HOMERIC Mevqodo~ IN PLATO’S SOCRATIC DIALOGUEStal soul and a mortal body). The Platonic-Socratic mythical notion of a
region beyond the heavens in which the divine banquet occurs and to-
ward which the human souls long to ascend after their bodily lives have
ended and whose heights are proportional to the quality of their prior
embodied lives seems to be a far cry from the Homeric Hades.
Great pain in return for pain hubristically visited is poetically pre-
sented in Homer through physical wounding or killing. But in the great
myth of the Phaedrus the emphasis is upon the pleasure a human soul
can enjoy by mastering the hubristic horse that dwells within each of
us. The pain to which the bad horse is subjected leads directly to the
greatest delight. In controlling the bad horse (“a companion to u{bri~
and boastfulness”; Phaedrus 253e2) and through the philosophical e[rw~
that such restraint makes possible, the Platonic myth emphasizes the
almost inexpressible happiness the just human soul feels in recollecting
a glimpse of the divine banquet through the beholding of the beauty of
one’s beloved. The emphasis on justice shows that this image is designed
for this life.
There is, however, one quasi-similarity in content between the Ho-
meric and the Platonic imagery. In Plato, the souls do journey through
Hades, with the better ones actually enjoying the journey. But some other
souls are deposited into Hades, namely the ones that encouraged oth-
ers to indulge their bad horse, like the seductive and false “non-lover.”
The non-lover (that is, the soul that has no genuine e[rw~) “tosses the
soul around for nine thousand years on the earth and leads it, mindless,
beneath it” (Phaedrus 257a1– 2). At this point, it is worth noting from the
previous passage that the violent yanking of the bad horse is done, in
large part, to anchor it properly on the earth. This, the “steering” of our
earthbound nature, determines the fate of our souls—in language that
at least seems less mythical, it determines the quality of our lives here.
This is what the dialogue wants us to see as Socrates demonstrates
it to Phaedrus in a manner that is in its own way as magnifi cently poetic
(and more concentrated, albeit less oblique) than the work of Homer.
The references in the great myth of Plato to the Homeric images of “giv-
ing over to pain” open out in Plato to the possibility of a happiness that
belongs to human beings alone.
Conclusion: Platonic-Socratic ΔApovdeixi~
Neither ajpodeivknu'mi nor its noun form, ajpovdeixi~, are Homeric words.
Both occur fi rst of all in the classical age of Greece.^23 Literally, ajpodei-
knu'mi means “show from.” Lexical defi nitions include “exhibit,” “point