This is the second part of a two-part article. Read the first part here.
Introduction
As argued in Part A of this exposition, Plato’s use of drunkenness, mainly in the Symposium but also in the Phaedrus, is a metaphor designed to defend Socrates’ philosophical inspiration and its civic benefits, drawing on Euripides’ Bacchae and on Solon’s political poetry.
On the one hand, Plato must have felt encouraged to use this daring metaphor by Euripides’ influential description of genuine Bacchic experience which, as he explicitly states, does not involve actual drunkenness (Bacch. 76-77).
On the other hand, correct sympotic behavior was a perfectly suitable comparison for a well-ordered city, able to instill the virtue of sōphrosynē to its citizens, a comparison systematically promoted in Solon’s elegies (poem 4.9-10).
Thus, Plato hoped that his audience would readily differentiate between the drunken antics of Alcibiades, graphically described in the Symposium (for example, 212d-213b; 213e-214d), and the intoxicating passion of the philosopher who enthuses his audiences in his obsessive search for the truth.
Plato underlines the metaphorical value of Socratic baccheia with a plethora of words that mean “like, resembling, similar to” (as in Symposium 215b1, 5-6, and 8; 216c8-10), clearly meant to enhance the effect of Socrates’ comparison with Dionysus’ worshippers while declaring its fictional nature. Socrates used the same technique in the Phaedrus where he admits that he described erotic mania (employed in its pederastic context) in a figurative manner, as a metaphor for philosophical ardour (Phaedrus 265b-c). Therefore, it makes sense for Plato to revisit the metaphor of drunkenness in the Laws, his last dialogue that debates the constitution of a new colony (Magnesia); Plato revises here the subjects of civic ethos and civic education, including the roles of philosophy and poetry in the ideal city, in his most mature phase.
Yet, in the Laws, Plato seems to undermine the metaphorical understanding of drunkenness as analyzed thus far by recommending to the citizens of Magnesia the so-called “Test of the Wine” which involves actual wine drinking. Furthermore, he rejects the Bacchic ecstasy of those “who imitate in their drunken state the so-called Nymphs and Pans and Silenoi and Satyrs” — a description which evokes Socrates’ comparison with the Silenoi and Marsyas in the Symposium, as “unsuitable for citizens” (815d2).
Thus, in what follows, I explore Plato’s references to the Test of the Wine to outline the various metaphors about wine and drunkenness employed by Plato in the Symposium and the Laws, aiming to reconcile their seemingly contradictory applications.
Virtue and the Test of the Wine
In the Laws (649d6-9), drinking too much is listed as one of the excesses associated with lack of self-control and emotional indulgence, while the spectacle of a drunken man who “is moved and moves everywhere, raging both in body and soul” (775c4-d3) is …
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