The Audience’s Response to Plato’s Eschatological Myths: Aesthetic Experience at the Service of Morality

This paper explores the audience’s response to the eschatological myths in the Gorgias, the Phaedo, and the Republic by reconstructing a concept of aesthetic experience in the light of Plato’s ideas on pleasure. I argue for a kind of pleasure that has emotional and intellectual components, which make it a combination of pure and mixed pleasures. This kind of pleasure, which these myths produce, is meant to strengthen virtue because feeling pleasure from listening to a story provides a model for our character and shapes it accordingly. These myths thus provide an incentive for choosing a virtuous life.