Gellrich, Socratic Magic

Socratic Magic: Enchantment, Irony, and Persuasion in Plato's Dialogues
Author(s): Michelle Gellrich

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Classical World, Vol. 87, No. 4 (Mar. - Apr., 1994), pp. 275-307
Published by: Classical Association of the Atlantic States
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SOCRATIC MAGIC: ENCHANTMENT,
IRONY, AND PERSUASION
IN PLATO'S DIALOGUES
Eros . . . is an awe-inspiring magician, sorcerer, and sophist.
Plato, Symposium203d*
Protagorasdrawsthem from each of the cities throughwhich
he passes, enchantingthem with his voice just like Orpheus,
and they follow after his voice spellbound.
Plato, Protagoras315a
Magic: Metaphor or Irony?
Was Socrates a magician? Though the question has been seriously

posed before, it still sounds rhetorical. Certainly, this is one of the
least probable ways of regarding the man who made such a deep mark
on Western thought with his obsessive search for moral definitions
and his insistence on pursuing elenchic argument with a doggedness
that was by turns irritating and engrossing. But to put the point like
this is to touch the tip of the iceberg, for it is precisely the tendency of
Socrates' performances to engross and stun audiences that elicits the
not uncommon observation in Plato's dialogues that he is indeed a
magician, a goes, fitted out with techniques that involve his interlocu-
tors in the mental equivalent of sleights of hand and prestidigitation.
Through words that he uses in ways no one else ever had, Socrates
casts a spell over souls, and in so doing strives to satisfy their
desires-not those they think they have, but their true desires as
human beings whose search for excellence has gone wrong and who
must relearn what it is they really want. Isn't this magic-a perfor-
mance using speech and action in the service of desires that have been
obstructed or displaced but that nonetheless strive mightily for
fulfillment? '
This question, too, seems rhetorical. It suggests that the whole
problem as formulated involves a manner of speaking, and that
Plato's Socrates, if he is a magician, is so only in a metaphorical or
an ironical sense. Those who have tackled the matter head on, as
Jacqueline de Romilly and Pedro Lain Entralgo both have, conclude
as much, and they emphasize that Plato's notorious distrust of
traditional magic prevents us from understanding the attribution
*1 use the Oxford Classical Texts of Plato's works, Platonis Opera (1905-1913), ed.
John Burnet, 5 vols. Translations from Greek are my own.
' For this view of magic, see B. Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and
Other Essays (Boston 1948) 59-65. For recent reassessments of magic in ancient Greece,
see Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, ed. C.A. Faraone and D. Obbink
(New York 1991); and G.E.R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason, and Experience: Studies in the
Origin and Development of Greek Science (Cambridge 1979).
275
276 MICHELLEGELLRICH
straightforwardly.2 But there has been another strain in classical

scholarship, exemplified by the work of Karl Meuli and E.R. Dodds,
which takes seriously the influence exerted on Plato by shamanism,
and which asserts that the idea of the separable soul, along with the
teaching in Phaedo that philosophy is the practice of dying, is deeply
marked by shamanistic practice.3 Others have argued against this
thesis, asserting that such Greek concepts as the free soul may be
explained on the basis of indigenous beliefs discernible in the
evolution of psyche and without recourse to Hellenic contact with the
shamanistic culture of the Black Sea Scythians.4 Even if we accept this
critique, it remains true that the Greek language preserves a family of
terms related to goes which bears close resemblance to shamanistic
experience. Especially in their early history, these terms concern the
binding of souls, notably those of the dead, by a figure of great
prestige, a charismatic leader. Indeed, the goes is originally a
psychopomp who presides over funeral rituals and ensures that the
deceased is safely situated in the afterlife, his honor appeased and his
potential for harm allayed by the proper ceremonies. The goes
oversees a rite of passage concerned with the status of the dead, and
incantation is an important tool in his arsenal. About this magical-
religious nexus Walter Burkert remarks that although shamanism may
not have influenced the development of the Greek free soul, the
scholarly debate about shamanism "has in any case performed the
useful function of taking the so-called [shamanistic] myths and legends
seriously and showing how they make sense as clues to actual cult
practices.'"5
Of chief significance for the present essay is not the origin of
beliefs about the goes, but the fact that the early Greeks practiced
magical control over souls of the dead and that the language which
developed around such practice was eventually transmuted in two
ways. It comes to define persuasion as a mode of enchantment, or
goeteia; and later still it makes its way into the Platonic characteriza-
tion of philosophical psychagogia. Thus both the sophist and the
philosopher in specific ways inherit the legacy of the goes-a
2 P. Lain Entralgo, The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity, ed. and tr.
L.J. Rather and J.M. Sharp (New Haven 1970); J. de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in
Ancient Greece (Cambridge 1975); and P. Boyance, Le culte des Muses chez les
philosophes grecs (Paris 1937). For a discussion of de Romilly's thesis and a more
general consideration of the issues in this paper, see J.0. Ward, "Magic and Rhetoric
from Antiquity to the Renaissance: Some Ruminations," Rhetorica 6.1 (1988) 57-118.
3 K. Meuli, "Scythica," Hermes 70 (1935) 121-76; E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the
Irrational (Berkeley 1951) 135-235. A standard work on shamanism is M. Eliade,
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, tr. W.R. Trask (Princeton 1964).
4 J. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton 1983) 13-69. From
an entirely different angle, oralists such as E. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge,

Mass. 1963) 134-64, argue against Plato's investment in magic, which they treat as an
element of an archaic mindset Plato sought to revolutionize.
s W. Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, Mass.
1972) 165.
SOCRATIC MAGIC: ENCHANTMENT, IRONY, AND PERSUASION 277
suggestion already advanced by Burkert, but not yet studied in any

depth.6 In both cases, a crucial link with the primitive context of
meaning seems to lie in the activity of a leader, typically set apart
from the group by his extraordinary powers or charisma, who
manages souls through spellbinding words. This historical confluence
of sophistry and philosophy via psychagogia poses obvious challenges
for the interpretation of Plato's dialogues, because his abiding critique
of sophistry often targets its recourse to magical incantation. Dialectic
is frequently presented as a use of language opposed in every way to
sophistic enchantment. How are we to judge Plato's critique in light
of the distinctive imprint that the goes has made on the characteriza-
tion of the persona of Socrates? Specifically, do arguments that treat
such characterizations as ironical or metaphorical underestimate his-
torical continuities between the magician, the sophist, and the dialecti-
cian?
My answer to these questions turns on a reconsideration of
Socratic irony and a cautious approach to what we mean by metaphor
when applied to instances of Socratic magic. Because Plato in his
portrayals of Socrates as a goes transfers to philosophy a set of terms
first used in death ritual and later in oratory, his transfer is a
metaphor in a basic sense. But I will argue that the metaphor
preserves a number of key elements native to the original complex,
and thus does not radically attenuate the magical character of
Socrates' activity. Similarly, when Socrates is called a goes, his irony
is typically implicated in the characterization, either as the behavior
stimulating the attribution or as the response to it. But we will see that
irony, as a form of concealment or of playing with double identity, is
embedded in the complex of goeteia, which also involves the manipu-
lation of mimesis. For this reason it should not be treated unreflecti-
vely as a strategy that simply vitiates the seriousness of Socratic
magic, but instead as one that is implicated with magic in a variety of
ways.
The dialogue that most clearly and amply features the issues I
have raised is Phaedrus, and the bulk of my essay involves a close
reading of that piece. Its power lies in its synthesis of elements that
are often separated in the Platonic corpus. Notably, it holds dialectic
together with goeteia, persuasion, and eros, and in so doing harmo-
nizes activities that are strongly contrasted in other works such as Ion,
Gorgias, Republic, and Philebus. This is not to say that Phaedrus is
idiosyncratic. While its presentation of dialectic in some ways revises
what we find elsewhere in Plato, it also offers a brilliant summation
of tendencies discernible in various dialogues, both early and late,
including Phaedo, Charmides, Euthydemus, Meno, Symposium, Soph-
ist, and Laws. To appreciate these tendencies fully, we need to reckon
with the performative and rhetorical components of Socrates' speech
6 W. Burkert, "GOES: Zum griechischen 'Schamanismus'," RhM n.s., 105 (1962)

36-55.
278 MICHELLE GELLRICH
as an address to an interlocutor with a particular personality and set

of beliefs.7 The specific ways in which dialectic is magical and
psychopompic emerge from a consideration of the context in which
speech operates as a somatic activity linked to the living presence of
Socrates. In focusing on the dramatic elements of Phaedrus enmeshed
with goeteia, I am not making a case for the dialogue as Plato's last
word on dialectic. Instead, I urge that we study how Phaedrus
challenges a canonical view of dialectic that de-emphasizes its implica-
tions as a form of psychagogia. This study may in turn assist in a
reevaluation of neglected aspects of other dialogues. Integral to this
reconsideration, as I have already noted, is an assessment of Socratic
irony.
Gorgias: Speech, Love, and Enchantment
The Platonic corpus provides abundant evidence of the character

of speech as goeteia, though typically the focus is sophistic or poetic
rather than philosophic speech. From the gentle putdowns of poetry in
Ion, through the hotblooded condemnations of rhetoric in Gorgias, to
the impressive philosophical critiques of poetry and rhetoric in
Republic, Plato opposes traditional forms of logos as dangerous,
spellbinding magic. The ground covered by these works is too familiar
to require further elaboration. Suffice it to say that Plato has taken
hold of a popular understanding of the power of speech and
submitted it to a new and often corrosive attack on age-old faiths.
Indeed, we find references to the logos as a mode of enchantment as
early as Homer's epics, though the most sustained description of
magical speech before Plato is to be found in Gorgias' Encomium on
Helen.8 Because the conception of language developed in this piece
surfaces often in the Platonic dialogues, we can use it as a locus
classicus for attitudes that circulated broadly in ancient Greece and
that provided the background for much of Plato's thinking about
logos-a point borne out extensively in Eric Havelock's Preface to
Plato.9 In examining Gorgias' Encomium, however, I will be isolating
elements that are not merely troublesome to Plato but that assume a
profoundly ambiguous status in his writing. For despite his persistent
targeting of Gorgianic and sophistic views, he is far from rejecting
7 For discussions of the performative and rhetorical character of the dialogues, see
J.A. Arieti, Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama (Lanham, Md. 1991); G.R.F.
Ferrari, Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge 1987); S.
Rosen, Plato's Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image (New Haven 1983) 1-57; and
P. Friedlander, Plato: An Introduction, 2nd ed., tr. H. Meyerhoff (Princeton 1969)
230-35.
Lain Entralgo (above, n.2) 1-31.
9 Havelock does not explicitly base his argument on Gorgias' Encomium, but what
he says about the psychology of poetic performance finds strong support in the
Encomium. Also see Lain Entralgo (above, n.2) 88-100.
them altogether as treacherous influences, and in works such as

