Shame and Awe Drench the Soul
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Socrates — τὸν μὲν ἑκόντα τὸν δὲ ὑβριστὴν μάλʼ ἄκοντα… ὁ μὲν ὑπʼ αἰσχύνης τε καὶ θάμβους ἱδρῶτι πᾶσαν ἔβρεξε τὴν ψυχήν.
The two horses go down onto their haunches, and Socrates marks the difference between them with a single pair of words: the good horse drops hekōn, willingly, the bad one akōn, unwilling — 'the insolent one, very much against its will.' That contrast, willing versus unwilling, is not casual; hekousion and akousion, the voluntary and the involuntary, are the hinge of all Greek thinking about responsibility. Then comes the reaction. Pulled back from the brink, the charioteer's soul is flooded 'from shame and awe' — aischynē and thambos — and the flood is described physically: it 'drenched the whole soul with sweat.' The soul, which has no body, sweats. Plato lets the image be extravagant on purpose. The recoil from the beloved is not a cool act of self-control; it is a drenching, whole-body convulsion of reverence.
The charioteer has hauled the reins back so hard that both horses drop onto their haunches — the good one willingly, the insolent one much against its will. Pulled back from the beloved, the soul reacts not with relief but with a flood of feeling: shame at what it nearly did, and awe at what it has seen. Socrates gives the moment a startlingly physical image.
Two words carry the weight of this passage, and both point past the immediate scene to the largest questions in Greek ethics. The first is the willing/unwilling pair. When Socrates says the good horse sits back hekōn and the bad one akōn, he is invoking the distinction between voluntary and involuntary action that runs through Greek law, tragedy, and Plato's own arguments — the distinction on which praise, blame, and guilt all turn. The soul's inner life, he is quietly insisting, has this same moral grammar: within one person, one motion can be willing and another unwilling at the very same instant. That is what it is to be a divided soul, and it is why the Protagoras thesis that no one does wrong willingly cannot be the whole story — here the wrongdoing is exactly what one part of the soul wills while another refuses it. The second word is thambos, awe, and it transforms the register of the entire scene. What holds the lover back at the last moment is not calculation, not even shame alone, but a flood of religious awe — the specific dread one feels in the presence of the holy. Plato pairs it with aischynē, shame, and drenches the soul in sweat to insist that this is a bodily, involuntary reverence, not a decision. The beloved has become, for the lover, something numinous: a place where beauty itself shows through a human face, and the soul recoils the way a worshipper recoils at the threshold of a god. This is the hinge of the whole palinode. The first two speeches could only see desire as a hunger to be either fed or starved. Socrates has now shown desire opening, at its height, onto awe — and awe is the beginning of worship, not appetite.
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