Envy Stands Outside the Dance
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — μένει γὰρ Ἑστία ἐν θεῶν οἴκῳ μόνη· τῶν δὲ ἄλλων ὅσοι ἐν δώδεκα ἀριθμῷ τεταγμένοι θεοὶ ἄρχοντες ἡγοῦνται κατὰ τάξιν ἣν ἕκαστος ἐτάχθη.
Socrates — φθόνος γὰρ ἔξω θείου χοροῦ ἵσταται.
For Hestia remains alone in the house of the gods; but of the rest, all twelve who are ranked in the number of the ordered gods lead as rulers, each according to the station he was assigned. … For envy stands outside the divine chorus.
Socrates describes the great procession of the gods riding out across the top of heaven — a cosmic parade in which one goddess stays home, and one thing is barred entirely.
The great procession of the gods across the roof of heaven is one of Plato's most beautiful cosmic images, and two of its details carry the whole theology. First, Hestia stays home. Goddess of the hearth, she 'remains alone in the gods' house' while the other eleven ride out — because a hearth, by its nature, cannot travel. She is the fixed, unmoving center, the still point the wheeling cosmos turns around; the moving heaven is given an unmoving heart. Everything else is procession, order, motion in ranks (<em>táxis</em>, the drawn-up battle-line of the gods) — but at the center, stillness. The souls that follow will circle forever; only the divine hearth simply <em>is</em>.<br><br>The second detail is one of the loveliest sentences in Greek: <em>phthónos gàr éxō theíou choroû hístatai</em> — 'for envy stands outside the divine chorus.' The gods are a <em>chorós</em>, a dance, and no envy can join it. This is a deliberate rejection of the older Greek religion, in which the gods were <em>jealous</em> above all — Herodotus's divine that grudges mortals their happiness and strikes down whoever rises too high ('the whole of the divine is envious,' he wrote). Plato will have none of it. His gods feel no <em>phthónos</em>; in the <em>Timaeus</em> the maker of the world is good precisely because, 'being without envy, he wanted all things to become as like himself as possible.' The revolution is enormous and quiet: the divine reconceived as <em>generous</em> rather than grudging, wanting to share its perfection rather than hoard it. That is why the soul's whole ascent is possible at all — the gods do not resent the climbing soul, they lead the dance it is trying to join. Envy is a purely human weight, and it, too, stands outside; you cannot rise with the gods and begrudge at the same time.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 247a in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 247a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/247a/