The Charm of Poetry, and the Old Quarrel

Quite so.

Yet we have not so far brought against it the gravest charge. For that it is capable of corrupting even decent people — apart from a very few — is surely altogether dreadful.

Why would it not, if indeed it does this?

Listen and consider. For surely, when the best of us listen to Homer or one of the other tragic poets imitating one of the heroes in grief and drawing out a long speech in his lamentations, or singing and beating their breasts, you know that we feel delight and, giving ourselves over, follow along in sympathy, and earnestly praise as a good poet whoever affects us most in this way.

I know it well — how could I not?

But when a grief of our own comes to one of us, do you notice, in turn, that we pride ourselves on the opposite — if we are able to keep quiet and endure it — since this is a man's part, while that which we praised before is a woman's?

I do, he said.

Then is it a fine thing, I said, that this praise holds — that in seeing a man of a kind one would not think worthy to be oneself, but would be ashamed to be, one feels no disgust but takes delight and praises him?

No, by Zeus, he said — it does not seem reasonable.

Yes, I said — if you were to look at it from that angle.

In what way?

If you were to reflect that the part which is then forcibly held in check amid our own private misfortunes, and hungers to weep and lament fully and have its fill of it, being by nature the sort of thing that desires these things, is the very part that is filled and gladdened by the poets, while the part of us that is by nature best, since it has not been adequately trained by reason or by habit, relaxes its guard over this tearful part — seeing that it is watching another's sufferings, and that there is no shame to itself in praising and pitying another man who, though he claims to be good, grieves when he ought not — but instead reckons that it gains something by this, namely the pleasure, and would not consent to be deprived of it by holding the whole poem in contempt. For I think that few people reason that the enjoyment taken from others' griefs necessarily carries over into one's own; for once one has nourished the pitying impulse to be strong on those occasions, it is not easy to restrain it in one's own sufferings.

Very true, he said.

Is not the same account true also of the comic? That is, if you yourself would be ashamed to play the clown, but in comic imitation, or even hearing it privately, you take great delight in it and do not hate it as low, are you not doing the very same thing you did in the case of pity? For the impulse in yourself that wants to play the clown, which you were holding back by reason for fear of a reputation for buffoonery, you now let loose again; and by giving it free rein there, you have often, without realizing it, been carried away in your own affairs to the point of becoming a comedian.

Very much so, he said.

And indeed the same holds for sexual desire, and spirit, and all the appetitive things, and the painful and pleasant things in the soul, which we say accompany us in every action — that poetic imitation produces such effects in us; for it nourishes and waters these things when they ought to be left to wither, and sets them up as rulers over us, when they ought to be ruled if we are to become better and happier instead of worse and more wretched.

I cannot say otherwise, he said.

So then, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet admirers of Homer who say that this poet has educated Greece, and that for the management and education of human affairs he is worth taking up and learning from, and that one should order one's whole life by this poet and live so, you must love and welcome them as the best men they are capable of being, and grant that Homer is the most poetic of poets and the first of the tragedians, but you must know that only so much of poetry as consists of hymns to the gods and praises of good men is to be admitted into the city; for if you admit the sweetened Muse, in lyric or epic verse, pleasure and pain will reign as kings in your city instead of law and the argument that has always, by common consent, been held to be best.

Very true, he said.

Let this, then, I said, stand as our defense concerning poetry, now that we have brought it back to mind — that it was reasonable of us to send it away from the city then, being the sort of thing it is; for the argument compelled us. But let us say to it, so that it does not condemn us for some harshness and boorishness, that there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry; for indeed there is "that yelping bitch, barking at her master," and "great amid the empty chatter of fools," and "the mob of the over-wise holding sway," and "the subtle thinkers who are, for all that, paupers," and countless other signs of this ancient opposition between the two. Nevertheless, let it be said that we, at least, would gladly welcome it back if pleasure-seeking poetry and imitation could offer any argument that it ought to have a place in a well-ordered city, since we are indeed conscious in ourselves of being charmed by it; but it is not holy to betray what seems to be true. Is it not so, my friend — are you not charmed by it too, and especially when you view it through Homer?

Very much indeed.

Then is it not just that it should return in this way, having offered its defense in lyric verse or some other meter?

Quite so.

