HOMERIC Mevqodo~ IN PLATO’S SOCRATIC DIALOGUESsense receives praise. For example, for the training of the guardians,
Socrates would ban Odyssey 10.444– 45:
[Tiresias] alone has intelligence even after death,
but the rest of them are fl ittering shadows.Socrates calls this passage and others like it “neither true nor ben-
efi cial to the men who are to be fi ghters” (386c7; emphasis mine). Since these
men are the ones to be reared so as to help friends and harm enemies,
to be inculcated with the opinion of what is best for the city and to
do battle fearlessly, any passage that would present death as miserable
would seem to harm this rearing. But even this view, according to which
the young souls are shaped entirely by the non-hyponoetic, literal mean-
ing of the poems they hear, and according to which their natural con-
cern with death could be completely excised along with the excising of a
few selected passages from Homer and other poets, presupposes a mal-
leability of the spirited human soul that is highly questionable at best.
Nevertheless, even granting this malleability and granting the ef-
fi cacy as well as the (however remote) possibility of training soldiers by
means of such censorship, an affi rmative philosophical use of this same
passage is found at the conclusion of another dialogue, the Meno. After
demonstrating to his obtuse interlocutor that there are no teachers of
virtue of the kind Meno supposed (since the wisest statesmen could not
pass their virtue on to their sons), Socrates concludes that virtue comes
from divine dispensation to the virtuous, but without their understand-
ing it. That is why there are no teachers nor will any be found “unless
there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a
statesman. If there were one, he could be said to be among the living
what Tiresias was said to be among the dead, namely that ‘he alone re-
tained his intelligence while the others are fl itting shadows.’ In the same
manner such a man would, as far as v irtue is concerned, here also be the
only true thing compared with shadows” (100a1– 7).
Here the philosophical uJpovnoia is exposed precisely through the
Homeric image. No longer at war, Odysseus has just left the house of
Circe after many swinelike years with her directions to an encounter
with the prophet Tiresias. After making the required sacrifi ces and
entering Hades, the encounter begins. Tiresias knows that Odysseus is
seeking his return to Ithaca and informs him that this journey will be
most diffi cult, will cost him all of his men, but that it can be accom-
plished if he takes certain precautions and adheres to them rigorously.
He must “contain his own spirit [qumov~]” (Odyssey 11.105) and that of his