Read the provided article, answer the following questions. Each answer should be no more than two to three sentences. Indicate the place in the text that supports your answer and provide an abbreviated direct citation for support.

PHAEDRU§

This is one of the greatest of the dialogues. It should be read with the Symposium. The two together gfoe Plato's idea of love. The Phaedrus is a conversation, not a discourse or a succession of questions and an­ swers directed to a single subject. Socrates and Phaedrus take a walk into the country and talk about whatever occurs to them, but they are Athenians and one of them is Socrates and their notion-and Plato's-of how to pass the time pleasantly while walking is some­ thing quite different from our own.

Love is the first matter they tak.e up. Phaedrus has with him a piece of writing about it which h.e greatly admires and reads to Soc­ rates who objects to it as making love chiefly a physical desire. To him it is an impulse full of beauty and goodness, a kind of divine madness which lifts the soul up and can enable it to enter the path which leads to the truth. The first movement to philosophy, the impulse to seek what is higher-in Plato's phrase, "the beyond"-comes from falling in love with visible, physical bea1tty.

It is really impossible for us to grasp what beauty meant to the Greeks. It was a mighty power exercising a profound influence upon their dai.ly lives. The greatest leader Thebes produced was said to have told his countrymen that they would never conquer Athens until they had brought the Parthenon to Thebes. Any Greek would understand that. Of course the Thebans would be better men, more courageous, wiser, too, with that beauty always before them. In the Republic, Plato's philosopher-rulers must be graceful as well as wise. Socrates gives Phaedrus a description of what a lover feels which leaves our love poetry far behind. To fall truly in love starts a man on the path upward to where love is satisfied in the perfect beauty of the truth.

The stre.5s in the Phaedrus is on visible beauty, but the reader of Plato must always remember that Socrates, the most beloved and the most lovely of all, was completely without it. Again and again his snub nose is mentioned, his protruding eyes, and so on. He had "no form nor comeliness that we should desire him." His wonderful beauty was within.

The last part of the dialogue is about the inferiority of books and writing in general to pure thought and to discussion concerned only with seeking for knowledge, not with putting it into a shape accept-

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