Abstract

The myth of judgment in the final pages of Plato’s Gorgias has left more than one of its readers puzzled, a standpoint that is especially true in regards of the way that the punishment reserved to the unjust souls in Hades has been interpreted. In this paper, we shall see that the specific function of the punishment in the final myth of Plato’s Gorgias is to offer a metaphor of the effects of refutation upon the soul. For such a claim, we intend to show that punishment itself is modelled by means of an analogy with medicine which structures the Dialogue as a whole. After we have observed how Socrates introduce this analogy inside the myth by using nudity as a criterion of the evaluation of the soul, we shall analyze how the punishment itself is characterized. In the end, if we can assert that punishment reflects the use of refutation, it is because the pain it causes is analogous to the shame that one who disposes of the wrong beliefs experiences after being refuted.