for an account of his morning's entertainment by the orator Lysias. Their conversation in these opening pages is peripatetic, and much of it is directly concerned with the landscape in which they walk and talk. Where they should sit for Phaedrus to deliver Lysias' speech; what landmarks they pass on the way; and (when they get there) whose shrine they have stumbled upon – such are the questions that exercise them as they stage-manage the speechmaking of the dialogue's first part. Their theatre even has a resident chorus: the ‘chorus (khorōi) of cicadas’ (230c3) whose summery treble Socrates takes note of on arrival. The cicadas' song will be heard to greatest effect later in the dialogue, at the outset of the critique of rhetoric that makes up its second part. Before launching fully into their discussion of rhetoric, Socrates and Phaedrus will break off to consider their physical environment once again, when Socrates – arresting the action, as it were, to let the chorus have its moment – warns Phaedrus against the potentially mesmerising effect of the droning cicadas overhead and tells him a parable in which they are the main characters (see 258e6–259d8).