Wisdom is a State of the Soul

To understand what Socrates thought, we can expect Plato to work through several questions.

One we have yet to consider is how thinking in the "soul" (ψυχή) leads to action.

This question will take us to what is called Socratic Intellectualism and eventually to the Tripartite Theory of the soul, but first we need to think about some history.

Understanding Changed Over Time

If thinking in the soul leads to action, then thinking is function of the soul. The Greeks, however, did not always believe this. Their understanding of the soul changed over time.

Their earliest Greek thinking about the soul we can see is in the Homeric poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. ⊕ Many Greeks could quote Homer from memory.

Socrates, as Plato represents him, quotes Homer at his trail (Apology 34d), and this behavior was not restricted to those who moved in intellectual circles. The Greeks knew the poems from the performances of rhapsodes, professional reciters who accompanied themselves with the lyre.

Attributed to the Berlin Painter, c. 490 BCE
These poems were first transmitted orally. In the late 8th or early 7th century BCE, they were written down. This was when writing in Greek was first beginning to spread.

Other, non-Homeric ways of thinking about the soul would become important, but the conception in the Homeric poems remained common through Socrates' lifetime.

The Soul and the Living

First, before we think about the Homeric poems, we need to think about the word soul.

This word now has connotations we need to avoid if we are to understand the changes in the Greek thinking about the soul. To acomplish this, it helps to approach this history with only the assumption that having a ψυχή, or "soul," marks the difference between being alive and not being alive. Things with a soul are alive. Things without a soul are not aive.

This assumption about a soul is a basic meaning of ψυχή. This ancient meaning is preserved in the contemporary use of the English term animate to mean bring to life. The etymology here runs through the use of the Latin term anima as a translation of ψυχή.

We can start with this ancient meaning of the word ψυχή and understand changes in thinking about the soul as changes in thinking about what the soul contributes to the living.

A Life Force that can Flit Away

⊕ .

In the Odyssey at XI.74, Odysseus meets the soul of Elpenor in Hades. Epenor had died (by falling from a roof and breaking his neck) but was not buried as custom demanded because there was no time. The soul of Elpenor asks Odysseus to bury "him," where "him" refers to his corpse.

"His flesh [Achilles's] too may be pierced with the sharp bronze, and in him is but one life (ψυχή), and mortal do men deem him to be" (Iliad XXI.568).

When the soul of Patroclus leaves him, Achilles describes what happens. "Alas," he says, "there survives in the halls of Hades, a soul and a phantom (ψυχὴ καὶ εἴδωλον), with no wits (φρένες) at all" (Iliad XXIII.103).

In the Odyssey at XI.222, Odysseus's mother tells him that at death "the soul (ψυχὴ), like a dream, flits away...."

"Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished" (Odyssey XI.489).


Socrates, in Plato's Phaedo, attirbutes this sort of understanding of the soul to Crito.

"I cannot persuade Crito here that I am the Socrates who is now conversing and arranging the details of his argument. He thinks I am the one he will presently see as a corpse and he asks how to bury me" (Phaedo 115c). In the opening line of the Iliad, Homer tells us that Achilles's "wrath" caused the death of many Greeks. Their souls went to Hades, and they were left on the battlefield.

"Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Peleus's son, Achilles, that destructive wrath of his that brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of heroes and made the heroes themselves spoil for dogs and every bird" (Iliad I.1).

(The Iliad purports to recount the final year of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy, which may have taken place in the 13th century BCE. The poem takes its title from a Greek name for Troy, Ἴλιον. Agamemnon leads the Achaeans. Achilles fights for Agamemnon.)

In this first line, we can easily understand part of what Homer is saying. Achilles acted on desires born in anger, and the actions he took led to the deaths of many men.

What Homer says happened when the men died is much more difficult to understand.

Homer seems to be thinking of the soul as a life force that exists as a residue of the living when it leaves the body in death. The presence of the soul marks the difference betweeing being alive and being dead, but Homer does not think that something going on in the soul explains why the living human being acts the way he does. The soul is just a life force that somehow manages to have an existence outside the body when the human being has died.

This can seem strange to us. We tend to use the word soul to talk about the person.

Psychological Explanations

Homer gives what we would call psychological explanations. The states and processess in these explanations, though, are not conceived as states and processes of the soul.

These explanations, moreover, are not always ones we ourselves would give.

