as small, good and bad alike, and is in all equally right, and equally to be esteemed—that is what you have heard?
PHAEDRUS: Nay, not exactly that; I should say rather that I have heard the art confined to speaking and writing in lawsuits, and to speaking in public assemblies—not extended farther.
SOCRATES: Then I suppose that you have only heard of the rhetoric of Nestor and Odysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours when at Troy, and never of the rhetoric of Palamedes?
PHAEDRUS: No more than of Nestor and Odysseus, unless Gorgias is your Nestor, and Thrasymachus or Theodorus your Odysseus.
SOCRATES: Perhaps that is my meaning. But let us leave them. And do you tell me, instead, what are plaintiff and defendant doing in a law court—are they not contending?
PHAEDRUS: Exactly so.
SOCRATES: About the just and unjust—that is the matter in dispute?
PHAEDRUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And a professor of the art will