THE INTERPRETIVE CHALLENGE OF THE MYTH OF ER

The political lessons of the Myth of Er have been ambiguous at best throughout its reception. Because the Republic is Plato’s most celebrated work of political theory, and a staple of political theory curricula today, the obscurity of its conclusion can be all the more dissatisfying: the Myth of Er was once famously appraised as “a lame and messy ending” to “a powerful and otherwise impressively unified book” (Annas Reference Annas1981, 353).^{Footnote 1}

For readers committed to the political-theoretical significance of the Republic, the Myth of Er presents a serious interpretive challenge that remains to be met. Many landmark studies evade the issue by either ignoring the myth (Kraut Reference Kraut1997; Murphy Reference Murphy1951; Santas Reference Santas2010; Schofield Reference Schofield2006) or granting it only a cursory treatment (Bloom Reference Bloom1968, 435–6; Cross and Woozley Reference Cross and Woozley1964, 288; Ferrari Reference Ferrari2005, 32; Reeve Reference Reeve1988, 262–3; Sayers Reference Sayers1999, 161–3; Strauss Reference Strauss1964, 137–8). Those that endeavor to glean a theoretical lesson from the Myth of Er rightly present it as an extension of the philosophical defense of justice spanning the broader arc of the Republic (e.g., Adam Reference Adam1902, 456–7; Ferrari Reference Ferrari and Partenie2009; Johnson Reference Johnson1999; Reeve Reference Reeve1988). Accordingly, political theorists working from this framework often read the myth as an affirmation of individual choice and agency against moral luck (Allen Reference Allen2013, 76; Bobonich Reference Bobonich2002, 56–8; Dorter Reference Dorter2003; McCoy Reference McCoy2012; Zuckert Reference Zuckert2009, 381).

The problem, however, is that the myth does not consistently bear out such readings, with only select, momentary passages in the myth supporting them, and much of its rich, baffling detail left unaccounted for. As Julia Annas (Reference Annas1981, 349–53) pointed out in her famous complaint, the lessons that readers typically draw from the myth are more often than not undermined by what actually happens in it (see also Annas Reference Annas1982, 130–4; Halliwell Reference Halliwell and Ferrari2007, 445, 458–65; Roochnik Reference Roochnik2003, 121–31).

The content of the Myth of Er is sufficiently convoluted that readers can find themselves divided about whether it supports or subverts the Republic’s central argument: the defense of justice as a good unconditionally worthy of pursuit, and which can be defined as a kind of constitutional harmony governing the makeup of both the just soul and the famous ideal city of the kallipolis. The influential line of thought favoring the subversive interpretation of the myth belongs to the legacy of Leo Strauss’s (Reference Strauss1964) reading of the Republic, which famously found certain particular moments in the book so plainly ridiculous as to expose—and serve as an ironic comment on—the impracticability of the entire project. Strauss’s portrait of a Plato trading in paradox and irony opens up ways of approaching the Myth of Er in those terms: its elaborate details may have been constructed to subvert the surface claims in the Republic’s account of justice, shedding light instead on the impossibly stringent character of its moral prescriptions (Rosen Reference Rosen2005, 387–8), or on the inability of individual moral agents to overcome the elements of chance and contingency governing the cosmos (Benardete Reference Benardete1989, 225–9).

On the other hand, interpretations that take the myth to support the Republic’s broader account of justice face another problem. If they are correct, the concluding myth becomes a redundant reiteration of the preceding lessons, and an unnecessarily confusing one at that (Bloom Reference Bloom1968, 435; Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum1986, 130). One way of going around the issue is to suggest that the myth is not necessarily intended for the same audience as that of the philosophical arguments, but is rather a cruder form of rhetoric designed to persuade non-philosophers of the advantages of justice (Bloom Reference Bloom1968, 436; see also Arendt Reference Arendt2006, 108; Brisson Reference Brisson1998, 11). The countervailing solution is to embrace the myth’s strangeness as an instance of what Elizabeth Markovits (Reference Markovits2008, 151–9) calls a “summoner,” or call to judgment. The Myth of Er, on this view, is deliberately disorienting or dissatisfying, and these unsettling emotions can jolt Plato’s readers into practicing philosophical virtues celebrated in the Republic, like thinking critically for oneself (Seery Reference Seery1988), breaking away from consequentialist guides to moral action (Annas Reference Annas1982), or resisting epistemic hubris (Lear Reference Lear and Santas2006, 38–42) and otherwise being cognizant of the limits and contexts proper to our theoretical models (Roochnik Reference Roochnik2003, 121–31).