In the Iliad at XIII.698, when a blow to the jaw dazes Euryalus, Homer describes him as "other thinking" ⊕


"other thinking" (ἀλλοφρονέοντα) and hence without the awareness of things people exhibit when they are conscious. We can translate Homer's words here, but it would be strange now to explain the behavior of someone knocked unconscious by saying that he is "other thinking."

The same is true of Homer's explanation of what is going on in Odysseus's mind when he is deliberating about what to do in a certain situation he faces. We can see what experience Homer means to attribute to Odysseus, but we would describe it as he does.

"Odysseus's spirit (θυμὸς) rose up in his chest, and he was anxious in his lungs and spirit, whether he should rush after them [the maids who consorted with the suitors who sought Penelope, Odysseus's wife, in Odysseus's absence] and deal death to each, or suffer them to lie with the insolent wooers for the last and latest time" (Odyssey 20.5).

Orphism and the Afterlife

In addition to the Homeric conception of the soul and human psychology, we can see another strand of Greek thinking in Orphism and its related form in Pythagoras and others. This strand of thinking was a minority position, but it became influential in philosophy.

⊕


Orphic gold leaf, 4th century BCE. British Museum 3155.

      ΓΗΣΠΑΙΣΕΙΜΙΚΑΙΟΥΡΑΝΟΥΑΣΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΟΣΑΥΤΑΡΕΜ
ΟΙΓΕΝΟΣΟΥΡΑΝΙΟΝΤΟΔΕΔΙΣΤΕΚΑΙΑΥΤΟΙ

      Γῆς παῖς εἰμι καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος, αὐτὰρ ἐμοὶ γένος οὐράνιον· τόδε δ’ ἴστε καὶ αὐτοί Orphism involved purifying rituals, but we do not know much more about it. The ideas appear to have been pretty vague, but they seem to have included the thought that we can look forward to our existence in the afterlife because it need not be grim, as it is in Homer.

It seems that initiates into Orphism were sometimes buried with gold leaves that carried inscriptions. In the British Museum, there is a leaf from the 4th century BCE with information about the bearer: "I am a son of Earth and of starry Heaven, and so I have a heavenly origin; this you yourselves also know" (B 1.6-7 = DK 1 B 17.6-7).

Plato seems to ahve thought that the Orphics believed that the soul is in the body as some kind of punishmnent and that when its sentenced is served, it might return home.

"I think it most likely that those around Orpheus (οἱ ἀμφὶ Ὀρφέα) gave the body its name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment, and that the body is an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes, the safe for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed" ⊕

The Catylus is thought to be a middle dialogue.

"not even a letter needs to be changed." Socrates is saying that the word σῶμα derives from the verb σῴζω. (Cratylus 400b).

(Our knowledge of what the Orphics thought depends heavily on Plato. He refers to "books of Musaeus and Orpheus" (Republic II.364e), but these books are now lost.)

This conjecture in the Cratylus does not tell us what the soul contributes to the living. So, in this respect, we have not advanced past the Homeric conception. What is new, though, it seems, is the thought that souls are somehow what the living are. It is us who returns home.

Character and Intelligence

⊕
The word 'character' is from χαρακτήρ (charaktēr), which means "stamping tool." Character, so to speak, stamps the flesh and blood to make an individual. We get some of this idea in more detail in Herodotus (484–425 BCE) and Thucydides (460–400 BCE). They sometimes talk about the soul in connection with emotions and character.

Herodotus tells the story of the Achaemenid king Cambyses who takes the Pharaoh Psammenitus prisoner and "makes a trial of his soul" by forcing him to watch as his daughter is enslaved and his son led away to be executed in a public spectacle (Histories III.14.1). Herodotus comments too in a different context that because of the forethought of god, animals good to eat and "timid in soul" are prolific breeders (Histories III.108.2).

We also see this way of thinking about the soul in Thucydides's report of Pericles's "Funeral Oration." This a speech Pericles give in commemoration of the war dead at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). He says that those who do not shrink from danger, even though they know very well the pain they may experience and pleasure they may miss, are "rightly judged strongest in soul" (History of the Peloponnesian War II.40.3).

Pythagoreanism and Transmigration

⊕ Pythagoreanism begins with Pythagoras. He led a school in Croton (in Southern Italy) in about 530 BCE.

Xenophanes (6th to 5th century BCE) reports that Pythagoras once intervened when a puppy was being whipped because he recognized the soul of a friend when it yelped (DK B 21 7). The behavior Pythagoras takes to indicate the soul of his friend is not intellectual.

