BERNARD FREYDBERGtryon. He struck [Hera] beside her right breast with a tri-barbed arrow,
so that the pain (a[lgo~) he gave her could not be quieted (5.393– 94).
He also struck [Hades] among the dead men at Pylos, and gave him to
agony (ojduvnh/sin) (5.397).
At Odyssey 17. 5 6 6 – 67, after commenting on the u{bri~ of the suitors,
his fear of their large numbers and of their hostility, Odysseus laments
the beating he endured from Antinoös, saying:^19
For even now, as I went through the house, doing
no harm, and this man struck me and gave me over to suffering
[ojduvnh/sin].Socrates calls his great myth in the Phaedrus an ajpovdeixi~ that the clever
(deinoi~) will not trust (a[pisto~), but that the wise (sofoi~) will trust
(pisthv) (245c1– 2; emphasis mine). ΔApovdeixi~ is usually translated
straightforwardly as “proof,” both in general and in translations of
Plato.^20 However, as John Sallis has observed in a matter of highest im-
portance for the reading of Plato, “ΔApovdeixi~ means a showing forth, an
exhibiting of something about something, a making manifest of some-
thing so that it can be seen in its manifestness. Thus, for the Greeks a
proof was anything but a technique of a sort that could be employed in
almost total detachment from the content and that could serve as an
appropriate insight into the matter itself in its manifestness.”^21 In the
conclusion of this paper I will venture my own translation, inspired by
that of Sallis, and suggested by Plato’s use of Homeric imagery.
During the great myth, Socrates speaks of the charioteer’s bring-
ing the hubristic, unruly horse to order:
He violently yanks the bit back out of the teeth of the insolent
[uJbristou' horse, only harder this time, so that he bloodies its foul-
speaking tongue and jaws, sets its legs and haunches fi rmly on the
earth [pro;~ th;n gh`n] and gives it over to pain [ojduvnai~]. (Phaedrus
254e2– 5)The literal poetic connection, clearly, is between u{bri~ and pain. The
pain infl icted by mortals upon immortals, and upon those mortals like
Odysseus who are under special divine guidance, has enormous punish-
ment or death to the perpetrator as its consequence.^22 Plato’s use of this
allusion in the Phaedrus is of particular interest for several reasons. First
of all, the Platonic-Socratic mythical charioteer directing two horses,
one “beautiful and good and from stock of the same sort” (246b), while
the other is the opposite and has the opposite sort of bloodline (246b),
functions as an image of a human soul having many lives (an immor-