The Myth of Judgment

Socrates

Listen, then, they say, to a very fine account — one you'll take for a myth, I imagine, but I take for a true story; for I'll tell you what I'm about to tell you as something that actually happened. As Homer tells it, Zeus and Poseidon and Pluto divided up the rule between them, once they had taken it over from their father. Now there was this law about human beings under Cronus, and it still holds among the gods even now: that whoever has lived out his life justly and piously should, once he dies, depart to the islands of the blessed and dwell there in complete happiness, free of evils, while whoever has lived unjustly and impiously should go to the prison of retribution and justice, the place they call Tartarus. The judges of these cases, under Cronus and still recently under Zeus's rule, were living men judging the living, on the very day each person was due to die — and so the cases were judged badly. So Pluto and the overseers coming from the islands of the blessed kept telling Zeus that men were arriving on both sides who didn't belong there. So Zeus said: well, I'll put a stop to this happening. For right now the cases are being judged badly. The ones being judged, he said, are judged still clothed — for they're judged while alive. Now many people, he said, with wicked souls are dressed up in fine bodies and lineages and riches, and when the judgment comes, plenty of witnesses show up for them, ready to testify that they've lived justly; so the judges are overawed by these witnesses, and at the same time they themselves judge while still clothed, with their own eyes and ears and whole body screening off their soul. So all of this stands in their way — their own coverings and the coverings of the men being judged alike. So first of all, he said, they must stop knowing their death beforehand, since right now they know it in advance. That much, in fact, has already been told to Prometheus, so he'll stop them from knowing it. Next, they must be judged stripped of all of that — for they must be judged while dead. And the judge too must be naked — dead himself — studying the soul itself with his own soul alone, the moment each person dies, stripped of all his kin and having left behind on earth all that finery, so that the judgment may be just. So having recognized this before you did, I made judges of my own sons — two from Asia, Minos and Rhadamanthus, and one from Europe, Aeacus — and once they themselves have died, they'll hold court in the meadow, at the fork from which the two roads lead off, one toward the islands of the blessed, the other toward Tartarus. Rhadamanthus will judge those from Asia, and Aeacus those from Europe, and to Minos I'll give the privilege of deciding whenever the other two are at a loss over some point, so that the judgment on people's journey may be as just as possible.

This, Callicles, is what I've heard and believe to be true — and from this account I reckon something like the following follows. Death, it seems to me, is nothing other than the separation of two things, soul and body, from each other; and once they've been separated from one another, each of the two keeps its own condition not much less than it had while the person was alive, the body keeping its own nature, and all its treatments and sufferings plainly visible. For instance, if someone's body was large, whether by nature or by feeding or by both while he was alive, then his corpse is large once he's died too, and if fat, fat also once dead, and so on for the rest — and if in turn he made a practice of wearing his hair long, his corpse is long-haired too. Again, if someone was a whipped man and carried, while living, the traces of blows as scars on his body, whether from whips or other wounds, one can see his corpse bearing these same marks too; and if someone's limbs were broken or twisted in life, these same things are plainly visible in death as well. In a word, whatever condition the body had been prepared to have in life, these same features remain visible after death too, either all of them or most of them, for a certain span of time. The very same thing, then, seems to me to hold for the soul as well, Callicles — once it's stripped of the body, everything is plainly visible in the soul, both its natural features and the conditions the person's soul acquired through his practice of each particular thing. So whenever they arrive before their judge, those from Asia before Rhadamanthus, Rhadamanthus stops each of them and studies his soul, not knowing whose it is — but often, laying hold of the Great King or some other king or potentate, he finds nothing sound in the soul at all, but one flogged raw and covered with scars from perjuries and injustice, which each of his actions has smeared into the soul, and everything crooked from lying and pretension, nothing straight, because it was raised without truth; and he sees the soul crammed with disproportion and ugliness from unchecked power and luxury and violence and unrestrained conduct; and seeing it in this state, he sends it off in disgrace, straight to its place of confinement, where it's bound to go and undergo the sufferings it deserves. Now it's fitting for everyone undergoing punishment, when rightly punished by another, either to become better and benefit from it, or to become an example to others, so that others, seeing him suffer whatever he suffers, may grow better out of fear. Those who benefit and pay their penalty at the hands of gods and men are the ones who have committed curable wrongs; but even so, the benefit comes to them only through pain and suffering, both here and in Hades — for there's no other way to be rid of injustice. But those who have committed the worst wrongs, and through such crimes have become incurable, from these come the examples — and while these men themselves no longer benefit at all, being incurable, others benefit, who see them suffering, on account of their crimes, the greatest and most painful and most terrifying sufferings for all time, hung up there in Hades in the prison, quite literally as examples, sights and warnings for whichever wrongdoers keep on arriving. And I say Archelaus will be one of these, if Polus is telling the truth, and so will any other tyrant of that kind — and I think most of these examples turn out to have come from tyrants and kings and potentates and men who've handled the affairs of cities, since it's their power that lets them commit the greatest and most unholy crimes. Homer bears witness to this too — for he portrays kings and potentates as the ones punished in Hades for all time, Tantalus and Sisyphus and Tityus, while Thersites, or any other private person who was wicked, no poet has ever portrayed as gripped by great punishments as incurable — no doubt because it wasn't open to him to sin on that scale, which is why he was happier than those to whom it was open — but the truth is, Callicles, that it's from among the powerful that the utterly wicked men tend to come; nothing, however, stops good men from arising among these too, and it's very much worth admiring the ones who do; for it's hard, Callicles, and worthy of great praise, for a man given great scope to do wrong to live his life out justly. Few such men come to exist — though both here and elsewhere there have been, and I think there will go on being, men fine and good in this particular virtue, that of justly managing whatever's entrusted to them; and one has even become quite renowned among the rest of the Greeks, Aristides son of Lysimachus — but most men in power, my excellent friend, turn out wicked. So, as I was saying, whenever Rhadamanthus gets hold of someone of that kind, he knows nothing else about him — not who he is, nor whose son — only that he's some wicked man; and having seen this, he sends him off to Tartarus, marking him as to whether he seems curable or incurable, and once he arrives there he suffers what he deserves. But sometimes, catching sight of another soul that has lived piously and with truthfulness, that of a private man or someone else — most of all, I'd say, Callicles, a philosopher's, one who has minded his own business and not meddled in others' affairs during his life — he's filled with admiration and sends it off to the islands of the blessed. Aeacus does the very same — each of the two holds a rod as he judges — while Minos sits overseeing them, alone holding a golden scepter, as Homer's Odysseus says he saw him—

