Remember that you are human: this is the central message of ancient Greek reverence. “How could I forget?” you ask. Very easily, especially if you are so rich, so powerful, or so successful that you push every thought of failure away from your mind—every thought of human error, madness, or death. But you will err, if you are human; you will do crazy things, no matter how hard you cling to the notion that your mind is sound; and you will die. Between now and death you will have many opportunities to crash down from whatever height you have reached, and you will fall harder if you forget that the human path is strewn with stumbling blocks.
The greatest wealth and power in the neighborhood of ancient Greece belonged to Croesus, king of Lydia. Croesus forgot. He thought he was the happiest and most fortunate of all human beings, living or dead, and he asked a visiting Greek wise man to confirm this opinion of himself. The sage was an Athenian named Solon, who was already legendary for wisdom. Solon knew the question was irreverent, because no human being could be the best in any contest for very long. He was not willing to answer the question as asked; instead, he replied with a sentence that became one of the most famous expressions of Greek wisdom: “Call no man happy until his life is over.” By this he meant that a human life is too uncertain to be judged on the basis of any part of it: no one can safely claim to be living a totally successful life. The future holds surprises.
Soon after his conversation with Solon, Croesus provoked war with his mighty neighbor Persia; he was defeated and slated for execution by fire. As he perched on the great pile of wood that the Persians had set alight, Croesus remembered Solon. He gave a huge groan, and cried out Solon’s name. The Persian king heard him and asked his interpreters what Croesus was saying:
So Croesus related the story [about Solon]. And the fire, which had now been lit, was licking around the edges. When Cyrus [the Persian king] heard from his interpreters what Croesus had said, he had second thoughts and it came into his mind that he—himself a human being—was about to put another human being into the fire alive—a person who had once been no less fortunate than he had himself. Then Cyrus was afraid of having to pay for this, and he reckoned that nothing is safe in human affairs, and so he ordered the fire extinguished as quickly as possible … (Herodotus, History 1.86)
But the fire was already out of control. Croesus began to pray, and according to legend the god Apollo heard the prayer, sending rain to put out the fire. So Croesus was saved, and in the experience he recovered an understanding of his own humanity. So did the Persian king, who came to admire both Croesus and Solon for their wisdom.
The story teaches us a curious fact about the ancient Greek notion of reverence: that it is supposed to be universal, to transcend cultural boundaries. This surprises modern readers, especially if they know how clearly the Greeks understood the differences among human customs. Reverence is expressed in ceremony, but there are no universal human ceremonies (just as there are no universal human languages). So how could reverence be universal?
Herodotus, who tells the story of Croesus, is well aware of cultural difference, and in commenting on the variety of funeral customs, he quotes Pindar’s famous line “Custom is king.” Still, when he comes to the fate of Croesus, he does not ascribe it to Persian custom. Instead, he reports that the Persian king wanted to save Croesus because he was struck by the thought of their common humanity. In all the Greek stories of reverence lost and regained, humanity is at issue. You can forget your humanity in either of two ways: by taking on the airs of a god, or by acting like a beast of prey. Either way, you come back to reverence when you recover a sense of your humanity in common with others. And the others in these stories are usually people you were tempted to regard as inferior—foreigners whom you happen to have conquered, children who (in your judgment) do not know as much as you do, or just plain citizens who (you think) ought to accept your leadership without a fuss.
A reverent soul listens to other people even when they are inferior; that is a large part of remembering that you are human together with them. The king of Persia showed his reverence by listening to Croesus; Croesus showed his lack of reverence by not listening to Solon. In both episodes, reverence requires a king to listen to an inferior, and in both cases the person who is inferior is also foreign. The story I have told involves a Greek, a Lydian, and a Persian. Herodotus is not forgetting that these three have different languages and customs, because he tells us that it was a translation of Croesus’ story that reminded Cyrus of their common humanity.
Reverence does not stop at any of the boundaries that human beings make among themselves; reverence overlooks differences of culture, social class, age, and even gender. Reverence is more democratic than Greek democracy, which was limited by age and birth and gender. Reverence calls us to be conscious of bare humanity, the humanity of our species. The ancient Greeks were very clear about this: reverence is about just being human, and not about a distinctly Greek or Persian way of being human.
Reverence does require adherence to custom and ceremony, but not to every ceremony (for Greek customs of reverence, see the notes to this chapter). Greek city-states had ceremonies that were peculiarly theirs, designed to celebrate citizenship in one city as opposed to another. But those are not the ceremonies of reverence; reverence is about being human, not about being Greek or Athenian, or about belonging to just this family.