Phaedrus he actually appropriates them within a newly inspired notion
of dialectic method.
The view of speech elaborated in Gorgias' Encomium significantly
binds enchantment, persuasion, and love in a way that is often
depicted if not theorized in the visual and literary art of early
Greece.'0 Among the sculptural evidence that abounds (in reports as
well as in extant specimens), Pausanias, for example, provides a
description of a temple in Athens dedicated to Aphrodite Pandemos
and Peitho (1.22.3); in Megara he tells of a temple to Aphrodite,
under the title Praxis, attended by Peitho, Paregoros, Eros, Himeros,
and Pothos (1.43.6); and he speaks of Pheidias' statue of Zeus at
Olympia, whose base contained a relief portraying the birth of
Aphrodite greeted by Eros and "crowned by Peitho" (5.11.8). Though
magic does not overtly figure in these examples, we are in a semantic
field that involves charisma-the force of an allure that is irresistible
and spellbinding. A rich passage in Pindar's Pythian 4 bears out these
connections between eros, enchantment, and persuasion, which also
appear frequently elsewhere in Greek poetry. The long mythical
section of the ode that narrates the voyage of the Argonauts tells of
Jason's magical conquest of the magician Medea through words
inspired by the goddess of love: "The Cyprian born first brought the
bird of madness to men, and taught the wise son of Aison the charms
of entreaty, so that he could take away Medea's shame before her
parents, and so that the Hellas of her desire could excite her with the
lash of Peitho as she burned in her breast " (216-219). The conception
of love as an experience incorporating enchantment and persuasion
remains central to Greek literature-it recurs in full-blooded form in
Theocritus' second and eleventh Idylls, and it is pivotal to the action
of Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica. I will show later that it also
shapes Plato's portrayals of Socrates. But let us first note briefly what
Gorgias says about it.
In the Encomium on Helen, the mythological subject of erotic
seduction is developed partly through an explanation of the logos as a
substance, whose material characteristics inform its power to elicit
emotion and control action." Sound and the delivery of sound by a
'0 For a fuller discussion of the close bond between peitho and eros, see R.G.A.
Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy: A Study of Peitho (Cambridge 1982) 29-66; and
N. Gross, Amatory Persuasion in Antiquity: Studies in Theory and Practice (Newark,
Del. 1985). Neither, however, does much with magic, though it figures in Gross'
discussion (124-48) of Theocritus' second and eleventh Idylls. For the visual arts, see S.
Reinach, Repertoire des vases peints grecs et 6trusques (Paris 1924), under Peitho.
" For the Greek text of Gorgias' Encomium, see Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin 1951), vol. 2, fr. 11. For the psychosomatic character of
Gorgianic psychology, see C. Segal, "Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos,"
HSCP 66 (1962) 99-155; and D.B. Claus, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry Into the
Meaning of Psyche Before Plato (New Haven 1981) 141-55. On Gorgias and
enchantment, see G.B. Walsh, The Varieties of Enchantment: Early Greek Views of the
speaker whose body is an integral part of his performance determine

Alexander's success in seducing Helen. Seeing him stimulates her
desire as much as hearing him does. His presence, Gorgias would have
us believe, engraves upon her psyche images that engender love, and
his words are like incantations, epddai, whose rhythmic, repetitive
features beguile the soul by magic, goeteia. The entire process is a
magical binding ritual, in which the operator's manipulation of
language and gesture enables him to attain his desire by drawing his
object into a spell. Thus, Gorgias concludes, if Helen was seduced by
beholding Alexander or listening to his words, she is as innocent of
blame as if she had been compelled by divine necessity or brute force.
Placing his account of the logos in such a context, Gorgias
effectively identifies the allure of speech in general as erotic and
magical. It is rooted in the power of an occult substance to satisfy
desire, and this substance is itself ensconced in a charismatic person.
The divinity and the occult force of the word are explicitly named in
the Encomium on Helen: "speech is a powerful lord, which by means
of a very small and invisible body achieves the divinest works. For it
can stop fear and take away grief and bring about joy and increase
pity" (8). In a synecdochic chain, Alexander, his word, and his glance
are imbued with an extraordinary charm. Moreover, they are figured
in images of piercing and penetration, which align such intangible
modes of force as the logos with physical assault. To be seduced by
speech is to undergo the psychic equivalent of rape. Phaedrus, as we
will see, reproduces this erotic scenario and characterizes sophistic
rhetoric as a forceful masculine overcoming of a feminized audience.
Socrates stakes his difference on this predetermined territory. This is
not to say that Plato was directly responding to the Encomium on
Helen; it is unlikely that a dialogue like Phaedrus, which assimilates
so many variant strains of popular rhetoric, presumes a single
antagonist. But the point is that Gorgias expresses a typical Greek
appreciation of logos as a form of eros at the same time that he
recapitulates a tendency to figure this erotic communion in terms of
the dominant cultural model of masculine control.
The indebtedness of Gorgianic views of logos to the magical
tradition of song is obvious. Orpheus, who mesmerized inanimate
matter and natural creatures as well as humans with his music and
who travelled to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, seems to
have been the archetypal goes, and his story incorporates central
features of ancient Greek magical views: psychagogia, specifically,
influence over the souls of the dead; enchantment through musical
logos; and eros as the occasion for wonder-working.'2 We should also
Nature and Function of Poetry (Chapel Hill 1984) 80-106; and T.G. Rosenmeyer,
"Gorgias, Aeschylus, and Apate," AJP 76 (1955) 225-60.
12 Strabo 7.18 calls Orpheus a goes and says he celebrated orgies connected with
initiatory rites (teletaO).Diodorus Siculus 5.64.5-7 records the tradition that Orpheus was
a pupil of the Idaean Dactyls of Crete who were goetes. Though evidence about
note in this context Empedocles, another famous goes renowned for

his cathartic skills, who was the reputed teacher of Gorgias and who,
according to Diogenes Laertius (8.57), was the founder of rhetoric.
Diogenes records (8.59) Gorgias' claim to have been present when
Empedocles practiced magic. The linkage between magic, catharsis,
and rhetoric is significant, for through Gorgias, sophistic attitudes
sustain an appreciation of the primitive awe felt for the enchanting
and purifying power of great speakers. So do the dialogues of Plato.
Plato on Magic: Critique and Appropriation
Not only was Plato deeply struck by this "shamanistic" complex

represented by Orpheus and Empedocles, among others; despite his
frequent broadsides against it, he also perceived affinities between the
ancient wonder-worker, whose language could effect reversals, and the
figure of Socrates. He sometimes drew analogies between the Orphic
religious tradition and the view of dialectic as conversion of ethos. In
Charmides he refers to the reputed teachings of the Thracian
Zalmoxis, a famed king-healer with magical powers, in developing the
concept of sophrosyne. In this work, Socrates proffers a cure for
Charmides' headache by citing the pharmaceutical principle of Zal-
moxis, "that as one ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the
head, or the head without the body, so, too, one ought not to attempt
to cure the body without the soul" (156e). Socrates proceeds to say
that this cure of the soul is effected, again according to Zalmoxis, by
the use of certain incantations: "these incantations are the fair words,
and from these words temperance is engendered in souls, and when it
is engendered and present, there it is easy to furnish health both to the
head and the body" (Charmides 157a).
Appealing to a psychosomatic model of healing that has much in
common with a Gorgianic view of the soul, the Thracian king
sanctions a method of treating the part by treating the whole. The
continuity between physical and psychical factors is basic to his
therapeutic law. And the incantatory word, or epod, used in
conjunction with an object or amulet, in this case a leaf, is the
instrument of transformation. It is labelled a pharmakon; as an
invisible force operating on the invisible psyche, it is analagous to the
material leaf operating on the tangible sdma, or body, but its power is
prior and superior, for "without the charm the leaf would be of no
Orpheus before Plato is sparse and unclear, Simonides fr. 567 (Page) first mentions the
enchanting power of Orpheus' song; then follow Aeschylus Ag. 1629-1631; and
Euripides Bacch. 650, Cyc. 646-653, and Alc. 359. Alc. 357-362 is the first reference to
the myth about Orpheus' trip to Hades. For Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles as
goetes, see Burkert (above, n.6); Dodds (above, n.3) 135-78; and F. Graf, "Orpheus: A
Poet Among Men," Interpretations of Greek Mythology, ed. J. Bremmer (London
1987) 80-106. On Orpheus and song-magic, see W.K.C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek
Religion: A Study of the Orphic Movement (New York 1966) 1-68; and C. Segal,
Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore 1989) 1-35.
avail" (Charmides 155e). The soul, in short, through the epode, must
be properly predisposed if a cure is to be effective. Not only is it
susceptible to material properties of words, but it in turn acts on the
material body. Epitomizing a magical approach to illness, Zalmoxis
treats therapy as a psychosomatic technique whose efficacy is linked to
pleasing speech, logos kalos, which creates a prerequisite order in the
psyche, or what Socrates calls sophrosyne-the subject that the
dialogue proceeds, aporetically, to define.'3
The archaic character of beliefs about logotherapy featured in
Charmides is apparent, and some commentators have accordingly
concluded that the entire work is ironic, that it "craftily abuses" the
views about incantatory speech it sets forth. 14 Though the quasi-
physical nature of psyche in the work does not conform with the
rigorous dualism familiar to us in the middle dialogues, we should be
cautious about interpreting Socrates' attitude as skeptical toward the
cure he ostensibly embraces. Rarely is his irony so cut and dried, and
for that matter rarely, as we will see, does it reveal a simple identity
behind the mask. Socrates typically preserves key elements of the
ironized object in the process of overcoming its deficiencies. The
present dialogue offers a case in point. Pretense is undoubtedly central
to the drama of healing Charmides' headache, as the opening lines of
the dialogue make clear. Socrates follows Critias' advice "to pretend"
(155b) that he has a remedy, and as the handsome young man
approaches there is a scurrying about by those who wish to sit next to
him, during which time Socrates catches fire from seeing the inside of
Charmides' garment and loses his gift of gab. All this is in the ironic
spirit of erotic play for which Socrates is famous. But the doubleness
does not discredit the notion that the "beautiful speech" of the epjde
can order the soul so much as lead the way to the insight at the end of
the dialogue-that the "beautiful speech" capable of charming is
Socratic dialogue. Uncertain after the elenchos of what sophrosyne is,
Charmides is unwilling to pronounce decisively on the question
whether he possesses it, and agrees instead to submit himself to
Socrates: ". . . Socrates, I'm entirely convinced that I need the charm,
and there is nothing to hinder me from being charmed by you until
you say that it's enough" (176b). In the face of an obvious move to
revise the epode by replacing Zalmoxis' words with Socrates', the
interpretive problem becomes one of explaining how Socratic speech
enchants. Charmides does not provide a clear response to this
13 I rely on Lain Entralgo (above, n.2) 114-27, though I disagree with his
conclusions about the rationalized epode in Plato. R. Kotansky, "Incantations and
Prayers for Salvation on Inscribed Greek Amulets," Magika Hiera (above, n.l) 107-37,
notes that "the first explicit reference to an amulet applied with an incantation occurs in
Plato's Charmides (155e-156e)" (p. 109).
14 Such an approach to Charmides is exemplified by Claus (above, n.l 1) 169-72.
question, though it does provocatively suggest that the answer lies in
the confluence of eros, enchantment, and psychagogia. Phaedrus will
spell out the ties more clearly.
It is no accident that a dialogue whose chief subject is sophrosyne
should also provide a heavy dose of magical themes. Plato repeatedly
configures these terms together. In the Republic, Books 2 and 3, when
the subject of training the guardians arises, we encounter passages in
which enchantment is to be used to temper and moderate the youthful
soul (41 la-414e). Musical rhythms in conjunction with purified,
canonical texts form a new curriculum whose purpose is to instill
order in the soul and to prepare it for the higher calling of dialectic
and guardianship. A similar attitude toward enchantment and the
epode is found in Laws, which repeatedly treats enchantment as a vital
element of education and civic governance. The centrality of incanta-
tion in this dialogue is partly explained by a passage that regards the
power of the epode as rooted in human biology (Laws 790c-791b).
The subject is training the infant's soul, and the Athenian Stranger
proposes that it would be ideal if babies could spend all their time at
sea, so to speak. Internal distress is remedied not by stillness or silence
but by movement and song, which put a spell on infants and induce
calm. External motion, rhythmic and repetitive, is a homeopathic cure
for internal commotion in a process explicitly likened to the curative
rites of the Corybants and the Dionysiac frenzy of the Bacchae.
Although the previous example points to the automatic character
of the epdde, its persuasive power to mold the soul and predispose it
to proper training is obvious in passages of the Laws concerned, as
the former section of Republic is, with the education of children and
adults. Here is a vivid example: after the Athenian Stranger has set
forth his plan of ordering the state by establishing three choruses,
composed of different age groups and led by different gods, he
summarizes his remarks by proclaiming that "every man and child,
free and slave, female and male-indeed the whole city-must never
stop incanting to itself these things we have described" (Laws 665c).
For incantation, more effectively than any other force except violence,
leads the soul by persuading it. Other passages bear out confidence in
the persuasive power of epodai, which are relied upon to strengthen
political order and to overcome doubt (cf. Laws 726e, 903d-e).
Epo5dai serve a similar function in Phaedo (77e-78a), when
Socrates addresses the fear that Simmias and Cebes feel about the
separation of psyche from soma at death. It is the child in us,
Socrates maintains, who is afraid of death as though it were a
bogeyman. "What is necessary, said Socrates, is to say a magic spell
over [this child] every day until you have charmed away his fears."
Even if one must search all countries and foreign races for such a
magician, the effort would be worth it, "for you could not spend
money more opportunely." The gentle irony of Socrates' advice does
not undermine his suggestion, for he is in effect urging his compan-
ions to find for themselves someone to replace him-the only one they
presently know who could charm away their fear of death. He directs
this remark in particular to Cebes who is more impressed than
Simmias is with Socrates' powers of enchantment and who, perhaps
for that reason, is usually the recipient of Socrates' more argumenta-
tive speeches.'5 That Socratic discourse is itself the epode Simmias and
Cebes would seek is only implicitly advanced in this passage, as it is in
Charmides. But the implication is worth noting, for it will be
developed more explicitly in other dialogues.
We may not be surprised that Plato found incantation helpful in
averting fear and controlling a civic population. But this valuation can
appear in works, such as Republic and Laws, that are famous for
their searing condemnation of goeteia as charlatanry: "those who
have become like beasts and think that the gods are either careless or
bribeable, who feeling contempt for humans lead the souls of many,
and who undertaking to persuade the gods, by enchanting them with
sacrifices and prayers, try to bring down private citizens and whole
houses and cities for the sake of money"-such are sentenced to
confinement in the central prison (Laws 909b). "And if it seems that a
person is like an injurer by the use of spells or charms or incantations
. . .he will be put to death" (Laws 933d). The problem with goeteia
is that it appeals by promising "quick fixes" for illness, automatic
profits for the disadvantaged, or certain success for those who seek to
harm others (Laws 909, 932e-933e). It is the short and expedient route
to an end which should be approached by a longer way.
The coexistence of such condemnatory attitudes with favorable
assessments of enchantment characterizes Plato's work throughout his
career. Lain Entralgo and de Romilly have seen in the paradoxical
uses of goeteia in the Platonic corpus a dilemma that may be resolved
by construing the positive senses as metaphorical and transformed by
the workings of dialectic: the revised goeteia, according to this view, is
a figurative way of explaining the capacity of a purified, philosophical
language to lead the soul, and it is quite distinct from primitive magic.
In this view we can therefore trace a development from archaic uses of
the concept to later, rationalized ones; and in this history Plato's
achievement is to have made the epode and the goes into able tools
for articulating his dialectical project. 16 It will take a reading of
Phaedrus to demonstrate why such an approach is unsatisfactory; but
let me say at the outset that its pitfall lies in assuming that Socratic
strategies of language borrowed from magic can be fundamentally
differentiated from magic, and that the epode in the texts of Plato has
been thoroughly overhauled by reason. It is questionable how "ra-
'I See R. Burger, The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (New Haven 1984) 85-87 for a
fuller discussion of the difference between Simmias as a lover of Socrates' argumenta-
tive powers and Cebes as a lover of Socrates' enchanting powers.
6 This is the argument of Lain Entralgo 114-26; see also de Romilly 32-37 (both
above, n.2).
tional" is the epode in the foregoing examples, where its semi-

