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THE VOICE OF AUTHORITY: DIVINATION AND PLATO'S PHAEDO*

Over the last few years there has been considerable interest in, and progress made on, the important roles played by myth and religion in the Platonic dialogues. My article aims to contribute to this discussion not by making any general claims about the nature of Platonic or Socratic myth and religion, but by focussing on the implications of speech grounded in the religious realm in one particular dialogue. I shall suggest that in the Phaedo Plato takes the cultural structures of divination and makes them over into the image of philosophy. Here, as elsewhere, Plato engages in a programmatic reinterpretation of the some of most important elements of his society. Just as the Protagoras and the Gorgias attempt to redefine what counts as pleasure or political expertise, the Phaedo does the same with divination. At stake, as always, is what it means to lead a philosophical life. Divination is a particularly resonant concept because it allows us to focus on the problem of the authoritative voice. The most obvious example is the voice of Delphic Apollo, mediated by his oracle, but Plato also presents us with human ‘authorities’ who have some pretensions to ‘oracular’ authority. Those who receive such pronouncements must decide how to deal with them, and clearly Plato and his Socrates will be concerned with a properly philosophical response. The Phaedo also foregrounds the issue of the extent to which Socrates can or should be included among such authoritative voices. Plato has Socrates juxtapose an Apollonian world of divination (mantike) and music (mousike) with his own Apollonian world of philosophy to dramatize a question that is particularly pressing on the last day of his life: what authority are we to give to Socrates’ logoi? Can he be replaced once he is gone? I maintain that the dialogue moves from presenting Socrates as a purveyor of quasi-oracular wisdom to recognizing that, talented as Socrates is, the argument is more important, and that pursuing truth through argument is a transferable skill that his disciples must take up and must continue in his absence. The authoritative voice of divination is only one variety of religious discourse, and thus I shall also be concerned to some degree with the nature of Socrates’ relationship with the supernatural, although I do not hope to establish either Socratic or Platonic religious beliefs. My focus is on Socrates’ interaction with this discourse. Religious speech, associated as it is with initiation, revelation and non-human authority is contrasted with philosophical enquiry. It is the task of philosophy to absorb and transform it. Mark McPherran has already argued from a historical perspective that divination was taken seriously by Socrates, although he recognized that it could not stand alone and must be subjected to rational examination.1 My