Ion

Summary

Ion is one of Plato's shortest dialogues, a single conversation between Socrates and Ion of Ephesus, a rhapsode who earns his living reciting Homer at festivals and lecturing on what the poems mean. Ion has just come from Epidaurus, where he won first prize at the games held for Asclepius, and he is bound for the Panathenaea at Athens. He believes he can say more and finer things about Homer than any critic alive, and he thinks the Homeridae ought to give him a golden crown. Socrates begins with a puzzle Ion cannot answer. If Homer and Hesiod treat the same subjects, and whoever can judge a good speaker on a subject can also judge a bad one, why does Ion grow drowsy whenever anyone mentions another poet? Socrates' answer is the famous image of the magnet. The Muse is like the stone of Heraclea, which not only draws iron rings but makes them able to draw others. She moves the poet, the poet moves the reciter, and the reciter moves the crowd, a hanging chain of borrowed power. Poets, on this account, compose while out of their senses, like Corybantic dancers or Bacchic women, and God speaks through them as through prophets. Ion, moved and flattered, agrees, and admits that when he recites the sorrows of Hecuba his eyes fill with tears and his hair stands on end, while he keeps one eye on the audience and his fee. The second half tests whether the rhapsode has any knowledge of his own. Socrates sets passages of Homer before him: Nestor's advice on rounding the turn in the chariot race, Hecamede's posset for the wounded Machaon, a simile from fishing, the visions of the seer Theoclymenus. In each case Ion concedes that the charioteer, the physician, the fisherman or the prophet judges better than he does. Pressed to name the part of Homer that belongs to the rhapsode alone, he retreats to knowing what a general should say to his troops, and finally claims that a good rhapsode is a good general. Socrates asks why the best general in Greece wanders about reciting poems, compares him to the shape-shifting Proteus, and offers him a choice between being thought dishonest or inspired. Ion takes inspiration. The dialogue is comic, and much of its comedy turns on Ion's vanity, but its questions are serious. Socrates neither despises poetry nor defends it as knowledge; he calls Homer the best and most divine of poets and still denies that the reciter possesses an art. Readers have long noticed the irony in his praise of divine madness, which leaves the poet honoured and yet without responsibility for the truth of what he says. The Ion stands behind the fuller critique of poetry in the Republic and the more generous account of inspired madness in the Phaedrus, and it raises for Christian readers the difference between a frenzy that bypasses the mind and the inspiration of Scripture, in which the human authors wrote with understanding.

Top Lessons

• Loving a poem is not the same as knowing a craft

  Ion's devotion to Homer is real, and his performances move twenty thousand people. Socrates does not deny either fact. He asks a narrower question: can Ion give an account of what makes Homer good that would also let him judge any other poet? The dialogue separates enthusiasm, which can be narrow and still genuine, from knowledge, which reaches the whole of its subject.

• The magnet and the chain of rings

  The image at 533d-536d explains three things at once: why poetry moves people, why the performer seems to share the poet's power, and why neither can explain that power. It also places the audience at the end of the chain. Students should notice that the image flatters Ion while quietly removing his claim to expertise, and that its picture of the poet as a light, winged and holy thing comes from a speaker who elsewhere asks for reasons.

• Who judges Homer's chariot race?

  Socrates' test is simple and still useful. When a poem describes chariot driving, medicine, fishing or warfare, the expert in that craft can say whether the description is accurate. The rhapsode cannot. This raises a lasting question about what kind of truth poetry offers: if it is not technical truth, is it any truth at all, or is it truth of another kind that the dialogue does not name?

• Performance, payment and the divided heart

  Ion's most revealing admission is that he weeps when he recites the sorrows of Troy while watching the crowd, because if they cry he will laugh when he is paid. The performer is both carried away and calculating. The passage invites honest reflection on any public role, including preaching, teaching and acting, in which real feeling and concern for reward can sit side by side.

• Divine frenzy and the inspiration of Scripture

  Socrates says that God takes away the minds of poets and uses them as ministers, as he uses diviners and prophets. Christian readers have sometimes compared this with the doctrine of inspiration, but the differences are large. The biblical writers wrote as themselves, with memory, research and argument (Luke 1:1-4; 2 Peter 1:21), and Paul insisted that prophecy in the church be intelligible and that the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets (1 Corinthians 14:32). Comparing the two accounts helps students see what Plato's Socrates is and is not claiming.

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Medical Lens

The Ion is not a medical text, but two features interest historians of medicine and psychiatry. First, it uses medicine as a model of genuine expertise: the physician, like the charioteer and the fisherman, is the proper judge of Homer's lines about his craft, and the test passage is Hecamede's restorative drink for the wounded Machaon, quoted in the dialogue as Pramnian wine with grated goat's-milk cheese and an onion as relish, an early literary description of a remedy. Second, Socrates' account of poetic possession, with its comparison to Corybantic dancers and Bacchic women who are not in their right minds, belongs to the Greek vocabulary of divine madness later classified in the Phaedrus. Ion's report of tears, bristling hair and pounding heart during performance is a vivid first-person description of the bodily effects of absorbed emotion. Readings of this as trance or dissociation are interpretive; the dialogue frames it religiously and ironically, not clinically.

• 531e

  Socrates names the physician as the one who can judge which speaker talks best about the wholesomeness of food.

• 533e-534d

  Poets compared to Corybantic revellers and Bacchic maidens who compose only when out of their senses; God takes away their minds and uses them like diviners.

• 535b-e

  Ion describes weeping, hair standing on end and a throbbing heart while reciting, and Socrates argues that a man weeping amid friendly crowds is not in his right mind.

• 538b-c

  Hecamede's posset for the wounded Machaon (Iliad 11) is assigned to the judgment of the art of medicine rather than the rhapsode.

• 540c

  Ion concedes that the physician, not the rhapsode, knows what the one in charge of a sick man ought to say.