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

What is it about?

The aim of this paper is to throw some additional light on the lot-casting episode of the Republic’s Myth of Er. It is largely a reaction to McPherran’s views presented in his 2010 chapter entitled “Virtue, Luck and Choice at the End of the Republic.” I agree with his statement that the purpose of the lottery is to somehow absolve the gods from responsibility for each soul’s choice of life and the subsequent happiness and badness attached to it. Unlike McPherran, however, I argue that this strategy is a successful one, and discloses no traces of divine interference, which would endanger its credibility. Nevertheless, although the lot-casting process effectively diverts the responsibility for its outcome from the gods onto tychē, the scope of this strategy is very narrow, and actually limited to the placement of the souls in the choice-queue. By the end of the paper I touch upon the concept of tychē as employed in the Myth, and conclude that it is equivalent to the folk concept of chance.

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