THE PARIS REVIEW (February 10, 2025): Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, his master and erastēs (older male lover).
SOCRATES: Dear Phaedrus, wither away, and where do you come from?
PHAEDRUS: From Lysias, Socrates … and I am going for a walk outside the wall [of Athens].
Earlier that day, Phaedrus says, Lysias had given him a speech in which he described the erotic relationship that a master can have with a young disciple whom he does not love, with whom he is not in love.
PHAEDRUS: Lysias has represented one of the beauties being tempted, but not by a lover; this is just the clever thing about it; for he says that favors should be granted rather to the one who is not in love than to the lover.
This report does not satisfy Socrates. Dying to know more, he is determined not to let Phaedrus out of his sight; he will follow him everywhere, hound him until he agrees to read Lysias’s speech to him. At the very threshold of the reading scene there thus emerges a close and complex connection between loving and reading, two verbs, two gerunds, between which, for reasons that will soon become apparent, it makes sense to leave open all the possible punctuation marks, including the possibility that there be none (as though one wrote them in scriptio continua, with no space between them, which was a common scriptural practice in Plato’s day). Loving()reading could then be read (or connected) at least in two different ways:
1. Lovingreading or loving-reading (a double verb, conjugated as transitive, where what one loves-reads is someone or something, Lysias or the book).
2. Loving reading (in which case, it is reading that one loves).