In Empedocles (5th century BCE) too, there is the idea that the soul is divine in origin and that it transmigrates as punishment. "Of them, I too am now one, an exile from the divine and a wanderer" (DK 31 B 115 = D 10).

Ps.-Iamblichus is a name historians use to refer to the author of Theology of Arithmetic. The authorship of this work is disputed. Some historians attribute it to Iamblichus (a 3rd to 4th century CE Platonist), but others attribute it to a subsequent author who draws on Iamblichus. Ps.-Iamblichus gives a report that suggests that Philolaus (a Pythagorean and contemporary of Socrates) believed the soul is responsible for emotion and character but not for intelligence.

Ps.-Iamblichus reports that Philolaus said that "the head [is the place] of intelligence, that the heart [is the place] of the soul and sensation," that whereas "the brain is the ἀρχή or starting-point of a human being, the heart is the starting-point of an animal" (DK 44 B 13).

In this fragment, Philolaus does not pair the soul with "intelligence."

This way of thinking about the soul would not provide an obstacle to the Pythagorean belief in the transmigration. If the Pythagorans thought that a human intelligence couild migrate from a human being into a non-human animal, they would have to explain why this intelligence never showed itself. There is no such obstacle if character is what passes.

Intellectualism about Character

Against this complicated historical background, Socrates has his conception of the soul.

If, for the moment, we set aside his view of the afterlife, we can see that what is prominent in his conception is intellectual understanding of character. Socrates understood the soul so that it is responsible for character and understood character so that it is a part of intelligence. ⊕   "Then, Simmias, if this is true, my friend, I have great hopes that when I reach the place to which I am going, I shall there, if anywhere, attain fully to that which has been my chief object in my past life, so that the journey which is now imposed upon me is begun with good hope; and the like hope exists for every man who thinks that his intelligence (διάνοιαν) has been purified and made ready.
  Certainly, Socrates.
  And does not the purification consist in this which has been mentioned long ago in our discourse, in separating, so far as possible, the soul (ψυχὴν) from the body and teaching the soul the habit of collecting and bringing itself together from all parts of the body, and living, so far as it can, both now and hereafter, alone by itself, freed from the body as from fetters?
  Absolutely" (Phaedo 67b).

The evidence for this begins with Aristophanes (an Athenian comic playwright and older contemporary of Plato). In the Clouds, Aristophanes makes fun of Socrates and the new education that had become fashionable in 5th century Athens. This new education had become an object of suspicion because it was contrary to traditional thinking, and Socrates was caught up in the conservative reaction in way that would lead to his execution.

Socrates, in the Clouds, leads what Aristophanes lampoons as a "thinkery." ⊕

When Pheidippides asks his father who dwells in the "thinkery" Socrates heads, Strepsiades says he does "not know the name accurately" and describes them as "anxious thinkers, noble and excellent" (Clouds 101).

The term "anxious thinker" is one Aristophanes invents.

Xenophon (contemporary with Plato), reports that Socrates did not participate in such "anxious thinking."

"He did not converse about the nature of things in the way most of the others did-examining what the sophists call the cosmos.... He would argue that to trouble one's mind with such problems is sheer folly" (Memorabilia I.1.11).

Plato gives conflicting evidence.

In the Phaedo, which is a traditionally middle dialogue, Plato makes the character Socrates say that although in his youth he "was tremendously eager for the kind of wisdom which they call inquiry about nature (περὶ φύσεως ἱστορίαν)" (96a), he later lost interest in this inquiry.

In the Apology, Socrates say that the protrayal of him in Aristophanes's Coulds has no truth in it.

"Many accusers have risen up against me before you, who have been speaking for a long time, many years already, and saying nothing true; and I fear them more than Anytus and the rest, though these also are dangerous; but those others are more dangerous, gentlemen, who gained your belief, since they got hold of most of you in childhood, and accused me [as Aristophanes portrays Socrates] without any truth, saying, There is a certain Socrates, a wise man, a ponderer over the things in the air and one who has investigated the things beneath the earth and who makes the weaker argument the stronger" (Apology 18b).