Political theorists have good reason to be troubled by the wide disagreement on how to interpret the pages that have the final word on what is arguably Plato’s most important work of political theory. But this impasse is all the more remarkable because the range of available readings appears to suggest that it may not be possible to take the myth’s convoluted details seriously without having to presume, to some extent, a distance between what Plato wrote and what he meant. This suggestion, in turn, provides a telling window into an improbably detached conception of the philosopher’s relationship to society that informs several orthodox ways of understanding Plato’s political theory and its legacy. Reproduced in the interpretations that treat the myth, alternately, as subversive commentary or as rhetoric for non-philosophers, is the familiar portrait of an elite Plato, who cautions philosophers to direct their intended messages to a separate philosophical readership apart from the ordinary agents of politics, or to make use of rhetorical resources external to philosophy in order to convince audiences lacking the capacity to reach the same conclusions through philosophical means alone. A rather different form of that detachment prevails even in readings that take the myth’s function to be an invitation to philosophical judgment. Echoing a prominent picture of Plato as an advocate of “Socratic citizenship” (e.g., Villa Reference Villa2001), they assign to philosophers the task of provoking readers into thinking critically for themselves, much like a Socratic gadfly stinging awake the drowsy horse of Athenian society.

In the pages that follow, I show that an alternative framework for making sense of the Myth of Er is yet possible. This is an approach that allows us to take the myth’s complex details at face value without assuming a hidden agenda behind them; and it is consequently one that encourages us to believe that Plato’s relationship to his readers was more consistently earnest than it was patronizing.

I argue that Plato chose to end the Republic with the Myth of Er partly in order to extend an account, launched in the Myth of Metals and continued in the Allegory of the Cave, of the curriculum of education and testing administered to the kallipolis’ citizens. My reading grows out of a literary observation. The Myth of Er shares a striking set of similarities—which tends to go unremarked by commentators—with two other narrative interludes placed at critical junctures in the Republic. First, its framing echoes the plot structure of the Myth of Metals and the Allegory of the Cave, both of which recount experiences that are described in terms of being delivered out of a subterranean place, during sleep, into a different world above and waking up there. Second, these stories of dreaming and waking are, in each case, deployed to offer a redescription of the natures of its subjects following a transformative event. In the Myth of Metals and the Allegory of the Cave, these transformations concern the potential effects of education on one’s nature: how the citizens of the kallipolis are to be sorted after a basic training in music and gymnastics; the radical epistemic conversion experienced by a student of dialectic. In the Myth of Er, on the other hand, Er wakes up just as his fellow travelers are reincarnated into new natures, which are heavily determined by the patterns of lives they have selected at the end of their eschatological journey.

The preoccupation with individual nature in the earlier two stories about waking up above ground, I believe, can help illuminate its treatment in the third. The Myth of Metals and the Allegory of the Cave occur at two pivotal moments in the education and testing of the kallipolis’ rulers, when the pool of prospective philosopher-guardians is purged of its less promising candidates. When we take the periodic recurrence of the plot common to these three stories and the periodic sorting of the city’s leaders to be related, the Myth of Er also reads as an account of an analogous process of education and testing: in this case, of the search for natures on whom the cumulative effects of their philosophical educations have successfully taken hold.

Plato’s investment in interrogating the relationship between philosophical education and philosophical natures suggests, in turn, that he did not solely think of philosophers as detached observers and critics of society. Instead, he also theorized a process of socialization during which they shared in, and were themselves shaped by, the cultural mores ingrained in the environments in which they were brought up. Philosophers, for Plato, did not sprout from nowhere, but had to be formed; and what essentially set them apart from non-philosophers was not a fact of life but an open question.

