though inferior, because they have not the approval of the whole soul. At
last they leave the body and proceed on their pilgrim's progress, and those
who have once begun can never go back. When the time comes they receive
their wings and fly away, and the lovers have the same wings.

Socrates concludes:--

These are the blessings of love, and thus have I made my recantation in
finer language than before: I did so in order to please Phaedrus. If I
said what was wrong at first, please to attribute my error to Lysias, who
ought to study philosophy instead of rhetoric, and then he will not mislead
his disciple Phaedrus.

Phaedrus is afraid that he will lose conceit of Lysias, and that Lysias
will be out of conceit with himself, and leave off making speeches, for the
politicians have been deriding him. Socrates is of opinion that there is
small danger of this; the politicians are themselves the great rhetoricians
of the age, who desire to attain immortality by the authorship of laws.
And therefore there is nothing with which they can reproach Lysias in being
a writer; but there may be disgrace in being a bad one.

And what is good or bad writing or speaking? While the sun is hot in the
sky above us, let us ask that question: since by rational conversation man
lives, and not by the indulgence of bodily pleasures. And the grasshoppers
who are chirruping around may carry our words to the Muses, who are their
patronesses; for the grasshoppers were human beings themselves in a world
before the Muses, and when the Muses came they died of hunger for the love
of song. And they carry to them in heaven the report of those who honour
them on earth.