And we might indeed grant, too, to its champions — those who are not themselves poets, but lovers of poetry — to speak on its behalf without meter, arguing that it is not only pleasant but also beneficial to constitutions and to human life; and we will listen favorably. For we shall surely profit, if it turns out to be not only pleasant but also beneficial.

How, he said, could we fail to profit?

But if it cannot, my dear friend and companion, then — just as those who have once fallen in erotic love with someone, if they come to believe that the erotic love is not beneficial, hold themselves back from it by force, though reluctantly — so too shall we, because of the erotic love for such poetry that has grown in us through the upbringing of noble constitutions, be well disposed toward its proving to be as good and as true as possible; but as long as it is not able to make its defense, we shall listen to it while chanting to ourselves, as a charm, this very account we are giving, guarding against falling back again into that erotic love of childhood, the erotic love of the many. We shall sing, then, that such poetry is not to be taken seriously, as though it grasped truth and were a serious thing, but that whoever listens to it must be on his guard, fearing for the constitution within himself, and must hold to exactly what we have said about poetry.

I agree entirely, he said.

For the contest is great, I said, dear Glaucon — great, and greater than it seems — the contest of becoming good or bad; so that it is not worth a man's while, lifted up by honor or by money or by any office, or indeed by poetry, to neglect justice and the rest of virtue.

I agree with you, he said, on the basis of what we have gone through; and I think anyone else would too.

The Rewards of Justice, and the Immortal Soul

And yet, I said, we have not gone through the greatest rewards of virtue and the prizes set before it.

You are speaking of an inconceivable magnitude, he said, if there are other things greater than what has been said.

But what, I said, could become great in so short a time? For this whole span, from childhood to old age, would surely be a short one, set against all time.

Nothing, certainly, he said.

What then? Do you think that, in the case of an immortal thing, one need be in earnest only for so much time as this, and not for all time?

I think so, he said — but what do you mean by this?

Have you not perceived, I said, that our soul is immortal and never perishes?

And he, glancing at me in astonishment, said: by Zeus, not I — but can you say this?

Unless I am doing wrong, I said. And I think you can too — it is nothing difficult.

Not for me either, he said — but I should be glad to hear this easy thing from you.

You shall hear, I said.

Just speak, he said.

Is there something you call good, I said, and something evil?

I do, he said.

Do you think of them, then, as I do?

In what way?

That the evil is everything that destroys and corrupts, and the good is everything that preserves and benefits.

I do, he said.

But what of this? Do you say there is some evil and some good peculiar to each thing? For instance, ophthalmia for eyes, and disease for the whole body; blight for grain, rot for wood, rust for bronze and iron — and, as I say, for practically everything, some inborn evil and disease?

I do, he said.

Then whenever one of these attaches itself to something, does it not make the thing it attaches to bad, and in the end dissolve and destroy the whole of it?

How could it be otherwise?

So each thing's inborn evil, its own badness, destroys it — or, if this does not destroy it, then nothing else could ever still corrupt it. For the good would never destroy anything, nor again would that which is neither bad nor good.

How could it? He said.

If, then, we find something among existing things that has an evil making it bad, but this evil is unable to dissolve and destroy it, shall we not already know that for a thing so constituted there was no destruction?

That is likely, he said.

What then? Is there not, I said, something that makes the soul itself bad?

Very much so, he said — all those we just went through: injustice, licentiousness, cowardice, and ignorance.

Does any of these, then, dissolve and destroy it? And take care that we not be deceived into supposing that the unjust and foolish man, when caught in wrongdoing, has then been destroyed by his injustice, injustice being a badness of the soul. But consider it this way — just as the body's own badness, being disease, wastes and destroys it, and brings it to the point of not even being a body, so too all the things we just mentioned, through their own peculiar evil, which corrupts them by settling in and being present within them, arrive at not-being — is that not so?

Yes.

Come then, consider the soul too in the same way. Do injustice and the rest of vice, being in the soul, corrupt and wither it by their presence and by settling in it, until they lead it to death and separate it from the body?

Certainly not that, he said.

But surely this at least is unreasonable, I said — that a thing should be destroyed by another's badness and not by its own.

Unreasonable.