BORN-AGAIN CITIZENS IN THE MYTH OF METALS

The Myth of Metals in Book III of the Republic—also known as the Noble Lie—is perhaps Plato’s most notorious myth. The reputation owes largely to the myth’s appeal to the authority of the concept of nature as a fixed standard for organizing a city: it tells a story of how a god has mixed gold into the construction of those individuals among the citizens most naturally disposed to rule, and silver, iron and bronze into the natural assistants, farmers and craftsmen, respectively. The story encourages its audience to regard these natural aptitudes as fixed—like pure metals that cannot be transformed into one another—and it enjoins societal institutions to restore citizens to their rightful places in the natural order.

The rigid understanding of individual nature in the myth gives it the gloss of radicalism for which the Republic is so often criticized—most famously by Karl Popper (Reference Popper1963, 61), who found in this myth an “exact counterpart” of Nazi racial policy. On this understanding, the nature of an individual citizen is not only a static and inalienable disposition that delimits what she is and is not suited for, but, like race, it cannot be helped and is determined from birth. While the Myth of Metals has since remained a primary point of reference in authoritarian or otherwise anti-democratic portraits of Plato (Dombrowski Reference Dombrowski1997; Reeve Reference Reeve1988, 212–3; Schofield Reference Schofield2006, 282–309; Schofield Reference Schofield and Partenie2009), the view that individuals are naturally born one way or another has been ascribed to the myth even by commentators who thought much more highly of Plato than Popper did (Bloom Reference Bloom1968, 366; Monoson Reference Monoson2000, 128; Santas Reference Santas2010, 10, 14–26, 160; Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1998, 279).

A close examination of the myth’s opening lines, however, reveals a more complete picture. As we shall see, the myth’s appeal to the concept of nature also involves a revision in its meaning: from the kind of biologically determined essence evoked by most orthodox readings, to a property defined by the qualities that citizens possess at the end of their early upbringing. In the kallipolis, citizens are selected and sorted on the basis of personal attributes that are discerned through a test following a basic education, which are not necessarily the attributes they have at the beginning of their biological lives (Andrew Reference Andrew1989, 577–8, 581, 589–90; Kasimis Reference Kasimis2016, 35; Rowett Reference Rowett2016, 68–9). Accordingly, the years of a preliminary education open up a modest window of social mobility for citizens who distinguish themselves in their early studies.

Crucially, the social reorganization proposed in these passages is made possible through an extraordinary conceptual intervention. If the nature of an individual is a disposition fixed from birth, the myth explains how citizens are to be sorted on its basis by telling a story that reconceptualizes what it means to be born in the first place. In the myth, birth itself is reimagined as an event that occurs not when a citizen is biologically born, but sometime after she has completed the education in music and gymnastics described in Books II and III. The myth’s opening lines depict a gestation and a birth, in order to convince the newly educated citizens of the kallipolis that

Until this moment, according to these lines, the citizens have not lived at all. Rather, they are told that they were in fact asleep during the years of their early education in music and gymnastics; and that they have spent these years, not in this world, but inside the womb of their mother, the earth, where both they and the distinctive markers of their occupational identities were formed. Only after this process of gestation were they released above ground, to wake into their current selves.

This has radical consequences for the concept of nature that supplies much of the myth’s normative force. Here, Socrates tells the story about waking from a subterranean slumber in order to stipulate that the nature of a citizen is defined by those qualities with which she is born—this time around. Whatever dispositional traits that manifest in an individual citizen at the end of her preliminary education, the claim goes, have to be treated as though she had possessed them all her life and will always continue to do so, regardless of whether they were in fact biologically innate, a product of this early upbringing, or—more likely—some combination of both.

Biological, especially hereditary, factors do not so much disappear from this account as they get subsumed into the proposed reconceptualization of the content of an individual’s nature. The myth still assumes that members of the city’s several classes will “for the most part” produce offspring like themselves, and poor observation of the city’s breeding regulations is to blame for the eventual deterioration of the kallipolis (415a, 546a–7a). The point of the myth, however, is that what can be known about a citizen at the time of her biological birth is inadequate for determining her place in society (Kasimis Reference Kasimis2016, 344; Wood and Wood Reference Wood and Wood1978, 145–52). Accordingly, institutions in the city must redefine the measures of a person’s natural aptitude around a more appropriate standard, and reassign, for any child whose makeup deviates from that of her parents, “the proper value to its nature” (Rep. 415c).

