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¹⁸⁰ It is reported that Plato wrote tragedies in his youth (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, III, 5).

¹⁸¹ This is a puzzling phrase, since products of human art would ordinarily be thought of as opposed to natural things. If there is a couch in nature, it would perhaps be of the sort used by the people in the first city Socrates envisioned (372B). The look, not a visible shape but an intelligible design, that the many couches share, is dependent upon the nature of the human body. It is the latter that is something in nature in the sense that all instances of it participate in the same form, which makes them be what they are. There is something off-kilter about the whole use of couches and tables as an approach to the topic of imitation, and this is reflected in Glaucon’s reluctant responses. The verbs used just below for generating and bringing into being have the same root as the word for nature (phusis), while the verbs for making and producing have the same root as the word for poetry (poiêsis).

¹⁸² An extreme example may be found in Plato’s Ion, but the general belief that profundity in poetry indicates wisdom about all aspects of life was, and is, widely shared.

¹⁸³ Thales predicted a solar eclipse, and found a way to corner the market on olive oil; Anacharsis was credited with inventing the anchor and the potter’s wheel.

¹⁸⁴ The name means something like “one of the meat people.”

¹⁸⁵ The passage rings the changes on various ways potential learners are pursued and pursuers. A tutor was a slave or servant who took a child to its lessons and never let it out of his sight, so the relation is reversed here for an adult so desirous of learning that he follows the wise poet from city to city. Protagoras and Prodicus were traveling teachers who went to the homes of the rich to train their sons for distinction in life.

¹⁸⁶ Socrates gave one example earlier at 393D-394A.

¹⁸⁷ The following anti-philosophic quotations are all in verse; none of the sources is known.

¹⁸⁸ Aristotle’s Poetics might be regarded as an acceptance of this invitation.

¹⁸⁹ The image Socrates made at 588B-589B was the most recent and most extreme picture of disunity in the soul, but his reference may be to its having three parts at all. The dialogue as a whole has taken the soul as analogous to a city, where the task is to find a polity that will succeed best at making one community out of many distinct members, but the current argument about immortality points to an abiding simplicity at the core of the soul. Even a perfectly harmonized three-part soul may only be an imitation of a higher unity.

¹⁹⁰ A patron god of fishermen who lived in the sea.

¹⁹¹ Another legendary source of invisibility. In this case the name is a pun on the object’s power, “the cap of invisibility,” since Hades is the invisible one (a-eidês).

¹⁹² The story Odysseus tells about his wanderings in Bks. IX-XII of the Odyssey was addressed to Alcinous, the king of the Phaiakians. The phrase “tale of Alcinous” became a common expression for a story of tedious length, not as a comment on the original story but as a way of chiding someone by saying, in effect, “you’re no Odysseus.” Socrates is thus apologizing in advance for his own weakness as a storyteller. The word translated “stalwart” is almost the same as Alcinous’s name, with a mu instead of a nu; the play on words suggests that the strength needed to secure a happy life, and even to engage in philosophy in a healthy way (619E), does not depend on having the luck to possess a powerful intellect (alki-nous). The story, though it incorporates and adapts details from various legends, is pure invention. The name Er is Hebrew, his father’s name is spelled like that of Armenia in Asia Minor, and Pamphylia means “Everytribe.”

¹⁹³ According to Iliad VIII, 13-16, Tartarus is the deepest pit in the universe, as far below Hades as the heavens are above earth.

¹⁹⁴ The spot the souls have reached represents the center of the spherical cosmos. The pillar of light is the axial part of an encircling band. The warships to which this structure is compared were triremes, large fast galleys that came into use during Socrates’ lifetime. They got their speed from three banks of oars, one above the other; apparently the large hulls this required were held intact by encircling ropes with their ends joined inside the ship. As the winch of the cosmos, around which the ends of the encircling cords within the light are twisted, Socrates places a spindle. This was the ancient forerunner of the spinning wheel, a shaft with hooks to which natural fibers were attached, and a weighted knob which was turned to twist them into elongated threads. Thus the mechanism for holding the cosmos together becomes the control knob for revolving the celestial spheres, and at the same time is the weaving instrument used by the three Fates, the goddesses who wove the destinies of human beings.

¹⁹⁵ The visible differences the bodies in the heavens present to the bodily eye are seen by the souls in the nested knobs that turn their spheres. From the outermost rim inward, they are (1) the fixed stars, (2) Saturn, (3) Jupiter, (4) Mars, (5) Venus, (6) Mercury, (7) the sun, and (8) the moon. The widths of the rims would correspond to the thicknesses of the spheres, which must accommodate the greatest and least distances of the bodies from the center. In the case of the sun, for example, that variation produces the inequality in the length of the seasons. The relative thicknesses given are not entirely accounted for by that, though, and may also suggest radial distances at intervals like those between strings tuned to a diatonic scale.

¹⁹⁶ The spindle as a whole gives everything in the heavens a daily motion westward, but each of the bodies in the inner spheres has a slower eastward revolution as well, the moon completing a cycle fastest, in a month, the sun, Mercury, and Venus next at the same average angular rate, and Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn progressively slower.

¹⁹⁷ Necessity may have two senses here. The spindle imparts necessity to the cosmos by determining a fixed order of motions, which may have consequences in all other motions. But the spindle’s action is itself in some way subject to necessity, because its workings could not produce the celestial appearances alluded to in this paragraph. Either the bodies in spheres 2-8 must wander, on eccentric paths or epicycles not controlled by the spheres’ own motions, or the knobs must be turned at non-uniform rates. Also, the spindle could not account for the fact that the seven wandering stars travel through the Zodiac, around an axis different from that of the daily motion. In its second sense, necessity is called “the wandering cause” in Plato’s Timaeus (48A), the source of the discrepancy between the rational patterns of the cosmos and the workings of the perceptible world.

¹⁹⁸ The people named are all from around the time of the Trojan war, about a thousand years before Socrates’ time. The first two were poet-singers. Orpheus, who’d been taught by the Muses, died torn apart by frenzied Thracian women; Thamyris challenged the Muses, who deprived him of the power to sing. Ajax, the most powerful Greek warrior at Troy after Achilles’ death, was enraged when Achilles’ armor was awarded to Odysseus. Agamemnon, returning home in triumph from that war, was ambushed and killed by his wife and her lover. Atalanta was a young woman who could run faster than men, and said she would marry any man who could outrun her, if he was willing to be killed if he lost; she lost to a man who, with the connivance of Aphrodite, distracted her by dropping golden apples. Epeius built the Trojan horse. Thersites was a foot-soldier at Troy, a smart aleck who challenged his commanders in council, and he was definitely a cause of wit in others. The Odyssey presents Odysseus as a man willing to risk everything to test himself against every challenge the world might offer a human being, until he nearly loses everything and discovers what matters to him in finite human life.

¹⁹⁹ The plain is beside the river Lethe, which brings forgetfulness of past lives. The word for truth (alêtheia) is formed as a negation of the root that signifies forgetfulness. In Plato’s Phaedrus (248B), Socrates refers to a plain of truth, a fertile place where the soul, figured as two horses and a charioteer, can be nourished by the food it needs. Hence the plain of Lethe is a sterile place where the soul would wither in the absence of truth.