The Other Horse: Companion of Hubris
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Socrates — ὁ δʼ αὖ σκολιός… ὕβρεως καὶ ἀλαζονείας ἑταῖρος… μάστιγι μετὰ κέντρων μόγις ὑπείκων.
The second horse of the soul's team is drawn entirely as a physical grotesque, and every feature is a moral judgment in disguise. He is skolios — crooked, bent, the opposite of the straight upright bearing that marked the good horse. He is a 'companion,' hetairos, of two vices Plato names with precision: hybris, the insolent overreach that violates limits, and alazoneia, the imposture or empty boastfulness of a fraud. And where the good horse is guided by a word alone, this one obeys only 'scarcely,' mogis, and only under mastix and kentron — the whip and the goad. The catalogue of ugly features (Socrates gives many more) is not idle description: in the Greek imagination, as often in Plato, the shape of the body is read as a legible sign of the shape of the soul.
Having described the soul's good horse — upright, honor-loving, needing no whip — Socrates now paints its opposite. The second horse is the unruly one, the appetite that drags the whole soul toward the body. Its physical ugliness is drawn as a portrait of its moral character: crooked, deaf, a friend of insolence, obeying the driver only under the lash.
This is the black horse of the most famous image in the dialogue, and it is worth seeing exactly what part of us it stands for. Plato divides the soul, here as in the Republic, into three: reason, the charioteer; a spirited, honor-loving part, the good horse that answers to a word; and appetite, this crooked beast that answers only to the lash. Appetite is not simply desire — it is desire that has slipped every restraint, and Socrates marks its character with two heavy words. It is the companion of hybris, the arrogant transgression the Greeks feared as the root of tragedy, the impulse that recognizes no limit it did not set itself. And it keeps company with alazoneia, imposture — the swagger of a thing pretending to more than it is. The portrait is deliberately repellent, and the repulsion is the point. But notice what Socrates does not do: he does not cut the horse loose. The chariot has three members, and the driver's task through the rest of the palinode is not to kill this horse but to master it — to break it to the rein until even it can be brought, trembling, into the presence of beauty. The lower drive is not the enemy of the soul's ascent; ungoverned it wrecks the ascent, but harnessed it supplies part of the very power that lifts the team. Plato's ideal is never a soul with only good horses. It is a soul whose charioteer can drive the bad one too.
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