Vulgar words in Phaedrus (Page 1)

This book at a glance

ass x 4
bastard x 3
            

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~   ~   ~   Sentence 136   ~   ~   ~

It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent nor anyone else is there to defend it.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 464   ~   ~   ~

Why did a thousand years invent nothing better than Sibylline books, Orphic poems, Byzantine imitations of classical histories, Christian reproductions of Greek plays, novels like the silly and obscene romances of Longus and Heliodorus, innumerable forged epistles, a great many epigrams, biographies of the meanest and most meagre description, a sham philosophy which was the bastard progeny of the union between Hellas and the East?

~   ~   ~   Sentence 663   ~   ~   ~

SOCRATES: You are a dear golden ass if you suppose me to mean that Lysias has altogether missed the mark, and that I can make a speech from which all his arguments are to be excluded.

~   ~   ~   Sentence 975   ~   ~   ~

SOCRATES: There is something more ridiculous coming:-Suppose, further, that in sober earnest I, having persuaded you of this, went and composed a speech in honour of an ass, whom I entitled a horse beginning: 'A noble animal and a most useful possession, especially in war, and you may get on his back and fight, and he will carry baggage or anything.'

~   ~   ~   Sentence 980   ~   ~   ~

SOCRATES: And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place of a horse, puts good for evil, being himself as ignorant of their true nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having studied the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades them not about 'the shadow of an ass,' which he confounds with a horse, but about good which he confounds with evil,-what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?

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