Socrates and the young Phaedrus walk outside the walls of Athens, sit under a plane tree by a stream, and talk about love and rhetoric and the soul. The dialogue contains the myth of the charioteer, the soul as winged horses that must be controlled, and the famous critique of writing as inferior to living speech. The irony is that Plato wrote this down. The setting is the most sensuous in all of Plato, the philosophical content among the most profound. Love, Socrates argues, is a kind of divine madness. Reading the dialogue, you believe him.