The Shape of the Earth in Plato's Phaedo

Abstract

Way of Seeming, gave a picture of the world in which &TXr6 y--qq and a'& tecopcx ^were rationalised as a system of concentric rings or stephanai. In effect, this system was a sort of scientific version of the traditional poetic picture of the world in which a round, flat earth was surmounted by the dome of heaven wreathed with signs and had beneath it first Hades, then Tartarus, with gates, a bronze threshold at the top, a bronze fence round it, about its neck a triple coil of night, and a floor which was as far beneath earth as earth was beneath heaven., The Parmenidean rationalisation of poetry is in strong contrast to the more strictly mnaterialistic picture of the Ionian Greeks, according to which the world was either like a log of wood floating on water (Thales) 2, or like a cylindrical drum three times as broad as it was deep (Anaximander) 3, or like a lid floating upon air (Anaximenes Anaxagoras, Democritus) 4, and in which the poetical concept of Hades and Tartarus, so necessary to those preoccupied with rewards and punishments in an after life but quite unnecessary to those who were not, had been totally eliminated. I considered the Parmenidean picture in connexion with the general account of t& i'7ra yiq and the image of whorls given in the myth of Er in the Republic. It seems clear that in the Republic Plato had in mind the traditional poetic picture of Hades below a flat earth. It is true that he does not actually tell us where the gaxtotvtoq T63noq is, the judgment place of souls whence they proceed either upward through the X&al?oc -ou oi pavou or downward through a corresponding Xca[La into the equivalent of Tartarus, but since the souls on their return to the meadow from either journey