Humbled, It Follows
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Socrates — ὅταν δὲ… ὁ πονηρὸς τῆς ὕβρεως λήξῃ ταπεινωθεὶς ἕπεται ἤδη τῇ τοῦ ἡνιόχου προνοίᾳ.
The taming reaches its end, and Socrates marks it with two carefully weighted words. The bad horse, 'suffering this many times' — the bloodied jaw, the wrenched bit, repeated over and over — at last 'ceases from its hubris,' lēxē tēs hybreōs: the storm of insolent appetite finally dies down. And then it is tapeinōtheis, 'humbled' — brought low, its proud violence broken. Only now does it do what the good horse did all along: it 'follows,' hepetai, the charioteer's pronoia, his 'forethought.' The whole progression is compressed into that last phrase. What the lower soul finally submits to is not brute force but foresight — the reasoning part's capacity to look ahead and govern. The war in the chariot ends not with the appetite destroyed but with it consenting, at last, to be led.
The end of the long taming. After the bad horse has been hauled back and bloodied again and again — its jaw and tongue torn on the bit — Socrates gives the outcome. Suffering this many times over, the wicked horse at last stops struggling. Humbled, it finally follows the charioteer's guidance, and the soul's inner war subsides into order.
This is where the great image comes to rest, and the resting-place is worth dwelling on, because Plato could have ended it differently. He does not have the charioteer kill the bad horse or cut it loose; the wild appetite is not eliminated but broken to the rein, tapeinōtheis, 'humbled,' until it follows of its own accord. That word sits at a remarkable point in the life of the Greek language. For Plato and his contemporaries tapeinos, 'low,' was mostly an insult — the condition of the servile and the crushed — and the humbling of the horse here is a defeat, the necessary beating-down of a proud thing. Yet the very same word would be turned inside out a few centuries later, when Jewish and Christian Greek made humility the highest of the virtues; reading this line, one is watching the word poised on the edge of that reversal. But the deeper claim is in the last phrase. What the appetite finally submits to is the charioteer's pronoia — his 'forethought,' the mind's power to look ahead — and pronoia is no small word either: it is the term Greek theology would use for divine Providence, the fore-thinking intelligence that orders the whole cosmos. The analogy the palinode has been quietly building stands fully revealed here. The government of a single soul, appetite yielding to reason's foresight, is a small copy of the government of the universe, all things yielding to the provident Mind that arranges them. To school the lower drive until it follows forethought is not merely private self-control; it is bringing one small soul into line with the order of the whole. And it is achieved not by force in the end but by consent — the humbled horse follows now because it has learned to, which is the only kind of order that lasts.
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