automatic, biologically grounded character is often apparent. But
none of these passages, after all, is overtly concerned with the
language of dialectic, so that they seem to prove only that Plato found
social uses for incantation. He is known to resort to tactics whose
moral foundation is doubtful, but whose efficacy in changing behavior
has been demonstrated. It remains to be seen how such valuations of
the epode as one finds in Charmides, Phaedo, Republic, and Laws
bear on philosophical discourse.
Phaedrus: Magic as Ironic Homeopathy

Although the terms goeteia, goes, and epode are not found as
often in Phaedrus as in other works, this dialogue is nonetheless full
of ways of speaking and acting that are joined to this complex, and
from them we can appreciate how much Plato owes to the sophistic
configuration of goeteia from which he often appears to distance
himself and the philosophical logos. Because the dialogue features a
systematic presentation of dialectical method, this indebtedness is all
the more striking and worthy of explanation.
The character of the purified rhetorical art, as Plato aims to
define it at the end of his dialogue, takes its point of departure from
the scene depicted in the beginning. But it is facile to draw an
opposition between sophistic and dialectical rhetoric on the basis of
the differences between Lysias' and Socrates' speeches. For one thing,
the sophist's speech on the non-lover offers a prototype for the
ultimate nonreciprocity of the relationship between the lover and the
forms, which remain self-contained and autonomous in the face of
desire.'7 Then again, there is a problem of explaining not only the
predominance of mythic speech at the culmination of Socrates'
self-corrected account of love and the soul, but the persistence of
rhetorical features that Plato, on a traditional reading, would seek to
overcome in a rehabilitated art. Notably, seduction remains very much
a part of the new rhetoric, and so does the lure of sound, gesture, and
the charismatic body as forces capable of changing people's minds.
The unresolved ambivalence in the work toward the emotive and
magical charis associated with goeteia is at the heart of Socrates'
irony.18
The logos is explicitly figured as a charm in Phaedrus, since the
written speech of Lysias, the biblion which Phaedrus suggestively
hides under his cloak, moves the interlocutors outside the city walls
17 See R. Burger, Plato's Phaedrus: A Defense of a

Philosophic Art of Writing
(Alabama 1980) 27-30.
18 M.C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy
and Philosophy (Cambridge 1986) 200-33, includes poetry and eros in the life of
philosophy. See also S. Benardete, The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy: Plato's
Gorgias and Phaedrus (Chicago 1991) 103-93.
into the sensuous countryside. From the beginning the seduction of

speech is identified more generally with erotic seduction.'9 Phaedrus'
responses to Lysias and later to Socrates, and Socrates' typically ironic
responses to the handsome youth he has just encountered, all converge
around a love for the logos, which is also a logos about love. The
cross-currents of meaning bring eros, sophistry, and enchantment into
a complicated eddying, as desire becomes both the subject matter of
discourse and its dramatized effect. Phaedrus is constructed as an
involved play on the convertibility of the terms contained in the
epigram from Symposium. Depending on how one approaches the
dialogue, the subjects of love, magic, and sophistry are predicated by
the other terms. One assumes the philosopher is outside the configura-
tion as the grand manipulator of the transformations. But the
dialogue not only brings Socrates into the play of meanings; it
eventually reveals the embeddedness of dialectic in the terms it strives
to transcend. Let us follow closely the steps that get us to this insight,
beginning with a subject that provides an overview of moves typical of
the work as a whole.
The homoeroticism of Phaedrus is central to the dialogue's form
and content.20 Not only is it the subject of Lysias' speech, but it
shapes the dynamics of response between the two interlocutors. Into
this male-centered characterization of eros that dominates theme and
structure, Plato weaves a counterpoint of heterosexual desire. The
scene of the conversation is haunted by the overtones of a sexual
assault described in the first exchange of the dialogue. Close to the
place where Phaedrus and Socrates recline along the banks of the
Ilissus a mythical rape once occurred: Oreithuia, who was at play with
her girl-friend Pharmaceia, was forcibly seized by Boreas. The episode
is emblematic of a well-known type of seduction in Greek literature
that continually resurfaces as the conversation winds its way to the
end.2' The female position in sex is to be overcome by force, stripped
of one's will to refuse, and filled with a seed one may not desire. By
contrast, homoerotic love involves mutual consent, rationality, and
self-mastery. To the extent that the lovers in a male relationship are
passionately covetous and suffer emotional frenzy, they bear the
marks of a feminized eroticism;22 or so the popular wisdom articulated
'9 On the logos and seduction, see J. Derrida, "La pharmacie de Platon," La
Dissemination (Paris 1972) 74-84. Ferrari (above, n.7) has a full reading of the
relationship between background and foreground in Phaedrus.
20 On this subject see P. duBois, "Phallocentrism and Its Subversion in Plato's
Phaedrus," Arethusa 18 (1985) 91-103.
21 See F. Zeitlin, "Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth," in Rape, ed. S.
Tomaselli and R. Porter (New York 1986) 122-51.