These proposals, in turn, also reframe our understanding of what a basic education and testing in the kallipolis does to a person. On many conventional readings of the myth, these early years simply supply the time and opportunity for the citizens’ latent talents and limitations—supposedly hard-wired into their constitutions from biological birth—to begin revealing themselves. But while the myth does not rule out this possibility, it also embraces the prospect that the effects of early education might penetrate down into the inner site of those talents and limitations, and become practically indistinguishable from any such determinant of potential that might have been operating there all along. After all, Socrates designs the kallipolis’ preliminary cultural curriculum around the expectation that its carefully curated content will “become established as habits and nature” in the characters of its subjects (395d). On this conception, to speak of an individual’s nature is not to attribute to her a static, inalienable disposition determined from birth; but it is rather to recognize a more fluid amalgam of dispositional traits, blending unknown proportions of biological precondition and the influence of her early upbringing, that for all intents and purposes warrants being treated as static and inalienable from a certain age.

The Myth of Metals has thus been characterized in a number of studies as an act of political deception that seeks to “blur the distinction between nature and art and between nature and convention” (Strauss Reference Strauss1964, 102; see also Andrew Reference Andrew1989, 585). These studies rightly identify the radical innovation of the Myth of Metals as the representation of culture as nature. They share the premise, familiar to standard readings of the myth, that citizens in the kallipolis possess natures—dispositional essences that are fixed from “birth” and remain stable thereafter. But they also note that the myth makes this appeal to the concept of nature while swapping out its content. The myth takes the characters of citizens after they have been exposed to—and potentially transformed by—the city’s educational programs, and transfers to these traits the authority, the normative weight and the entrenched quality of givenness that ordinarily accompany everyday notions of what is biologically innate. As Demetra Kasimis (Reference Kasimis2016) has recently pointed out, this maneuver need not be read merely through the lens of deception and cynicism. On her interpretation, the myth's reconfiguration of the content of nature is not so much intended to deceive as it is an “open secret” that Plato shared with his readers as a way of shedding new light on a topic of deeper theoretical significance—in this case, to hold up a critical mirror to contemporary Athenian practices of regulating citizenship.

As we shall see, however, the Myth of Metals is not the only place in the Republic where Socrates makes this intervention. Accordingly, we can develop a coherent account of the central narrative interludes in the Republic building on the insight, shared with Kasimis (Reference Kasimis2016), that the treatment of the concept of nature in the Myth of Metals invites special theoretical interest from Plato’s readers. But rather than take these passages as reflective commentary on specific political institutions in Plato’s Athens, this reading suggests that they are primarily designed to set up a sequence of working concepts of nature that is immediately internal to the text of the Republic. Approached this way, the Myth of Metals is somewhat less a story about the institutionalization of class hierarchy, and more the initial articulation of an alternative framework for conceptualizing individual natures in the kallipolis.^{Footnote 3} A person’s nature, on the framework suggested in the myth, is best understood as some combination of biological predisposition and early upbringing, where the respective contribution of each is unknown and irrelevant. As we shall see, this formulation is also provisional, and it will be revisited and updated at subsequent stages in the curriculum of education and testing described in the Republic.

It bears noting that this is a framework that presupposes the natures of individuals to be fluid, insofar as they are open to internalizing the effect of one’s education. But just as he insists on it in the Myth of Metals, Socrates’ subsequent efforts to reconceptualize the natures of individuals will consistently appeal to the notion of nature as a fixed essence. This is, in fact, part of the whole point: it is by virtue of a stable understanding of their natures that the kallipolis’ citizens can be sorted into their respective roles, and by virtue of such an understanding that they come to orient their views of the world and their places in it. When Socrates proposes summarily treating the attributes of persons after education as though they constituted a fixed nature, we might understand him to be asserting what Kwame Anthony Appiah (Reference Appiah2017) has recently described as an “idealization”: an imperfect representation that, for practical purposes, can be treated as if it were true.

