Phaedrus Summary
Plato

The personal history of Phaedrus (15 BC-50 AD), a first century Roman writer, has been lost in the mist of history, but his fables in verse based on those of Aesop will live for countless generations ... Read more

Biography EssayPlato stands at the center of philosophical thought in the ancient world. He was the first person to approach philosophical issues systematically, but it was the genius with which he tr... Read more

Plato, known as perhaps the greatest of all the ancient Greek philosophers and educators, was more interested in moral rather than natural (or scientific) philosophy. Nevertheless, he made many import... Read more

Plato stands at the center of philosophical thought in the ancient world. He was the first person to approach philosophical issues systematically, but it was the genius with which he treated those iss... Read more

In the following essay, first published in 1927, Duff discusses what is known of Phaedrus's life, reviews the critical consensus on his work, and locates his work in the tradition that spans fr... Read more

In the following essay, Henderson examines the possible historical conduits by which Phaedrus's literary work might have been dispersed, and suggests that the parallelism of Phaedrus's n... Read more

In the essay that follows, Goodyear highlights Phaedrus's choice of style and attempts to explain his stature as an obscure poet. Phaedrus holds no exalted rank amongst Latin poets, but he c... Read more

In the essay that follows, Rubin compares the degrees of subtlety and ambiguity in the fables of Phaedrus and the seventeenth-century French writer de La Fontaine, who used Phaedrus as a source. Of... Read more

In the following excerpt, Becher analyzes Phaedrus's influence on de La Fontaine, a seventeenth-century French fabulist who particularly admired Phaedrus's ironic criticisms of social in... Read more