22 See D.M. Halperin, "Why is Diotima a Woman? Platonic Eros and the
Figuration of Gender," in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in
the Ancient Greek World, ed. D. Halperin et al. (Princeton 1990) 257-308; and (in the
same volume) J.J. Winkler, "Laying Down the Law: The Oversight of Men's Sexual
Behavior in Classical Athens," 171-209.
by Lysias and by Socrates in his first speech has it. But the two
models of eros become a pretext for the development of a different
exercise in love.
Plato seems to plant these models of sexual intercourse early in
the dialogue in order to depict Socrates not as a stable character in
one of the scenarios but as a moveable identity who passes from one
configuration of desire to another, and within each from aggressor to
passive receptacle.23 His metamorphic powers and his escape from a
binary logic are characteristic of him. This will seem an improbable
claim in view of the assaults that Socrates frequently makes upon the
sophists for their manipulation of mimesis and multiple identity. But
to conclude from these assaults that Socrates himself does not engage
in such manipulations is to overlook a good deal of evidence in
Plato's dialogues to the contrary. Thus, when he embarks upon his
first speech in Phaedrus, he claims he is filled with an influx of
inspiration and mastered by a higher force: he feels something welling
up in his breast ("it must be that I have been filled to the brim
through my ears from external sources, like a water pitcher," 235d),
and under compulsion from Phaedrus he proceeds with his head
covered in an embarrassed fashion suggesting female modesty but also
sexual allure. By contrast, at the end of the dialogue we find him
articulating the project of dialectic in the metaphor of masculine
insemination of a partner's soul. Between these bracketing moments,
we find other variations in Socrates' erotic persona. The instability of
his identity, obvious in the play with gendering to which we will
return, is a miniature of a broader dynamic at work in Phaedrus: to
lead the soul of the young man with whom he has taken up, Socrates
dons a number of masks. His irony is implicated in his disguise, and
both are integral to the psychagogic journey toward truth. But we
should be cautious about assuming the usual understanding of this
irony. For in a traditional sense of the term closely linked with
Socrates-a sense that has recently been reassessed by Gregory
Vlastos-it always involves a reality behind the pretense: it is a
structure of doubleness in which appearance is belied by a second,
true meaning opposed to the first.24 The difficulty with this view is
that Socrates' performances often involve a series of tranformations
23
For this point see duBois (above, n.20).
24 G. Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca 1991) 21-44. His
argument departs from earlier treatments such as that of Werner Boder, Die sokratische
Ironie in den platonischen Fruhdialogen (Amsterdam 1973), who maintains that the
literal uses of eironeia in Plato retain the old derogatory sense of deception and
duplicity. Vlastos shows that, contrary to this now common view, eir6neia undergoes
revision in the dialogues, for Plato sometimes uses it to mean transparent dissembling,
which eventually becomes the normative view of Socratic irony. My own view of
Socratic irony as regressive in structure has been shaped by Paul de Man, "The
Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. C.S. Singleton
(Baltimore 1969) 173-209, whose theory is influenced by Friedrich Schlegel. On these
uses of "irony," see E. Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Seattle 1990).
that never come to rest in a simple truth about his identity. A study of
erotic force and submission in the dialogue will elucidate these points.
The attraction exerted by Lysias' speech is inseparable from a
total performance of which Phaedrus was not merely a spectator but
an imitator:
Oh Phaedrus, if I don't know my Phaedrus, I've forgotten
myself. . . . I know very well that when listening to Lysias,
he listened not once, but often urged him to repeat, and
Lysiaseagerlyobeyed. Yet not even this was enough for him,
but finally taking up the book, he examined what he most
desired. And doing this, sitting from early morning,he went
for a walk when he got tired, having learnedthe speech, by
god, all the way through. . . . He was going outside the wall
in order to practiceit. (Phaedrus 228a-b)
Socrates' description of his friend is marked by humorous dissonance.
Lysias, a master of the plain style and a speaker known for his lack of
interest in pathos, has worked his listener up to a high pitch-the kind
of pitch associated with the grand style, which is typically replete with
passion. Moreover, he has done so with a speech that debunks passion
and praises cool, rational control. Although the characterization of
Phaedrus is ironic, Phaedrus himself never regards it as hyperbolic or
in need of correction. Thus, the dialogue sets in place a response to
sophistic oratory that is disturbing partly because the speech itself isn't
worth much. Whether or not one thinks that the spontaneous, loose
arrangement of the points is artful in its apparent artlessness, the
speech gets a thumbs down on moral grounds.25 Behind the trappings
of his novel, paradoxical thesis that one ought to choose the non-lover
over the lover, Lysias' speaker has taken the conventional social
expectation of rational control in male sexual activity and played it
out along the lines of a self-serving hedonism aimed at decorous
self-gratification without concern for the good. It will take Socrates'
revision of this speech to uncover the unwitting truth about Lysias'
aloof lover. Phaedrus' logomania, which is above all a craving for
performance, blinds him to the ethical limitations of the sophist, who
emphasizes the dazzling surface qualities of his thesis and its copious
arguments for all they are worth. Lysias has drawn the young man
into a state of fascination-of obsessive erotic desire-which obliter-
ates ordinary awareness and suspends routine activity. Morever, he
has contaminated Phaedrus, in a sense which I will explain, with his
performance, with the result that the acolyte yearns for the idol,
imitating his voice and gesture and seeking occasions to indulge
himself with more speech of the same kind.
In emphasizing the performative character of Lysias' speech, I do
not mean to overlook its status as a product of writing-a status of
which we are reminded not only by the biblion which Phaedrus hides
under his clothes, but by Lysias' reputation as one of the foremost
25
See Ferrari (above, n.7) 45-59, 88-95; and also Nussbaum (above, n.18) 200-33.
logographers of his day. Moreover, as others have argued, Lysias'

condemnation of eros is based upon the illusion of the speech as an
actual address, for the very notion of a true non-lover would seem to
preclude the possibility of desire for the favors of a particular
beloved.26 Compelling as this point is, it does not obviate the
importance of Lysias' speech as an example of performed writing,
whose allure is simultaneously logographic and somatic, that is,
connected with the dynamics of oral recitation. The erotic attraction
of speech, as we will see, though primally located in the drama of a
living body that speaks and moves, may also inhabit writing, as
becomes clear at the end of the dialogue.
To summarize this portion of our inquiry, in Phaedrus as in
Gorgias' Encomium on Helen, the peitho of oratorical performance is
identified with eros. But the scenario depicted by Plato allows us to
formulate the relation of these terms more specifically. The situation
of an older, more successful male lover wooing a younger novice is a
paradigm for peitho as the activity of pleading that is always implicit
in eros and always seeking to overcome difference. The hierarchical
construction of identity is at the bottom of the "mystery" that
inspires this particular attraction and that makes courtship in general
an activity of transcending social distance. Lysias' self-staging as a
non-lover heightens the element of mystery that drives the pursuit. We
may just as well say, however, that eros is implicit in peitho as the
abstraction of sexual desire expressed through a striving for identifica-
tion in a context of disagreement. Should one succumb to the lover or
the non-lover? Where opinions are divided, persuasion like eros
aspires to transcend difference and to attain communion with the
audience.27
Of course, there are varieties of eros, and this becomes quite clear
when Socrates enters the scene. On Lysias' understanding, the other is
simply the occasion for the fulfillment of one's own desire, which is
allegedly always under control since it is not based on passionate
attachment. Plato would have us understand the bond between the
sophist and his audience along these lines: Lysias as speechmaker is in
the position of the non-lover about whom he speaks, since he delivers
a cool, offhanded piece of rhetoric that seduces Phaedrus without
concern for his moral situation. Eros and peithd in such a configura-
tion are narcissistic. Love turns back on itself and avoids reciprocation
or recognition of another's needs. Persuasion is self-affirming and
indifferent to all except the thrill of acclaim. But what Lysias presents
as a relationship between controlled male equals becomes a form of
charismatic bondage at the rhetorical level, with Phaedrus in the
feminized, ravished position of receiving without resistance. The usual
course of such sophistic bondage is for the victim to reproduce the
26
See Burger (above, n. 17) 19-30 and Benardete (above, n. 18) 108-11.
27
My formulation of peitho and eros is indebted to K. Burke, A Rhetoric of
Motives (Berkeley 1969).
self-centered structure of desire with someone else, to become a master

of the logos by inventing a new slave. Phaedrus can only do this
through imitation, and that is precisely the stage at which we find him
when Socrates arrives and sees that the young man needs a feminized
partner to mimic the effects of Lysias' seduction. But the encounter
does not go as Phaedrus expects.
Recognizing in Lysias' and Phaedrus' mutual attraction a pale,
attenuated version of the sacred impulse to surmount estrangement in
the search for ultimate spiritual union, Socrates uses irony to lure
Phaedrus into a new liaison that will dispel the mystifications of
sophistry. As always, the position to be refuted in a Platonic dialogue
is invested with some value. Phaedrus has met "one who ails from the
desire to listen to speech, and when [Socrates] saw him, seeing him he
was pleased that he would have one to share in the Corybantic frenzy
with him, and he bid him to lead on" (Phaedrus 228b). These words
are Socrates' own, and in using them to describe the attitude of the
star-struck youth with whom he has taken up, he tacitly embarks upon
a reversal of the narcissistic domination exercised by Lysias' speech.
He cuts short the mimetic chain of sophistic rhetoric-its unthinking,
self-centered creation of victims who in turn become victimizers-by
seeming to submit to it. Manipulating references to sickness in
describing Phaedrus' and his own addiction to the logos, he sets in
motion a homeopathic treatment of illness. For Socrates to describe
himself as "sharing in the Corybantic frenzy along with" Phaedrus is
to invoke a rite that could be used to cure a bad condition of the soul
by the intoxicating spell of rhythmic sound. The Corybantic rites,
which we have already mentioned in connection with the epode in
Laws, are of the kind known as teletai: their "chief function was not
worship of gods but the direct benefit of the participant. . . . Those
who resorted to the teletai sought relief from some anxiety with which
they were afflicted and assurance of future happiness. They believed
that they were cleansed by the rites of something that was a blight on
their lives."28 Orpheus, the archetypal goes, was known in antiquity as
the one who first introduced the Greeks to teletai, and though we
cannot be sure about the details of Orphic initiatory rites, they almost
certainly included epodai, as Lain Entralgo has argued.29 In the
classification of maniai within his second speech, Socrates describes
the beneficial madness of these ceremonies (244d-e). The cure is
homeopathic in eliciting responses like those of the disorder, or as
Hackforth says in his commentary on Phaedrus, "the frenzy is
conceived as at once the climax of the malady and the source of
See I.M. Linforth, "The Corybantic Rites in Plato," UCPCPh 13 (1946) 121-62.
28
Diodorus Siculus 5.64.4 says of Orpheus that he was the first to bring teletai and
29
mysteria to the Greeks. For discussions of Orpheus and teletai, see Guthrie (above,
n.12) 17, 201-04 and Lain Entralgo (above, n.2) 43-107.
SOCRATICMAGIC: ENCHANTMENT, IRONY, AND PERSUASION 291
healing."30 Significantly, women were the chief beneficiaries of the

teletai known as the Corybantic rites, a point that underscores
Socrates' mimesis of a feminine role at this stage. In Phaedrus, the
twist on the model of telestic mania is that the disease Socrates aspires
to heal is felt as pleasurable by Phaedrus-but, then again, pleasure is
often approached as morbid in the dialogues.
Catharsis and Goeteia
What unfolds, therefore, is a ritual purification or catharsis; and