Finally, this reading of the Myth of Metals does not, of course, deny that it helps to establish the infamously inegalitarian political structure of the kallipolis; whether the dispositions of future guardians are biologically innate or acquired along the way does not change the fact that they constitute a philosophical elite picked out to rule over their less philosophical counterparts. But it does change the focus of our understanding of the myth. When we shift the default paradigm for thinking about individual nature from biological determinism to the interaction of predisposition and educational effect, we also see that Plato does not present us with an account of natural-born philosophers in the conventional sense.

THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE AND THE HABITS OF THE PHILOSOPHERS

By Book VII of the Republic, most of the original subjects of the Myth of Metals have dropped out of Socrates’ investigation, which quickly settles into an account of the philosophical education reserved for the kallipolis’ potential guardians. If my reading of the Myth of Metals is correct, Socrates’ study of individual nature continues with this select group, not because Plato necessarily believes the natures of philosophers are structured in a fundamentally different way from those of ordinary citizens, but because the particular interest of his investigation is in the question of what a philosophical education does to the natures of its recipients. As such, philosophers are allocated a special role in the Republic, not only as the designated guardians of the kallipolis, but also as a case study in how further education necessitates a redescription of what Plato calls nature.

The philosophical education in question is the second phase of the kallipolis’ educational curriculum. Having been educated in music and gymnastics and subsequently sorted on its basis (Rep. 521e), a select pool of potential guardians now faces a second round of selection (537d), in which they are to be educated in the abstract sciences leading up to the study of dialectic. The candidates selected through the corresponding round of tests will be the guardians entrusted to govern the city.

Socrates tells the Allegory of the Cave to his interlocutors, Glaucon and Adeimantus, as a way of representing the transformative effect that an education in dialectic will have on the characters and identities of those who have been subjected to it. But he does so by couching his account in the language of nature. If the Myth of Metals had proposed conceptualizing the natures of individual citizens in terms of the traits they possess after an education in music in gymnastics, the Allegory of the Cave also tells a story of an awakening in order to make an analogous claim with respect to the traits that would-be philosophers are left with at the end of this higher, more sophisticated kind of education.

Here, Socrates paints a vivid image of a prisoner who, having dwelt in an underground cave all his life, is forced to scale the path to the world above, where he opens his eyes to the light of the sun for the first time. The experience is likened to the process of opening one’s eyes to knowledge. A person informed by opinion but not knowledge may be said to be merely “taken in by dreams and slumbering out of his present life,” so that he is at no point ever awake: “before waking up here he goes to Hades and falls finally asleep there” (515a, 534c; see also 521c). It takes a wakeful mind to see past the illusions of the things people tend to believe, and Socrates tells us that the politics of the kallipolis must amount to rule “in a state of waking, not in a dream as the many cities nowadays are governed by men who fight over shadows with one another” (520c–d).

The recurrent motifs of dreaming and waking are a metaphor, once again, for a transformation in the working understanding of individual nature. Socrates designates the cave as an “image of our nature in its education and want of education” (514a). If the other prisoners conceive of themselves as shadows cast on the cave wall (515a), the prisoner who has escaped the cave knows himself to be most truly at home in the upper realm (517c–d). The elements of this story, of ascending from an underground place to wake into a new reality, come together to make a powerful claim that an individual’s nature has to be reconceptualized to reflect the expected outcome of a philosophical education.

The Allegory of the Cave, then, uses the same plot structure framing the Myth of Metals to make a familiar assertion about the content of individual natures, at an analogous juncture of selection in Socrates’ description of the kallipolis’ educational curriculum. How did Plato intend for his readers to understand the relationship between these parallel assertions? One temptation is to regard the claims of the Allegory of the Cave as conclusively overriding any pronouncements made about individual natures in the earlier myth. We might take the Allegory of the Cave at its word, and simply accept that the natures of the kallipolis’ philosopher-guardians consist—and have in fact always consisted in—those attributes that a dialectical education has brought out in them, no matter what the candidates themselves were told in a placeholder myth they heard when they were much younger. A guardian of the kallipolis trained in dialectic, for instance, would be brought up to realize a potential for philosophy that she had carried within her all her life—a fixed essence, like the blueprint of an oak contained in an acorn—and she would in turn be able to look back with critical distance on a time when she was told her nature consisted in musical and gymnastic excellence. From this enlightened vantage point, that earlier understanding might now seem to her to have been nothing more than a useful fiction that had helped prepared her along the path to her true calling.

