Ambrosia and Nectar at the Manger
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Socrates — ὁ ἡνίοχος πρὸς τὴν φάτνην τοὺς ἵππους στήσας παρέβαλεν ἀμβροσίαν τε καὶ ἐπʼ αὐτῇ νέκταρ ἐπότισεν.
The vision over, the soul comes home. Having beheld the true realities and been fed by the sight, it sinks back inside the vault of heaven and returns. And Socrates ends the heavenly episode with a domestic, almost tender image: the charioteer leads his team to the manger, sets ambrosia before them, and pours out nectar for them to drink. These are the food and drink of the Olympian gods, the fare of the immortals — and for the length of its circuit above the sky, the soul has been living exactly the gods' life, eating what they eat. It is the highest point the soul ever reaches, the full meal of the divine, and it is the height from which it will fall. Everything hungry and unsatisfied in our earthly loving is measured, in this myth, against this one remembered supper.
The heavenly circuit ends. Having gazed on the truly-existing realities and been feasted by them, the soul sinks back within heaven and comes home. The charioteer stables his horses at the manger, throws them ambrosia, and gives them nectar to drink — the food and drink of the gods, for a soul that has just lived the gods' own life.
The little stable-scene is doing more than it seems. Ambrosia and nectar are not decoration; they are the technical food and drink of the athanatoi, the deathless gods, and the word ambrosia means, at its root, exactly that — a-brotos, 'not-mortal,' the immortal thing. By having the charioteer feed the horses ambrosia and nectar at heaven's manger, Plato places the soul, for the span of its circuit above the sky, on the literal diet of the immortals: living the gods' own life, deathless nourishment for a deathless thing. This is the summit of the whole myth, and it defines everything below it by contrast. The soul has eaten the food of the undying and seen reality face to face — and then it falls, molts, forgets, and wakes up in an earthly body, ravenous for a nourishment it can no longer name. That nameless hunger is the human condition as the palinode diagnoses it: we are creatures who once drank nectar, now trying to slake an immortal thirst with mortal things, and never quite able to. And this is precisely where love comes in. When the fallen soul catches sight of beauty in a beloved, it is tasting, for the first time since heaven, a trace of that remembered supper — beauty being the one Form that still shines here below. Love is not the appetite the first speech called it; it is the immortal hunger remembering its true food. The lover reaching for the beautiful is a soul that once ate ambrosia, reaching, without quite knowing it, for the table it fell from.
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