Simmias of Thebes

Thebes, Greece

Thebes is a city in Greece, situated to the north of the Cithaeron range, which divides Boeotia from Attica, and on the southern edge of the Boeotian plain. It played an important role in Greek myth, as the site of the stories of Cadmus, Oedipus, Dionysus and others...

was a disciple of Socrates

Socrates

Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...

, and a friend of Cebes

Cebes

Cebes of Thebes was a disciple of Socrates in the late 5th-century BCE. One work, known as the Pinax or Tabula, attributed to Cebes still survives, but it is believed to be a composition by an anonymous author of the 1st or 2nd century....

. In his Memorabilia

Memorabilia (Xenophon)

Memorabilia is a collection of Socratic dialogues by Xenophon, a student of Socrates...

, Xenophon

Xenophon

Xenophon , son of Gryllus, of the deme Erchia of Athens, also known as Xenophon of Athens, was a Greek historian, soldier, mercenary, philosopher and a contemporary and admirer of Socrates...

 includes him in the inner circle of Socrates' followers. He appears in Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's Phaedo

Phaedo

Plato's Phaedo is one of the great dialogues of his middle period, along with the Republic and the Symposium. The Phaedo, which depicts the death of Socrates, is also Plato's seventh and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days .In the dialogue, Socrates...

(Cebes and Simmias as main discussion partners of Socrates), Crito

Crito

Crito is a short but important dialogue by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. It is a conversation between Socrates and his wealthy friend Crito regarding justice , injustice , and the appropriate response to injustice. Socrates thinks that injustice may not be answered with injustice, and...

, Phaedrus

Phaedrus (Plato)

The Phaedrus , written by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's main protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues. The Phaedrus was presumably composed around 370 BC, around the same time as Plato's Republic and Symposium...

, and Epistle XII

Twelfth Letter (Plato)

The Twelfth Letter of Plato, also known as Epistle XII or Letter XII, is an epistle that tradition has ascribed to Plato, though it is almost certainly a literary forgery. Of all the Epistles, it is the only one that is followed by an explicit denial of its authenticity in the manuscripts. In the...

.

Character in Plato's Phaedo

Simmias is one of Socrates' interlocutors in Plato's Phaedo. This is a philosophical dialogue

Socratic dialogue

Socratic dialogue is a genre of prose literary works developed in Greece at the turn of the fourth century BC, preserved today in the dialogues of Plato and the Socratic works of Xenophon - either dramatic or narrative - in which characters discuss moral and philosophical problems, illustrating a...

 by Plato, so the analogy presented in it by the character Simmias, although summarized here, need not reflect the views of the historical Simmias.

Simmias Attunement Analogy

1. Body is visible, composite and mortal.
2. A harp is visible, composite and mortal.
3. When the harp is destroyed the tune which is ethereal, invisible and divine is also destroyed.
4. The soul
   Soul
   A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...
   
    is like a tune (harmonia) of the parts of the body. If the body is destroyed, the tune cannot survive.

Socrates attacks Simmias's Analogy with four different arguments:

1. Harmonia-argument would be a contradiction to the anamnesis
   Anamnesis (philosophy)
   In philosophy, anamnesis is a concept in Plato's epistemological and psychological theory that he develops in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo, and alludes to it in his Phaedrus.-Meno:...
   
   -argument that Simmias had already agreed on before.
2. If the soul would be a tune, and bodies can be tuned differently, there would be more or lesser souls - which is not possible.
3. Virtue is the proper attunement of the soul, and vice the lack of such an attunement. But if the soul itself is an attunement, then virtue and vice would be attunements of an attunement. But an attunement can't participate in non-attunement. So if a soul is a perfect attunement, it could not have virtue or vice.
4. The soul is the ruling principle of the body. But attunement is governed by the material of the musical instrument. By analogy, that would make the body the ruler of the soul.

Thus, Simmias' argument cannot be upheld.

Later tradition

In addition to the references in Plato and Xenophon, Diogenes Laërtius

Diogenes Laertius

Diogenes Laertius was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is one of the principal surviving sources for the history of Greek philosophy.-Life:Nothing is definitively known about his life...

mentions Simmias as the author of 23 brief dialogues, now lost, including On Philosophy and On Music.
Simmias appears as a character in Plutarch's De Genio Socratis.