Socrates' role as healer is linked with his feminization-with his
apparent submission to Phaedrus' disease and with his assumption of
a Corybantic persona. In representing the encounter of his two
characters in the language of a homeopathic cathartic rite, Plato
suggests that the narcissistic fascination in which Socrates finds his
young companion is an erotic aberration, which can be overcome by
manipulating imitation. Falling into a manic role-appearing to
duplicate Lysias' effect on Phaedrus by joining in his Corybantic
frenzy-Socrates can exert the kind of control only available to a
pretender. As I have already mentioned, the description of Phaedrus'
soul as manically inspired is humorous. Such humor is a textual signal
that cues us to irony. But the irony in this case does not cast doubt on
the truthfulness of Socrates' attribution of a disturbed state to his
companion as much as it distances Socrates from a truly like response.
The distancing is especially apparent in Socrates' words to Phaedrus
after he recites the speech: "A marvellous speech, my friend, and I'm
quite struck by it. I feel this on account of you, Phaedrus, because
while looking at you, you seemed to me to be delighted by the speech
as you were reading it. So thinking that you know more than I do
about such things, I followed you, and as I was following, I shared in
the Bacchic frenzy with you as if you were a god" (234d). In this
passage, the same metaphor occurs as the one used before the speech,
except that sumbakcheuein is substituted for sugkorubantian. And
Socrates proceeds in this staged manic condition to put down the
manic experience of eros.
The use of cathartic ritual in Phaedrus recalls the famous role
accorded to catharsis in Phaedo, which proposes that philosophy is
the practice of purifying the soul of the body, and in Sophist, which
defines the dialectical method of elenchos as the "greatest and chiefest
of all purifications" (230d). But the contexts and implications of this
activity in the three works seem divergent.31 In Phaedo it is a question
30 Plato's Phaedrus, tr. and comm. R. Hackforth (Cambridge 1952) 59. For a
recent work that challenges the homeopathic understanding of catharsis, see E.S.
Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton 1992).
3' For discussions of the role of catharsis in Plato's dialogues, see L. Moulinier, Le
pur et l'impur dans la pensee des Grecs d'Homere a Aristote (Paris 1952); R.E.
Cushman, Therapeia: Plato's Conception of Philosophy (Chapel Hill 1958) 55-59,
161-80; and Lain Entralgo (above, n.2) 127-38.
of removing sensual contaminants from the soul: the body is explicitly

featured as a pollutant muddying the waters of the soul's ascent to the
world of forms. But in Phaedrus it is a question of purifying the soul
by using the body as a psychagogic instrument, rather like the way it
is used by Diotima in Symposium as an essential vehicle for
transcendence to the ultimate erotic vision of forms. The drama of
catharsis in Phaedrus, like the efficacy of the epode described in
Charmides, casts doubt on the idealism of a doctrine that would treat
the soul as restorable to its pristine state by removing the physical
dirt. This point makes us recall the moment already noted in Phaedo
when Socrates urges his friends to seek out a goes who can remove
from their souls the fear of death. He is himself such a magician and
purifier, and the performative context of the dialogue makes us see
that his presence and his soothing words charm the soul into acquiring
the sophrosyne that is the precondition for a life of philosophy. In
short, the drama of Phaedo, with its tenderly human interactions
between Socrates and the close circle of friends who accompany him
when he dies, complicates the programmatic teaching by showing how
the body and its language assist the goal of converting the soul and
bringing it to a place beyond. The socially interactive character of
philosophy is featured with moving grace and force in this work. Thus
the distance between this earlier work and the later one narrows once
the dialogical drama is taken into account.
The case of Sophist is more difficult since in this work Socrates is
replaced by the Elean Stranger. But the teaching about catharsis seems
quite compatible with the doctrine of Phaedo. After initial efforts to
define the sophist, a fifth division of the term is advanced, which
begins by collecting various operations that constitute the techne
diakritike or the art of separating.32 Through a series of divisions
which themselves reflect the art being defined, the Stranger concludes
"that part of the art of separation is purificatory (kathartike), that
part concerning the soul we have defined, and under that, the
instructional art (didaskalike), and under that again, the educational
art (paideutike). Within the educational art, the refutation concerned
with the vain appearance of wisdom (doxosophian), let us say, in the
account that has disclosed itself to us, is nothing but the sophistry of
noble lineage" (231b). This purificatory art, of course, whose aim is
paideia, describes the Socratic elenchos. The problem posed by the
dialogue, however, is why the dialectical purifier should be called a
sophist, especially since his aim seems exactly the opposite of the
sophist defined in the earlier divisions of the dialogue, whose function
is to induce the false conceit of wisdom. Once again, those who see
Socratic irony or comedy undermining any serious purpose in this
32 For discussions of this passage in Sophist see F.M. Cornford, Plato's Theory of
Knowledge: The Theaetetus and the Sophist of Plato (London 1935) 177-87, and Rosen
(above, n.7) 115-31.
strange turn of conversation seem intent upon preserving the canonical
dichotomy of philosopher and sophist rather than exploring possible
reasons for the unexpected continuity between the two. I suggest that
the linkage is facilitated by terms that are literally absent but
conceptually present throughout this discussion of catharsis, although
they are very much a part of the later discussion of mimesis: I mean
goeteia and goes. As we have seen, Plato inherited a tradition in
which the purificatory activity was identified with magic and with the
magician's capacity to effect a reversal in the souls of things. This
psychagogy had already, historically, been grafted onto the persua-
sive power of the sophist-a point affirmed almost incidentally
by a passage in Cratylus, which declares priests and sophists to
be experts in purificatory operations (396e). What Plato is imagin-
ing in Sophist is a revision of this psychagogic function in such a
way as to produce a sophistry "of noble lineage." But Phaedrus
allows us to appreciate how much this new sophistry remains indebted
to tactics of ironic concealment, despite the teaching of Sophist, which
would seek to distance the dialectical psychopomp from the mimesis
of the traditional rhetor. The goal of dialectic is not the goal of
sophistry, but its methods in many cases overlap. Let us now return to
Phaedrus to conclude our study of how the cathartic process is
enacted.
Ostensibly seduced by the logos that Phaedrus recites, Socrates
places himself in a position from which he can seduce: he seeks to
displace the rival leader by imitating the effect he has had on the
follower. In this way the vicious circle of narcissism is broken. Why?
Because Socrates' mask (his duplication of Phaedrus' response) elicits
a recognition of the split between self and other. Phaedrus reads the
irony, and thus sees Socrates as different from the manic individual he
is pretending to be. This illumination makes way for others. The
doubleness of Socrates, which announces itself as such, enables an
appreciation of the difference between subject and object, precisely
what the narcissist does not understand. Knowledge, in short, arises
from ironic self-differentiation. Socrates' elaboration of the dialectical
method later in the dialogue clarifies this. But the whole process
depends upon his first giving way-or appearing to give way-to the
seductive logos that has entrapped his young friend.
At work in Socrates' cathartic, homeopathic irony is the principle
of sympathetic response: one cannot lead the soul unless he imitates or
identifies with the one to be led. In the words of one of Erasmus'
characters in Ciceronianus who looks to cure someone suffering in
just the way Phaedrus does, "there is no better way to heal them than
to pretend that you have the same trouble."33 The key concept is
33 Desiderius Erasmus, Ciceronianus, Or A Dialogue on the Best Style of

Speaking,
tr. Izora Scott (New York 1908) 20.
"pretense." Socrates' success has everything to do with seeming to be

entranced, with entering into the condition of the young man he seeks
to cure, and thus insinuating himself into a position from which he
can take up the reins. His charisma-his ability to draw as if by divine
force-is embedded in this sympathy. Responding to the needs of his
partner, he takes his ethos from the partner who then confers upon
him the recognition of one acting with special powers.34 Ultimately,
this strategy is formulated as a principle of Aristotle's Rhetoric-that
persuasion depends upon the process of the speaker taking his
premises and his moral character from his listeners (1395bl-20).
Dependent upon the realization that there is a second persona
behind the facade, Socrates' irony quickly turns into a shadow game,
for he uncovers not a "true self" but another mask. Playing the
Corybant while denigrating erotic frenzy, he then purifies himself after
his first speech and becomes the unveiled, unpossessed mythologizer
of the second speech, who washes away his distasteful report with a
new logos extolling the virtues of mania. Apologizing for its poetical
language designed to please Phaedrus, he becomes the dialectician of
the concluding portion, but one whose character is a strange hybrid,
part inseminator and part midwife of philosophical truth. Only with
difficulty can we stabilize an identity behind the shifting images, and
that fact is reflected in the problems that have historically attended the
interpretation of Socrates' character in this dialogue. His irony marks
a performance that is too fluid to fix by a method of dialectical
separation and division. That is why a traditional understanding of
irony, which assumes an accessible essence behind the dissimulated
front, is inadequate for interpreting the figure we encounter in Plato's
works. The play with deferred identity is in fact tactical: it serves the
purpose of psychagogia, of moving the soul forward in a continual
search driven by the mysteries of courtship, that is, by the elusive,
ironic personae of Socrates.
We would do well to recall the similarity between the homeo-
pathic scenario we have just studied in Phaedrus and another one in
Meno. In the latter work, Socrates' leading of his interlocutor is again
situated in a context where he takes on the same character and
disposition as the one whose mind he seeks to change. But more
significantly for our purposes, this dialogue explicitly identifies the
mimesis involved in sympathetic response with goeteia. The discussion
of arete has reached an impasse, and the flustered Meno, who was
34 For the definition of charisma that I rely upon here and that has been most
influential in modern times, see M.Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of
Interpretive Sociology, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, 3 vols. (New York 1968) 1:242-54,
3:1111-56. For another reading of Plato indebted to Weber on charisma, see H. Berger,
Jr., "Facing Sophists: Socrates' Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras," Representations 5
(1984) 66-91.
sure he knew what arete is, has unwittingly assisted Socrates in the
refutation of his third attempt at definition. Bothered and bewildered,
he laments:
Socrates, I heard before I met you that it was nothing else
but a case of you yourself being in doubt and makingothers
doubt, too. But now, it seems to me, you are bewitchingme
and druggingme and simply putting me underyour spells so
that I have become full of perplexity. If I may joke, you
appear to me to be entirely like the flat stingrayin appear-
ance and in other respects. For it makes numb the one who
approachesand touches it. And you seem to have done some
such thing to me right now. (Meno 80a)
Socrates responds to the charge of goeteia by noting: "As for me, if
the stingray paralyzes others only through being paralyzed itself, then
I am like it. But not otherwise. It isn't that, knowing my way, I
perplex other people; rather, being at a loss myself, I make others feel
at a loss, too" (Meno 80c-d). The state of being perplexed, called
aporia and linked with the "narcotic" power of the narke, or
stingray, describes the leader and the follower.
In a way that parallels Phaedrus, Socratic perplexity is manipu-
lated as a tactic: it is part of a larger drama involving irony, mimesis,
and teaching. To move the stung soul of Meno, Socrates features
himself as stung, too. The coalescence seems crucial to the psychago-
gic odyssey. The fact of the matter is that Socrates is very much
motivated to continue the inquiry, and urges Meno to examine and
seek with him what arete is. And the elenchos lumbers on, swallowing
up Meno's paradox that if you don't know what something is, how
can you search for it or know it when you find it, and if you do know
it, why look for it at all. The conclusion, in which Socrates advances
the un-Platonic claim that virtue is right opinion and given to us by
the gods, leaves us wondering whether the break in the apory is to be
taken seriously; and as often happens Socrates recedes into an enigma.
For our purposes, the importance of Meno is twofold: it invites
us to see the narcotic state in which Socrates finds himself in the
middle of the dialogue as a mimetic mask donned to serve the needs
of another, and it affirms the value of irony as the producer of
psychagogic mysteries. Socrates is a goes partly because of this
ever-shifting doubleness in his sympathetic activity, for he is able to
fall under the influence of an emotional stimulus, while at the same
time controlling it to effect an end. Magic is ironic homeopathy. Its
aim is cathartic, for it aspires to remove the contaminants that
obstruct the path of philosophical inquiry; and it uses the body, the
charismatic presence of Socrates, to effect the cleansing. In the
process it calls into doubt the viability of a doctrine that would
classify the body as dirt. To repeat, dialogical performance compli-
cates programmatic teaching and prevents the explicit level of argu-
ment from claiming a monopoly on the truth about the human quest
for knowledge.
Magic, Mimesis, and the Leader of Souls
That the goeteia of persuasion is intertwined with mimesis

