(614) These, then, are the prizes and rewards and gifts which are bestowed upon the just by gods and men in this present life, in addition to the other good things which justice of herself provides. Yes, he said; and they are fair and lasting. And yet, I said, all these are as nothing either in number or greatness in comparison with those other recompenses which await both just and unjust after death. And you ought to hear them, and then both just and unjust will have received from us a full payment of the debt which the argument owes to them. Speak, he said; there are few things which I would more gladly hear. Well, I said, I will tell you a tale; not one of the tales which Odysseus tells to the hero Alcinous, yet this too is a tale of a hero, Er the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth. He was slain in battle, and ten days afterwards, when the bodies of the dead were taken up already in a state of corruption, his body was found unaffected by decay, and carried away home to be buried. And on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, he returned to life and told them what he had seen in the other world. He said that when his soul left the body he went on a journey with a great company, and that they came to a mysterious place at which there were two openings in the earth; they were near together, and over against them were two other openings in the heaven above. In the intermediate space there were judges seated, who commanded the just, after they had given judgment on them and had bound their sentences in front of them, to ascend by the heavenly way on the right hand; and in like manner the unjust were bidden by them to descend by the lower way on the left hand; these also bore the symbols of their deeds, but fastened on their backs. He drew near,

(365) to which I answer, Nothing great is easy. Nevertheless, the argument indicates this, if we would be happy, to be the path along which we should proceed. With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rhetoric who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawful gains and not be punished. Still I hear a voice saying that the gods cannot be deceived, neither can they be compelled. But what if there are no gods? or, suppose them to have no care of human things—why in either case should we mind about concealment? And even if there are gods, and they do care about us, yet we know of them only from tradition and the genealogies of the poets; and these are the very persons who say that they may be influenced and turned by ‘sacrifices and soothing entreaties and by offerings.’ Let us be consistent then, and believe both or neither. If the poets speak truly, why then we had better be unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice; for if we are just, although we may escape the vengeance of heaven, we shall lose the gains of injustice; but, if we are unjust, we shall keep the gains, and by our sinning and praying, and praying and sinning, the gods will be propitiated, and we shall not be punished. ‘But there is a world below in which either we or our posterity will suffer for our unjust deeds.’ Yes, my friend, will be the reflection, but there are mysteries and atoning deities, and these have great power. That is

(13) And we must not despise the familiar observation that there is something more to be considered than the present. There are the periods of the past and, again, those in the future; and these have everything to do with fixing worth of place.

Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his power and because the fall is to his future good. Those that have money will be made poor- and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those that have unjustly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the victim, and those that are to suffer are thrown into the path of those that administer the merited treatment.

It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is a prisoner by chance; every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what he now suffers. A man that murders his mother will become a woman and be murdered by a son; a man that wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged.

Hence arises that awesome word "Adrasteia" ; for in very truth this ordinance is an Adrasteia, justice itself and a wonderful wisdom.

We cannot but recognize from what we observe in this universe that some such principle of order prevails throughout the entire of existence- the minutest of things a tributary to the vast total; the marvellous art shown not merely in the mightiest works and sublimest members of the All, but even amid such littleness as one would think Providence must disdain: the varied workmanship of wonder in any and every animal form; the world of vegetation, too; the grace of fruits and even of leaves, the lavishness, the delicacy, the diversity of exquisite bloom; and all this not issuing once, and then to die out, but made ever and ever anew as the Transcendent Beings move variously over this earth.

In all the changing, there is no change by chance: there is no taking of new forms but to desirable ends and in ways worthy of Divine Powers. All that is Divine executes the Act of its quality; its quality is the expression of its essential Being: and this essential Being in the Divine is the Being whose activities produce as one thing the desirable and the just- for if the good and the just are not produced there, where, then, have they their being?

