SOCRATES: And when the king or orator has the power, as Lycurgus or Solon or Darius had, of attaining an immortality or authorship in a state, is he not thought by posterity, when they see his compositions, and does he not think himself, while he is yet alive, to be a god?
PHAEDRUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: Then do you think that any one of this class, however ill-disposed, would reproach Lysias with being an author?
PHAEDRUS: Not upon your view; for according to you he would be casting a slur upon his own favourite pursuit.
SOCRATES: Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.
PHAEDRUS: Clearly.
SOCRATES: And what is well and what is badly—need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach us this?
PHAEDRUS: Need we? For what should a man live if not for the pleasures of discourse? Surely not for the sake of bodily pleasures, which almost always have previous pain as a condition of them, and therefore are rightly called slavish.