“Well, Axiochus, since you regard the most reputable calling of all as more to be rejected than all the others, what are we to think of life’s other pursuits? Shall we not escape from them?
“Once I also heard Prodicus say that death concerns neither the living nor those who have passed away.”
“What do you mean, Socrates?”
“As far as the living are concerned, death does not exist; and the dead do not exist. Therefore death is of no concern to you now, for you are not dead, nor, if something should happen to you, will it concern you, for you [c] will not exist. To be upset for Axiochus, about what neither does nor will concern Axiochus, is pointless distress, just as if you were to be upset about Scylla, or the Centaur, which, as far as you’re concerned, neither exist now, nor will exist later, after your death. What is fearful exists for those who exist; how could it exist for those who don’t?”
“You’ve taken those clever ideas from the nonsense that everybody’s [d] talking nowadays, like all this tomfoolery dreamed up for youngsters. But it distresses me to be deprived of the goods of life, even if you marshal arguments more persuasive than those, Socrates. My mind doesn’t understand them and is distracted by the fancy talk; they go in one ear and out the other; they make for a splendid parade of words, but they miss the mark. My suffering is not relieved by ingenuity; it’s satisfied only by what [e] can come down to my level.”
“That’s because, Axiochus, you’re confusing the perception of fresh evils with the deprivation of goods, without realizing it, forgetting that you [370] will have died. What distresses someone who is deprived of good things is having them replaced by bad things, and someone who doesn’t exist cannot even conceive of the deprivation. How could anyone feel distress whose condition provides no awareness of anything distressing? If you hadn’t started out, Axiochus, by ignorantly supposing, somehow or other, that the dead also have some sensation, you could never have been alarmed by death. But in fact you refute yourself; because you’re afraid to be deprived of your soul, you invest this deprivation with a soul of its own; and you dread the absence of perception, but you think you will perceptually grasp this perception that is not to be.
[b] “As well as many other fine arguments for the immortality of the soul, a mortal nature would surely not have risen to such lofty accomplishments that it disdains the physical superiority of wild animals, traverses the seas, builds cities, establishes governments, and looks up at the heavens and sees the revolutions of the stars, the courses of sun and moon, their risings and settings, their eclipses and swift restorations, the twin equinoxes and [c] solstices, and Pleiades storms, summer winds, torrential downpours, and the violent course of tornadoes, and establishes for all eternity a calendar of the states of the universe, unless there really were some divine spirit in the soul which gives it comprehension and insight into such vast subjects.
“And so, Axiochus, you pass away, not into death, but into immortality, nor will you have good things taken from you, but a purer enjoyment of [d] them, nor pleasures mixed with the mortal body, but entirely undiluted by pains. For once you are released from this prison cell, you will set forth yonder, to a place free from all struggle, grief, and old age, a tranquil life untroubled by anything bad, resting in undisturbed peace, surveying Nature and practicing philosophy, not for a crowd of spectators, but in the bountiful midst of Truth.”
[e] “Your argument has converted me to the opposite point of view. I no longer have any fear of death—I almost long for it, if I may imitate the orators and use a hyperbole. I have traveled17 the upper regions for ages past and shall complete the eternal and divine circuit. I was being weak, but I’ve got a grip on myself and become a new man.”
[371] “Then perhaps you’d like another argument, which was related to me by Gobryas, a Persian sage: he said that his grandfather Gobryas (who, when Xerxes made his crossing, was sent to Delos to guard the island sanctuary where two deities were born) learned from some bronze tablets, which Opis and Hecaërge had brought from the Hyperboreans, that the soul, after its release from the body, goes to the Place Unseen, to a dwelling beneath the earth. Here the palace of Pluto is not inferior to the court of [b] Zeus, since the earth occupies the center of the universe and the vault of heaven is spherical, and half of this sphere fell to the celestial gods, and the other half to the gods under the earth, some of them brothers, others children of brothers. The gates on the way to Pluto’s palace are protected by iron bolts and bars. When the gates swing open, the river Acheron, and then the river Cocytus, receives those who are to be ferried across to Minos and Rhadamanthus, in what is called the Plain of Truth. There sit [c] judges who interrogate everyone who arrives about what kind of life he has lived and what sorts of activities he engaged in while he dwelled in his body. It is impossible to lie.
