No Leisure for Monsters
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Socrates — ἐγὼ δέ, ὦ Φαῖδρε, ἄλλως μὲν τὰ τοιαῦτα χαρίεντα ἡγοῦμαι, λίαν δὲ δεινοῦ καὶ ἐπιπόνου καὶ οὐ πάνυ εὐτυχοῦς ἀνδρός· ἐπιρρεῖ δὲ ὄχλος τοιούτων Γοργόνων καὶ Πηγάσων
I find such explanations charming, in their way — but they are the business of a man too clever, too hard-working, and not especially to be envied. For once you've explained Boreas away, the rest come flooding in demanding the same: Hippocentaurs, then the Chimaera, then a whole mob of Gorgons and Pegasuses.
Should he explain the myth away — Boreas as 'just a gust of wind'? Socrates declines the fashionable game: such cleverness is endless. Debunk one story and a mob of monsters lines up behind it, each demanding the same treatment.
The fashionable intellectual sport of Plato's day was allegorical rationalizing: Boreas 'was really' a gust of wind that blew a girl off the rocks. Socrates's refusal turns on two barbed words. Such work needs a man <em>lían deinós</em> — 'too <em>deinós</em>,' the untranslatable adjective that means terrible AND terrifically clever at once (it survives in 'dinosaur,' the terrible lizard). And a few lines later he calls the method an <em>ágroikos sophía</em>, a 'boorish cleverness': real intelligence, gracelessly applied. The praise and the sneer are the same words.<br><br>His actual argument is practical: debunking is infinite. Explain one myth and a <em>mob</em> — an <em>óchlos</em>, the word for a jostling crowd — of Hippocentaurs, Chimaeras, Gorgons and Pegasuses floods in, each demanding its own reduction. He has, he says next (229e–230a), no leisure for it: he cannot yet obey the Delphic command and know <em>himself</em>. The irony detonates later: this same man, who refuses to explain myths away, will freely invent the chariot of the soul — Plato's answer to the rationalizers being not less myth, but better myth.
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