"Now let us take up from the beginning the question, what the accusation is from which the false prejudice against me has arisen, in which Meletus trusted when he brought this suit against me. What did those who aroused the prejudice say to arouse it? I must, as it were, read their sworn statement as if they were plaintiffs: Socrates is a criminal and a busybody, investigating the things beneath the earth and in the heavens and making the weaker argument stronger and teaching others these same things. Something of this sort is what they say. For you yourselves saw these things in Aristophanes's comedy [the Clouds], a Socrates being carried about there, proclaiming that he was treading on air and uttering a vast deal of other nonsense about which I know nothing" (Apology 19a). Strepsiades, in conversation with his son, Pheidippides, comically refers to its members as ψυχῶν σοφῶν or "wise souls" who "in speaking of the heavens persuade people that it is an oven, and that it encompasses us, and that we are the embers" and who "teach, if one gives them money, to conquer in speaking, right or wrong [by making one appear as the other]" (94).

(We can see the complaints about higher education some people make are not new.)

This portrayal of Socrates in Aristophanes's Clouds does not show in detail how Socrates understood the soul. It is a comedy, not an analysis, but it does allow us to be sure that Socrates was known for talking about wisdom as a state of the soul as early as 423 BCE, the year in which the Clouds was first performed in the annual Dionysian festival in Athens.

Why Aristophanes's Portrayal is Funny

To understand what Socrates thought, it helps to think about the joke Aristophanes makes.

When Aristophanes calls Socrates and his followers "wise souls," he is being sarcastic. The majority in the audience found it funny to hear Socrates mocked in public in this way because they thought that he and his followers were absolute fools who lived contemptible lives.

Aristophanes trades on this thought by representing Socrates and his followers as devotees of the new scientific/sophistic education that had become an object of suspicion. Aristophanes shows in comical fashion how the devotion to this new education has turned Socrates and his followers into "the pale-faced men with no shoes" who live strange ascetic lives. They have done something most in the audience would never do. They have traded their sense and vitality for the witless and feeble existence the audience associates with souls in Hades.

Aristophanes's joke, though, might well turn on more than this contempt.

Many in the audience would have found it weird to hear about wisdom in connection withy the soul. The Homeric conception makes the soul a life force that somehow continues to exist after death, and the newer conception we saw in Herodutus and Thucydides goes only so far as to make the soul reponsible for character. In this environment, Socrates would be comical not only for the aburd life he chooses but also for his strange understanding of the soul.

Desires are Part of the Intellect

Socrates himself unfortunately does not tell us how he came to think that wisdom is a function of the soul, but we can imagine that what happened was something like the following.

The actions someone takes are the primary evidence for his character. Since no one acts without desire, his character explains the desires that motivate him.

In thinking about what character is, Socrates took it to consist in beliefs about what is good and what is bad. We appeal to these beliefs to explain why human beings act in the ways they do, and Socrates seems to have thought that explanations of any other kind are really nothing more rationalizations to shift resonsibility from ourselves and our beliefs.

This gives Socrates a conception of desire that sometimes is called "Socratic Intellectualism."

To know how to control our desires and hence our lives, we need to know how desires arise in the soul. Is there a basic power of desire we need to control to live beneficially? Or, alternatively, are our desires beliefs we form in an exercise of reason?

According to Socratic Intellectualism, what we need to control are our beliefs.

To live benefically, we do not need to control a basic power of desire. There is no such power. Human beings do not work this way. Our desires are part of the intellect. They are beliefs about good and bad we form in an exercise of reason. We pursue what we believe is at least as good an outcome as any of the alternative available to us in the circumstances, and we calculate the value of outcomes in terms of our beliefs about what is good and what is bad.

Socrates shows the Many they are Confused

Socrates, in the Protagoras, has this understanding of how human beings function. ⊕
In the Gorgias and the Meno, Plato can seem to make Socrates think that some desires are not beliefs.

The Protagoras is traditionally thought to be an early dialogue. Socrates' primary interlocutor is the Sophist, Protagoras. At one point in their conversation, Socrates turns to the question of what "rules" a human being. He suggests ⊕

  "Come, Protagoras, and reveal this about your mind: What do you believe about knowledge? Do you go along with the many? They think this way about it, that it is not powerful, neither a leader nor a ruler (ἡγεμονικὸν οὐδ᾽ ἀρχικὸν), that while knowledge is often present, what rules is something else, sometimes desire, sometimes pleasure, sometimes pain, at other times love, often fear. They think of knowledge as being dragged around by these other things, as if it were a slave. Does the matter seem like that to you? Or does it seem to you that knowledge is a fine thing and rules a man, so that if someone were to know what is good and bad, he would not be forced by anything to act otherwise than knowledge dictates, and that intelligence would be sufficient to save him?
  Not only does it seem exactly as you say, but it would be shameful for me of all people [because I call myself a Sophist and say I educate men] to say that wisdom and knowledge are anything but the strongest in human affairs" (Protagoras 352a).

