Unpraying and palinode

Use in the book

At 142d Socrates gives the movement a short timescale. People eagerly desire offices and possessions, obtain them, and after a little interval take back what they asked. The interval separates seeming good from experienced harm. It does not prove that the objects are invariably bad; it proves that the original desire did not contain adequate knowledge of whether they would benefit this person.

Alcibiades repeats the formulation at 148b in his own account of the need for caution. That repetition is an advance over simply approving Socrates’ examples: he now imagines himself making an ill-judged request and wishing to undo it. Nevertheless a verbal recollection is not complete education. The end requires waiting for a changed capacity to distinguish good and bad, rather than trusting the recantation to repair every outcome.

The musical image gives the prayer a second utterance but offers no assurance that events can be reversed. A dead child, a lost life or an exile cannot simply be cancelled by saying the opposite. The dialogue exploits that disproportion between revisable words and possibly irreversible consequences. Its practical alternative is to defer the first ill-informed act, not to depend upon the efficacy of the second song.

Places to read

1. 142dThe many sing a palinode and unpray their original requests after a short delay.
2. 148bAlcibiades repeats the paired verbs while acknowledging the risk of his own prayer.

Translation in this edition

Note 12 says that aneuchesthai is known to the lexicon only from this dialogue, not that the author can be proved to have coined it. The note compares Stesichorus’ recantation as reported in Phaedrus 243a–b. At 148b Burnet follows a later correction in T that restores the wording of 142d, but prints the subjunctive required by the sentence; the principal manuscripts instead have praying a palinode.