The Men Who Died Singing
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Socrates — λέγεται δʼ ὥς ποτʼ ἦσαν οὗτοι ἄνθρωποι, γενομένων δὲ Μουσῶν καὶ φανείσης ᾠδῆς, τινὲς ἐξεπλάγησαν ὑφʼ ἡδονῆς, ὥστε ᾁδοντες ἠμέλησαν σίτων τε καὶ ποτῶν, καὶ ἔλαθον τελευτήσαντες αὑτούς· ἐξ ὧν τὸ τεττίγων γένος φύεται, γέρας τοῦτο παρὰ Μουσῶν λαβόν, μηδὲν τροφῆς δεῖσθαι, εὐθὺς ᾁδειν, ἕως ἂν τελευτήσῃ
The story goes that the cicadas were once men — men from before the Muses existed. When the Muses were born and song first appeared in the world, some of those men were so thunderstruck by the pleasure of it that they sang and went on singing, forgot to eat or drink, and died without ever noticing. From them the race of cicadas springs, holding this prize from the Muses: to need no food from birth, but to sing at once, and without food or drink to sing on until death — and afterward to go to the Muses and report who among the living honors them.
Noon. The cicadas are ringing overhead, and Socrates tells Phaedrus who they are: the remainder of the first audience music ever had — men who heard the newborn Muses and forgot to be mortal.
Plato invents a myth on the spot — no earlier source has it — to explain the loudest thing in the scene: the noon chorus overhead. Its verbs are all borrowed from this dialogue's own vocabulary of seizure. The first hearers of song were <em>exeplágēsan</em>, thunderstruck (exactly Socrates's word for Lysias's recital at 234d); and they died <em>élathon … hautoús</em> — 'it escaped their own notice': <em>lanthánō</em>, the un-noticing verb whose negation is truth itself (<em>alḗtheia</em>), and the very word for the beloved's blindness at 255d. Art-mania, taken to its limit, is a death you don't feel. The Muses' 'prize' (<em>géras</em> — Homer's word for the hero's portion, Briseis to Achilles) makes the bargain permanent: no food, no drink, song from birth to death. It is the portrait of every artist who ever starved for the work — offered, characteristically, as an award.<br><br>The myth's frame is a warning: the cicadas, Socrates has just said (259a), watch the noon field like the Sirens — men who talk through the drowse they report to the Muses; men who nap they laugh at as slaves. Even the insects in this dialogue are an audience, and idleness a performance someone grades. That the Muses are Memory's daughters (and their name likely grows from *men-, the mind-root shared with <em>manía</em> and <em>mántis</em>) gives the joke its deep floor: music, memory, madness, and mind are one family — and the dialogue's last act will ask whether writing, the new invention, feeds that family or starves it.
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