  "Well is there something you call dread, or fear? And is it—I address myself to you, Prodicus [a Sophist and contemporary of Socrates]—the same as I have in mind—something I describe as an expectation (προσδοκίαν) of bad, whether you call it fear or dread?
  Protagoras and Hippias agreed to this description of dread or fear; but Prodicus thought this was dread, not fear.
  No matter, Prodicus. My point is this: if our former statements are true, will any man wish to go after what he dreads, when he may pursue what he does not? Surely this is impossible after what we have admitted—that he regards as bad what he dreads? And what is regarded as bad is neither pursued nor accepted willingly by anyone" (Protagoras 358c).

"Each man possesses opinions about the future, which go by the general name of expectations; and of these, that which precedes pain bears the special name of fear, and that which precedes pleasure the special name of confidence; and in addition to all these there is calculation, pronouncing which of them is good, which bad" (Laws I.644c).

  "Well now, Gorgias, a man who has learnt building is a builder, is he not?
  Yes, Socrates.
  And he who has learnt music, a musician?
  Yes.
  Then he who has learnt medicine is a medical man, and so on with the rest on the same principle; anyone who has learnt a certain art has the qualification acquired by his particular knowledge?
  Certainly.
  So, on this principle, he who has learnt what is just is just?
  Absolutely, I presume.
  And the just man, I suppose, does what is just.
  Yes, Socrates" (Gorgias 460bb).

"Socrates thought all the virtues are knowledge, so that knowing justice and being just go together, for as soon as we have learnt geometry or building, we are builders and geometers" (Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics I.1216b; cf. Nicomachian Ethics 1144b). to Protagoras that "knowledge" rules and that no psychological state can move someone to act against his knowledge.

The argument is a little hard to see because the dramatic structure in the Protagoras is more complex than what we have seen in the dialogues we have considered so far.

⊕ Socrates takes "the many" (oἱ πολλοί) to deny that knowledge is a ruler and ⊕
"Simonides [of Ceos, lyric poet, c. 566-468 BCE] was not so ill-educated as to praise a person who willingly did no bad, as though there were some who did bad willingly. I am fairly sure of this--that none of the wise men considers that anybody ever willingly errs or willingly does shameful and bad deeds; they are well aware that all who do shameful and bad things do them unwillingly" (Protagoras 345d).






  "Then if the pleasant is good, no one who knows or believes there are actions better than those he is doing, and are possible, will do the lesser ones if he is free to do the better ones; and this yielding to oneself is nothing but ignorance, and mastery of oneself is as certainly wisdom.
  They all agreed.
  Well then, by ignorance do you mean having a false opinion and being deceived about matters of importance?
  They all agreed to this also.
  Then no one willingly goes after bad or what he thinks to be bad; it is not in human nature, apparently, to do so—to wish to go after what one thinks is bad in preference to the good; and when compelled to choose one of two bads, nobody will choose the greater when he may choose the lesser" (Protagoras 358b). to believe instead that someone can know what is best but be overcome by pleasure for something else.

The many, however, are not someone Socrates can question.

To circumvent this problem, instead of proceeding as we have seen him proceed in earlier dialogues, Socrates leads a conversation in which he and Protagoras identify what the many believe and how they would respond in dialectic. Protagoras, at the end of this conversation, accepts that the dialectic he helps Socrates imagine shows the many have beliefs that commit them to denying it is possible for knowledge to be overcome by pleasure.

We can reconstruct how the dialectic shows this as follows.

The many, first of all, think that someone can be "overcomme by pleasure." They think the following is possible, even common, namely that someone can do something other than "what is best, even though [he] know[s] what it is and [is] able to do it" (Protagoras 352d).

These beliefs give Socrates the following premises to use against the many:

1.  The best thing S can do is a (go to the gym).
2.  S does b, where b (go to the party) ≠ a, because S is overcome by pleasure.

The many also believe (as Socrates works hard with Protagoras to get them to admit) that

PG.  The pleasant is the good.

