Like the Symposium, I am enamored of The Phaedrus as a work of imaginative literature. Any contemporary writer would be jealous of how he draws and manipulates his characters, exposing them for the reader.

But again, his hatred of rhetoric, as something whose danger as a tool for demagogues makes it too dangerous, cannot be suppressed. And in that, a critique of democracy as something which killed his teacher Socrates.

Poor Quintillian, I see how he felt the need to defend his career from such complaints.