(363) make the oaks of the just— ‘To bear acorns at their summit, and bees in the middle; And the sheep are bowed down with the weight of their fleeces 3 ,’ and many other blessings of a like kind are provided for them. And Homer has a very similar strain; for he speaks of one whose fame is— ‘As the fame of some blameless king who, like a god, Maintains justice; to whom the black earth brings forth Wheat and barley, whose trees are bowed with fruit, And his sheep never fail to bear, and the sea gives him fish 4 .’ Still grander are the gifts of heaven which Musaeus and his son 5 vouchsafe to the just; they take them down into the world below, where they have the saints lying on couches at a feast, everlastingly drunk, crowned with garlands; their idea seems to be that an immortality of drunkenness is the highest meed of virtue. Some extend their rewards yet further; the posterity, as they say, of the faithful and just shall survive to the third and fourth generation. This is the style in which they praise justice. But about the wicked there is another strain; they bury them in a slough in Hades, and make them carry water in a sieve; also while they are yet living they bring them to infamy, and inflict

(618) of evil to the life which will make his soul more unjust, and good to the life which will make his soul more just; all else he will disregard. For we have seen and know that this is the best choice both in life and after death. A man must take with him into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that there too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other allurements of evil, lest, coming upon tyrannies and similar villainies, he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse himself; but let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. For this is the way of happiness. And according to the report of the messenger from the other world this was what the prophet said at the time: ‘Even for the last comer, if he chooses wisely and will live diligently, there is appointed a happy and not undesirable existence. Let not him who chooses first be careless, and let not the last despair.’ And when he had spoken, he who had the first choice came forward and in a moment chose the greatest tyranny; his mind having been darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not thought out the whole matter before he chose, and did not at first sight perceive that he

The FUMIGATION from FRANKINCENSE. THE piercing eye of Justice bright, I sing, 1 Plac'd by the throne of heav'n's almighty king, Perceiving thence, with vision unconfin'd, The life and conduct of the human kind To thee, revenge and punishment belong, Chastising ev'ry deed, unjust and wrong; Whose pow'r alone, dissimilars can join, And from th' equality of truth combine: For all the ill, persuasion can inspire, When urging bad designs, with counsel dire, 'Tis thine alone to punish; with the race Of lawless passions, and incentives base; For thou art ever to the good inclin'd, And hostile to the men of evil mind. Come, all-propitious, and thy suppliant hear, When Fate's predestin'd, final hour draws near.

(3) [Asclepius] The faults of men are not, then, punished, O Thrice-greatest one, by law of man alone?

[Trismegistus] In the first place, Asclepius, all things on Earth must die. Further, those things which live by reason of a body, and which do cease from living by reason of the same,—all these, according to the merits of this life, or its demerits, find due [rewards or] punishments. [And as to punishments] they’re all the more severe, if in their life [their misdeeds] chance to have been hidden, till their death. For [then] they will be made full conscious of all things by the divinity, just as they are, according to the shades of punishment allotted to their crimes. XXIX

(612) The demand, he said, is just. In the first place, I said—and this is the first thing which you will have to give back—the nature both of the just and unjust is truly known to the gods. Granted. And if they are both known to them, one must be the friend and the other the enemy of the gods, as we admitted from the beginning? True. And the friend of the gods may be supposed to receive from them all things at their best, excepting only such evil as is the necessary consequence of former sins? Certainly. Then this must be our notion of the just man, that even when he is in poverty or sickness, or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death: for the gods have a care of any one whose desire is to become just and to be like God, as far as man can attain the divine likeness, by the pursuit of virtue? Yes, he said; if he is like God he will surely not be neglected by him. And of the unjust may not the opposite be supposed? Certainly. Such, then, are the palms of victory which the gods give the just? That is my conviction. And what do they receive of men? Look at things as they really are, and you will see that the clever unjust are in the case of runners, who run well from the starting-place to the goal but not back again from the goal: they go off at a great pace,

(8) Thus we come to our enquiry as to the degree of excellence found in things of this Sphere, and how far they belong to an ordered system or in what degree they are, at least, not evil.

