Lot-casting, Divine Interference and Chance in the Myth of Er

In this paper I shall focus on a minute part of the provocative and rich in content Myth of Er, related at the very end of Plato’s Republic. I shall deal with a single aspect of the passage which, in conjunction with the brief statement in book II (379c1-7), ^[1] marks the historical beginning of the efforts to provide an answer to the Problem of Evil, i. e. to produce a theodicy. The story of the disembodied souls’ post-mortem act of choosing the next body begins at 617d. An integral part of that story is what one may call the lottery episode, a rather intriguing few lines which pose several interpretative challenges and call for further comments. On the pages that follow their elucidation is attempted. My approach to the issue is largely a reaction to McPherran’s interpretation of the lottery episode in his 2010 chapter entitled “Virtue, Luck, and Choice at the End of the Republic”.

As far as the Myth of Er as a whole is concerned, it has been leading the commentators to varied conclusions, and has been arousing disparate feelings in them, ranging from deep admiration to strong depreciation. Stewart introduces his discussion of the myth with the following sentence: “We come now to the Myth of Er (Rep. 614Aff.), the greatest of Plato's Eschatological Myths, whether the fullness of its matter or the splendour of its form be considered.” ^[2] This stands in stark contrast to Annas, who finds it to be “a painful shock;” she is dumbfound by its “childishness” and its “vulgarity [which] seems to pull us right down to the level of Cephalus, where you take justice seriously only when you start thinking about hell-fire.” ^[3] Still, most of the scholars dealing with the closing pages of the Republic remain more moderate and balanced in their judgment of the Myth’s philosophic value, emphasizing both its merits, and the seemingly insoluble difficulties that it gives rise to.

The fascinating tale of Er, probably the most puzzling of Plato’s four great eschatological myths, ^[4] commences after Socrates already presented to Glaucon some this-worldly advantages that a just person rightly enjoys, and is meant to illustrate those much greater, albeit unobservable, rewards he is going to receive in the afterlife. In it, the reader is introduced to a brave soldier of the name of Er, the son of Armenius, of Pamphylia, ^[5] who was killed in an unspecified war. His lifeless body, left on the battlefield, had resisted decomposition for ten days, and after being collected and placed on a funeral pyre by his relatives, on the twelfth day was miraculously revived. Immediately after coming back to life, he related to the mourners the astounding story of his experience in the netherworld. This wonderful report consists of four sections – with two elucidating comments interjected into the third one – and a closing advice which winds up not only Er’s tale, but also the dialogue as a whole. ^[6]

The lottery episode is to be found in the third section of Er’s story, where the reader follows the souls as they arrive at the cosmic beam of light and are bidden to approach the goddess Necessity’s daughter Lachesis. While they are gathering around her throne, an unnamed prophet ^[7] steps out, takes from the lap of Lachesis lots and patterns of life, and, ascending a high-raised tribune, addresses the assembly on behalf of his mistress. Then the souls, qualified by the prophet as ephemeral, ^[8] learn that they are about to embark on another course of earthly life; that their daimon will not be assigned to them, but they will choose it themselves; ^[9] that samples of lives will be presented to them, and they will pick one of those in the order determined by the casting of lots (prōtos d’ ho lachōn prōtos haireisthō bion, 617e2); ^[10] that the choice of an appropriate life will be left at their own discretion, and that the decision, once maid, will be irreversible. The responsibility for the ensuing happiness and distress will thus lay solely with them; god will remain blameless. ^[11] The prophet then throws the lots (rhipsai epi pantas tous klērous, 617e6), and each soul grabs the one closest to her, except for Er, who is forbidden to do so. Next, the prophet spreads out before the assembly patterns of lives, far more numerous than the souls present there. These lives are to be lived in a wide variety of human and animal forms, and abound in things bringing happiness and distress, as well as things intermediate; everything is given there, except for the quality or order of the soul (psychēs taxin), which will be determined of necessity by the features of the chosen life-pattern. The prophet also notifies the assembly that those souls, who due to the will of chance (tychē), come late in line, shouldn’t be disheartened: even the last one to choose, provided it chooses wisely, will earn at least a tolerable life, and not a disgraceful one.

