Plat. Phaed. 78e

Lyrics set to music are professed to be the culmination of the Platonic educational course. One's soul imitates their form. We too can become resolute and taught: like acts upon like. Graves assumes this when he writes that ‘European poetic lore is, indeed, ultimately based on magical principles’. Frazer deems this ‘sympathetic magic’, or, the spell that words have on things.

We hear in the most consolatory passages of Plato that in the days leading up to his death Socrates has been fashioning some verses in his solitude. His daemon visits him in his dreams and admonishes him to ‘make and practice music’. His charming philosophic poetry, spoken to his beloved friends that day, constitutes his curative ‘music’, if ‘philosophy is the consummate art of the muses’ still holds.

His dear friends are aghast at his impending death, but he consoles them with his dialectical argument for the immortality of the soul. At the end of his rather tenuous argument, his friends are still uneasy for him. They have not been convinced, intellectually, of his doctrines. The philosophic tale of the soul, his story of its immortal life… all have just been a ‘spell’ with which he soothes their fears, which they should repeat to themselves as a chant:

‘There’s a child inside us, Socrates; try to reassure us as if we were afraid’.

‘Well, you must sing spells [ἐπᾴδειν] every day, till you’ve charmed it out’.

The lofty cosmological and psychological proof which he attempts is no more than a lullaby with which to quell the disorders of the souls around him.