With Shamelessness It Drags
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Socrates — βιαζόμενος ἠνάγκασεν αὖ προσελθεῖν τοῖς παιδικοῖς… ἐνδακὼν τὸν χαλινόν μετʼ ἀναιδείας ἕλκει.
The scene is built as a rematch, and its cruelty is in the recurrence: the desire that was violently checked does not die, it regroups and comes back. The bad horse 'forces' and 'compels' the team back toward the beloved a second time, and Socrates gives the decisive move a precise mechanical image — the horse 'bites down on the bit,' endakōn ton chalinon. The bit is the exact point where the driver's control reaches the animal; by clamping it in its teeth, the horse makes the reins useless and takes the mouth away from the driver. And so it drags the whole soul forward met' anaideias — 'with shamelessness.' That last word is chosen against the earlier scene like a matched pair: the good horse was held back 'by aidōs,' reverent shame; this one advances by anaideia, its exact negation. Reverence and shamelessness are the two poles between which the soul is being pulled.
The bad horse recovers from the violent check and returns to the attack. After a lull it forces the team back toward the beloved, and this time — champing down on the bit so the reins cannot hold it — it hauls them forward 'with shamelessness.' Socrates picks the word deliberately: anaideia is the exact opposite of the aidōs that restrained the good horse.
Everything in this passage turns on the pairing of two words a few lines apart — aidōs and anaideia — and it rewards knowing how heavy that pair was for a Greek. Aidōs, the reverent shame that made the good horse draw back, was not treated as a minor social feeling but as one of the load-bearing pillars of a human world. In Hesiod's grim prophecy, the end of civilization comes when Aidōs and Nemesis wrap themselves in white robes and abandon the earth to its wickedness; in the Protagoras, Zeus sends aidōs and justice to human beings as the very gifts that make cities possible. So when Socrates now says the bad horse drags 'with anaideia,' shamelessness, he is not merely calling it rude. He is naming the force that is left when that pillar is knocked out — appetite that has lost the capacity to feel the check of reverence, desire that can no longer blush. The two horses have become the two possibilities of a human soul at the height of longing: the one that reveres what it desires and therefore holds back, and the one that has stopped revering anything and simply pulls. And notice the shape of the struggle Plato insists on — the shameless horse is not slain here, it is defeated and comes back, bites the bit, has to be broken again. This is why the palinode's picture of love is a discipline and not a single victory. The lower drive is persistent by nature; what love does, rightly lived, is not eliminate it but school it, round after round, until even the shameless horse learns to feel the awe the others already feel. The taming, not the killing, is the work.
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