Note 120 — Chapter XII · THE LAY AUTHORS

Prodikos is, acc. to Welcker, Kl. Schr. ii, 497 ff., responsible for most of the theories propounded in the Ps.-Platonic Axiochus on the subject of the ἀθανασία τῆς ψυχῆς, Ax. 370 B ff., the tendency of the soul to the heavenly αἰθήρ (366 A), and even of the Platonizing fantasy at the end about the fate of the departed (371-2). Prodikos, if we adopted this attribution, would become less the “forerunner of Sokrates” (as Welcker calls him) than the forerunner of Plato. There is, however, no real reason to attribute to him any more share in that document than is asserted distinctly in it. The brief and carelessly composed pamphlet consists of a medley of the conventional ingredients of the usual λόγοι παραμυθητικοί loosely strung together. To Prod. is assigned: the disquisition on the troubles of life in all its stages 336 D-367 E; and the saying ὅτι ὁ θάνατος οὔτε περὶ τοὺς ζῶντάς ἐστιν οὔτε περὶ τοὺς μετηλλαχότας κτλ., 369 B (cf. Buresch, Leip. Stud. ix, 8–9). These two passages put together would establish as the opinion of Prodikos just the opposite of what Welcker wishes to ascribe to him. He would show himself as a true πεισιθάνατος (—ἐξ ἐκείνου θανατᾷ μου ἡ ψυχή, 366 C), who would make death a mere exit into a state of unconsciousness after the troubles of life, and thus seem an absolute nonentity. But the piece is in reality quite without authority: it apparently puts forward the name of Prodikos, who is so often stated in Plato to have been the “teacher” of Sokrates, merely in order to have a definite authority (like the fabulous Gobryes later on) for what the author does not wish to represent Sokrates as saying on his own account. One of the sayings attributed to the imaginary Prodikos, ὅτι ὁ θάνατος . . . is, however, only too clearly a simple appropriation of Epicurus’ aphorism, ὁ θάνατος οὐδὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς κτλ. (p. 61, 6 Usen.; cf. p. 227, 30; 391. Heinze also points this out, Ber. sächs. Ges. d. Wiss. 1884, p. 332). The other passage (366 D ff.) agrees suspiciously with what Teles (p. 38 Hens.) has to say on the same subject apparently in entire dependence on Krates the Cynic. It seems extremely probable that the author of the Axiochus also had Krates before him or even Teles (as Wyttenbach already suggested, Plu., Mor. vi, p. 41); and that he attributes what he has thus borrowed from extraneous sources to “Prodikos” by a fiction that never came amiss to the composers of such dialogues.—It follows then that what Prodikos really said about the soul and its destiny is unknown to us; cf. on this recently much-discussed subject: Brinkmann, Rh. Mus. 51, 444 ff.