It is in this vein that Jonathan Lear (Reference Lear and Santas2006, 32), in his pathbreaking study of the Republic’s allegories and myths, suggests that the Allegory of the Cave functions much like a delayed punch line to a joke set up much earlier in the “proto-philosophical” Myth of Metals. The Allegory of the Cave, on his account, is a “repetition and re-creation” of the Myth of Metals to the extent that both stories work by dismissing the totality of what their respective audiences know about reality, and in so doing, planting in them the seeds of the unsettling thought that what seems to be real in the world may not be all there is. Only when the potential guardians of the kallipolis encounter the Forms through a higher education in dialectic will they have an answer to the dissatisfaction they experienced when they first heard the Myth of Metals as children, and they in turn will be in a position to see what that myth was an allegory for (Ibid., 34–7).

Indeed when we take the Allegory of the Cave as a conclusive statement on the content of the guardians’ natures—to which the claims of the Myth of Metals had merely been a temporary prelude—we seem to gain a richer insight into a point of disanalogy between the two stories. In the Myth of Metals, the citizens’ experience of their preliminary education had been likened to a dream, whereas in the Allegory of the Cave, it is only the condition prior to education that is represented as a dream or a state of diminished reality, and the process of being educated in dialectic is portrayed as a slow and painful awakening. It might make sense to represent a dialectical education differently because it trains its students in a fundamentally different way of thinking from what their earlier education had required of them. If gymnastics and music had educated citizens “through habits… not knowledge” (Rep. 522a), dialectic allows its practitioner to partake in those habits without losing critical perspective, just as the freed prisoner ought to be able to see both in the light of the upper realm and in the darkness of the cave (520b–c). If the Myth of Metals depicts the citizens’ experiences prior to their preliminary education as an old reality that is permanently lost, like a dream one cannot return to, the Allegory of the Cave presents dialectic as an art that equips its students to traverse dream and reality precisely because they can distinguish between those realms.

Yet, the structural similarity between the two stories also complicates this picture. Unlike the Myth of Metals, the Allegory of the Cave is directed to an audience—Glaucon and Adeimantus, and through them, Plato’s readers—that has heard this kind of story before. To a reader made familiar with the structure of the Allegory of the Cave through the Myth of Metals, the seeming conclusiveness of the dialectical awakening depicted in it is undercut by the very fact that it deposes an analogous awakening from a previous myth along the way. If the Allegory of the Cave seeks to draw a sharp distinction between a discriminating education in knowledge and a blind education in habits, the same story, by virtue of what it shares with the Myth of Metals, also points to their fundamental similarity. At the end of the day, dialectic remains a form of education that seeks to make knowledge a kind of habit: “steady and strenuous participation in arguments”—the content of dialectical training—is, for Socrates, “a gymnastic that is the antistrophe of the bodily gymnastic” (539d).

This means that the philosophical attributes of the guardians are no more prefigured into their natures than the characters of the kallipolis’ citizens after their preliminary upbringing can be said to be biologically innate. Much like excellence in gymnastics and music, these philosophical qualities are better understood as the interactive product of the habits of thought and bearing that they have acquired from their dialectical education—which have now calcified into a kind of second nature—and their dispositions prior to this education. In particular, what is being assigned the designation of nature in the Allegory of the Cave is a modification of the formulation introduced in the Myth of Metals. Now, the working concept of a person’s nature consists in an unknown amalgam of some given predisposition and the influence of a dialectical education—where the predisposition in question is in fact the combination of biological predisposition and early upbringing that had been, under a previous working concept, understood as one’s nature.

The point suggested by the Allegory of the Cave is that it now suffices to conflate once again the distinction between that which was given and that which was cultivated. A character refined through an education in philosophical dialectic may not in fact be the conclusive realization of an innate essence built into one’s nature, but a provisional commitment to presupposing this to be the case helps to orient the way philosophers in the kallipolis must understand themselves and their pursuits.