For consider, Glaucon, I said, that we do not think the body need perish even from the badness of the food itself — whether that badness is staleness, or rottenness, or whatever it may be; but if the badness of the food produces in the body a badness of body, we shall say that the body perished, on account of the food, by its own evil, which is a disease; whereas, the badness of food being one thing and the body another, we shall never allow that the body is corrupted by a foreign evil that has not produced in it its own inborn evil.

Again you speak most correctly, he said.

By the same reasoning, then, I said, unless a badness of body produces in the soul a badness of soul, let us never allow that the soul is destroyed by a foreign evil apart from its own badness — one thing by the evil of another.

That is reasonable, he said.

Let us, then, either refute this and show that we are not speaking rightly, or, as long as it remains unrefuted, let us never say that, because of fever, or some other disease, or slaughter, or even if someone should cut the whole body into the smallest possible pieces, the soul is on that account any more destroyed, until someone demonstrates that these sufferings of the body make the soul itself more unjust and more unholy; and when a foreign evil arises in one thing but each thing's own evil does not arise within it, let us allow no one to say that either the soul or anything else is destroyed.

But surely, he said, no one will ever show this — that the souls of the dying become more unjust because of death.

But if someone, I said, dares to meet this argument head-on and say that the dying man becomes worse and more unjust, so as not to be forced to admit that souls are immortal, we shall, I suppose, insist that, if the one who says this speaks truly, injustice is deadly to the one who has it, like a disease, and that those who catch it die by this very thing, which kills by its own nature — some very quickly, others more slowly — and not, as now, that the unjust die on this account at the hands of others who inflict the penalty.

By Zeus, he said, injustice will not, then, appear altogether terrible, if it is to be deadly to the one who has it — for that would be a release from evils — but rather, I think, it will appear quite the opposite: killing others, if that is even possible, while making the one who has it very much alive, and, besides being alive, sleepless as well; so far off, it seems, has it pitched its tent from being deadly.

Well put, I said. For since its own peculiar badness and its own peculiar evil are not enough to kill and destroy the soul, an evil appointed for the destruction of something else will hardly destroy the soul, or anything else, except that for which it is appointed.

Hardly, he said, as is likely.

So then, since it is destroyed by no evil at all, neither its own nor another's, it is clear that it must always exist; and if it always exists, it is immortal.

The Soul's True Nature, Like Glaucus

That is necessary, he said.

Let this, then, be so, I said; but if it is so, you realize that they would always be the same in number. For they could not become fewer, I suppose, since none is destroyed, nor again more; for if any of the immortal things whatever were to increase, you know that it would come to be out of the mortal, and everything would end up being immortal.

What you say is true.

But, I said, let us not think this — for the argument will not allow it — nor, again, that the soul is, in its truest nature, such as to be full of great variety and unlikeness and difference within itself.

What do you mean? He said.

It is not easy, I said, for something composed of many parts, and not put together in the best way, to be everlasting — as the soul just now appeared to us to be.

That certainly does not seem likely.

That the soul, then, is immortal, both the argument just given and the others would compel us to admit; but as for what it truly is, one must view it not as maimed by its association with the body and other evils, the way we now view it, but must contemplate it adequately by reasoning as it is when it becomes pure, and then one will find it far more beautiful, and will see justice and injustice, and everything we have just gone through, more clearly. But now we have spoken truly about it, as it appears in its present state; we have, however, viewed it in a certain condition, just as those who look at the sea-god Glaucus could no longer easily make out his original nature, because the old parts of his body are partly broken off, and partly ground down and altogether maimed by the waves, while other things have grown onto him — shells and seaweed and stones — so that he looks more like some wild beast than what he was by nature; so too we see the soul in just such a state, from countless evils. But we must look there, Glaucon.

Where? He said.

To its love of wisdom, and to what it lays hold of and what kind of company it longs for — seeing that it is akin to what is divine and immortal and to what always is — and to what it would become if it gave itself wholly to following such things, and were lifted by this impulse out of the sea it is now in, and had the rocks and shells knocked from around it, those that now, because it feasts on earth, have grown over it in such numbers, earthy and stony and wild, from those banquets that are called happy. And then one might see its true nature, whether it is many-formed or single-formed, or in whatever state and however it is; but for now we have, I think, gone through its experiences and kinds in human life well enough.

Quite so, he said.