Despite his warnings, however, many souls make hasty and foolish choices, even so the drawer of the first lot, who instantly seizes the greatest tyranny, not understanding that it will implicate him in abominable and horribly self-destructive acts. ^[12] Unable to recall the prophet’s earlier instructions, he wails loudly, beats his breast and ascribes his ordeal to the workings of tychē, the gods, and everything but his own choice. ^[13] Next, the others approach the life-patterns lying on the ground and make their choices, persons renowned and ordinary, humans and animals alike. ^[14] Their choice, however, is for the most part determined by their past habits and bad experiences; wisdom plays little part in the evaluation of the offered possibilities. ^[15]

With the context in which the lottery episode appears thus outlined, we can now turn to two closely connected problems raised by it. The first one is to discover the purpose which the lot-casting is supposed to fulfil within the broader frame of Plato’s intention to release the divinity from the responsibility for the evils experienced by the living entities, and the second to determine its status as being either independent from or propelled by the gods. By the end of the paper I shall also touch upon the meaning and impact of tychē, introduced in the fabric of the Myth through the random falling of the lots.

As for as the purpose of the lottery in the architectonics of the Myth, McPherran writes the following: “Every commentator on the Myth of Er has rightly understood Plato’s insertion of the initial lottery to be his way of initially absolving the gods of moral responsibility for each soul’s choice of life and the consequences that accompany that choice.” ^[16] This generalization, although unsupported by any reference, sounds quite reasonable – with the employment of lot-casting Plato must have had in mind something like diverting the responsibility from the gods on tychē. ^[17] What remains dubious is how successful this enterprise is, and how big a role it plays in the overall argument for god’s blamelessness, i. e. how broad its scope is. We shall first go through several objections to its credibility, all of them found in McPherran (2010), and then briefly consider the broadness of its scope.

Already in the introductory part of his article, McPherran expresses a doubt concerning the fairness of the lot-casting procedure, which, if confirmed, will clearly cast a long shadow on the entire project of absolving god from the responsibility for the badness: “Unfortunately, it is unclear if the lottery is rigged in some fashion …” This, however, seems to be a rather groundless supposition. First, there is no textual indication whatsoever that such an act could have taken place; second, and more important, there is no sufficient reason for it taking place. For, assuming that some kind of fraud is involved in the lot-casting, a very natural reaction would be to ask by whom and for whose benefit is it done? The rigging clearly must be done by a god or some other divinity. Now, if we want to exclude from the divine nature properties like utter fickleness, whimsicalness and gratuitous spite, and thus deny that any divine being would perpetuate such an elaborate fraud simply as a pastime, the beneficiaries obviously must be some of those souls who come among the first in the choice-line. But then the gods must be somehow biased, either through some error in judgment, or by being induced to partiality by gifts and implorations. The former is impossible, since in the gods not a trace of ignorance abides. ^[18] As for the latter, in the lottery scene of the Myth there are no other divinities involved except for Lachesis and her semi-divine servant, the unnamed prophet. Lachesis is a daughter of the goddess Necessity, and thus absolutely unshakable. Consequently, it is highly improbable that she would employ somebody of questionable character as her spokesman. Furthermore, even if they were not associated with Necessity, an emblem of the unalterable, rational cosmic law, in Plato’s theology there is no room whatsoever for a wanting ^[19] or a bribable deity. ^[20] Therefore, the worry concerning any divine interference in the lottery’s outcome can be safely dismissed. ^[21]

The same argumentation applies to another, although closely connected, concern which McPherran voices on p. 138: “Plato mysteriously undermines his insulation project by describing the lot-caster as a prophet, thus a being who can in theory know in advance the outcome of his toss. The semi-divine prophet could, then, influence his toss in a non-random way.” However, his being a prophet does not mean that he knows everything that will transpire in the future, including the outcome of the toss and the best possible way to rearrange it in order to achieve the desired end, whatever it may be. And even if we assume that he in fact has full knowledge of the future (at least of the lottery), knowing that an event will take place does not imply any causal impulse aimed at altering it in any way. He could just very well know the outcome, and let it be. ^[22]

A graver doubt is, however, expressed in the last paragraph of the same page: “[F]or the audience Plato has the prophet address – the disembodied souls and Plato’s own readers – the casting of lots (klēroi) was not a way of making decision via a random selection; rather, it was a way of allowing the gods to decide an issue.” Were this statement a representation of the actual attitude on the issue exercised by Plato’s contemporaries, it could seriously challenge the lot-casting as an insulation technique. It seems, however, that the reality in fifth and fourth century Athens was different. Of course, there must had been a period when the lot-casting used to be taken as an expression of divine will, both in Greece and elsewhere, but we have very little, if not nil evidence that such an intuition was current during the age of the Republic. ^[23]

To start with the references from Plato’s works which McPherran provides in order to add some weight to his claim (p. 144, n. 22) – none of them really supports the expressed worry. The references to the Timaeus are unusual, to say the least. Neither at 34b-36d, nor at 46c-47e there is any mention of lottery as indicative of any kind of divine interference. The former passage deals with the construction of the World Soul and the distribution of the soul-stuff into the circles of the Same and the Different, while the latter with the auxiliary causes that facilitate the sense organs’ operation, and the benefits that these provide for the humans.