The most important practices of reverence—burial and sacrifice—have to do with death and eating. Wild beasts feed too, and die, but (it seemed to the Greeks) without ceremony, and many ancient Greeks had a terror of falling into the ways of wild animals. Still, custom and ceremony are of small importance compared to attitudes of reverence. The ancients appear not to have cared too much about minor violations of ceremony; hardly anyone was punished for these. And if they did prosecute someone for violations of reverence, they did not accept the defense that the accused had been faithful to the rituals. Rituals, they knew well, could be empty. The great cases of irreverence—the famous cautionary tales of ancient Greece—are about feelings and thoughts gone wrong. They are, in other words, about failures of virtue—and failures of knowledge. Great heroes and leaders have a way of forgetting their human limitations, with disastrous results.
Greek poetry thrums with great heroes who pay a price for forgetting their humanity. Common people, apparently, are less prone to failures of reverence. This should be no surprise; ordinary lives pass within the fabric of family and city, a fabric held together by constant small acts of reverence. Reverence is most obvious when it is missing, and it is missing most often in people who are—or who think they are—exceptional. Irreverent heroes put themselves above the human level sometimes, and sometimes below; they can go wrong either way. The most famous examples from poetry are in Homer’s Iliad.
Hector is the defender of Troy, the city, the family, and civilized life in general—all of which are supposed to be preserved by reverence. But Hector wins too many battles; success goes to his head. After defeating Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus, Hector is flush with a string of victories. He rips the armor of Achilles from the dead Patroclus, who had borrowed it for the day, and clothes himself in it. But Achilles is the son of a goddess, and the greatest warrior of them all. Zeus is shocked:
Unhappy man, you have no thought of death,
Yet death is close. You are putting on
The immortal armor of a man who makes you
And others tremble. You killed his comrade,
Gentle and strong, and you violated the order of things
When you took the armor from his shoulders and head.
(Iliad 17.201—205 [Trans. Lombardo, 199–204])
Violating the order of things is the proud heart of irreverence. Hector parades back into battle wearing Achilles’ armor, although the man he has slain is not Achilles. Even Zeus respects the order Hector violated—kosmos, in Greek. The same brash irreverence will soon prevent Hector from listening to good advice from a comrade, Polydamas, who urges Hector to take the army behind the walls of Troy. But Hector, because of his string of successes, is confident that Zeus is on his side. He ignores the advice and insists that the army follow his example:
Not a Trojan here will listen. I won’t let them.
(Iliad 18.296 [Trans. Lombardo, 317])
And because of Hector’s failure to listen, which is a failure of good judgment, he will lead his army to defeat, and he will feel such great shame over this that he will decline to follow his defeated army to safety, because there he would have to face the man whose advice he has not taken (22.99ff.; Lombardo 115ff.). And so Hector will face his death alone, while his parents watch in horror from the walls of Troy.
Achilles is a man of rage. In his furious grief for Patroclus, he begins to see himself as a violent beast of prey—a lion or a wolf. When he closes in on Hector for the final battle between them, Hector begs him to agree that whoever wins will honor the body of the other by turning it over to relatives for proper burial rites. Achilles’ response is calculated, inhuman:
Don’t try to cut any deals with me, Hector.
Do lions make peace treaties with men?
Do wolves and lambs agree to get along?
(Iliad 22.261–63 ([Trans. Lombardo, 287–89])
In this Achilles violates reverence three times—once by promising to neglect ceremony due to the dead, once by denying a suppliant, and once by taking the part of an animal. Beasts of prey have no respect for the remains of their victims, and neither does Achilles in his inhuman rage.
Later, Hector makes his dying request to Achilles, and Achilles wishes he could be even more inhuman than he is. Hector cries out:
“I beg you, Achilles, by your own soul
And by your parents, do not
Allow the dogs to mutilate my body …”
And Achilles, fixing him with a stare,
“Don’t whine to me about my parents,
You dog! I wish my stomach would let me
Cut off your flesh in strips and eat it raw
For what you’ve done to me. There is no one
And no way to keep the dogs off your head …”
(Iliad, 22.338–48 [Trans. Lombardo, 375–87])
Achilles will remain in this bestial frame of mind until Hector’s father, Priam, visits him in his shelter by the shore. Then, simply by being who he is, old and stricken with grief, Priam reminds Achilles of his own father. Achilles remembers his father, and in that moment he remembers himself, remembers his humanity.
Remembering your humanity is not like remembering the date of your birth or how much money you borrowed from your neighbor. It is not about simple facts. The reverent soul remembers how to feel what it ought to feel about itself and about other people—a remembrance that is moral from the start. The most violent sociopath may, in some sense, remember that he is human—indeed, he may remember that he is a sociopathic human at the very time he commits the most odious crime. Achilles does remember the fact that he will die at the height of his killing rage. The moment comes when Achilles has at his mercy a young prince of Troy, Lycaon. The boy clasps Achilles’ knees in the classic gesture of supplication and begs for his life, but Achilles reminds him of their common mortality:
You die too, friend. Don’t take it hard.
Patroclus died, and he was far better than you.
Take a look at me. Do you see how huge I am,
How beautiful? I have a noble father,
My mother was a goddess, but I too
Am in death’s shadow.
(Iliad 21.106–10 [Trans. Lombardo, 112–17])
And with that he kills the boy, though reverence would require that he spare him as a suppliant. Achilles has remembered only that all men die, but this is not enough for reverence. The Persian king in Herodotus’ story gets it right. When he remembers his mortality, he acknowledges his fear of the future. With that comes something like sympathy for a fellow human being in trouble, and he is moved to do the right thing.
Most modern philosophers are not satisfied with this sort of account. How could it make you a better person to remember your mortality? They tend to draw a clear line between facts and values, and they have called it a fallacy to derive an “ought” from an “is”—a value from a fact. And yet the Iliad seems to blame Achilles and Hector for failing to draw just that sort of inference. Achilles remembers he is mortal, but he forgets that, as a mortal, he should behave in a certain way. So what? There’s no mistake in that.
Yet much of ancient Greek thought, from poets to philosophers, builds on the idea that virtue depends on knowing what it is to be human. (This sort of idea is called ethical naturalism.) I won’t take on the colossus of modern philosophy here, except to give one example that brings light on the old Greek idea. If you know what a knife is, you know that it is supposed to cut, and that it must therefore be sharp. Bad knives don’t cut. If you were a knife, and you knew what you were, you’d know that you should be sharp and, unless you forgot, you’d try to stay that way. By analogy, if you know what a human being is, you know that human beings are supposed to live in society (otherwise, being dependent, they die off), and that human beings must therefore have the virtues that enable them to function in society. Bad human beings don’t function in society; good ones maintain the edge that allows them to be useful parts of a community. Most ancient Greek thinking about ethics starts with this inference from the “is” of vulnerable human nature to the “ought” of virtue.
Not all rulers are as wise as the Persian king in the story Herodotus tells us about Solon and Croesus. Athens became especially skittish about tyrannical kings as the city grew attached to its new-fledged democracy. In Homer’s world, all great people were supposed to have had great opportunities to go wrong. But Athenian poets of the fifth century BCE trained their spotlight on the egregious failures that follow one-man rule. They were writing for an audience that feared tyranny above all. Tyrants (to judge from their representations on stage) are monarchs who have achieved power on their own, by their own strength or cunning, and who live in the fear that others will follow their example. If you seized power from someone weaker than you, you would have every reason to expect that someone else will try to find the strength needed to overthrow you.
Tyrants are suspicious, overly dependent on their own judgment, and stubbornly reluctant to hear anyone’s advice. Above all, they are prone to failures of reverence, and with their failures of reverence come failures of judgment. Human judgment has a way of going wrong, especially in isolation from competing points of view. We need to think together, if we are to take due notice of all the things we could do wrong. Tyrants isolate themselves through a combination of fear and overconfidence. They do not listen, not to the common people, not to women, not to children, and not even to prophets who claim to speak for a god. Too sure of themselves to take counsel, they set themselves high and fall hard.
In his most famous play, Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles has his chorus sing a hymn to reverence “Be with me always, Destiny.” The second stanza of that hymn begins with these lines:
Hubris grows from tyranny,
hubris overflowing
with a monstrous waste
of all that has no use, no profit:
it climbs high,
it rushes to a precipice jutting out—
the end, no foothold saves it now.
(Chorus, Oedipus Tyrannus, 873–79)
This is a Greek way of articulating the evergreen idea that power corrupts. Hubris is best understood simply as the opposite of reverence, in action or attitude. But why mention hubris in connection with Oedipus? His famous sins against father and mother were committed when he was a powerless young man. The road rage that killed his father began in his father, and the fantastic marriage to his mother was the natural outcome of his leadership in Thebes. But those famous Oedipal actions are merely the backdrop to this play, which concerns Oedipus’ last hours as tyrant in Thebes. Oedipus’ irreverence belongs mainly to the way he rules his people: he rejects advice from the people of the chorus, from his wife, and from a prophet. He flies into a rage at his brother-in-law (and uncle) before hearing the man out.
