ABSTRACT
In the Phaedrus, Socrates introduces the idea of divine madness. Of this he distinguishes four kinds: the madness of the oracle, the madness of possession, the madness of the poet and the madness of love. The madman (the prophet, the possessed, the poet, the lover) is endowed with a clarity of vision by which he passes through the door into truth so that, as Socrates puts it, ‘the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman’.
