Symposium

“What then, Socrates?” said Agathon. “Surely you do not believe me so full of the theatre as not to know that to one who has sense a few who have their wits about them are more fearsome than many who are foolish?”

194c“I should indeed not do well, Agathon,” he said, “if I held some boorish opinion of you; but I know well that if you met with any whom you believed wise, you would care more about them than about the many. But it may be that we are not these — for we too were there, and were part of the many — but if you met with others who were wise, you would probably be ashamed before them, if you thought, perhaps, that you were doing something that was shameful. Or how do you put it?”

“What you say is true,” he said.

“But before the many you would not be ashamed, if you thought you were doing something shameful?”

194dAnd Phaedrus, he said, took him up and said, “My friend Agathon, if you answer Socrates, it will no longer make any difference to him how anything whatever here turns out, if only he has someone to converse with, above all someone beautiful. I for my part am glad to hear Socrates converse; but I must take care of the encomium to Love and receive his speech from each one of you. So when each of you two has paid the god his speech, then let him converse.”

194e“Why, you speak well, Phaedrus,” said Agathon, “and nothing prevents me from speaking; for it will be possible to converse with Socrates often, later on as well.

“I for my part want first to speak of how I must speak, and then to speak. For all who have spoken before seem to me not to be making an encomium of the god but to be calling human beings happy for the good things of which the god is the cause for them; but of what kind he himself is who 195a gave these gifts, no one has said. And there is one right¹ way of all praise about anything: to go through in speech of what kind, the cause of what kinds of things,²