When Socrates says, for the only time in the Socratic literature, that he strives to “know himself” (Phdr. 229e), he does not what this “self” is, or how he is to know it. Recent scholarship is split between taking it as one’s concrete personality and as the nature of (human) souls in general. This paper turns for answers to the immediate context of Socrates’ remark about selfknowledge: his long diatribe about myth-rectification. It argues that the latter, a civic task that (...) Socrates’ dismisses as too laborious, nevertheless serves as a model for the more personal former task. Both involve piecemeal acknowledgement and adjustment of one’s commitments for the sake of living successfully. Both require looking simultaneously to general facts about people (or the world) and to particular facts about oneself (or one’s city). Socrates’ hope that he differs from Typhon (230a) means that he hopes he is amenable to rectification. (shrink)

Julius Tomin has recently questioned the new orthodoxy, stemming from Burnyeat's impressive article, that Socratic midwifery is not genuinely Socratic. I understand that many will feel the need to question Burnyeat's position, but I am unhappy that Aristophanes' comedy has once again been thought to give support to the view that Socrates had been known as an intellectual midwife. Thus my response will concentrate on our understanding of Clouds, and in particular on the key passage at 135ff.

In his second question of thePhaedrus, Socrates asks Phaedrus how he spent (διατριβή) his morning with Lysias. Phaedrus answers: ‘You'll learn, should you have the leisure (σχολή) to walk and listen.’ Socrates responds:What? Don't you think I would judge it, as Pindar puts it, a thing ‘surpassing even lack of leisure’ (καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον), to hear how you and Lysias spent your time? (227b6–10)Socrates quotes fromFirst Isthmian2. In this victory ode, Pindar celebrates, uniquely in his extant oeuvre, a charioteer winner (...) who has driven his own team. The epinician poem and the dialogue, especially the myth in Socrates’ second speech, have remarkable systematic parallels. This suggests that Pindar's victor serves as model for the palinode's philosophical lover, and Pindar's song for Socrates’ conversation. (shrink)

The tradition of interpreting Plato's Phaedrus as simply a homage to passion ignores many passages that draw on ancient Greek religion, particularly the Eleusinian Mysteries. States of religious mania, particularly that experienced at Eleusis, included visions brought on by the use of some drug, or pharmakon. The experience of truth in the Phaedrus is read through the experience of ecstasy by initiates.