As a young man he has solved, by his own wits, the riddle of the Sphinx; this success made him master of Thebes and husband of the queen. Now a mature man, he is confident that he can find out what has caused the plague with a little help from his fellow citizens. He presents himself to his people as equal to a god, and he evidently thinks himself superior to Tiresias, prophet of Apollo. Tiresias failed to solve the Sphinx’s riddle at that time, while he, famous Oedipus, unraveled it without divine assistance. Now, when Tiresias seems to speak against him, Oedipus quickly jumps to the conclusion that the prophet is part of a conspiracy. Deafened by his own suspicions and his fear of a coup, Oedipus lashes out, even at his wife-mother. There is more to his irreverence, but this would be enough for Sophocles’ audience to know that Oedipus is in for a great fall.
In the Antigone of Sophocles, Creon travels the clear, easy road from failure of reverence to failure of judgment. Again, the story is familiar: Oedipus’ two sons quarrel over whose turn it is to rule in Thebes; one of them runs for help to an enemy city and brings its troops against his own homeland. Thebes repels the invaders in the famous battle of the seven heroes at the seven gates. At every gate but one, the defender beats his enemy:
Except for a savage pair, full brothers [i.e., the sons of Oedipus]:
Their two spears stand upright, conquering,
Each in the other’s dead breast.
(Chorus in Antigone, 144–46)
Creon decrees that the rebel brother’s corpse be left unburied for birds to peck at and wild beasts to gnaw. He is flirting with a gross violation of reverence, which requires burial ceremonies for human dead in all normal circumstances. Still, after such a war, ancient custom did allow rulers to set aside burial and display the dead as a warning to others and a supreme punishment. So this decree by itself does not make Creon irreverent. Sophocles’ audience probably thought that Antigone goes wrong in her extreme, death-defying argument for burial customs above all else. Still, the audience must have judged Creon outrageous because he proceeds like a tyrant, confident in his judgment, fearful of conspiracy, and unwilling to listen to anyone who disagrees with him. That is his irreverence, and the cause of his downfall. The point is made throughout the play, but most clearly by his son, Haemon:
Father, the gods give good sense to every human being,
And that is absolutely the best thing we have. (683–84)
Good sense to every human being. This is an explosive idea; we can be fairly sure it was widely held in Athens and helped to detonate the series of upheavals that led to the establishment of democracy, based on the rule that any citizen had the right to be heard in assembly. (Yes, I know that women and slaves and immigrants could not have this privilege, but the idea behind this privilege was truly universal, as you can see from these lines.) Haemon goes on to remind his father to listen to what others say:
And now, don’t always cling to the same anger,
Don’t keep saying that this, and nothing else, is right.
If a man believes that he alone has a sound mind,
And no one else can speak or think as well as he does,
Then, when people study him, they’ll find an empty book.
But a wise man can learn a lot and never be ashamed;
He knows he does not have to be rigid and close-hauled.
You’ve seen trees tossed by a torrent in a flash flood:
If they bend, they’re saved, and every twig survives,
But if they stiffen up, they’re washed out from the roots.
It’s the same in a boat: if a sailor keeps the footline taut,
If he doesn’t give an inch, he’ll capsize, and then—
He’ll be sailing home with his benches down
and his hull to the sky.
So ease off, relax, stop being angry, make a change.
I know I’m younger, but I may still have good ideas;
And I say that the oldest idea, and the best,
Is for one man to be born complete, knowing everything.
Otherwise—and it usually does turn out otherwise—
It’s good to learn from anyone who speaks well. (705–23)
Creon does not respect his son. He fails to listen, makes bad decisions in consequence, and ruins his life. “Beat your megaphones into hearing trumpets,” wrote the poet William Stafford. Good advice for anyone, but especially for leaders.
Reverence is the greatest virtue of leaders, because it gives powerful people the strength to listen to those who are weaker than they, and it reminds them that no one, no matter how successful, was “born complete, knowing everything.” Gods do know everything (or almost everything), according to the ancient Greek mythology. To present yourself as all-knowing, then, is to forget your humanity and play the part of a god. Both Oedipus and Creon fall into this trap.