Justice Rewarded, by Gods and by Men

Well then, I said, we settled the other matters in our argument, and did not praise justice for its wages or its repute, as you said Hesiod and Homer did, but found justice itself, for the soul itself, best, and that one must do just things whether one has the ring of Gyges or not, and along with such a ring the cap of Hades too?

Most true, he said.

Is it not now, then, I said, Glaucon, free of reproach to give back, besides those things, the wages also to justice and to the rest of virtue — as many and as great as it provides to the soul from men and from gods, both while the man still lives and after he has died?

Certainly, he said.

Will you, then, give me back what you borrowed in the argument?

What in particular?

I granted to you that the just man should seem unjust and the unjust man just; for you asked that, even if it were not possible for this to escape the notice of both gods and men, it must nevertheless be granted for the sake of the argument, so that justice itself might be judged against injustice itself. Or do you not remember?

I would indeed be committing an injustice, he said, if I did not.

Since, then, I said, they have been judged, I now claim back, on behalf of justice, the reputation it actually has from both gods and men, and ask that we agree it is thought of in this way, so that it too may carry off the prizes of victory, gaining from its reputation what it gives to those who possess it, since it has been shown to give the goods that come from actually being just, and not to deceive those who truly take hold of it.

What you ask is just, he said.

Then, I said, first you will grant me this — that the gods, at least, are not unaware what sort each of the two is?

We will grant it, he said.

And if they do not escape notice, the one would be dear to the gods, the other hateful to them, just as we agreed also at the beginning.

That is so.

And shall we not agree that for the man dear to the gods, whatever comes to him from the gods, all comes about in the best way possible, unless some necessary evil awaited him from an earlier fault?

Certainly.

This, then, is how one must think about the just man — whether he falls into poverty or into sicknesses or into any other of the things thought bad — that for him these things will end in some good, whether he is living or even after he has died. For the man who is willing to make it his earnest purpose to become just and, by practicing virtue, to be like a god so far as a man can, is surely never neglected by the gods.

It stands to reason, he said, that such a man should not be neglected by one like him.

Must we not, then, think the opposite of this concerning the unjust man?

Very much so.

Such, then, would be the prizes of victory from the gods for the just man.

So it seems to me, at any rate, he said.

But what, I said, of the rewards from men? Is it not so, if we must state the truth of the matter? Do not the clever and unjust act just like those runners who run well on the way out but not on the way back? At first they spring off sharply, but in the end they become ridiculous, their ears drooping on their shoulders, and they run off without a crown, while those who are true runners, once they reach the finish, take the prizes and are crowned. Is this not, for the most part, what happens with the just as well? Toward the end of each action and each association and of life itself, are they not held in good repute and do they not carry off the prizes from men?

Very much so.

Will you bear with me, then, if I say about these men the very things you yourself said about the unjust? For I will say that the just, once they have grown old, hold office in their own city if they wish to, marry from wherever they wish, and give their daughters in marriage to whomever they want; and everything that you said about the unjust, I now say about these men. And again, about the unjust — that most of them, even when they go undetected while young, are caught at the end of the race and become ridiculous, and, growing old, are wretchedly abused by strangers and citizens alike, scourged, and suffering what you yourself called crude, and you spoke truly — and then they will be racked and burned — take it that you have heard from me too all those things they suffer. But see whether you can bear what I am saying.

Quite so, he said; for what you say is just.

Such, then, I said, would be the prizes and wages and gifts that come to the just man while he lives, from both gods and men, in addition to those goods which justice itself provided.

Very much so, he said — fine and secure things.

These things, then, I said, are nothing either in number or in magnitude compared to those that await each of the two after he has died; and we must hear about them, so that each may fully receive what our argument owes him to hear.

The Myth of Er: The Journey, and the Spindle of Necessity

Do go on, he said, since there is not much else I would hear more gladly.