Since the question is whether "knowledge is ruler" and hence whether S can be overcome by pleasure if he has knowledge, the assumption for the reductio is

3.  S knows that the best thing he can do is a.

Further, since the many think that S is not confused about what is best in the situation in which he is overcome by pleasure, the first inference is from this assumption to

4.  S does not believe that doing b is as least as good as doing a.

Socrates now works to get the many to commit themselves to the negation of (4) and thus contradict their claim that knowledge can be overcome by pleasure.

The argument with which Socrates gets the many to commit themselves to the negation of (4) is not straightforward to follow, but the crucial point seems to be that they believe what Socrates believes about how human beings function. They assume S must desire to do b if he does b, and Socrates shows them that they have beliefs that commit them to thinking that S has this desire only if S believes that doing b is as least as good as doing a.

What if anything does this show about what Socrates himself believes?

The rules of dialectic do not require Socrates to believe anything in particular. His role as questioner is to make the many to contradict themselves, but given the context in which the dialectic takes place, it is natural to think the real target is Protagoras. By enlisting Protagoras to show the many they are committed to thinking that what "rules" a human being are his beliefs about what is good and what is bad, Socrates is trying to get Protagoras to see that he himself shares this belief about desire and how the human soul functions.

Socrates describes this belief they have uncovered in dialectic as a fact about "human nature."

"Then [given what has been agreed,] no one willingly goes after bad or what he thinks to be bad; it is not in human nature (ἐν ἀνθρώπου φύσει), apparently, to do so—to wish to go after what one thinks is bad in preference to the good; and when compelled to choose one of two bads, nobody will choose the greater when he may choose the lesser" (Protagoras 358c).

Socrates, as Plato represents him, thought that human beings seem to work this way and that questioning in dialectic shows that others are committed to believing this too.

Looking Forward in the Platonic Dialogues

The question Plato now faces is whether Socrates is right about the soul and human nature.

As we will see in a subsequent lecture, Plato comes to believe that Socrates was not right.

In the Republic (traditionally thought to be a middle dialogue), Plato concludes that the soul is more than reason, that it contains two nonrational parts in addition to reason, and that the desires in these parts are not beliefs about what is good and what is bad. Given this theory about how human beings function, it is possible for pleasure to overcome knowledge.

Thinking about this development now, though, is getting ahead of ourselves.

Perseus Digital Library

Aristophanes, Clouds
(Loeb Classical Library: Aristophanes, Clouds) ⊕

Strepsiades is burdened with debt because of is aristocratic wife and the expensive tastes she encourages in their son, Pheidippides. So, in the scene below, Strepsiades encourages his son to enroll in the "thinkery" so that Socrates can teach him how to make the weaker argument appear stronger. Strepsiades hopes Pheidippides will use this skill to defeat the family's creditors in court. Pheidippides, however, who is young and athletic, wants nothing to do with those ⊕

Aristophanes jokes about Socrates and his followers going without shoes at Clouds 363, 719, and 858. This was true of Socrates even in the coldest weather. See Plato, Symposium 174a and 219a. See also Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.6.2.

Chaerephon (Socrates's friend) was known for his pale, corpse-like appearance (Clouds 503-504).

In (Birds 1555), Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a ψυχαγωγός and Chaerephon as a "bat" from Hades who comes to drink an offering of blood. Many in his audience would have understood this against the background of Homer's Odyssey XI.34 and XXIV.14.

The verb corresponding to ψυχαγωγός can mean "lead or attract the souls of the living, win over, persuade" or, negatively, "beguile," but the primary meaning is to "lead departed souls to the underworld." So the joke in part is that Socrates' teaching leads his students to Hades.

At Clouds 186, Strepsiades says that the students in the thinkery look like "the men captured at Pylos."

In 425 BCE, the Athenians defeated the Spartan force occupying Sphacteria (an island next to Pylos in the western Peloponnese). They brought prisoners and held them in Athens in chains (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 4.41.1) until peace was made. By the time the Clouds was staged, they had been imprisoned for two years.

At Clouds 1112, Strepsiades says that when his son graduates from the thinkery, he will be "pale-faced and wretched."

Free women were expected to pale because they were expected to spend their time indoors. Free men, by contrast, were expected to be deeply tanned because they were expected to spend the daylight hours outdoors (on the farm if poor or in sport if rich, as Pheidippides with horses).

