allegories there is a great deal which is merely ornamental, and the
interpreter has to separate the important from the unimportant. Socrates
himself has given the right clue when, in using his own discourse
afterwards as the text for his examination of rhetoric, he characterizes it
as a 'partly true and tolerably credible mythus,' in which amid poetical
figures, order and arrangement were not forgotten.

The soul is described in magnificent language as the self-moved and the
source of motion in all other things. This is the philosophical theme or
proem of the whole. But ideas must be given through something, and under
the pretext that to realize the true nature of the soul would be not only
tedious but impossible, we at once pass on to describe the souls of gods as
well as men under the figure of two winged steeds and a charioteer. No
connection is traced between the soul as the great motive power and the
triple soul which is thus imaged. There is no difficulty in seeing that
the charioteer represents the reason, or that the black horse is the symbol
of the sensual or concupiscent element of human nature. The white horse
also represents rational impulse, but the description, 'a lover of honour
and modesty and temperance, and a follower of true glory,' though similar,
does not at once recall the 'spirit' (thumos) of the Republic. The two
steeds really correspond in a figure more nearly to the appetitive and
moral or semi-rational soul of Aristotle. And thus, for the first time
perhaps in the history of philosophy, we have represented to us the
threefold division of psychology. The image of the charioteer and the
steeds has been compared with a similar image which occurs in the verses of
Parmenides; but it is important to remark that the horses of Parmenides
have no allegorical meaning, and that the poet is only describing his own
approach in a chariot to the regions of light and the house of the goddess
of truth.