Now in every living being the upper parts- head, face- are the most beautiful, the mid and lower members inferior. In the Universe the middle and lower members are human beings; above them, the Heavens and the Gods that dwell there; these Gods with the entire circling expanse of the heavens constitute the greater part of the Kosmos: the earth is but a central point, and may be considered as simply one among the stars. Yet human wrong-doing is made a matter of wonder; we are evidently asked to take humanity as the choice member of the Universe, nothing wiser existent!

But humanity, in reality, is poised midway between gods and beasts, and inclines now to the one order, now to the other; some men grow like to the divine, others to the brute, the greater number stand neutral. But those that are corrupted to the point of approximating to irrational animals and wild beasts pull the mid-folk about and inflict wrong upon them; the victims are no doubt better than the wrongdoers, but are at the mercy of their inferiors in the field in which they themselves are inferior, where, that is, they cannot be classed among the good since they have not trained themselves in self-defence.

A gang of lads, morally neglected, and in that respect inferior to the intermediate class, but in good physical training, attack and throw another set, trained neither physically nor morally, and make off with their food and their dainty clothes. What more is called for than a laugh?

And surely even the lawgiver would be right in allowing the second group to suffer this treatment, the penalty of their sloth and self-indulgence: the gymnasium lies there before them, and they, in laziness and luxury and listlessness, have allowed themselves to fall like fat-loaded sheep, a prey to the wolves.

But the evil-doers also have their punishment: first they pay in that very wolfishness, in the disaster to their human quality: and next there is laid up for them the due of their Kind: living ill here, they will not get off by death; on every precedent through all the line there waits its sequent, reasonable and natural- worse to the bad, better to the good.

This at once brings us outside the gymnasium with its fun for boys; they must grow up, both kinds, amid their childishness and both one day stand girt and armed. Then there is a finer spectacle than is ever seen by those that train in the ring. But at this stage some have not armed themselves- and the duly armed win the day.

Not even a God would have the right to deal a blow for the unwarlike: the law decrees that to come safe out of battle is for fighting men, not for those that pray. The harvest comes home not for praying but for tilling; healthy days are not for those that neglect their health: we have no right to complain of the ignoble getting the richer harvest if they are the only workers in the fields, or the best.

Again: it is childish, while we carry on all the affairs of our life to our own taste and not as the Gods would have us, to expect them to keep all well for us in spite of a life that is lived without regard to the conditions which the Gods have prescribed for our well-being. Yet death would be better for us than to go on living lives condemned by the laws of the Universe. If things took the contrary course, if all the modes of folly and wickedness brought no trouble in life- then indeed we might complain of the indifference of a Providence leaving the victory to evil.

Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled: and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.

(612) we have not introduced the rewards and glories of justice, which, as you were saying, are to be found in Homer and Hesiod; but justice in her own nature has been shown to be best for the soul in her own nature. Let a man do what is just, whether he have the ring of Gyges or not, and even if in addition to the ring of Gyges he put on the helmet of Hades. Very true. And now, Glaucon, there will be no harm in further enumerating how many and how great are the rewards which justice and the other virtues procure to the soul from gods and men, both in life and after death. Certainly not, he said. Will you repay me, then, what you borrowed in the argument? What did I borrow? The assumption that the just man should appear unjust and the unjust just: for you were of opinion that even if the true state of the case could not possibly escape the eyes of gods and men, still this admission ought to be made for the sake of the argument, in order that pure justice might be weighed against pure injustice. Do you remember? I should be much to blame if I had forgotten. Then, as the cause is decided, I demand on behalf of justice that the estimation in which she is held by gods and men and which we acknowledge to be her due should now be restored to her by us 6 ; since she has been shown to confer reality, and not to deceive those who truly possess her, let what has been taken from her be given back, that so she may win that palm of appearance which is hers also, and which she gives to her own.