“Now those who were inspired by a good daemon during their lifetimes go to reside in a place for the pious, where the ungrudging seasons teem with fruits of every kind, where fountains of pure water flow, where all sorts of meadows bloom with many kinds of flowers, with philosophers discoursing, poets performing, dances in rings, musical concerts, delightful [d] drinking-parties and self-furnished feasts, undiluted freedom from pain and a rich diet of pleasure; nor does fierce cold or heat ever occur, but through it wafts a temperate breeze, infused with the gentle rays of the sun.
“There is a certain place of honor for those who are initiated, and there they perform their sacred rites. Why should you not be the first in line for this privilege, you who are ‘kin to the gods’? Legend tells us that [e] Heracles and Dionysus, before their descents into the realm of Hades, were initiated in this world, and supplied by the Eleusinian goddess18 with courage for their journeys yonder.
“But those who have wasted their lives in wickedness are led by the Erinyes to Erebus and Chaos through Tartarus, where there is a place for the impious, and the ceaseless water-fetching of the Danaids, the thirst of Tantalus, the entrails of Tityus eternally devoured and regenerated, and the never-resting stone of Sisyphus, whose end of toil is a new beginning. [372] Here, too, are people being licked clean by wild beasts, set on fire constantly by the Avengers, and, tortured with every kind of torture, consumed by everlasting punishment.
“That is what I heard from Gobryas, but you must decide for yourself, Axiochus. I am moved by argument, and I know only this for sure: every soul is immortal, and also, when removed from this place, free from pain. So whether above or below, Axiochus, you ought to be happy, if you have lived piously.”
“I’m too embarrassed to say anything to you, Socrates. I’m so far from fearing death that now I actually passionately desire it. That’s how much I’ve been affected by this argument, as well as by the one about the heavens. Now I despise life, since I’m moving to a better home.
“And now I’d like to go over what you’ve said, quietly and by myself. But after midday, Socrates, please visit me.”
“I will do what you ask. And now I’ll go back to my walk to the Cynosarges, where I was going when I was summoned here.”
1. The Cynosarges was a gymnasium outside the Athenian city wall; the Ilisus was a river in whose stream bed was a spring called Callirhoe.
2. Axiochus was the uncle of the famous Alcibiades; Clinias and Charmides, both remarkably handsome young men, appear in Euthydemus and Charmides, respectively, as members of the Socratic circle.
3. Accepting the conjectural deletion of aiphnidiou.
4. Prodicus of Ceos was a philosopher and teacher; see Protagoras 315d, 337a ff.
5. A fifth-century-B.C. comic poet.
6. Callias was a wealthy Athenian noted for his patronage of philosophers (Apology 20a); the events in Plato’s Protagoras and Xenophon’s Symposium take place in his house.
7. Reading chronos in a2.
8. Ephebes were members of an Athenian military college established in the late fourth century B.C.
9. Reading dia for kai before touto in b7.
10. Omitting kai in c1.
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br /> 11. Omitting Hēras in c5.
12. Iliad xxiv.525–26 and xvii.446–47 and Odyssey xv.245–46, respectively (translations by R. Lattimore).
13. Euripides, in his lost play Cresphontes (frg. 452 Dindorf).
14. Omitting eleoumenon in d4.
15. Three fifth-century-B.C. leaders under the Athenian democracy.
16. The naval commanders at Arginusae were illegally prosecuted en masse; cf. Xenophon, Memoirs of Socrates I.1.18, and Plato, Apology 32a–c.
17. Accepting the emendation meteōroporō or -polō in e3.
18. Demeter, whose cult at Eleusis was the most important of the Greek mystery cults; those initiated there were promised a happy survival in the underworld after death.
EPIGRAMS
Translated by J. M. Edmonds, revised by John M. Cooper. Text: Elegy and Iambus (Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1931), vol. II.