appears repeatedly in the Platonic dialogues, and the linking often
works to the mutual discredit of the terms.35 Such is the case in the
critique of imitation in Book 10 of Republic (598d), where the
mimetes is a goes who deceives others into believing that, since he can
represent all craftsmen and the objects they produce, he is all-wise.
Earlier, in Book 2 of Republic (380d) where some of the same
problems of mimesis arise, Socrates rejects the poetic habit of
describing god as the cause of all things, saying: "Do you think that
god is a magician and able to appear by design at different times in
different forms, at one time being himself and then changing his form
into many shapes, and at another deceiving us and making us believe
such things about him. . . ?" A passage in Statesman(303c) similarly
connects the imitator with the magician, but adds the sophistes to the
list. This move is anticipated in Sophist (235a), when the Elean
Stranger engages in a division of mimesis in order to ascertain the
precise character of the sophist who is not "of noble lineage":
"Concerning the sophist, then, tell me. Isn't it now clear that he is
some sort of magician insofar as he is an imitator of things that are?"
After Theaetetus suggests that he is one of those who shares in play,
the Stranger affirms that the sophist inhabits the general class of
wonder-workers, and is a maker of semblances (phantasmata) pro-
duced by the body without knowledge of the things imitated (265-268).
We should again cite the epigram taken from Symposium (203d),
which does not specifically call Eros a mimetes, but whose context
makes clear that his very nature is "in between" and metamorphic-
he is the offspring of Poros and Penia, and adapts himself to the
exigencies of the moment. That is why he is a magician and a sophist.
In works such as these, mastery of the logos is associated with
imitative expertise and the changing of identity. This protean behavior
in the service of psychagogia is dangerous magic.
But the criticism does not prevent Socrates from being depicted as
a wielder of such magic. Particularly in Phaedrus, a dialogue
announcing a reformed philosophical rhetoric, the emergence of the
new does not depend exclusively upon the use of rational arguments to
compel sophists to change their ways; it incorporates ancient tech-
niques of mimetic and charismatic enchantment usually deemed
foreign to the spirit of dialectic. In fact, Socrates' conduct is aptly
described by the division of mimesis in Sophist (267-268) labelled
"imitation in accord with knowledge (met' epistemes)," that is, taking
on the character of another with whose personality and traits one is
familiar-precisely the case I have argued for Socrates' sympathetic
response toward Phaedrus. This class is dichotomized from the class
35 See Burkert (above, n.6).

associated with the tarnished sophist, namely, "imitation in accord

with appearance (meta doxes)." There is a difference between Socratic
and sophistic uses of mimesis. But we should also appreciate how far
along the path of division we have come in Sophist when we
unexpectedly encounter a description that could apply to Socrates. I
say unexpectedly because the analysis of mimesis in the dialogue is
cast within the framework of being and non-being-a metaphysical
problem that mimesis complicates by participating in both categories.
An odd third term that cannot be embraced within Eleatic opposi-
tions, mimesis disrupts the ontology of either/or, and herein lies both
its danger and its power. Socrates, the philosopher of true being,
enacts his inquiry with methods that productively engage the ironic
illusions that are part of the slippery world of mimesis, though his is a
mimesis grounded in knowing.
His participation in the strategies of the goes is not surprising,
given the morphology of this figure as a psychopomp who presides
over rituals of the dead and who ensures that the soul of the deceased
passes peacefully into the afterlife. As Burkert has shown, the goes is
crucial to the process of reestablishing social equilibrium through a
rite of passage that adapts the living and the dead to a new condition.
Psychagogia originally develops in this context; it refers literally to the
activity of the goes as a soul-man, entrusted with the task of spiritual
readjustment in the face of loss.36 In overcoming that loss, he works
homeopathically: he takes on the responses of the bereaved, leading
them in their laments but also using them to serve a dual end-to
appease the soul of the potentially wrathful dead person and to
assuage the grief of the living by giving it a coherent social channel
for expression. The goes is the figure around whom the community
rallies in its death cry-a crying named by yet another Greek word
related to the complex we have been investigating, goao.37
That the function of the funeral goos, the spontaneous lament of
the next of kin, is magical in its aims and incantatory style has been
borne out by a variety of scholars. What has not been explained is the
development of a ceremony over which a male presides into one which
women oversee. For by the time we reach the historical period, the
lament of the dead is performed by females, with males playing a
subdued and secondary role. Such is the conclusion borne out, for
example, by the lament for Hektor in Iliad 24, which has been studied
at length by those concerned with the form of death ritual in ancient
36
See Burkert (above, n.6). Benardete (above, n.18) 170-71 touches briefly on
psychagogia as necromancy in Phaedrus.
37 On the etymological relations between terms related to goes, see P. Chantraine,
Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue grecque (Paris 1968-1980).
Greece.38 Whatever the evolution from male goes to female goos, the
significant fact is that the complex of goeteia when we encounter it in
Plato bears traces of a process in which the masculinity of the goes
has been interwoven with feminine imagery. This imagery in turn is
associated with other predominantly female forms of religious experi-
ence involving incantation, such as the Corybantic rites. The result is a
performance by Socrates densely layered with magical terms that have
a complex history we only imperfectly understand.
The important point for us is that Socratic goeteia, which arises
in response to the ushering in of a new method, is illuminated by the
ancient function of the goes. The krisis, or activity of discriminating,
for which Socrates is famous is also a krisis in a second sense of the
term, a turning point or crisis. Moreover, as Sophist amply demon-
strates, the crisis initiated by criticism is cathartic. Plato's dialogues
offer ample proof that the separation from tradition initiated by
Socrates' questioning is traumatic. Socrates both makes a break with
the past and heals the loss: he is the goes presiding over a rupture that
he himself has initiated. Moreover, his enchantment moves hand in
hand with his irony-with his manipulation of homeopathy and
sympathetic response. On these counts, too, Socrates is a master of
techniques often disparaged in the dialogues. Admittedly, the tech-
niques and the labelling function as metaphors, but that does not
attenuate their close family resemblance with the primitive context in
which they originally develop. Despite his overtly caustic attacks on
magic, some of Plato's portrayals of Socrates tacitly remind us that
the goes once filled a vital social role and, far from being an imposter
or charlatan, commanded a respect he deserved.
Socratic Dialectic: Philosophical Uses of Magic and Charisma
Many would want to approach Socratic goeteia as merely

propaideutic in leading interlocutors to an adequate level of inquiry-
perhaps a useful tool of early education, which is how the Republic
and Laws often present it, but hardly an instrument for serious
intellectual activity. What tells against this dismissal is that in two of
his mature dialogues Plato put a high value on the entire complex of
love, charm, and the body in which this magic is implicated, and even
elevates it to the status of a method for achieving the upward ascent.
In addition to Symposium, Phaedrus is known for doing just that
through the myth of love and the soul recounted in Socrates' second
speech. Nor, as I have demonstrated, is it satisfactory to polarize eros
38
On the goos and its magical properties, with special attention to the dirges in
Homer, see E. Reiner, Die rituelle Totenklage der Griechen (Stuttgart 1938), and A.
Schnaufer, Fruhgriechischer Totenglaube: Untersuchungen zum Totenglauben der myke-
nischen und homerische Zeit (Hildesheim 1970). On the difference between the highly
emotional goos and the more restrained threnos, see M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in
Greek Tradition (New York 1974) 4-14.
and dialectic as antithetical modes of striving toward the forms.39 For
although eroticism is undoubtedly a technique of the body, so too is
dialectic, despite its apparent ensconcement in reason. But let me put
this point more carefully, since Plato offers notoriously different
accounts of dialectic. More than any other dialogue, Phaedrus allows
us to understand how magic and persuasion are embedded in the
philosophical logos, which is an art of rhetoric even though some
works declare it to be opposed to such an art. We must examine more
carefully the implications of Plato's unveiling the dialectical method
of collection and division in the context of a techne that is explicitly
rhetorical.
Richard Robinson has sorted out the various uses of the term
"dialectic" in the Platonic corpus and concluded that the designation
has a strong tendency to mean "the ideal method, whatever that may
be."40 Still, despite the diversity of accounts, this ideal method is
marked by a number of recurring characteristics. It is the search for
what a thing is in itself (Republic 533b), that is, the essence or formal
and abiding element in the thing. It sets its sight on "what neither
comes into being nor passes away, but is always identically the same"
(Philebus 61e). Before the composition of Phaedrus and Sophist,
dialectic is associated chiefly with elenchos, but with these works it
becomes identified with the joint procedure of collection and division,
though question-and-answer remains central to both methods. In fact,
throughout the Platonic corpus, dialectic is above all a social activity
and cannnot be conducted by the individual alone. As a kind of koine
skepsis, or communal inquiry, it is perhaps inevitable that Plato would
come to treat it in the way he eventually does in Phaedrus-as
psychologically conditioned by the circumstances of performance and
the nature of the interlocutors engaged. Faithfulness to the nature of
the subject matter is therefore only one aspect of the dialectical
enterprise, for the unfolding of this subject matter must be adapted to
the soul of the one to be guided-a criterion discussed in some depth
in Phaedrus (270e-272b). As early as Gorgias (454-455), Plato ex-
pressed appreciation for two forms of persuasion: 1) that from which
we get belief without knowledge, and 2) that which eventuates in
knowledge. Although this dialogue does not pursue the second
category, Phaedrus does, and the result is a conception of dialectical
activity that is thoroughgoingly rhetorical.
In Euthydemus, too, this conception is innate in Plato's notion of
knowledge and method. For here the question arises what the best
kind of knowledge is, and Socrates leads his interlocutor to see that
what they are looking for must combine knowing how to make or do
39 This tendency is apparent in Lain Entralgo (above, n.2) 108-38. Recent readings
that argue against this polarization are Nussbaum 200-33 and Benardete 103-93 (both
above, n.18).
48 R. Robinson, Plato's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1953) 61-92. See also J.
Stenzel, Plato's Method of Dialectic, tr. D.J. Allan (New York 1964).
something with knowing how to use it. After discarding some possible
examples, Socrates asks if the art of speechmaking is the best knowl-
edge: "For indeed the speechmakers, whenever I meet them, seem to
be super-wise, Clinias, and their art itself something divine and lofty.
This, however, is nothing to wonder at; for it is a portion of the art
of enchanters, and falls short of it only little. For the enchanter's art
is the charming of snakes and tarantulas and scorpions and other
beasts and pests, but the other is the charming and persuading of
juries and assemblies and other crowds" (289e-290a). The convergence
of magic and persuasion is not the only notable feature of this
passage. For though Socrates dismisses the rhetorical art as the object
of the search, he nonetheless suspects that "somewhere about here
would appear the knowledge we have so long been seeking." Dialectic
is not advanced in this aporetic dialogue as the answer to the question
posed. But the fact that Phaedrus shows it to be a techne involving
words, persuasion, and enchantment illustrates how earlier dialogues
anticipate issues more fully developed in later ones.
Such a rhetorical orientation to dialectic is hard to square with
Philebus, which explicitly differentiates dialectic from the art of
persuasion (57d-59d). In fact, the emphasis in this dialogue on the
value of the techne that offers the greatest accuracy or precision seems
to preclude any possibility of embracing within its parameters atten-
tion to the individual souls of those engaged in inquiry. Here the
attitude toward dialectic is reminiscent of the doctrines of catharsis in
Phaedo and of the divided line in Republic. We are asked to imagine
pure reason or intelligence (noesis) operating on true being defined in
these terms: "Concerning the things that are, we find stability, purity,
truth, and what we call clarity either in those things that are always
the same in themselves and most unmixed, or in things most akin to
them; everything else must be called secondary and inferior" (59c).
Philosophical transcendence involves the most precise, non-physical of
our faculties directing itself to the most pure, non-physical forms of
being. But the efficacy and human value of such an activity are called
into question by the very terms with which Socrates introduces it. For
Protarchus remarks at the beginning of the discussion that Gorgias
regularly said the art of persuasion was greatly superior to all others.
Socrates' response is telling: "The thing I've been seeking, my dear
Protarchus, is not what art or knowledge differs from all others in
being the greatest, the best, and the most helpful, but which sets its
sight on precision, exactness, and the fullest truth, though it may be
small and of small profit-that is what we now seek" (58c).
Commentators read irony in this statement, and thus discount the
implicit concession made to the art of persuasion.4' But much in the
Platonic corpus discourages such a reading. In light of the position
advanced in Phaedrus and anticipated in earlier dialogues, we should
4' See Plato's Philebus, tr. and comm. J.C.B. Gosling (Oxford 1975) 222-23.
take seriously the implication in Philebus that an art of high precision