THEE, Nemesis I call, almighty queen, By whom the deeds of mortal life are seen: Eternal, much rever'd, of boundless sight, Alone rejoicing in the just and right: Changing the counsels of the human breast For ever various, rolling without rest. To every mortal is thy influence known, And men beneath thy righteous bondage groan; For ev'ry thought within the mind conceal'd Is to thy fight perspicuously reveal'd. The soul unwilling reason to obey By lawless passion rul'd, thy eyes survey. All to see, hear, and rule, O pow'r divine Whose nature Equity contains, is thine. Come, blessed, holy Goddess, hear my pray'r, And make thy mystic's life, thy constant care: Give aid benignant in the needful hour, And strength abundant to the reas'ning pow'r; And far avert the dire, unfriendly race Of counsels impious, arrogant, and base. Next: LXI: To Justice Sacred Texts | Classics « Previous: The Initiations of Orpheus: LIX: To the Graces Index Next: The Initiations of Orpheus: LXI: To Justice » Sacred Texts | Classics

(365) sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us. He proceeded: And now when the young hear all this said about virtue and vice, and the way in which gods and men regard them, how are their minds likely to be affected, my dear Socrates,—those of them, I mean, who are quickwitted, and, like bees on the wing, light on every flower, and from all that they hear are prone to draw conclusions as to what manner of persons they should be and in what way they should walk if they would make the best of life? Probably the youth will say to himself in the words of Pindar— ‘Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may be a fortress to me all my days?’ For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakeable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox, as Archilochus, greatest of sages, recommends. But I hear some one exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult;

(1) [Asclepius] And these deserve [still] greater punishments, Thrice-greatest one?

[Trismegistus] [Assuredly;] for those condemned by laws of man do lose their life by violence, so that [all] men may see they have not yielded up their soul to pay the debt of nature, but have received the penalty of their deserts. Upon the other hand, the righteous man finds his defence in serving God and deepest piety. For God doth guard such men from every ill.

(361) for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two. Heavens! my dear Glaucon, I said, how energetically you polish them up for the decision, first one and then the other, as if they were two statues. I do my best, he said. And now that we know what they are like there is no difficulty in tracing out the sort of life which awaits either of them. This I will proceed to describe; but as you may think the description a little too coarse, I ask you to suppose, Socrates, that the words which follow are not mine.—Let me put them into the mouths of the eulogists of injustice: They will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound—will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled: Then he will understand that he

(386) ‘Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should be seen both of mortals and immortals 2 .’ And again:— ‘O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all 3 !’ Again of Tiresias:— ‘[To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,] that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades 4 .’ Again:— ‘The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamenting her fate, leaving manhood and youth 5 .’ Again:— ‘And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth 6 .’ And,— ‘As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved 7 .’ And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death. Undoubtedly. Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names which describe the world below—Cocytus and Styx,

(379) Assuredly. Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him. That appears to me to be most true, he said. Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the folly of saying that two casks ‘Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots 10 ,’ and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two ‘Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;’ but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill, ‘Him wild hunger drives o’er the beauteous earth.’ And again— ‘Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.’ And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which was really the work of Pandarus 11 , was brought about by Athene and Zeus, or that the strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis and Zeus 12 , he shall not have our approval; neither will we allow our young men to hear the words of Aeschylus, that

(363) upon them the punishments which Glaucon described as the portion of the just who are reputed to be unjust; nothing else does their invention supply. Such is their manner of praising the one and censuring the other. Once more, Socrates, I will ask you to consider another way of speaking about justice and injustice, which is not confined to the poets, but is found in prose writers. The universal voice of mankind is always declaring that justice and virtue are honourable, but grievous and toilsome; and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment, and are only censured by law and opinion. They say also that honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty; and they are quite ready to call wicked men happy, and to honour them both in public and private when they are rich or in any other way influential, while they despise and overlook those who may be weak and poor, even though acknowledging them to be better than the others. But most extraordinary of all is their mode of speaking about virtue and the gods: they say that the gods apportion calamity and misery to many good men, and good and happiness to the wicked. And mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man’s own or his ancestor’s