This is the context against which Socrates wryly says the following to Hippocrates. "Protagoras, you see, Hippocrates, spends most of his time indoors" (Protagoras 311a).

At Clouds 412, the chorus tells Strepsiades that he will get the wisdom he desires if "you have a good memory and are a ponderer, if there is endurance in your soul, if neither standing nor walking tires you, if you are not too put out by being cold or yearn for your breakfast, if you abstain from wine and physical exercise and all other follies."

For more evidence of Socrates' ascetic way of life, see Clouds 437 and 835. In Xenophon, see Memorabilia 1.3.5, 1.6.4, 1.6.6, and 2.1.1. In Plato, see Phaedo 64d. "charlatans, the pale-faced men with no shoes, such as that wretched Socrates and Chaerephon."

Strepsiades.
Do you see this little door and little house?
Pheidippides.
I see it. What then, pray, is this, father?
Strepsiades.
This is a thinkery (φροντιστήριον) of wise souls (ψυχῶν σοφῶν). There dwell men who in speaking of the heavens persuade people that it is an oven, and that it encompasses us, and that we are the embers. These men teach, if one give them money, to conquer in speaking, right or wrong.
Pheidippides.
Who are they?
Strepsiades.
I do not know the name accurately. They are anxious thinkers (μεριμνοφροντισταὶ), noble and excellent.
Pheidippides.
Bah! They are rogues; I know them. You mean the charlatans, the pale-faced men with no shoes, such as that wretched (κακοδαίμων) Socrates and Chaerephon (Clouds 94).


Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon

ἀμύητος, amyētos, adjective, "uninitiated, profane"

ἀκρατής, (ἀ + κράτος), akratēs, adjective, "without strength"
ἑκών, hekōn, adjective, "of one's own accord"
ἡγεμονικός , hēgemonikos, adjective, "capable of command, authoritative"

εἴδωλον, noun, eidōlon, "phantom" (a φάντασμα, an "appearance" of something)

In the Odyssey XXIV.14, the souls of the suitors (whom Odysseus has killed) fly like bats to the underworld "where souls dwell, phantoms (εἴδωλα) of men who have done with toils."

θύμος, thymos, noun, "faculty of strong feeling and passion"

"little θυμὸς was in me" (Illiad I.593). "you do not do well to put this anger in your θυμῷ" (Illiad VI.326). "But when she revived, and her spirit (θυμὸς) was returned into her breast (φρένα)..." (Illiad XX.475).

"But I took counsel how all might be the very best, if I might haply find some way of escape from death for my comrades and for myself. And I wove all manner of wiles and counsel, as a man will in a matter of life and death; for great was the evil that was nigh us. And this seemed to my θυμὸν the best plan" (Odyssey IX.420).

κακοδαίμων, (κᾰκός +‎ δαίμων), adjective, kakodaimōn, "unhappiness"
μεριμνοφροντιστής (μεριμνάω + φροντιστής), merimnophrontistēs, noun, "one who is an anxious thinker"

παράδοξος, paradoxos, adjective, "contrary to expectation, incredible"
προσδοκίαν, prosdokian, noun, "expectation"

φαντάζω, phantazō, verb, "make visible, appears"
φάντασμα, phantasma, noun, "appearance"

Death makes the soul appear to the eye. The appearance is a "phantom," which "flits away" (Odyssey XI.222).

-μα is added to verbal stems to form nouns denoting the result, a particular instance, or the object of an action
γράφω ("write") → γράμμα ("that which is written")
φαντάζω ("appears, make visible") → φάντασμα ("appearance, vision")

φρήν, phrēn, noun, "seat of perception and thought" (located in the midriff)

"they may devise some other plan in their minds (φρεσὶ) better than this" (Illiad IX.423).

"Patroclus, setting his foot upon Sarpedon's breast, drew the spear from out the flesh, and the midriff (φρένες) followed therewith; and at the one moment he drew forth the spear-point and the soul (ψυχήν) of Sarpedon" (Illiad XVI.504).