lacks usefulness unless it is wed to the art of persuasion. As a
corollary of such an implication, we should also take seriously that the
exactness of truth diminishes to the extent that its persuasiveness is
adapted to the individual soul of the listener. The drama of dialectical
inquiry engages the philosopher in strategies of irony, mimesis, and
enchantment, which I have analyzed in detail in Phaedrus. And these
strategies participate by their very nature in the nonrational soul. We
are back to the exigencies of psychagogia and to the dialectical goes.
Like Phaedrus, Symposium (215a-216e) reminds us that the sheer
presence of Socrates propels dialogue by keeping the interlocutor
focused in fascination. When Alcibiades compares Socrates to
Marsyas the satyr, he first notes that Socrates physically resembles the
magical piper, a fact that explains why people gape at Socrates and
wonder at his appearance. That Socrates' queer looks engage attention
is not an accidental feature of his appeal: his drawing power, as is
often the case with charismatic figures, has much to do with his
oddity. Just as important for our purposes is Alcibiades' claim that
Socrates enchants others without the musical instrument and even
without the musical speech of Marsyas. With plain words Socrates
enthralls:
Moreover, when we listen to someone else-even a good
orator-making his speeches, who could care less. But when
someone hears you or another speakingyour words, no mat-
ter whetherhe is an entirelyworthlessspeaker,and no matter
whetherthe one listeningis a woman, man, or child, we are
astoundedand possessed.And as for me, gentlemen,if it was
not that I might seem to be completely drunk, I would swear
to you how many things I have suffered and even now suffer
from his words. For when I hear him, much more than any
of those in a Corybanticfrenzy, my heart leaps and tears
pour forth because of his words, and I see many others
experiencing the same thing. (Symposium 215d-e)
The Corybantic madness we have already discussed is here linked not
with poetry or music, but with the plain speech of Socrates.42 This
psilos logos is now the epode that churns up the soul in order to make
way for conversion. Unadorned though it may be, the Socratic logos
that works magic is nonetheless embodied, and even when that logos
is repeated by another, it retains the charismatic power of the original.
Moreover, Socrates' words have an effect on listeners that is no less
bodily and vivid than Gorgias': they provoke tears and convulsions or,
as Meno has it, paralysis. Significantly, in this passage from Sympo-
sium where the language of Corybantic madness, enchantment, and
42
It is worth recalling in this connection a comment made about magic formulas by
Combarieu (1909) and quoted by Lain Entralgo (above, n.2) 45: "Magical formulas
have passed through the following phases: at first they were sung; then they were
recited; finally they were written upon a material object worn in some cases as an
amulet."
word magic dominates the description of Socrates and his effect on

Alcibiades, we encounter two crucial uses of eironeia singled out by
Vlastos to illustrate the typical Socratic meaning of the term.43 Again,
we see how frequently goeteia and eironeia are connected in Socrates'
activity.
In the cases of Meno and Alcibiades no less than of Phaedrus,
the power of Socratic logos is inseparable from a total performance,
whose effects are psychosomatic. Dialectic uses the body, rather than
abandoning it or attenuating it out of awareness. To put it another
way, the dialectical Socrates operates within the web of desire as much
as the erotic Socrates does-the two identities do not function in
alternation but in synchrony, at least in Phaedrus and Symposium.
Involving as it does a precipitous lapse into a trance-like state, goeteia
is the short way to an end. Yet Socrates' dialectical performances are
so absorbing that they may sometimes be characterized in terms of
their apparent opposite. For under the spell of Socrates' presence, one
can forget the presence of one's own body and lose oneself to an
experience whose effort is eclipsed. But such a transcending of the
body is itself a technique of the body, and that point has not been
appreciated often enough.
An important corollary of the allure exerted by Socrates is that
the attainment of truth in the dialogues is very much a matter of
personality. While scholars have made this point before, rarely has
acknowledgement of the cult of personality extended to a treatment of
Socratic goeteia.44 To the extent that dialectic can sustain inquiry and
gradually define the object, it typically depends upon Socrates' ability
to monopolize the attention of his interlocutor and exorcise stray
spirits. If Socrates warns Phaedrus against the temptation of giving
way to the spell of the cicadas during the sun of high noon under the
lofty plane tree, that is because he is competing with the legendary
insects for control of Phaedrus' concentration. To counteract the
potentially hypnotic hold the cicadas exert on one who listens (these
attendants of the Muses can charm like the Sirens do), Socrates must
not only work up a speech but put on a show that glistens with
Corybantic inspiration. He must set his body up as a counter-lure to
focus the soul. Once again, concentration, which we tend to think of
as a mental process, is very much a technique of the body. Of course,
Socrates plays ironically at all of this, which is another way of saying
that, like the goes, he retains a distance from the experience to which
he also submits.45
43 Symposium 216e and 218d-e, cited by Vlastos (above, n.24).
4 See Cushman (above, n.31) 161-205 and Friedlander (above, n.7) 154-70.
45 Ferrari (above, n.7) argues that the foreground/background dynamic in Phaedrus
is a metaphor for the dynamic movement in the dialogue between what is told
(rationally, dialectically, argumentatively) versus what is shown (by example, perfor-
mance, drama).
At this point, I need to consider a matter that has undoubtedly
been on the minds of some readers. The spellbinding qualities of
speech in Plato's dialogues are commonly associated with extended
monologic discourse-with the harangues of public address (cf.
Protagoras 336b, Sophist 268b-c). Since the figure of Socrates as a
goes appears most fully developed in works such as Phaedrus and
Symposium where he delivers long speeches, should we not consider
Socratic magic related to a type of logos that is actually uncharacteris-
tic of Socrates? Should we not distinguish between the hard-headed
sobriety of his short question-and-answer format and the inspired
rhetorical performance of the megaspeeches? Clearly there is an
important difference between these uses of the logos, and it is likely
that the latter type is more Platonic than Socratic. But two important
qualifications of this difference should be considered. First of all, in
both Phaedrus and Symposium the enchanting effects of Socrates are
not restricted to his long speeches but extend to his general conduct as
a leader of the dialogue who seeks to convert the soul and who uses
ironic strategies, such as sympathetic response and homeopathic
catharsis, to bring about the necessary turn. These strategies are
distributed broadly throughout the works. Moreover, as we have seen
in Phaedo, Charmides, and Meno, Socrates' goeteia is associated with
elenchos and with its ability by turns to tranquillize, to stun, or to
bind the subject in a kind of hypnotic spell. Secondly, the occurrence
of long speeches by Socrates within a Platonic work does not negate
their dialectical status. Within themselves, these logoi typically contain
dialectical structures, as does the myth of the soul in Phaedrus with its
uses of collection and division. But more importantly, the logoi are
framed within the works in which they appear as parts of a larger
dialectical design, intended either to clear the path of obstacles that
cloud the vision of truth or to culminate an earlier path of inquiry
that has already been cleared. We find examples of both kinds of
speeches in the first and second accounts of eros, respectively, in
Phaedrus. The point is that although extended monologic discourse
may not be exemplarily or even historically Socratic, when used it is
very much in the spirit of dialectic, for it functions elenchically or in
accordance with the method of collection and division. I am not
concluding that every instance of dialectic encountered in the Platonic
corpus brings us face to face with Socratic magic, but rather that
Socratic magic sometimes inhabits the activity of dialectic and is,
moreover, compatible with its psychagogic aims, which are featured
with great vitality and deliberation in dialogues such as Phaedrus and
Symposium.
Psychagogia and Writing
That dialectic works because of the psychosomatic presence of