It is not, though, a tale of Alcinous that I shall tell you, I said, but the tale of a valiant man, Er son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth, who once died in war; when the dead were taken up on the tenth day, already decayed, he was taken up sound, and, carried home and about to be buried on the twelfth day, he came back to life as he lay on the pyre, and once revived he told what he had seen there. He said that when his soul went out of him it traveled with many others, and they came to a certain supernatural place, in which there were two chasms in the earth, adjoining each other, and, opposite them, two others in the heaven above. Judges sat between them, and these, whenever they had given judgment, ordered the just to travel the road to the right and upward through the heaven, with signs of the judgments passed fastened on them in front, and the unjust the road to the left and downward, these too wearing on their backs signs of everything they had done. And when he approached, they told him that he must become a messenger to mankind of the things there, and they urged him to listen and to observe everything in the place. He saw, then, at each of those two chasms — the one of heaven and the one of earth — souls departing once judgment had been given for them, and, at the other two, from one, souls going up out of the earth, full of squalor and dust, and from the other, different souls coming down pure from heaven. And the souls that kept arriving seemed to have come as if from a long journey, and, going off gladly into the meadow, camped there as though at a festival, and those who knew one another greeted each other, and the ones who had come from the earth asked the others about the things there, and those from heaven about what had befallen the others. And they told each other their stories: the ones from the earth, wailing and weeping, recalling how many things and what things they had suffered and seen in their journey beneath the earth — the journey lasted a thousand years — while the ones from heaven, in turn, told of delights and of sights of inconceivable beauty. Now to relate most of it, Glaucon, would take a long time; but he said the main point was this: for all the wrongs anyone had ever done, and to however many people, each had paid the penalty for all of them in turn, tenfold for each — this being reckoned by each period of a hundred years, human life being taken as that length — so that they might pay tenfold requital for the wrong, and, for instance, if some had been the cause of many deaths, either by betraying cities or armies, and had thrown men into slavery, or had been accessories to some other affliction, for all of these they received tenfold pains for each, and again, if they had done good deeds and had been just and pious, they received their due reward in the same proportion. And concerning those who had just been born and lived only a short time, he told other things not worth mentioning. And for impiety and piety toward the gods, and toward parents, and for murder by one's own hand, he described still greater recompenses.

For he said that he was present when one was asked by another where Ardiaeus the Great was. Now this Ardiaeus had been tyrant in a certain city of Pamphylia, a thousand years already before that time, having killed his aged father and his elder brother, and having done many other unholy things besides, as it was said. He said, then, that the one who was asked replied: "He has not come, nor will he come here. For indeed we witnessed this too, one of the terrible sights: when we were near the mouth, about to go up, and had gone through everything else as well, we suddenly caught sight of him and others — nearly all of them tyrants, though there were also some private men who had committed great wrongs — whom, though they thought they were now about to go up, the mouth would not receive, but it bellowed whenever one of those so incurably disposed toward wickedness, or who had not paid a sufficient penalty, tried to go up. At that point, he said, savage men, fiery to look at, standing by and recognizing the sound, seized some and led them off, and, having bound Ardiaeus and others hand and foot and head, they threw them down and flayed them, and dragged them out along the road, tearing them on thorn bushes, and explaining to all who passed by why this was done, and that they were being led away to be cast into Tartarus. There, then, he said, though many and varied fears had come upon us, this one surpassed the rest — each man's fear that the sound would come for him as he was going up — and each went up most gladly when it stayed silent." And such, then, were the judgments and punishments, and the benefits, in turn, corresponded to these. And when seven days had passed for each of them in the meadow, they had to rise up from there and set out on the eighth day, and arrive on the fourth day at a place from which they could see, from above, a straight light stretched through the whole of heaven and earth, like a column, most closely resembling the rainbow, but brighter and purer; and they reached it after advancing a day's journey, and saw there, at the middle of the light, the ends of its bonds stretched down from heaven — for this light was the bond of heaven, like the undergirding cables of triremes, holding its whole revolution together in this way — and from the ends stretched the spindle of Necessity, through which all the revolutions turned; its shaft and its hook were made of adamant, and the whorl was a mixture of this and other kinds of material. The nature of the whorl was as follows: its shape was like that of the ones here, but one must understand, from what he said, that it was of this kind — as if, within one great whorl, hollow and scooped out all the way through, another such whorl, smaller, lay fitted inside it, like buckets that fit into one another, and so, too, a third besides, and a fourth, and four others. For the whorls were eight in all, lying one within another, showing their rims as circles from above, and forming, around the shaft, the continuous surface of a single whorl; and the shaft itself was driven right through the middle of the eighth. Now the first and outermost whorl had the widest circle of rim; the second widest was that of the sixth; third was that of the fourth; fourth was that of the eighth; fifth was that of the seventh; sixth was that of the fifth; seventh was that of the third; and eighth was that of the second.

