Poetry, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Plato's Phaedrus

Abstract

Difficulties often felt when trying to identify a main theme for the Phaedrus or to explain the attitude it implies toward an art of rhetoric are reduced once one applies general categories of poetic and rhetorical discourse to a series of competitive erotic speeches constituting the first part of the dialogue. Positive results include a unified literary reading of the dialogue as offering a particular theory of fiction while suggesting a critical reconsideration of the usual modern delimitation of its philosophical significance.