Before Socrates enticed him into philosophy—so an ancient tradition goes—Plato was active for a time as a composer of tragedies and dithyrambs (Dionysian choral songs). If that is true, nothing of his work in those genres survives. Even apart from his sometimes very poetical prose, for example in Socrates’ second speech of Phaedrus, we do, however, have evidence of Plato’s work as a poet. A number of “epigrams” attributed to him—poems suitable for inscription on a funerary monument or for other dedicatory purposes—survive in one or both of two collections of short Greek poems dating from medieval times, the “Palatine” and “Planudean” Anthologies. The edition of J. M. Edmonds, which we follow, prints seventeen poems from these sources, plus an eighteenth—in praise of the comic poet Aristophanes—that Olympiodorus (sixth century A.D. neo-Platonist philosopher) quotes as Plato’s (as does Thomas Magister in his Life of Aristophanes). The first ten poems are also quoted as Plato’s work in Diogenes Laertius’ life of Plato, and many of the eighteen are quoted under Plato’s name by one or more additional ancient authors. They are all in the form of elegiac couplets (a dactyllic hexameter, the meter of the Homeric epics, followed by a dactyllic pentameter), mostly a single couplet each (but numbers 4, 5, 7, 11, and 13 are double couplets, and 3 consists of three).
The first two poems are addressed to a young man, as it seems a student of astronomy, named Astēr (or perhaps only affectionately so called by his admirer)—a Greek word for ‘star’. Diogenes Laertius reports that the third was actually inscribed on the tomb at Syracuse of its dedicatee, Plato’s friend and associate in Syracusan political affairs, Dion (prominent in so many of the Platonic Letters). The Anthologies also give other attributions than to Plato in the case of some four of these poems, and Plato’s authorship has reasonably been doubted in other cases as well. It is odd to find Plato in numbers 4 and 6 speaking in erotic terms of Agathon and Phaedrus as desirable youths—these are historical persons appearing as characters in Plato’s dialogues on eros, but they were two decades Plato’s senior; and one notes that the object of the poet’s affection in number 8, Xanthippe, has the same name as Socrates’ wife. Nonetheless, there seems no reason to doubt that some of these poems—above all number 3, and perhaps others, including especially 1, 2, and 7—are actually by him.
For ease of identification we add for each poem (except the last) its position in Hermann Beckby’s edition of the Anthologia Graeca (Munich, 1957).
J.M.C.
[1]
You gaze at the stars, my Star; would that I were Heaven, that I might look at you with many eyes!
Greek Anthology vii 669
[2]
Even as you shone once the Star of Morning among the living, so in death you shine now the Star of Evening among the dead.
Greek Anthology vii 670
[3]
The Fates decreed tears to Hecuba and the women of Troy right from their birth;1 but for you, Dion, the gods spilled your widespread hopes upon the ground after you had triumphed in the doing of noble deeds. And so in your spacious homeland you lie honored by your fellow citizens, O Dion, you who made my heart mad with love.
Greek Anthology vii 99
[4]
Now, when I have but whispered that Alexis is beautiful, he is the observed of all observers. O my heart, why show dogs a bone? You’ll be sorry for it afterwards: was it not so that we lost Phaedrus?
Greek Anthology vii 100
[5]
My mistress is Archeanassa of Colophon, on whose very wrinkles there is bitter love. Hapless are all you who met such beauty on its first voyage; through what a burning did you pass!
Greek Anthology vii 217
[6]
When I kiss Agathon my soul is on my lips, where it comes, poor thing, hoping to cross over.
Greek Anthology v 78
[7]
I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.2
Greek Anthology v 79
[8]
I am an apple; one who loves you throws me at you. Say yes, Xanthippe; we fade, both you and I.
Greek Anthology v 80
[9]
We are Eretrians of Euboea,3 but we lie near Susa, alas, how far from home!
Greek Anthology vii 259
[10]
A man who found some gold left a noose, and the one who did not find the gold he had left tied on the noose he found.
Greek Anthology ix 44
[11]
I, Laïs, who laughed so disdainfully at Greece and once kept a swarm of young lovers at my door, dedicate this mirror to the Paphian4—for I do not wish to see me as I am, and cannot see me as I was.
Greek Anthology vi 1
[12]
This man was pleasing to foreigners and dear to his fellow citizens—Pindar, servant of the melodious Muses.
