Phaedrus 259b · 259b
When the Muses Were Born
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Socrates — οὐ πρέπει φιλόμουσον ἄνδρα ἀνήκοον εἶναι… γενομένων δὲ Μουσῶν καὶ φανείσης ᾠδῆς… τινὲς ἐξεπλάγησαν ὑφʼ ἡδονῆς.
Socrates opens the cicada myth by claiming Phaedrus for it: it would be unfitting, he says, for a philomousos — a 'Muse-loving man,' a person of culture — to be anēkoos, 'unhearing,' ignorant of such a story. Then the tale: long ago, before the Muses existed, the cicadas were human beings. But 'when the Muses were born and song appeared' — genomenōn Mousōn kai phaneisēs ōidēs — something overwhelming entered the world. Some of those early people were 'struck out of themselves,' exeplagēsan, by the sheer pleasure of song; it is the same shock-word, ekplēxis, that the palinode used for the soul thunderstruck by beauty. They sang and sang, forgetting food and drink, until they died without noticing — and from them the tribe of cicadas was born, insects that sing ceaselessly from birth to death and never need to eat.
Word by word
The setting
As the cicadas sing overhead in the noon heat, Socrates warns that they must keep talking and not doze, or the insects will despise them. Then he tells their story. It does not befit a Muse-loving man, he says, to be ignorant of such things — and he begins the myth: the cicadas were once human beings, born before the Muses existed; and when the Muses came to be and song first appeared, some of those early people were so overcome with the pleasure of singing that they forgot to eat, and died.
A note on this passage
The little myth of the cicadas is one of Plato's loveliest inventions, and like all his myths it does several things at once. On the surface it is a charming aetiology — a just-so story explaining why cicadas sing all summer without eating, and why their song feels like something more than insect noise. Underneath, it is a meditation on the double nature of the very thing this dialogue is made of: the pleasure of beautiful words. Song, when the Muses first brought it, was so intoxicating that it killed the people who first heard it; they were 'struck out of themselves' by pleasure and sang themselves to death, forgetting the body entirely. That is a genuinely ambivalent image. On one hand it is the highest compliment to art — song is so ravishing that mortals gave their lives to it, and were rewarded by being reborn as creatures who do nothing but sing. On the other hand it is a warning, and the warning is aimed precisely at Phaedrus and at the reader. To be seduced by the sheer pleasure of fine speech — to love the sound and the thrill of words so much that you forget to nourish yourself on their truth — is to die the cicadas' death: to become a beautiful noise that has emptied itself of life. Remember the setting. The cicadas are singing overhead at noon, in the drowsy heat, and Socrates has just said that lesser men would nod off under that song like sheep at a watering hole, while he and Phaedrus must keep talking. The cicadas are a live temptation, not just a story: the pull toward pleasant drowsing, toward enjoying the music of conversation without doing its hard work. And this is exactly the dialogue's deep question resurfacing in a new key. The whole discussion of rhetoric turns on whether words are to be loved for the pleasure and persuasion they give, or used in the service of truth — and here Plato dramatizes the danger in a myth. The love of the Muses is sacred; philosophy itself, Socrates says elsewhere, is the highest music. But song that has forgotten why it sings becomes a cicada: enchanting, tireless, and dead. The philomousos must not be merely a lover of beautiful sounds; he must let the love of the Muses carry him, through beauty, toward the truth the Muses' mother is named for — Mnemosyne, Memory, the recollection of what the soul once knew.
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