interlocutors is confirmed vividly in the argument of Phaedrus against
writing. The salient problem with written words is this: "you might
suppose that they speak as if they have sense, but if you ask them
anything, wanting to learn from what's said, they always say one and
the same thing" (275d). Without their parents, written characters are
dead. "Living and soulful speech," logos zon kai empsychos, goes
with knowledge and truly deserves to be characterized as epistemic
discourse. Such discourse is the property of dialectic whose leader may
become a genetic father, sowing his seed in an irresistible commingling
which ensures his continuity, that is, his immortality:
Seriousdiscourse[about worthy subjects]is nobler when one
using the dialecticalmethod and taking a fitting soul plants
and sows words with knowledge, which can assist the one
plantingthem and be not sterilebut productiveof seed, from
whereother wordsgrowingin yet other charactersare capable
of makingthis seed immortaland its possessorhappy, to the
extent that is possible for a human. (Phaedrus 276e-277a)
This metaphor describing the reproductive capacity of "speech with
knowledge" is made possible by a literal configuration of bodies in
the space of dialogue. Writing does not permit such intercourse.
Or does it? Ronna Burger has argued convincingly that despite
the explicit Socratic condemnation of writing in Phaedrus, the
dialogue, through its own status as writing as well as its programmatic
remarks, affirms a Platonic position different from the one argued via
the myth of Theuth and Thamus.46 This position is that any use of
language, oral or written, informed by the method of dialectic may lay
claim to philosophical integrity. Moreover, the overarching require-
ment that all good speech be constructed like a living thing, with parts
organically related, is actually presented as a principle of writing
(264c). Now the implication of the organic metaphor in writing applies
most obviously to structure, and that is how Socrates treats it in his
analysis of the deficiencies of Lysias' speech. But the metaphor has
broader connotations. For a piece of writing to exhibit somatic totality
it must be ensouled, informed by a principle of order that directs the
logic of the parts. Such animated writing is in fact represented by the
dialogue itself, which activates the process of interpretation and
engages the reader in question-and-answer aimed at understanding the
whole and closing the circle of inquiry. Specifically, the dialogue
initiates the search for the relationship between eros and peitho, the
apparently disparate terms that guide the two halves of the work and
that make it seem at first glance a monstrous hybrid rather than an
organic form. Because interpretation begins by assuming a distance
between text and reader that strives for closure or union, its structure
is erotic, as is the structure of peithJ. The goal of reading is
communion, the overcoming of the estrangement between interpreter
and author in a moment of consummated meaning. The charismatic
drawing power of the text lies in the mysteries or hermeneutic secrets
46 Burger (above, n.17) 90-109. For other discussions of writing and speech in
Phaedrus, see Benardete (above, n. 18) 155-74 and Derrida (above, n. 19).
that we seek to comprehend-the mysteries that drive the erotic
pursuit of reading much as the mysteries of Socrates' living presence
drive the erotic pursuit of spoken dialectic. Thus writing of a certain
kind overcomes the charge of rigor mortis that Socrates makes in
Phaedrus, and preserves the dynamics of talk that are so much a part
of the psychagogic journeys through which he leads his companions.
In this way readers of the dialogue recapitulate the process enacted in
the drama of Socrates and Phaedrus, and experience in their own
activity the erotic character of writing. Phaedrus had fallen prey to a
diseased version of such love in his passion for Lysias' speech, and it
takes the whole dialogue to set right his deranged condition and to set
up a model of writing that purifies the contaminated nature of his
first love.
But whether speech or writing can ever ultimately enjoy erotic
fulfillment is a question that forces itself upon us at every turn in the
Platonic dialogues. The aporetic style tells against it, and so do the
constant disclaimers in the nonaporetic works that the understanding
the interlocutors reach about a particular subject is adequate or
complete. We hear much about likely stories that represent the best
one can do in language to articulate the truth of things. We are often
asked to settle for accounts that stand as the limit of what can be
said. Moreover, the distance separating knower and known structures
recollection itself as an activity that assumes the mental image of the
original vision of forms.47 The metaphor of vision that predominates
in such passages as the myth of the soul in Phaedrus also assumes a
necessary gap between the subject and object of sight. In short, we
find abundant evidence in the dialogues that eros is a longing for
transcendence, for the overcoming of difference. But transcendence as
ultimate union is deferred in Plato's writings, a point which illumi-
nates more than any other the character of Platonic love as eternal,
unrequited desire.
Socratic irony participates crucially in this deferral. As I have
argued, it often evades binary oppositions and unfolds a regressive
play of identity whose main psychagogic function is to feed the
mysteries of courtship that are at the heart of philosophy in the
dialogues. Irony is erotic. In Phaedrus this regressive play is affiliated
with the imagery of monsters and hybrids unamenable to the laws of
dialectic. The end of the dialogue provides us with a vivid example of
such hybrids in the imagery of Socrates as part inseminator and part
midwife of a pregnancy in another man. Here, the maieutic trope of
Theaetetus (150b-151d) is cross-bred with the trope of masculine
fertilization.48 Socrates retains the generative function thought to
reside in the male, but he is also a feminized deliverer of life gestated
by the subject. The figure of the androgyne brings us back to the
4' See C. Griswold, "Style and Philosophy: The Case of Plato's Dialogues," The
Monist 63.4 (1980) 530-46.
48
On maieutic imagery in Plato's dialogues, see Halperin (above, n.22).
beginning of Phaedrus-to the Delphic inscription "know thyself,"

which Socrates says so dominates his attention that there is no time to
ponder the truth about the rape of Oreithuia and such related matters
as the truth about the Centaurs and the Chimaera and the Gorgons
and "countless other remarkable monsters of legend flocking in on
them" (229d-e). "I let such things be," he insists, "believing in
common opinion about them, and as I just said, I examine not them
but myself, whether I happen to be more intricate and puffed up than
Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, sharing in some divine and
unTyphonic nature" (230a). The question of external hybrids is
redirected to the nature of one's self, and the performance of Socrates
leaves little doubt about the range of his complexities, whose allure
ought not be misread through the ironic allusion to the horrific
Typhon-the offspring of Earth who, not incidentally, could repro-
duce the sound of every creature, divine or bestial (Theogony
820-880).49 Leaving behind a mythical rape, he proceeds to remake
traditional sexual relationships at the same time that he remakes the
power of language to lead and draw. To the end, he is a latter-day
goes, a master of mimesis who plays with doubleness and with the
always-deferred truth behind the mask.
This may seem an extreme claim, unpalatable because it flies in
the face of Socrates as a seeker of certainties whose dissembling hides
an accessible essence-an essence opposed to sophistic play, or paidia.
Let me end, therefore, by clarifying my conclusions. In light of the
ever-shifting erotic personae of Socrates in Plato's dialogues, I urge a
reconsideration of Socratic irony as a structure of dissimulated yet
discernible truth-a view recently affirmed in Vlastos' reinterpretation
of eironeia and the historic shift in the term he argues Socrates
initiates. Though doubleness is at the heart of Socrates' performances,
it typically does not come to rest in a position from which his identity
can be defined, above all in Phaedrus, which is also the dialogue
famous for setting out the method of collection and division. The
advocate of this new method cannot be encompassed by the method
he advocates, for his irony transgresses assumptions about difference
and identity that underlie sunagoge and diairesis. To put the point this
way is to see that the irony of Socrates' performance vis a vis
Phaedrus and the sophists gets taken up into another, higher one
involving a split vis a vis the system of dialectic, usually assumed to be
superior in a straightforward sense. The drama of the dialogues cuts
against the grain of dialectic's aspirations to unconditional truth. So
too, as I have observed, the irony of homoeroticism gets taken up into
the irony of androgyny, of male bodies incorporating female func-
tions. Socrates characteristically operates in this way, folding one
irony into another, always distancing himself from the supposed
attainment of absolute knowledge. This position is a more radical
49 For a discussion of Typhon and monstrosity in Phaedrus, see Benardete (above,

n.18) 112-15 and passim.
version of an insight that Vlastos happens upon in his analysis of

Alcibiades' relationship to Socrates in Symposium: "In that small
segment of the evidence I have scrutinized we can see how Socrates
could have deceived without intending to deceive. If you are young
Alcibiades courted by Socrates you are left to your own devices to
decide what to make of his riddling ironies. If you go wrong and he
sees you have gone wrong, he may not lift a finger to dispel your
error, far less feel the obligation to knock it out of your head."50 We
could call this the irony of irony. As Socrates' partners have difficulty
identifying the truth behind his riddling presence and get no help from
him in sorting out the puzzle, so do interpreters of Plato's works who
repeat, through the mediated form of written dialogue, the aporia of
those whom Socrates' irony stings.
The drama of truth and knowledge enacted in the performances
of Socrates provides an opening for appreciating the family similarities
between the magician, the sophist, and the dialectician. Although
critics have previously drawn attention to "Socratic sophistry" with
reference to technical features of the elenchic method, they have rarely
pursued them in a way that enables us to comprehend Socratic
goeteia. From the early dialogues, Socrates' pursuit of philosophy,
which is conducted as a social activity with strong tendencies toward
eroticism, is figured as enchanting and magical. But only in later
dialogues such as Phaedrus and Symposium is this conception
developed in a full-blooded form that challenges such intellectualist
accounts as those of Republic and Philebus. Neither conception
should be taken as cancelling out the other, but the modern scholarly
tradition has been to assimilate the erotic ascent to the rational or to
privilege the latter.51 The result has been a predisposition against
studying elements in the dialogues interwoven with eros-namely,
persuasion and enchantment. In arguing for the extension of this
traditionally Greek triad of terms in the work of Plato, I do not
intend to reduce the dialogues to variations on a common theme, but
to illuminate the historical continuities that make the dialectician a
mutation of the goes and his rhetorical avatar. In the process, I hope
to have stimulated interest in reassessing philosophical psychagogia,
with its peculiar uses of mimesis, homeopathy, and irony. Socrates'
eternally self-deprecating smile is the most abiding clue to the
mysteries of his psychopompic status. As a seeker of truth his goal
differs from the sophists; but by always splitting the relationship to
himself and others he appropriates sophistic strategies of enchantment
while remaking them and reorienting their purpose.
Louisiana State University MICHELLE GELLRICH

CW 87.4 (1994)
so Vlastos (above, n.24) 44.
5' As noted earlier (above, n.39), some recent studies such as Nussbaum 200-33 and
Benardete 103-93 (both above, n.18) move away from this tendency.

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Socratic Magic: Enchantment, Irony, and Persuasion in Plato's Dialogues

Author(s): Michelle Gellrich

Was Socrates a magician? Though the question has been seriously

straightforwardly.2 But there has been another strain in classical

an entirely different angle, oralists such as E. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge,

suggestion already advanced by Burkert, but not yet studied in any

6 W. Burkert, "GOES: Zum griechischen 'Schamanismus'," RhM n.s., 105 (1962)

as an address to an interlocutor with a particular personality and set

Gorgias: Speech, Love, and Enchantment

The Platonic corpus provides abundant evidence of the character

them altogether as treacherous influences, and in works such as

speaker whose body is an integral part of his performance determine

note in this context Empedocles, another famous goes renowned for

Plato on Magic: Critique and Appropriation

Not only was Plato deeply struck by this "shamanistic" complex

tional" is the epode in the foregoing examples, where its semi-

Phaedrus: Magic as Ironic Homeopathy

17 See R. Burger, Plato's Phaedrus: A Defense of a

into the sensuous countryside. From the beginning the seduction of

Tomaselli and R. Porter (New York 1986) 122-51.

logographers of his day. Moreover, as others have argued, Lysias'

self-centered structure of desire with someone else, to become a master

healing."30 Significantly, women were the chief beneficiaries of the

Catharsis and Goeteia

What unfolds, therefore, is a ritual purification or catharsis; and

of removing sensual contaminants from the soul: the body is explicitly

33 Desiderius Erasmus, Ciceronianus, Or A Dialogue on the Best Style of

"pretense." Socrates' success has everything to do with seeming to be

Magic, Mimesis, and the Leader of Souls

That the goeteia of persuasion is intertwined with mimesis

35 See Burkert (above, n.6).

associated with the tarnished sophist, namely, "imitation in accord

Socratic Dialectic: Philosophical Uses of Magic and Charisma

Many would want to approach Socratic goeteia as merely

take seriously the implication in Philebus that an art of high precision

word magic dominates the description of Socrates and his effect on

43 Symposium 216e and 218d-e, cited by Vlastos (above, n.24).

Psychagogia and Writing

That dialectic works because of the psychosomatic presence of

beginning of Phaedrus-to the Delphic inscription "know thyself,"

49 For a discussion of Typhon and monstrosity in Phaedrus, see Benardete (above,

version of an insight that Vlastos happens upon in his analysis of

Louisiana State University MICHELLE GELLRICH

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