Stripping the soul · Lexicon

From the book

Charmides

Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordApodynai is to strip or undress.
In the CharmidesThe setting makes literal undressing intelligible: Charmides is in a palaestra, and the praise concerns the body that exercise would expose.
In this editionThe edition deliberately repeats “strip” to keep the transfer visible.
A place to readChaerephon’s literal undressing is redirected to the soul and conversation.

Meaning

Apodynai is to strip or undress. Socrates takes the same verbal family from Chaerephon's proposal about Charmides' body and applies it metaphorically to the soul. Etheasametha means that we looked at or inspected; the proposal transfers the language of visual examination into conversation.

Use in the book

The setting makes literal undressing intelligible: Charmides is in a palaestra, and the praise concerns the body that exercise would expose. Socrates does not initially reject the invitation. He asks whether the youth's soul is well constituted and proposes stripping “this very thing” before the body's appearance. The priority matters: inward examination is to precede the visual display that the company has been imagining.

The practical counterpart follows at once. At his age Charmides should be willing to converse, and Critias confirms that he is philosophical and poetic. Socrates then asks that he be called over. The metaphor does not imply that a soul can literally be seen or that the examiner already knows its hidden condition. It identifies conversation as a means of exposing and testing what mere beauty leaves unexamined.

The transfer also anticipates the medical story, where the soul must receive treatment before the head. Both frames reverse the company's immediate priority without denying the body its place. Later questioning reveals uncertainty, borrowed formulas, pride, and intellectual promise; none amounts to a completed inventory of a separable inner object. “Stripping the soul” is therefore an image of access through encounter and answerability, not a declaration that transparent self-knowledge has been achieved.

Places to read

154d–155aChaerephon’s literal undressing is redirected to the soul and conversation
156e–158c2 3The later medical story similarly gives soul priority over the bodily request

Translation in this edition

The edition deliberately repeats “strip” to keep the transfer visible. It does not replace the second instance with a neutral “examine,” which would conceal the physical source of the metaphor.

ἀποδύω

Attested: ἀποδῦναι / ἀπεδύσαμεν (apodynai / apedysamen). Strip or undress; transferred from the proposed display of Charmides’ body to conversational inspection of his soul. References: 154d, 154e. Lexical identification: lemma: ἀποδύω. See Stripping the soul.