PLUTO, magnanimous, whose realms profound Are fix'd beneath the firm and solid ground, In the Tartarian plains remote from fight, And wrapt forever in the depths of night; Terrestrial Jove, thy sacred ear incline, And, pleas'd, accept thy mystic's hymn divine. Earth's keys to thee, illustrious king belong, 7 Its secret gates unlocking, deep and strong. 'Tis thine, abundant annual fruits to bear, For needy mortals are thy constant care. To thee, great king, Avernus is assign'd, The seat of Gods, and basis of mankind. Thy throne is fix'd in Hade's dismal plains, Distant, unknown to rest, where darkness reigns; Where, destitute of breath, pale spectres dwell, In endless, dire, inexorable hell; And in dread Acheron, whose depths obscure, Earth's stable roots eternally secure. O mighty dæmon, whose decision dread, The future fate determines of the dead, With captive Proserpine, thro' grassy plains, Drawn in a four-yok'd car with loosen'd reins, Rapt o'er the deep, impell'd by love, you flew 'Till Eleusina's city rose to view; There, in a wond'rous cave obscure and deep, The sacred maid secure from search you keep, The cave of Atthis, whose wide gates display An entrance to the kingdoms void of day. Of unapparent works, thou art alone The dispensator, visible and known. O pow'r all-ruling, holy, honor'd light, Thee sacred poets and their hymns delight: Propitious to thy mystic's works incline, Rejoicing come, for holy rites are thine.

(615) of man’s life, and the penalty being thus paid ten times in a thousand years. If, for example, there were any who had been the cause of many deaths, or had betrayed or enslaved cities or armies, or been guilty of any other evil behaviour, for each and all of their offences they received punishment ten times over, and the rewards of beneficence and justice and holiness were in the same proportion. /I need hardly repeat what he said concerning young children dying almost as soon as they were born. Of piety and impiety to gods and parents, and of murderers 7 , there were retributions other and greater far which he described. He mentioned that he was present when one of the spirits asked another, ‘Where is Ardiaeus the Great?’ (Now this Ardiaeus lived a thousand years before the time of Er: he had been the tyrant of some city of Pamphylia, and had murdered his aged father and his elder brother, and was said to have committed many other abominable crimes.) The answer of the other spirit was: ‘He comes not hither and will never come. And this,’ said he, ‘was one of the dreadful sights which we ourselves witnessed. We were at the mouth of the cavern, and, having completed all our experiences, were about to reascend, when of a sudden Ardiaeus appeared and several others, most of whom were tyrants; and there were also besides the tyrants private individuals

(366) what mighty cities declare; and the children of the gods, who were their poets and prophets, bear a like testimony. On what principle, then, shall we any longer choose justice rather than the worst injustice? when, if we only unite the latter with a deceitful regard to appearances, we shall fare to our mind both with gods and men, in life and after death, as the most numerous and the highest authorities tell us. Knowing all this, Socrates, how can a man who has any superiority of mind or person or rank or wealth, be willing to honour justice; or indeed to refrain from laughing when he hears justice praised? And even if there should be some one who is able to disprove the truth of my words, and who is satisfied that justice is best, still he is not angry with the unjust, but is very ready to forgive them, because he also knows that men are not just of their own free will; unless, peradventure, there be some one whom the divinity within him may have inspired with a hatred of injustice, or who has attained knowledge of the truth—but no other man. He only blames injustice who, owing to cowardice or age or some weakness, has not the power of being unjust. And this is proved by the fact that when he obtains the power, he immediately becomes unjust as far as he can be. The cause of all this, Socrates, was indicated by us at the beginning of the argument, when my brother and I told you how astonished we were to find that of all the professing