previous next

[493a] and we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb,1 and the part of the soul in which we have desires is liable to be over-persuaded and to vacillate to and fro, and so some smart fellow, a Sicilian, I daresay, or Italian,2 made a fable in which—by a play of words3—he named this part, as being so impressionable and persuadable, a jar, and the thoughtless he called uninitiate:4


1 The sage was perhaps Philolaus, a Pythagorean philosopher contemporary with Socrates. The phrase σῶμα σῆμα, suggesting a mystical similarity between “body” and “tomb,” was part of the Orphic doctrine.

2 “Sicilian” may refer to Empedocles; “Italian” to one of the Pythagoreans.

3 The play is with πιθανόν and πίθον:πειστοκόν is added to explain that πιθανόν is not used in its ordinary active sense of “impressive.”

4 The σοφός seems to have falsely derived ἀμυήτους from μύω (=close), with the meaning “unclosed,” in order to connect it with the notion of “cracked” or “leaky.”

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (Gonzalez Lodge, 1891)
load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (14 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: