Republic

”These, then,” I said, “would be the prizes, rewards, and gifts that come to the just man while living, from both gods and humans, in addition to those goods which justice itself provided.” “And indeed they are very beautiful and secure,” he said. “These things, then,” I said, “are nothing in multitude or magnitude compared to those which await each of them after they have died; and one must hear them, so that each of them may fully receive what is owed to be heard by the argument.” ”You may speak,” he said, “since there are not many other things I would hear with greater pleasure.” “But indeed,” I said, “I will not tell you an ‘Apologue of Alcinous’, but that of a brave man [alkimos], Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth. He once died in battle, and when the dead were taken up on the tenth day, already decayed, he was taken up whole, and having been carried home, on the twelfth day, when he was about to be buried, lying on the pyre, he came back to life, and having come back to life, he told what he had seen there. He said that when his soul departed from his body, it journeyed with many others, and they arrived at a certain wondrous place, in which there were two chasms in the earth adjacent to one another, and again in the heaven above, other chasms opposite them. Judges sat between these, who, when they had given judgment, commanded the just to journey to the right and upwards through the heaven, having bound tokens of the judgments passed upon them in front, and the unjust to journey to the left and downwards, these too having tokens of all that they had done behind them. And when he himself approached, they said that he must become a messenger to humans of the things there, and they commanded him to hear and behold everything in the place. Then he saw that by one chasm of the heaven and of the earth the souls departed, after they had been judged, while by the other two, from the one there arose from the earth souls full of squalor and dust, and from the other there descended other souls from the heaven clean. And those that arrived from time to time seemed to have come as if from a long journey, and gladly departing into the meadow, they encamped as if in a festival assembly, and those who were acquaintances greeted one another, and those who came from the earth inquired from the others about the things there, and those from the heaven about the things with them.”

”And they related their experiences to one another, some lamenting and weeping, remembering how many and what kind of things they had suffered and seen in their journey under the earth—and the journey was for a thousand years—while others from the heaven related their blessings and visions of inconceivable beauty. To tell most of them, Glaucon, would take a long time; but the sum of it, he said, was this: for all the injustices they had ever done to anyone, and for all the persons they had wronged, they paid the penalty for all in turn, ten times for each—this being once in every hundred years, since this is the length of a human life—so that they might pay a tenfold penalty for the injustice. For example, if any had been the cause of many deaths, either by betraying cities or armies, or casting men into slavery, or being accomplices in any other affliction, they should carry off tenfold pains for each of these; and on the other hand, if they had done any benefactions and had been just and holy, they should carry off their rewards in the same proportion. Concerning those who died as soon as they were born and lived but a short time, he said other things not worth remembering. But for impiety and piety towards gods and parents, and for murder with one’s own hand, he recounted still greater rewards. For he said he was present when one was asked by another where Ardiaeus the Great was. This Ardiaeus had been tyrant in a certain city of Pamphylia, already a thousand years before that time, having killed his aged father and older brother, and having committed many other unholy deeds, as was said. He said then that the one questioned replied, ‘He has not come,’ he said, ‘nor will he ever come here. For indeed we beheld this among the terrible sights: when we were near the mouth, about to ascend, and had suffered all the other things, we suddenly saw him and others—almost all of them tyrants, though there were also some private persons of those who had sinned greatly—whom, when they thought they were about to ascend, the mouth did not admit, but it bellowed whenever any of those who were so incurably in wickedness, or who had not sufficiently paid the penalty, attempted to ascend.’”