The two Laws references, although closer to the point, also fail to show that Plato himself took the falling of the lots as an expression of divine will. For 690c gives us nothing more than an information that one of the rights to rule rests upon casting of lots, and that this kind of rule is brought about by the favor of god and good fortune (theophilē kai eutychē archēn); this does not mean that the lottery is a way of allowing the gods to decide, but simply that the one who is chosen to rule by lot is loved by them and favored by fortune – which is a much weaker claim than the former.

The second passage referred to by McPherran, namely 756e-758a, is not only unsupportive of the thesis that the idea behind lot-casting was to let the gods decide, but actually repudiates it. First, from 756e we learn that after a certain group of councilors is chosen by lot, they are subjected to testing, which is an absurd step, had the legislator envisaged the lot casting as divine ordinance. Furthermore, at 757b-c Plato explicitly distinguishes between two kinds of equality – a superficial, arithmetical equality, determined by number, and a true, proportional equality, which gives the due measure to each person according to their nature. Now, the distribution of the first kind of equality is secured by employing the lot (klērōi apeuthynōn eis tas dianomas autēn), while the second one is ordained and supported by Zeus himself – dios krisis esti. As the text makes it obvious, it is not the outcome of the lot which is arranged by Zeus; if he stands behind anything, that would be the principle that the worthier should receive greater goods and honors then the less worthy. Finally we learn that the legislators, in order to foster justice, will be forced to occasionally employ lot-casting, lest the masses will become discontent and intestine discord will arise; but while doing that they should “pray, calling upon god and good luck (theon kai agathēn tychēn) to guide for them the lot aright towards the highest justice” (757e). They should also be careful to employ that form of equality “which needs luck (tychē)… as seldom as possible” (758a). Thus, what the mentioned passages in fact establish is that Plato does not consider the lot an instrument of god’s will, but a genuinely democratic (and therefore not overly laudable) means of establishing order in the state and equality among its citizens. ^[24] He is, moreover, reluctant to use it freely, and advises the casting of lots to be accompanied by prayers to god and good luck, so that they may positively influence the otherwise fortuitous outcome. Were the lot-casting conceived as McPherran says it was, it wouldn’t have been so obviously downgraded, and no separate intervention of the divinity would have been petitioned. ^[25]

For Plato, then, the lot was not a means of letting the gods express their will. And neither was it so for his contemporaries, and consequently, for his readers. In Athens’ everyday political life the drawing of lots was too common and too mundane an occurrence to have had any supernatural import attached to it:

The Athenian democracy entrusted to citizens drawn by lot most of the functions not performed by the Popular Assembly (ekklēsia). This principle applied mainly to the magistracies (archai). Of the approximately 700 magistrate posts that made up the Athenian administration, some 600 were filled by lot. ^[26]

Besides that, the members of the Council (boulē), were also appointed by lot, and the jurors (dikastai) were selected by lot out of the pool of hēliastai. All these officials were subjected to thorough examination before they could take up their office, and the magistrates were at any time liable to impeachment and, possibly, punishment, which is, again, hardly an evidence of trust in divine decision. Furthermore, many good ancient sources associate the lot with a very this-worldly activity, which is the democratic governance. Aristotle, most probably wrongly, ^[27] sees the institution of selection by lot already in the constitution of Draco (622 or 621 BC), ^[28] and says that it is a democratic principle. ^[29] Herodotus, ^[30] a generation older then Plato, stresses the selection of magistrates by lot as the most prominent feature of the best, i. e. the democratic governance. ^[31]

Finally, Xenophon’s Socrates, at least according to his katēgoros, ridiculed the democratic practice of appointing public officials by lot, saying that “no one would choose a pilot or builder or flautist by lot, nor any other craftsman for work in which mistakes are far less disastrous than mistakes in statecraft.” ^[32] He certainly wouldn’t have said such a thing, had he believed that the selection by lot had anything to do with divine providence. Therefore, McPherrans worry is clearly unfounded, because neither Plato, nor his audience, were normally prone to perceive the outcome of the lot as divinely directed. ^[33] Thus, the drawing of lots in the Myth of Er is justified as an initial technique for insulating the gods from responsibility.