Think yourself equal to a god, and you will commit the most dangerous kind of irreverence. Many ancient Greeks believed that the gods will take note if you have such arrogant thoughts, and they will cut you down to size. At the same time, early humanists believed that such stories can be told without the gods. If you set yourself too high, we—the other human beings in this case—will bring you down, because we, no less than gods, will not tolerate divine pretensions in a mortal (see chapter seven).
Playing god is a double outrage, because a man who intends to play god succeeds in playing only the part of a beast or a monster. In Euripides’ Bacchae, from which I quoted at the opening of this chapter, a young king sets out to do battle against the god Dionysus. He does not know what he is doing, because he does not believe that Dionysus is a god at all. A new cult has come to his city of Thebes, bringing with it the danger that men will lose control of women. The women of Thebes have left their duties at home—their looms and their children—so that they can run in the mountains and worship Dionysus. Pentheus plans to put down unruly behavior—with no thought that he is proposing to fight a god.
Like many tragic heroes, Pentheus has lost his wits. His outrage at the independence of the women deafens him to advice and explanation. He does not hear his grandfather or the prophet Tiresias or the women, or anyone else, and he never doubts the rightness of his decision to eliminate the new cult.
The Chorus of the play worship Dionysus, and they are shocked by the king’s irreverence:
Intelligence gone mad,
Spirit struck to arrogance, he has appointed
Himself to suppress the unconquerable by violence.
(Bacchae, 999–1001)
But who dares to fight with gods? In ancient Greek mythology it is not human beings who actually threaten the gods, but monsters and giants. Naturally, then, that is how the Chorus see the young king:
… a wild-eyed monster
Without a human face who
Like a deadly giant wrestles with the gods!
(Bacchae, 542–44)
Even the young king’s mother will see him as a beast. Before bringing out his army, Pentheus decides on a personal reconnaissance. When his mother catches him spying on the sacred rituals, she thinks he is a lion. She and the other worshippers hunt him down under this illusion, tear him apart with their bare hands, and bring his head home in triumph, like a hunting trophy.
Pentheus is the most famous mortal in ancient poetry who takes arms against a god. Keep in mind that Dionysus is a new arrival; no one in Greece, till now, has believed in his divinity, and no one has been practicing his rituals. Yet only Pentheus and his family are punished. The sin for which they are accountable, then, is not disbelief, and it is not failure to worship, for they share these failures with everyone in Greece. Their sin, as the Chorus clearly says, is that they have set themselves up as adversaries to the god. This is both an insult to Dionysus and a fatal mistake about what human beings can safely undertake to accomplish.
Conspicuous failures of reverence are like shadows in a sundrenched landscape. Reverence is the norm in a smooth-functioning society; as a result it is easily confused with the normal behavior that expresses reverence. Everything that the ancient Greeks considered normal and customary they also considered reverent:
[Dionysus] hates the man who does not try—
Each day, each longed-for night—
To live a flawless life
And wisely steers away,
In heart and mind,
From men who stand out above others.
What is ordinary,
What the crowd thinks right,
Is good enough for me.
(Chorus, Euripides’ Bacchae, 424–32)
Speakers in the Bacchae link reverence with a number of virtues—all the cardinal virtues, in fact, except for courage: good judgment (386–402, 997–1004), wisdom (395ff.), justice (893ff., 1005ff.), and sound-mindedness (1149). But certain types of custom belong especially to reverence, those by which human beings distinguish themselves most importantly from beasts of prey: treating the dead with due ceremony, observing certain laws of war, protecting suppliants, keeping oaths, offering meat animals to the gods, and respecting sacred places or the secrets of certain rituals.
Most of these customs of reverence are not available in Austin, Texas, in the year 2014; we do not recognize ancient Greek burial rites here, we buy meat from a butcher, and we never heard of suppliants. We do think it a good idea to keep our promises, and we share some of the ancient Greek ideas about war, but on the whole, ancient Greek reverence is denied to us. Or it would be, if the reverence were simply in the customs. Then reverence would be subject to cultural relativity. But reverence is not in the customs; reverence is something you bring to the customs. Socrates, we are told, “thought that the gods take the greatest joy from honors they receive from the people who are most reverent” (Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.3.3), and this seems to have been the conventional view.