Greek Anthology vii 35
[13]
We once left the sounding waves of the Aegean to lie here amidst the plains of Ecbatana. Fare thee well, renowned Eretria, our former country. Fare thee well, Athens, Euboea’s neighbor. Fare thee well, dear Sea.
Greek Anthology vii 256
[14]
I am the tomb of a ship’s captain; the tomb opposite is a farmer’s: for beneath the land and beneath the sea is the same place of Death.
Greek Anthology vii 265
[15]
Sailors, be safe, by sea and on land; I would have you know that the tomb you pass is a shipwrecked man’s.
Greek Anthology vii 269
[16]
Some say there are nine Muses. How thoughtless! Look at Sappho of Lesbos; she makes a tenth.
Greek Anthology ix 506
[17]
When Cypris saw Cypris at Cnidus, “Alas!” said she; “where did Praxiteles see me naked?”5
Greek Anthology xvi 162
[18]
The Graces, seeking for themselves a shrine that would not fall, found the soul of Aristophanes.
1. Reading tote in line 2.
2. The apple was dear to Aphrodite; to throw an apple at someone was to declare one’s love; to catch and hold it, to show one’s acceptance.
3. They were deported to Susa, King Darius’ capital, by the Persians in 490 B.C. See also no. 13.
4. I.e., Aphrodite; the poem was inscribed on a mirror for dedication by Laïs to her.
5. Cypris is Aphrodite, of whom there was a famous nude statue by Praxiteles at Cnidus.
ABBREVIATIONS OF TITLES
Alcibiades Alc.
Second Alcibiades 2Alc.
Apology Ap.
Axiochus Ax.
Charmides Chrm.
Clitophon Clt.
Cratylus Cra.
Critias Criti.
Crito Cri.
Definitions Def.
Demodocus Dem.
Epigrams Epgr.
Epinomis Epin.
Eryxias Eryx.
Euthydemus Euthd.
Euthyphro Euthphr.
&n
bsp; Gorgias Grg.
Halcyon Hal.
Hipparchus Hppr.
Greater Hippias G.Hp.
Lesser Hippias L.Hp.
Ion Ion
On Justice Just.
Laches Lch.
Laws L.
Letters Ltr.
Lysis Ly.
Menexenus Mx.
Meno M.
Minos Min.
Parmenides Prm.
Phaedo Phd.
Phaedrus Phdr.
Philebus Phlb.
Protagoras Prt.
Republic R.
Rival Lovers Riv.
Sisyphus Sis.
Sophist Sph.
Statesman Stm.
Symposium Smp.
Theaetetus Tht.
Theages Thg.
Timaeus Ti.
On Virtue Virt.
“+” = “and following.” For example, “R. 327a+” means “Republic 327a and following”; i.e., section 327a plus one or more of the sections immediately following.
INDEX
A
Abaris: Chrm. 158b
Abdera: Prt. 309c; R. 10.600c
abortion: R. 5.461c; Tht.149d
Academy: Ax. 367a; Ly. 203a
Acarnania(ns): Euthd. 271c
Acesimbrotus: Cra. 394c
Achaeans: Alc. 112b; L. 3.682d+, 3.685e, 3.706d+; R. 3.389e, 3.390e, 3.393+
Achaemenes: Alc. 120e
Acharnae: Grg. 495d
Achelous: Phdr. 230b, 263d
Acheron: Ax. 371b; Phd. 112e, 113d
Acherousian Lake: Phd. 113+
Achilles: Ap. 28c; Cra. 428c; G.Hp. 292e; L.Hp. 363b, 364b+, 364e, 365b, 369a+, 370b, 370e+, 371a+, 371d; Ion 535b; Prt. 340a; R. 3.388a+, 3.390e+, 3.391c; Smp. 178a, 179e+, 180a, 208d, 221c
Acragas: Thg. 127e
acropolis of Athens: Criti. 112a; Eryx. 398e; Euthphr. 6b; M. 89b
acropolis of Atlantis: Criti. 115d, 116c+
acropolis of Syracuse: Ltr. 3.315e, 7.329e, 7.348a, 7.349d, 7.350a
acropolis of the model city: L. 5.745, 6.778c
actors: see theater
Acumenus: Phdr. 227a, 268a, 269a; Prt. 315c; Smp. 176b
Complete Works Page 265