Ebook: Socrates Among the Corybantes: Being, Reality, and the Gods

In Plato’s dialogues, we find many references to Corybantic rites—rites of initiation performed in honor of the goddess Rhea. But, in the dialogue titled Euthydemus, there is more than a reference to the rites. Within the context of Socratic dialectic, the ancient rites of the Corybantes are acted out—although veiled and distorted.

In Socrates Among the Corybantes, Carl Levenson theorizes that Euthydemus is a valuable source in the history of religion as the rites of the Corybantes were meant to be secret. And since the Corybantic rites are of the Dionysian/Eleusinian type, Plato gives us a glimpse of the reality of Dionysiac ecstasy. The knowledge of these rites has usually been lost in the academic assertion that the Euthydemus was just a satire on philosophic arguing (which it is), and hence it has been consigned to a marginal place in Plato’s canon. But here Plato is rejecting his abstract theories on form in favor of intimacy with the reality of the world, of matter and being. Levenson states that complete immersion in the material substrate of the world is what Plato discovered at the heart of Dionysian ecstasy, and the aim of ecstasy, as Plato said, is to purify soul of ancient guilt.