The myth of the winged chariot. Lecture by the philologist Paola Radici Colace

Appointment at the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria on Thursday, February 20th, 2020, at 5.30 pm, in the Conference Room, together with the International Writers of Calabria Center, for an unmissable journey of knowledge, to discover the cultural roots of Western thought and Mediterranean Europe. Paola Radici Colace, honorary president and director of the Scientific Committee of the CIS of Calabria, full professor of classical Philology at the University of Messina, will speak on the theme “The myth of the winged chariot”.

The conference, which will be accompanied by a video projection, fits into the Cycle “Myth and philosophical hermeneutics in Plato. From the myth of the cave to the myth of Atlantis”.

Speakers: the director of the MArRC Carmelo Malacrino and the president of the CIS of Calabria Loreley Rosita Borruto.

The myth – in the “Phaedrus”, among Plato’s best-known dialogues – is a reflection on the soul and human existence, that is conducted by “two horses”: the spirit and the body, the material, in the fascinating theme of the relationship with the afterlife.

“Plato was the Greek philosopher who first developed a ‘theory of passions’, inserting it into his cosmological system”, Radici Colace says. “In the myth of the winged chariot, there are three actors: the two horses – one white that represents the spiritual soul and one black that represents the sensitive, linked to materiality soul – and the charioteer, who guides the chariot to which the two animals are harnessed, to lead him upwards. In this movement, the two horses aim in opposite directions: the white horse towards the Hyperuranium world, at the top, where the Ideas are found; the black horse pushes downwards towards the world of the senses. The task of the charioteer (metaphor of consciousness, of human intelligence) is to lead the chariot – the philologist continues – keeping the trajectory straight and transforming the energies of the passions and sensitivity into a help to move towards something higher”.