The Plain of Truth
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Socrates — οὗ δʼ ἕνεχʼ ἡ πολλὴ σπουδὴ τὸ ἀληθείας ἰδεῖν πεδίον οὗ ἐστιν, ἥ τε δὴ προσήκουσα ψυχῆς τῷ ἀρίστῳ νομὴ ἐκ τοῦ ἐκεῖ λειμῶνος τυγχάνει οὖσα, ἥ τε τοῦ πτεροῦ φύσις, ᾧ ψυχὴ κουφίζεται, τούτῳ τρέφεται
And the reason for all this striving — to see where the plain of Truth lies — is this: the pasture fit for the best part of the soul comes from the meadow there, and the nature of the wing, by which the soul is made light, is nourished by it.
Why do the souls strain so desperately in their circuit of the heavens, jostling and laming one another? Because of what waits to be seen there — and what the soul's wing must eat to stay aloft.
The palinode's cosmology turns literal here: Truth is <em>food</em>. Plato maps the region beyond heaven as pastureland — the <em>ἀληθείας πεδίον</em>, the Plain of Truth — and the soul's noblest part grazes there like a beast at a celestial meadow (<em>leimṓn</em>). What it eats is reality itself, the Forms; and what that pasture nourishes (<em>tréphetai</em>) is the <em>wing</em> — <em>pterón</em>, the master-image of the whole myth. The soul rises exactly insofar as its wing is fed, and the wing is fed only on the true. Feed it on Beauty and Justice themselves and it grows; feed it on their earthly shadows and it withers. To be 'made light' (<em>kouphízetai</em>) and to be heavy are the two fates of every soul, and diet decides which.<br><br>The geography is not idle decoration — it is an argument you can walk through. The Plain of Truth here has an exact twin in Plato's <em>Republic</em>: the Plain of <em>Lḗthē</em>, Forgetting, where the souls in the Myth of Er drink before rebirth and lose everything. Same word (<em>pedíon</em>, plain) under opposite powers — and the two governing nouns, <em>alḗtheia</em> and <em>lḗthē</em>, are one root, negated: truth is the <em>un</em>-forgotten. So the whole drama of ascent and fall is written into the vocabulary before Socrates argues it: the risen soul is the one that remembers, pastured on the unforgotten; the fallen soul is the one that drank at Forgetting's plain and grew too heavy to fly. The <em>Phaedo</em> makes the same equation in colder prose — knowledge is recollection — but only here does Plato let you see it as a landscape, and taste it as grass.
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