Thomas Taylor on Plato's Two Horses

Plato, Thomas Taylor · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

Taylor's rendering of the passage from the Phaedrus in which the two horses of the soul's charioteer are finally described, together with his additional notes from The Works of Plato. Plato had said one horse was good and the other not, without yet declaring the virtue of the one or the vice of the other; this is where he does so, and the descriptions are unusually physical. The good horse subsists in a more beautiful condition, erect and well-articulated, its neck lofty, its nose somewhat aquiline, its colour white and its eyes black — a lover of honour together with temperance and modesty, companion of true opinion, not whipped, and governed only by exhortation and reason.

The bad horse is crooked, various, rash in its motions, stiff and short-necked, flat-nosed, black, with grey eyes and full of blood; companion of injury and arrogance, its ears hairy and deaf, and scarcely obedient to whip or spur. The test comes when the charioteer beholds the amatory eye inflaming the whole soul through sensible perception: the obedient horse violently checks its own motions and through shame restrains itself, while the other cannot be held by spur or whip but hurries along leaping and exulting, compelling both charioteer and fellow-horse to rush with it. The passage matters to this section because the pair map directly onto the higher and lower Manas of the sevenfold scheme, which is why it is placed among the constitution files rather than among the Hellenic papers.

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