The Choice of Lives, and the River of Forgetfulness

And that of the largest was many-colored; that of the seventh, brightest; that of the eighth had its color from the light the seventh cast upon it; those of the second and fifth were similar to each other, more yellow than the rest; the third had the whitest color; the fourth was reddish; and the sixth was second in whiteness. And as it turned, the whole spindle revolved with a single motion, but within that revolving whole, the seven inner circles turned slowly in the direction opposite to the whole; of these, the eighth moved fastest, and next, keeping pace with one another, the seventh, sixth, and fifth; third in speed, as it appeared to them, came the fourth, circling back on itself; fourth came the third; and fifth, the second. And it turned upon the knees of Necessity. On each of its circles, above, stood a Siren, carried around with it, uttering a single sound, one note; and from all eight together a single harmony sounded in concord. And round about, seated at equal distances, three others, each on a throne, the daughters of Necessity, the Fates — Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos — dressed in white, with garlands on their heads, sang to the harmony of the Sirens: Lachesis of what has been, Clotho of what is, and Atropos of what is to come. And Clotho, touching it with her right hand, helped turn the outer revolution of the spindle, pausing from time to time; Atropos, with her left, did the same for the inner revolutions in turn; and Lachesis, in her turn, touched each with either hand. So they themselves, once they had arrived, had at once to go to Lachesis. A prophet first arranged them in order, then took from the lap of Lachesis lots and patterns of lives, mounted a high platform, and said—

"This is the word of Lachesis, maiden daughter of Necessity. Souls of a day, here begins another cycle of the mortal, death-bearing race. No guardian spirit will be allotted to you; you yourselves will choose a guardian spirit. Let whoever draws the first lot choose first a life that he will then be bound to by necessity. Virtue has no master; each of you will have more or less of it as you honor or dishonor it. The one who chooses bears the responsibility; the god bears none."

Having said this, he threw the lots among them all, and each one picked up the lot that fell beside him — except Er, who was not allowed to; and to the one who picked it up, it was clear what number he had drawn. After this, he set out before them once more the patterns of lives on the ground, far more numerous than the souls present. They were of every kind; for there were the lives of all the animals, and indeed all the human lives too. Among them were tyrannies, some lasting to the end, others breaking apart partway through and ending in poverty, exile, and beggary; there were also the lives of men of high repute, some for their looks and beauty and the rest of their strength and skill in contests, others for their birth and their ancestors' virtues, and likewise lives of men without repute in these same respects, and of women too, in the same way. No fixed character of soul was attached to them, since a soul that chooses a different life necessarily becomes different itself; but the rest of these lives were mixed together with each other, and with wealth and poverty, some with sickness, some with health, and some stood midway between these. Here then, it seems, my dear Glaucon, lies the whole danger for a human being, and for this reason above all each of us must take care that, setting aside every other study, he becomes a seeker and a student of this one, if he can somehow learn and discover who will make him able and knowledgeable, so that he can tell a good life from a bad one and always, everywhere, choose the better from among those open to him; reckoning up all that has just been said, and how these things, combined with one another or kept apart, bear on the virtue of a life, so as to know what beauty mixed with poverty or with wealth, joined with which condition of soul, produces evil or good, and what noble birth and low birth, private life and rule, strength and weakness, quickness and slowness to learn, and all such things belonging to the soul by nature or acquired, produce when mixed together — so that, reasoning from all of these at once and looking to the nature of the soul, one is able to choose between the worse life and the better, calling worse whichever will lead the soul toward becoming more unjust, and better whichever leads it toward becoming more just. He will let everything else go; for we have seen that this is the best choice for a person, both living and once dead. One must hold to this judgment as unyieldingly as adamant on the way down to Hades, so that there too he remains unshaken by riches and evils of that kind, and does not fall into tyrannies and similar courses of action, working many incurable evils and himself suffering still greater ones — but instead always knows to choose the middle life among such things, and to flee the extremes on either side, both in this life, as far as possible, and in every life to come; for it is this way that a person becomes happiest.

And so, then too, the messenger from that place reported that the prophet had spoken thus: "Even for the one who comes forward last, if he chooses with understanding and lives with resolve, a life worth loving — not a bad one — awaits him. Let neither the one who chooses first grow careless, nor the one who chooses last lose heart."