So I, Callicles, am persuaded by this account, and I'm looking to how I might show the judge a soul as healthy as possible — so, letting go of the honors most men prize, and practicing truth, I'll try, as best I can, to actually be as good as possible both in living and, when I come to die, in dying. And I call on all other people too, as far as I'm able, and I call on you especially, in return, to this life and this contest, which I say stands in place of all the contests here — and I reproach you with this: that you'll be unable to help yourself, when your trial and judgment comes, the one I was just now describing, but instead, going before that judge, the son of Aegina, once he takes hold of you and leads you off, you'll gape and grow dizzy there no less than I do here, and someone will perhaps strike you on the side of the head in utter disgrace, and treat you with contempt in every way.

Now perhaps all this seems to you to be told like an old wives' tale, and you look down on it — and there'd be nothing strange in looking down on it, if we could search and find something better and truer than this somewhere; but as it is, you can see that the three of you, the wisest of the Greeks alive today, you and Polus and Gorgias, cannot show that one ought to live any other life than this one, which also turns out to serve us well in that other place. But out of so many arguments, with all the others refuted, this one alone stands firm: that one must guard against doing wrong more than against suffering it, and that above everything else a man must practice, in private and in public alike, not seeming to be good but being it; and if anyone turns out bad in some respect, he must be corrected, and this is the second-best good, after being just — becoming just by being corrected and paying the penalty; and every kind of flattery, both toward oneself and toward others, whether toward the few or toward the many, must be avoided; and rhetoric, just like every other activity, must always be used toward what's just. So trust me, and follow this path, arriving at which you'll be happy both in life and in death, as the argument shows. And let someone look down on you as a fool and treat you with contempt, if he wants to, and yes, by Zeus, confidently let him strike you with that disgraceful blow — for you'll suffer nothing terrible, if you're truly fine and good, practicing virtue. And then, once we've practiced it together in this way, at that point, if it still seems we should, we'll take up politics, or whatever else seems best to us — and we'll decide then, being better at deciding than we are now. For it's shameful, in the state we plainly find ourselves in right now, to go on swaggering as though we were somebody, when we can never agree with ourselves twice over about the very same things, and that about the most important matters — to such a depth of ignorance have we sunk — so let's take as our guide the argument that has now come to light, which shows us that this way of life is the best, practicing justice and the rest of virtue both in living and in dying. Let's follow this one, then, and call on others to follow it too, rather than the one you trust in and use to call on me — for that one, Callicles, is worth nothing at all.