Custom is relative to a culture in a time and place. So is language, but the relativity of language does not carry over to what a sentence means. “Two is the square root of four” will be said differently in different cultures, but what it says is true in all of them. Funeral rites are different in different cultures, and to some extent they have different meanings as well, insofar as they express different beliefs about death, the body, and the possibility of an afterlife. But when Confucius says that funeral rites are empty without grief, anyone can see what he means, and when Achilles realizes that he will be tormented by Patroclus in his mind until he sees to his friend’s burial, we understand that too. We feel the same need for closure; it is not for nothing that we spare no expense in searching for the bodies of those who die in war or natural disaster.
The ancient Greeks did not think that deviations from the norm were, in themselves, great failures of reverence. The great failures belong to the heroes and tyrants who go too far, too fast, too thoughtlessly. The examples I have reviewed here are easy to understand from any cultural viewpoint. What the Greeks most cared about, under reverence, is a virtue that can cross cultural boundaries with ease.
If I ended here, you might think that reverence in ancient Greece was only about tragic resignation and the acceptance of mortality. But there is also a reverence of joy that arises in mystery religions. These began in ancient Greece as early as the sixth century before our era and center on initiation ceremonies by which, through symbolic death and rebirth, individuals believe they come into a special relationship with a god. Leaving fear to outsiders, the re-born worshippers revel in newfound joy. They believe that they take on attributes of the god they worship, power, youthfulness, and a blessed afterlife. The religious practices that meant the most to ordinary Athenians by the end of the fifth century BCE were elaborate initiations into the Eleusinian Mysteries. We cannot give a complete account of these because they were secrets which it was a violation of reverence to betray. Whatever they were, they apparently brought their initiates joy and a sense of the presence of the god, and by symbolic death and rebirth they released worshippers from the weight of their mortality.
Joyful reverence therefore shows the way to cross the boundary that was so important in tragic plays—the line between human mortality and the immortality of the gods. Tragic poetry often says, “Do not even dream of being like a god; never forget your human limitations.” Joyful reverence answers, “Follow your guide through initiation and you will find the way to be as nearly divine as a human being can be.” The two sides of reverence are partly reconciled in Euripides’ Bacchae. There, the Chorus celebrates the joy of initiation while inveighing against the perils of thinking thoughts too high for mortal human beings. The solution lies in the clear boundaries that set off the experience of joyful reverence. There are well-defined times and places for the initiations and other revels in which human beings are permitted to venture into divine territory. At that special time, and in that special place, with extraordinary rapture, they step across the line. But they must return to the norms of civic life, and they must never tell an outsider what they have done. The secret life of the initiate is suffused with joyful reverence, while the open life of the citizen is governed by its tragic cousin.
Aside from Euripides in the Bacchae, the ancient author who tells us the most about joyful reverence is Plato. Plato uses the heightened language and emotion-laden imagery of mystery religion to give his readers a sense of what philosophers would experience as they ascend to full knowledge of reality. Students of philosophy become more godlike as they approach the truth, and their immortal souls become less subject to corruptions of all kinds.
The great myth of Socrates’ second speech in Plato’s Phaedrus is suffused with joyful reverence. Here Plato visualizes a heaven in which the souls of gods and the souls of human beings, both immortal, race upwards in the form of winged chariots to the high rim from which they can see what lies beyond heaven. Both kinds of souls must feed on the sight of a splendid and remote reality that lies there. Gods have the power to see all of this, as they must in order to maintain their divine strength, and so they never fall from heaven. The charioteer of a human soul, however, is distracted by trying to control a mismatched pair of horses, and so never gets a really good view of reality. And when human souls fail to see reality, they are sent down from heaven to be imprisoned in mortal bodies.
The souls that follow the gods most closely in their winged journey will remain most like them, with no tincture of mortality. In this myth the important boundary is between minds and truth, rather than between gods and humans. Both life-forms must see the truth from a distance, over the edge of heaven, and neither group can take home a lasting knowledge of what they have seen. Instead, like worshippers in acts of repeated ritual, they must revisit the boundary of heaven again and again in order to see what is beyond and so to nourish the ability of their souls to take wing.
The reverence that the winged souls feel when they catch sight of reality is something new in the history of ideas. It is not reverence for any of the gods; it is a reverence that is felt in company with the gods, for a reality that is higher even than they, that resides in a space beyond even heaven. In the last analysis, the joyful reverence of Plato is reverence for truth.
Loving him, the mother takes thread in hand;
Leaving her, he’ll have this coat on his shoulders.
Now that he’s about to go, she mends with fine, fine stitches;
She knows the fear that he’ll be gone a long, long time.
Who would say the heart of a tiny blade of grass
Could repay the sun for all the warmth of spring?
—Meng Zhao (751–814 CE, Tang Dynasty)