φροντιστήριον, phrontistērion, noun, "place for meditation, thinking-shop"

σκιά, skia, noun, "shadow, shade of the dead, phantom"

⊕ "[C]ome to the house of Hades and dread Persephone, to seek soothsaying of the soul (ψυχῇ) of Theban Teiresias, the blind seer, ⊕ Some of the religious specialists in antiquity:

μάντις ("seer" or "soothsayer")
ἀγύρτης ("beggar priest")
καθαρτής ("purifier"),
ὀνειροκρίτας ("interpreter of dreams")
ὀρνιθόσκοπος ("bird seer" or "augur")
Ὀρφεοτελεστής ("priest of the Orphic Mysteries")
χρησμολόγος ("dealer in oracles")

"Begging priests and soothsayers go to the doors of rich men and persuade them that, through sacrifices and incantations, they have acquired a god-given power: if the man or any of his ancestors has committed an injustice, they can fix it with pleasant rituals. And if he wishes to injure an enemy, he will be able to harm a just one or an unjust one alike at little cost, since by means of spells and enchantments they can persuade the gods to do their bidding" (Plato, Republic II.364b).

"[The superstitious (δεισιδαίμων, "fearing the gods")] will go to the interpreters of dreams, the seers, the augurs, to ask them to what god or goddess he ought to pray. Every month he will visit to the priests of the Orphic Mysteries" (Theophrastus, Characters 16.11).

Theophrastus was the second head of Aristotle's Lyceum. whose sense (φρένες) abides steadfast. To him even in death Persephone has given mind (νόον), that he alone should have the sensibleness of the living (πεπνῦσθαι); but the others flit about as shadows (σκιαὶ)" (Odyssey X.490).

σῶμα

ψυχή, psychē, noun, "soul"

In HOmer, the ψυχή leaves temporarily during a faint (Illiad XXII.467).

It appears at death (Illiad IX.408, XIV.518, XVI.505, XXII.362) as it departs to "Hades" (Odyssey XI.65), where it exists as "a phantom, with no mind [or: wits] at all" (Illiad XXIII.104).

Hesiod does not talk much about the soul.

The word ψυχή does not appear in Theogony. It appears once in Works and Days 686, where it means "life." He does, though, talk about the afterlife without saying that it happens to the soul. He makes the grimness of this afterlife depend on one's conduct in life (Works and Days, 109-210, 230-236, 276-278). In the Shield of Heracles, the word appears three times. At 173, it means "life." At 151 and 254, he says that the soul goes to Hades in death.


ψυχαγωγός, psychagōgos, adjective, "leading departed souls to the nether world"

⊕ "[H]istorically the decisive step was taken by Socrates in conceiving of human beings as being run by a mind or reason. And the evidence strongly suggests that Socrates did not take a notion of reason which had been there all along and assume, more or less plausibly, that reason as thus conceived, or as somewhat differently conceived, could fulfill the role he envisaged for it, but that he postulated an entity whose precise nature and function was then a matter of considerable philosophical debate, and it was this entity that was the ancestor of our reason, rather than some ability or part of us which had been acknowledge all along. But however one thinks of the matter and prefers to describe it, one can hardly want to doubt that Socrates' assumption about the constitution of human beings constituted a crucial step in the history of the notion of the mind and that for this step he could rely on antecedents. For it seems clear enough that what Socrates actually did was to take a substantial notion of the soul and then try to understand the soul thus substantially conceived of as a mind or reason. By 'a substantial notion of the soul' I do not mean the kind of insubstantial shadow of a person presented at times in Homer, or some living-giving substance that quickens the body, but a notion according to which the soul accounts not only for a human being's being alive, but for its doing whatever it does.... This was not a common conception, it seems, even in Socrates' time, but it was widespread and familiar enough under the influence of nontraditional religious beliefs, reflected, for instance, in Pythagoreanism. And it seems to have been such a substantial notion of the soul which Socrates took and interpreted as consisting in a mind or reason" (Michael Frede, "Introduction," 18-19. Rationality in Greek Thought, 1-28. Oxford University Press, 1996).

"[Socrates'] extreme intellectualism [about desire] seems to have been based on a conception of the soul as a mind or reason, such that our desires turn out to be beliefs of a certain kind" (Michael Frede, "The Philosopher," 10. Greek thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, 3-16. Harvard University Press, 2000).

"[I]n the Protagoras, [in his argument against how the many understand being overcome by pleasure,] Socrates seems to argue as if the soul just were reason, and the passions were reasoned beliefs or judgments of some kind, and as if, therefore, we were entirely guided or motivated by beliefs of one kind or another. On this picture of the soul, it is easy to see why Socrates thinks that nobody acts against his knowledge or even his beliefs: nothing apart from beliefs could motivate such an action" (Michael Frede, "Introduction," xxx. Plato. Protagoras, vii-xxxii).