In a previous lecture I referred you to the beautiful opening and
the yet more beautiful close of the "Phaedrus." Let us turn back
and refresh ourselves with that Dialogue while we learn from it,
in somewhat more of detail, just what a book meant to an
Athenian: how fresh a thing it was to him and how little irksome.
Phaedrus has spent his forenoon listening to a discourse by the
celebrated rhetorician Lysias on the subject of Love, and is
starting to cool his head with a stroll beyond the walls of the
city, when he encounters Socrates, who will not let him go until
he has delivered up the speech with which Lysias regaled him, or,
better still, the manuscript, 'which I suspect you are carrying
there in your left hand under your cloak.' So they bend their way
beside Ilissus towards a tall plane tree, seen in the distance.
Having reached it, they recline.
'By Hera,' says Socrates, 'a fair resting-place, full of
summer sounds and scents! This clearing, with the agnus
castus in high bloom and fragrant, and the stream beneath
the tree so gratefully cool to our feet! Judging from the
ornaments and statues, I think this spot must be sacred to
Acheloüs and the Nymphs. And the breeze, how
deliciously charged with balm! and all summer's murmur in
the air, shrilled by the chorus of the grasshoppers! But the
greatest charm is this knoll of turf,--positively a pillow for
the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been a delectable
guide.'
'What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates,' returns
Phaedrus. 'When you are in the country, as you say, you
really are like some stranger led about by a guide. Upon my
word, I doubt if you ever stray beyond the gates save by
accident.'
'Very true, my friend: and I hope you will forgive me for the
reason--which is, that I love knowledge, and my teachers are
the men who dwell in the city, not the trees or country
scenes. Yet I do believe you have found a spell to draw me
forth, like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of
fruit is waved. For only hold up before me in like manner a
book, and you may lead me all round Attica and over the
wide world.'
So they recline and talk, looking aloft through that famous pure
sky of Attica, mile upon mile transparent; and their discourse
(preserved to us) is of Love, and seems to belong to that
atmosphere, so clear it is and luminously profound. It ends with
the cool of the day, and the two friends arise to depart.
Socrates looks about him.
'Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local
deities?'
'By all means,' Phaedrus agrees.
_Socrates_ (praying): 'Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who
haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that
the outward and inward may be at one! May I esteem the wise
to be the rich; and may I myself have that quantity of gold
which a temperate man, and he only, can carry.... Anything
more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me.'
_Phaedrus._ 'Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks,
should have all things in common.'
_Socrates._ 'Amen, then.... Let us go.'
Here we have, as it seems to me, a marriage, without impediment,
of wisdom and beauty between two minds that perforce have small
acquaintance with books: and yet, with it, Socrates' confession
that anyone with a book under his cloak could lead him anywhere
by the nose. So we see that Hellenic culture at its best was
independent of book-learning, and yet craved for it.