The Last Days of Socrates by Plato & Christopher Rowe & Plato

Author:Plato & Christopher Rowe & Plato
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

He struck his chest, and his heart he scolded thus:

94e “Bear up, my heart! Much worse you have endured.”125

Do you think Homer composed these lines in the belief that the soul was an attunement, and the sort of thing to be driven by bodily events, or rather because he believed it to be the sort of thing to drive and dominate these, being much too divine a thing to be compared with an attunement?’

‘Zeus, Socrates! That’s certainly how it seems to me.’

‘In that case, best of men, there’s nothing to recommend our

95a saying that soul is a kind of attunement; if we do that, it seems, we wouldn’t be in agreement either with the divine poet Homer or with ourselves.’126

‘That’s so,’ said Simmias.

‘So far so good,’ Socrates went on. ‘The matter of the Theban Harmonia could be said, perhaps, to have turned out in a moderately propitious way for us; what, then’ – here Socrates turned to Cebes – ‘about the matter of Cadmus?127 How shall we make that similarly propitious to us? What argument shall we use?’

‘It seems to me,’ said Cebes, ‘that you’ll find one, to judge by this wonderfully unexpected argument you’ve produced against attunement. As Simmias was expressing his worries, I was

95b myself very much wondering whether anyone would be able at all to handle his argument; so it seemed to me quite extraordinary that it didn’t manage to withstand even the first onset of your own argument. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the argument of Cadmus didn’t meet with exactly the same fate.’

‘Mind what you’re saying,’ said Socrates, ‘there’s a good man, in case some malign presence upsets the argument that’s coming. Well, that’s for the god to decide; as for us, let’s come to close quarters in true Homeric fashion and test whether there really is something in what you say. I think the nub of what you’re looking for is this: you think our soul needs to be

95c proved to be imperishable and immortal, or else the confident belief of a certain philosophical person who’s about to die, that he’ll fare better in Hades than if he were ending a different kind of life, will be just mindless and foolish. You’re saying that it doesn’t help to show that the soul is something strong and godlike, which existed even before we were born as human beings; all that might be so, but it could still indicate, not that the soul is immortal, but rather that it’s something long-lasting, which perhaps pre-existed for goodness knows how long and so used

95d to know and do all sorts of things – even so, none of that would make it any more immortal. As a matter of fact, its entry into a human body is – you said – the starting-point of its own perishing, like the onset of a disease, after which it labours its way128 through this life, finally perishing in what we call death. Your claim is that it makes no difference whether

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