Plato’s Most Beautiful Myth Retold and Interpreted

The Last Judgement (detail), by Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel, Vatican.

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Michelangelo/Public Domain

Plato concluded the ten books of the Republic with the myth of Er, which greatly influenced the Western mind, down to our very idea of heaven and hell. Although Plato “invented” the myth of Er, he did draw upon pre-existing elements of Greek and Egyptian mythology and cosmology.

The Myth

Er, a hero from Pamphylia, was slain in battle but came back to life on his funeral pyre to speak to the living of what he saw while he was dead.

In the 12 days that he was dead, Er’s soul went on a journey to a meadow with four openings, two into the heavens above and two into the earth below.

Judges sat in this meadow, ordering the good souls to the right and up through one of the openings into the heavens, and the unjust souls to the left and down through one of the openings into the earth.

Meanwhile, bright and sprightly souls floated down to the meadow from the second opening into the heavens, and dull and doleful souls rose up from the second opening into the earth. These returning souls had each been on a thousand-year journey: whereas the descending souls spoke merrily of what they had enjoyed in the heavens, the ascending souls wept bitterly at what they had endured in the underworld.

When Er approached the judges, he was told that he would not be judged but would simply stand as a witness and report what he saw to the living.

The Spindle of Necessity

After a week encamped in the meadow, the souls traveled for five more days to the Spindle of Necessity, a shaft of intensely bright rainbow light that extended into the heavens and held together the sun, moon, planets, and stars, each in their circular orbits that made up the whorl of the spindle. The primordial goddess Ananke, or Necessity, spun the spindle, attended by her three daughters, the Fates. In each circle lay a siren, who went round with it, hymning a single tone or note.

With all the souls now gathered at the foot of the spindle, a prophet announced:

Hear the word of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny.

The souls came forth one by one, according to their allotted number, to choose their next life from a vast scattering of human and animal lives.

Not having known the terrors of the underworld, the first soul hastily picked out the life of a tyrant, only to find that he was fated to devour his own children. Although he had been virtuous in his past life, his virtue had arisen out of habit rather than philosophy, meaning that his judgment was poor.

On the other hand, the souls that had returned from the underworld often chose a better, more virtuous station, but on no other grounds than bitter experience.

Last to come forth, the soul of the wily Odysseus sought out the life of a private man with no cares, which he found easily because overlooked by everyone else. Er heard him say that he would have picked it even if he had been the first to be called.

Having made their choice, the souls traveled through the scorching plain of Oblivion and set camp by the river of Forgetfulness. Each soul was required to drink from the river and have its memory erased, but the souls that had not been saved by wisdom drank more than was strictly necessary.

In the night, as they slept, the souls shot up like stars to be reborn into their chosen lives. As they did, Er opened his eyes to find himself lying on his funeral pyre.

Interpretation of the Myth

At the beginning of the Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon tells Socrates that most people have no real care for justice and only maintain a reputation for virtue to evade the social costs of being or seeming unjust. We behave justly, says Glaucon, not because we value justice but because we are weak and self-serving.

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In his magisterial reply to Glaucon, which is the substance of the Republic, Socrates famously conjures an ideal republic to help him define justice. Socrates argues that justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: if health in the body is intrinsically desirable, then so too is justice in the soul. For Socrates as for Plato, people with diseased or disordered souls are incapable of happiness because they are not in rational control of themselves.

Thus, one purpose of the myth of Er is to show that, even if being genuinely just does not always pay off or seem to pay off, it does pay off in the long run.

Having said, in the Republic, all that could be said on justice, Plato lets go of our hand and leaves us to grapple with the myth of Er. The myth of Er is not merely a gift from Plato but a gift from the gods, who contrived for Er to come back to life and share it with us.

In the myth, the Spindle of Necessity symbolizes fate and the oneness and interconnectedness of all things. The spindle’s attachment to heaven also represents our longing for pure and perfect (or platonic) ideals such as beauty, love, and justice. The hymning sirens are a nod to the Pythagorean notion of the heavenly bodies playing out a grand cosmic symphony.

Many spiritual traditions feature a central tree, vine, pillar, mountain, or other axis mundi (world axis) that bridges Earth and Heaven. In Eden, there are not one but two trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, the tree of moral consciousness and, by extension, of choice and freedom. The Spindle of Necessity, where souls are made to choose their next life, is, therefore, the fulcrum at which fate and freedom intersect.

Indeed, the myth of Er can be read as an ingenious formulation of the problem of free will. Plato emphasizes that whatever hand we have been dealt—as represented by the randomly allocated order of choosing—it is the choices that we make that determine our longer-term happiness.

Read more in The Meaning of Myth.