THE MYTH OF ER AS AN ACCOUNT OF THE EDUCATION AND TESTING OF NATURES

As we have seen, the kallipolis’ program for sorting its citizens on the basis of their natures, culminating in the selection of its rulers, had operated on a sequence of working concepts of nature. At each juncture of selection, the working understanding of the content of one’s nature was pegged to the attributes found in individuals after a course of education and testing. This meant that, in both the Myth of Metals and the Allegory of the Cave, what took on the designation of an individual’s nature was a conflation of some pre-given disposition—that which had hitherto passed for nature—and the influence of the latest round of education.

The recurrence of the waking-up story in the Myth of Er suggests that there is yet one more stage in this sequence that has yet to be accounted for. Like the Myth of Metals and the Allegory of the Cave before it, the Myth of Er is structured around an awakening from a dream and a rebirth out of the earth. Its hero-messenger, Er, is killed in a battle but then comes back to life to tell the story of what he saw in the other realm, as though he had merely slept through the ordeal and had “recovered his sight and saw that it was morning and he was lying on the pyre.” The journey from the afterworld back to the world of the living is an ascent, which Er travels with the souls sent to be reincarnated as they are carried “up to their birth” (Rep. 621b). The souls in the myth face a choice concerning the lives into which they are to be reborn when they next open their eyes: the “ordering of the soul” changes as it makes its way through the life it chooses, and the choice accordingly entails “looking off toward the nature of the soul” (618b–d; see also 611e–612a).

When we attend to the common plot that the Myth of Er shares with the earlier two narratives, we are better positioned to appreciate its function. In the remaining pages, I show that the myth represents Plato’s latest effort to redescribe the natures of individuals after they have been subjected to a new form of education. Building on the framework developed in the earlier narratives, the Myth of Er asserts an idealization of the nature of an individual soul, as the composite of a pre-given disposition—a character that has been shaped by the education of one’s life—and the influence of a final education administered in the afterlife. The content of the myth, accordingly, can be read as an account of that education and its corresponding test.

The Thousand-Year Journey: An Education in Cosmic Justice

The first half of the Myth of Er describes the journeys of the souls in the afterlife; a report of how they choose the patterns of their next lives makes up the second. When the myth is read on its own, the souls’ journeys appear to be primarily concerned with retribution for justices and injustices committed in the previous life—and this, in turn, is what makes the myth sit so oddly against the preceding endeavor, spanning most of the Republic, to defend justice as desirable in and of itself (Annas Reference Annas1981, 349–53; Annas Reference Annas1982, 130–4; Halliwell Reference Halliwell and Ferrari2007, 445, 458–65). On this reading, the second half of the myth might follow from the first because punishments and rewards in the afterlife act to clear away the unfinished work of worldly justice: only when these moral debts are paid do the souls have a clean ledger from which to begin their next lives (Lear Reference Lear and Santas2006, 39).

When the myth, by contrast, is read through the framework of education and testing suggested by the plot it shares with the Myth of Metals and the Allegory of Cave, it becomes clear that what transpires in the eschatological journeys has a more direct bearing on how the souls select the patterns of their next lives. In particular, when those journeys are taken to constitute an education that prepares its subjects for that choice, the convoluted setting of the myth betrays a much more coherent organizing structure than commonly recognized.

The journeys of the souls begin at a “certain demonic place” with two openings in the ground and two more in the heaven above (Rep. 614c; see also Adam Reference Adam1902, 435; Halliwell Reference Halliwell1988, 174). There, they are judged, and their judgments are attached to them as signs, as they go their separate ways: the just through one of the heavenly openings toward a path full of pleasures and rewards, and the unjust through an opening in the ground to a path full of terrors and punishments. Curiously, the journeys loop back, a thousand years later, to this demonic place of judgment. Two groups of souls, returning from their separate journeys through the second pair of openings in the heaven and the earth, reunite to tell each other about what they had seen on their respective paths. They go together to a meadow, where their numerous stories are devoured eagerly. Then they travel to a certain vantage point from which they behold the Spindle of Necessity that holds the cosmos together. Finally, they are taken to Necessity’s daughter, Lachesis, where they begin the process of choosing the patterns of their next lives.

A purely retributive account of the myth might dismiss the careful construction of these details as gratuitous, and at best an instance of fanciful scene-setting (Benardete Reference Benardete1989, 226). Accordingly, commentators tend to refrain from ascribing philosophical purpose to these elements of the myth. If, for instance, the point of the journey thus far is solely about retribution for the ills and merits of one’s life, it is difficult to see why some of its features are specifically set up the way they are: why and for whom the souls are made to carry signs of their judgment; why their thousand-year journeys must circuit back to the place where they had been judged; or why the myth emphasizes, to the extent that it does, the exchange of information that takes place between the souls who have completed their respective journeys.

But when the Myth of Er is considered in light of the educational project of the Republic, the oddly elaborate program set out for the souls in the afterlife begins to make more sense. Its various components—the convergence of the souls’ journeys at the place of judgment, the signs they are made to carry from and back to this place with the strange geography, and the vibrant exchange of stories about each journey—can all be read as contributing pieces to a systematic education in the rewards of justice, and in its function as the greater organizing principle of a harmonious universe (see Baracchi Reference Baracchi2002, 187, 194, and 219). This education, in particular, is one that compels its subjects to exercise putting together, alongside their own, the vast multiplicity of perspectives and experiences represented along the journey.

As a consequence of both the judgments passed on them and the stages of the journey they occupy, souls have differently limited knowledge of how retribution works in the afterlife. Souls who traveled the heavenly path, for instance, have no experience of the underground path (Benardete Reference Benardete1989, 227), and the souls yet awaiting judgment do not even know which of the paths will be theirs. But their convergence in the demonic place, where each thousand-year journey begins and ends, also permits them to access an abundance of information about experiences beyond their own (see Table 1). When, for example, souls return from their journeys, presumably still carrying their telltale signs—appearing “full of dirt and dust” if they had been judged unjust, and “pure from heaven” if they had been just (Rep. 614d–e)—they are seen, and their stories of terror or pleasure eagerly devoured, not only by other returning souls but by those newly arrived souls, yet to depart on their own thousand-year journeys.

TABLE 1.

The Educational Spectacle at the Demonic Place of Judgment

The moral lesson that it is better to be just than unjust has, of course, been told in less roundabout ways elsewhere (Gorgias 523a–527e; Annas Reference Annas1982, 125). But what sets the journey apart as an educational experience lies not so much in its message as in how its students arrive at it. In compelling souls to discern—by actively inquiring after journeys that were not their own—what is relevant in the wealth of information at the crowded site, the convoluted geography around the demonic place of judgment mandates that each of the different paths to the same lesson is always an exercise in drawing connections: in learning how one’s own experience and partial viewpoint measure against those of others, and how they might fit together schematically under an overarching principle of justice.

These are significant qualities to emphasize in the souls’ journeys, because they constitute part of a more comprehensive education in the meaning of justice that is designed to gradually expand one’s outlook from the immediate and personal to the abstract and global. The exercises at the demonic place of judgment prepare their subjects, at the end of their thousand-year journeys, for a vision of the coherent universe held together by the Spindle of Necessity. Over the course of this program, the perspective that souls come to have on the world of the afterlife expands progressively: from the limited gaze they have on their own paths of retribution, to the exchange of information that occurs back at the place of judgment, and to the view of the structure of the universe. Even the passage to the Spindle is approached gradually; the souls at first see it as a column of light, and the intricate stem and nested whorls of the Spindle do not come into visibility until the following day, when the souls move closer (Rep. 616b-c).

For each soul making this journey, these shifts in perspective correspond to shifts in the meaning of justice. The souls’ journeys track a lesson in the unity of cosmic justice as experienced from vantage points that gradually progress from the subjective to the objective: what appears at first to be retribution for deeds committed in one’s own life develops into a comprehensive system of retribution for all souls in the afterlife, until justice finally corresponds to the harmony of the whole cosmos (see Table 2). Souls in the Myth of Er, then, undergo what amounts to an immersive education in cosmic justice before they are sent to choose the pattern of their subsequent lives.

TABLE 2.

The Progression of the Meaning of Justice in the Eschatological Journey