Madness From a God, Sanity From Men
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Socrates — κάλλιον μαρτυροῦσιν οἱ παλαιοὶ μανίαν σωφροσύνης τὴν ἐκ θεοῦ τῆς παρʼ ἀνθρώπων γιγνομένης.
Here is the claim the whole palinode defends, stated as plainly as it ever will be: the ancients testify that madness from a god is finer than sanity from men. Everything hangs on the two prepositional phrases. This is not madness against sanity in general — the raving of disease is still an evil. It is madness whose source is divine set against sanity whose source is merely human. On that comparison the god-sent frenzy wins: the priestess mad with Apollo does more good than the shrewdest sober counsellor, because her wisdom is not her own but the god's. Socrates even enlists the old name-makers as witnesses, since, he has just argued, they built the honor of prophecy right into their language. The reasonable, self-possessed life the first speech exalted is real and good as far as it goes; it simply does not reach as high as a soul a god has taken over.
Socrates states the thesis his examples support. The ancients who named things bore witness to it: the madness that comes from a god is a finer thing than the sanity that comes from human beings. Divine unreason outranks mortal good sense — and the very words the old namers chose, he has just argued, prove they knew it.
The precision of the sentence is the point. Socrates is not praising madness as such — he knows perfectly well that most madness is disaster — but madness tēn ek theou, 'from a god,' as against sōphrosynē tēn par' anthrōpōn, 'sanity from men.' The whole argument turns on source. Human good sense is a fine thing, but it is capped at what a human mind can reach; a god-sent madness has no such ceiling, because the one who is mad in this way is being moved by something wiser than any mind. That is why the priestesses outdo the statesmen, and it is the exact template for what Socrates is about to say of love. Love, too, will turn out to be a mania ek theou, a madness from a god — and so, by this rule, a higher thing than the prudent, calculating non-love the first two speeches recommended. He even calls the old name-givers as witnesses, martyres, because their words encoded the truth before anyone argued it: the language itself honors divine madness. The reversal of the first speech is now complete and explicit. There, to be god-mad was to be anoētos, mindless. Here, to be god-mad is to be lifted above mere mind — and the sanity the first speech prized is quietly demoted to the merely human ceiling that love, at its best, breaks through.
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