A Metaphor in Plato: ‘Running Away’ and ‘Staying Behind’ in the Phaedo and the Timaeus

D. O'Brien

doi:10.1017/S0009838800035552

A Metaphor in Plato: ‘Running Away’ and ‘Staying Behind’ in the Phaedo and the Timaeus

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009

D. O'Brien

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D. O'Brien: Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

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In an earlier article I sought to analyse the metaphor of withdrawal in the last argument of Plato's Phaedo for the immortality of the soul.1 The key to the metaphor lies, I believe, in recognizing the paradox that in terms of Plato's metaphor something stays as it is, for example continues to be fire and to be hot, or to be cold and to be snow, by running away. Plato's argument is that fire will either ‘run away’, i.e. it will escape the onslaught of cold, and so continue to be fire, or else it will perish. For in terms of Plato's metaphor if something which is characterized essentially by one of a pair of opposites, in the way that soul is, were to ‘stay behind’ then it would have to ‘accept’ the opposite of the form by which it is characterized, and that it cannot do. Fire cannot be cold. Snow cannot be hot. The soul cannot be dead.

Type: Research Article
Information: The Classical Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , December 1977 , pp. 297 - 299

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838800035552 [Opens in a new window]

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^{page 297 note 1} CQ N.S. 17 (1967), 198–231, and 18 (1968), 95–106. I am grateful for their criticism of the present note to Mme F. Zaslawski and to Dr. S.V. Keeling.

^{page 297 note 2} For simplicity's sake, I attach the relevant expression of the metaphor to fire, which is how the metaphor is employed at 103 D 10, cf. ‘what cannot be cooled’ 106 A 8. It is applied also to snow, 103 D 5, or ‘what cannot be hot’, 106 A 3, to ‘the large in us’, 102 D 7, ‘the small in us or any other of the opposites’, 102 E 6–8, to ‘things which are not themselves opposites, but which always possess the opposities’, 104 B 7–9, cf. C 7 -9, to ‘three’, 104 C 1, and finally to soul, 105 D–E, 106 B–E.

The expression of the metaphor varies. is used at 102 D 9. Elsewhere, to express the same point, Plato uses alone, 103 D 8, 104 C 1, 106 E 7, 103 A 1, 103 D 11, 106 A 4, and 106 A 10, C 5, E 7. joined with occurs at 102 E 2, E 3–4, 106 A 5–6. Elsewhere, to express the same point, Plato uses alone at 104 C 2–3, C 7, C 8, and alone at 102 D 8, 103 D 6, D 11–12, 104 B 8, B 9, throughout 104 E to 105 E, and at 106 A 6, B 4, D 3, D 4.

^{page 298 note 3} Taylor, Commentary, p. 317, sees a legal metaphor in the sentence I have quoted: ‘they will not face a trial but evade the issue of an impeachment of being a this or a that... or any other indictment of permanence’. But (from ) and , the terms which Taylor principally relies upon, describe procedures which are radically distinct: see Harrison, A.R.W., The Law of Athens ii.218 ff.Google Scholar, and Lipsius, , Attische Recht ii.309 ff.Google Scholar, cf. especially Demosthenes 58.10–11, where both terms appear. It is difficult therefore to see that the combination of the two terms, in , would have any very definite legal meaning. As for the notion that fire and water agree to ‘face a trial’, the verb which Taylor himself cites is not but . I conclude that the legal flavour, if present at all, is very diluted.