The Phaedrus (Greek: Φαίδρος), written by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's main protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues. The Phaedrus was presumably composed around 370 BC, around the same time as Plato's Republic and Symposium; with those two texts, it is often considered one of Plato's literary high points. Although ostensibly about the topic of love, the discussion in the dialogue revolves around the art of rhetoric and how it should be practiced, and dwells on subjects as diverse as reincarnation and erotic love.

Socrates runs into Phaedrus on the outskirts of Athens. Phaedrus has just come from the home of Lysias, son of Cephalus, where Lysias has given a speech on love. Socrates, stating that he is "sick with passion for hearing speeches" 1, walks into the countryside with Phaedrus hoping that Phaedrus will repeat the speech.

They sit by a stream under a plane tree and a chaste tree, and the rest of the dialogue consists of oration and discussion. The dialogue, somewhat unusually, does not set itself as a re-telling of the day's events. The dialogue is given unmediated, in the direct words of Socrates and Phaedrus, without other interlocutors to introduce the story or give it to us; it comes first hand, as if we are witnessing the events themselves.

This is in contrast to such dialogues as the Symposium, in which Plato sets up multiple layers between the day's events and our hearing of it, explicitly giving us an incomplete, fifth-hand account.

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