When the prophet had said this, Er said that the one who had drawn the first lot came forward at once and chose the greatest tyranny, making the choice, in his folly and greed, without examining everything closely enough — not noticing that bound up in it was his fate to eat his own children, along with other evils; and when he had time to look it over calmly, he beat his breast and lamented his choice, not standing by what the prophet had foretold; for he did not blame himself for these evils, but chance and spirits and anything at all rather than himself. He was one of those who had come from heaven, having lived his earlier life under a well-ordered constitution, sharing in virtue by habit and without philosophy. And, broadly speaking, those who had come from heaven were caught out in such choices no less often, being unexercised in hardships; whereas most of those who had come from the earth, having themselves suffered and having seen others suffer, did not make their choices in haste. For this reason, then, most souls undergo a change between evils and goods also because of the chance of the lot; since, if someone always, whenever he arrives at life here, practiced philosophy in a sound way, and the lot for his choice did not fall among the last, it seems likely, from what is reported from that other place, that he would not only be happy here, but that his journey from here to there and back again would not be rough and underground, but smooth and through the heavens.

This, he said, was indeed a sight worth seeing — how each of the souls chose its life; for it was pitiful to see, and absurd, and wonderful all at once. For the most part they chose according to what they were used to in their former life. He said he saw the soul that had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan, unwilling, out of hatred for womankind because of his death at their hands, to be conceived in a woman and born; he saw the soul of Thamyras choosing that of a nightingale; and he saw a swan too changing over to take up a human life, and other musical creatures doing likewise. The soul that had drawn the twentieth lot chose the life of a lion; it was the soul of Ajax son of Telamon, which shrank from becoming a human because it remembered the judgment over the arms. Next after him came the soul of Agamemnon, and it too, out of hatred for the human race because of what it had suffered, exchanged its life for that of an eagle. The soul of Atalanta, drawing a lot somewhere in the middle, caught sight of the great honors given to an athlete, and could not pass them by, but took them. After her, he saw the soul of Epeius son of Panopeus passing into the nature of a craftswoman; and far off among the last, he saw the soul of Thersites, the buffoon, putting on the form of an ape. And it happened that the soul of Odysseus had drawn the last lot of all and came forward to choose; with the memory of his former hardships, his ambition had died away, and he went about for a long time searching for the life of a private man who kept out of everything, and with difficulty found one lying somewhere, neglected by all the others, and on seeing it he said that he would have done the same even if he had drawn the first lot, and he chose it gladly. And in the same way, souls passed from the other animals into human beings and into one another, the unjust changing into wild creatures and the just into tame ones, and every kind of mixture occurred.

Now when all the souls had chosen their lives, they came forward to Lachesis in the order in which they had drawn their lots; and she sent with each of them the spirit he had picked, to guard his life and fulfill what he had chosen. This spirit first led the soul to Clotho, under her hand and the turning of the spindle's whirl, confirming the fate that the soul had chosen when it drew its lot; then, having touched this, it led the soul on to the spinning of Atropos, making what had been spun irreversible; and from there, without turning back, the soul went beneath the throne of Necessity, and having passed through it, once the others too had passed through, they all journeyed to the plain of Lethe through terrible heat and stifling air; for it was bare of trees and of anything that the earth grows. So, as evening was already coming on, they camped beside the river Ameles, whose water no vessel can hold. Everyone was required to drink a certain measure of the water, but those not preserved by practical wisdom drank more than the measure; and everyone who drank it forgot everything. And when they had fallen asleep and it was the middle of the night, there came thunder and an earthquake, and from there, suddenly, they were carried up in different directions, each to his birth, shooting upward like stars. As for himself, he was kept from drinking the water; yet by what way and how he arrived in his body, he did not know, but suddenly, looking up, he saw himself at dawn lying on the funeral pyre.

And so, Glaucon, the story was saved and not lost, and it could save us too, if we are persuaded by it, and we shall cross the river of Lethe safely and not defile our soul. But if we are persuaded by me, believing the soul to be immortal and able to bear all evils and all goods, we shall always hold to the upward road and pursue justice together with practical wisdom in every way, so that we may be friends both to ourselves and to the gods, both while we remain here and when we collect the prizes of justice — like victors going about to gather them — and so may fare well both here and on the thousand-year journey we have gone through.