Now, from the last two sentences, two further questions arise: a) if the falling of the lot is not determined through god’s ordinance, what is its particular outcome due to? b) What is precisely the responsibility that the gods are insulated from?

The answer to the first question is rather obvious – the outcome of the lot (klēros) is directed by luck, or chance (tychē). ^[34] That sounds fair enough, but what does Plato have in mind when he brings up tychē? What is the concept that the word stands for? To this question only a brief answer will be given here. I shall first venture to say what the word does not stand for, and only after that what it could mean in the context of the Myth.

For the reasons just given, as well as because in the Republic 619c and in the Laws 757e Plato places divinities and luck side by side, as two distinct factors, the tychē of the Myth is not the theia moira or theia tychē of the poets. Next, despite the attractiveness of the proposal, it probably does not allude to Plato’s “later Timaeus view of the causes of evil … that he locates in the disorderly motions of matter.” ^[35] For one, in the Myth of Er luck or chance plays only a minor role as an explanans for the occurrence of badness, the main emphasis being put on the soul’s wrong choice, prompted by ignorance; furthermore, tychē and Anankē (the goddess) are in the Myth distinguished, if not contrasted, while in the Timaeus necessity and the wandering cause are rather the same thing. ^[36] It also isn’t Aristotle’s much more complex tychē of the Physics II. 5, which is an accidental or coincidental cause found among things that are for the sake of something and which involve decision, i. e. a conscious agent. ^[37] As a matter of fact, Plato gives no explanation of tychē neither in the Myth, nor elsewhere in the Republic. Thus it seems that he takes tychē as a ‘brute fact,’ close to the folk concept of chance, i. e. the inexplicable randomness with which we believe to meet daily. It is probably the same deficient tychē of Empedocles and Democritus, whom Aristotle reproves for first evoking it, and then leaving it undiscussed and unexplained. ^[38]

On the preceding pages an attempt was made to show that the mysterious prophet’s lot-casting may be taken as a successful strategy of diverting responsibility from god to tychē. Now a few words are due regarding the question what are the gods really absolved from through the lot-casting process, i. e. the question b) above. This issue is coextensive with the unresolved problem of the strategy’s scope, which we raised at the beginning of the discussion of the lot-casting in the Myth and its interpretation offered by McPherran, and thus one simple answer will have to suffice for both. At times, the text gives rise to an impression that klēros and tychē play a significant role in shaping the soul’s future life. Such places are 619d7 – dia tēn tou klērou tychēn, ^[39] and 619e2 – ho klēros autōi tēs haireseōs mē en teleutaiois piptoi. ^[40] It is, however, very difficult to discern Plato’s intention behind these statements, since “the myth does not indicate how a soul’s allotted position in the queue affects its choice of life.” ^[41] Moreover, they stand in contradiction with some other important passages and examples, besides the overall message that the chooser alone is responsible for his life. At 618a the prophet throws upon the ground patterns of lives, which are far more numerous than the souls present (poly pleiō tōn parontōn). ^[42] Next, at 619b the prophet is adamant in his claim that even the last one in the row shall get a desirable life, ^[43] provided he chooses with understanding (kai teleutaiōi epionti, xyn nōi helomenōi … keitai bios agapētos). Finally, the only soul among those listed in the Myth whose choice is not a terrible mistake or purely a matter of reactive, emotional selection, is the soul of Odysseus, exactly the last one to choose. ^[44] All this does not conclusively repudiates the idea that tychē, as the actuator of the lot’s outcome, has significant influence on the soul’s destiny. But it does cast a serious doubt on that idea, and leaves the burden of proof on those who accept it. In the lack of such proof, it seems safe to conclude that “the point of the lottery must be that it forms an orderly queue for the choice of lives, not that it seriously affects the choice that is eventually made.” ^[45] Thus the insulating power of the strategy is limited to the placement of the souls in the choice-queue. ^[46] Its obvious merits within the frames of the mythical tale would be to provide for a tidy arrangement of the selection process and thus avoid disorder and disturbance, as well as to discourage those dissatisfied with their place in the line from blaming the gods for that.