nothing i can really write here will do it justice, but “phaedrus” is almost certainly plato’s masterpiece from a compositional and philosophical perspective, and maybe the one dialogue of his that everyone should read. though ostensibly just a dialogue about the art of rhetoric, it is itself a pristine example of #greek prose rhetoric, and does everything that it recommends rhetors do compositionally when giving a speech. at the same time, it is able to pull in major parts of the platonic philosophy, including platonic love, spirituality, reincarnation, and a lot more.

we will be using the OUP edition of the text beginning at 274c, which you can follow along with in parallel here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg012.perseus-grc1:274c

prior to this point in the dialogue, socrates has encountered the youth phaedrus in a shady grove outside of athens, who has just come from hearing the orator lysias give a speech on love. socrates asks phaedrus to recount the speech to him, and together the two have worked dialectically through the ideas on love expressed in the speech, through to the structure of a good speech, and now (where we pick up) the story of the origin of writing, and what makes writing good or bad.

additionally, the best and most recent text for learning to read #plato in greek is louise pratt’s “eros at the banquet,” which takes students who have had about two semesters’ worth of greek fundamentals through a large part of the symposium, and focuses especially on the most difficult parts of reading plato like attic vowel contraction. she is very good about where she chooses to give glosses, giving readings on forms that an intermediate student couldn’t be expected to know, while still not giving them too much. https://www.oupress.com/books/9780031/eros-at-the-banquet

translating @MoMartin's requested portion of phaedrus

hi, that was my fault

blobs and meowmoji added for @gattogateaux   

in the colon notation they're under their usual names, like "blobcat" and "meow"

thinking about how thucydides is a demon. i would almost rather read any other classical author on earth. he writes like an ice queen, and there's no feeling worse than encountering and wrestling with a verb form only to find out that it literally appears nowhere else in the ancient greek corpus. meanwhile, i could read livy all day. you could just weep at some parts of AUC's compact and crystalline beauty.