Plutarch, Consolatio ad Apollonium
Frank Cole Babbitt, Ed.

The divine Plato has said a good deal in his treatise On the Soul about its immortality, and not a little also in the Republic and Meno and Gorgias, and here and there in his other dialogues. What is said in the dialogue On the Soul I will copy, with comments, and send you separately, as you desired. But for the present occasion these words, which were spoken [p. 207] to Callicles the Athenian, the friend and disciple of Gorgias the orator, are timely and profitable. They say that Socrates, according to Plato's account,¹ says : ‘Listen to a very beautiful story, which you, I imagine, will regard as a myth, but which I regard as a story; for what I am going to say I shall relate as true. As Homer ² tells the tale, Zeus, Poseidon, and Pluto divided the kingdom when they received it from their father. Now this was the custom regarding men even in the time of Cronus, and it has persisted among the gods to this day—that the man who has passed through life justly and in holiness shall, at his death, depart to the Islands of the Blest and dwell in all happiness beyond the reach of evil, while he who has lived an unjust and godless life shall go to the prison-house of justice and punishment, which they call Tartarus. The judges of these men, in the time of Cronus and in the early days of Zeus's dominion, were living, and judged the living, giving judgement on the day when the men were about to die. As time went on, for some reason the cases were not decided well. Accordingly Pluto and the supervisors in the Islands of the Blest went to Zeus and said to him that there kept coming to them at both places inadmissible persons. ' Very well,' said Zeus, ' then I shall put a stop to this proceeding. The judgements are now rendered poorly ; for,' said he, ' those who are judged are judged with a covering on them, since they are judged while alive, and so,' he continued, a good [p. 209] many perhaps who have base souls are clad with beautiful bodies and ancestry and riches, and, when the judgement takes place, many come to testify for them that they have lived righteously. So not only are the judges disconcerted by these things, but at the same time they themselves sit in judgement with a covering on them, having before their own souls, like a veil, their eyes and ears and their whole body. All these things come between, both their own covering and that of those who are being judged. In the first place, then, all their foreknowledge of death must be ended ; for now they have foreknowledge of it. So Prometheus has been told to put an end to this. Secondly, they must be judged divested of all these things ; for they must be judged after they have died. The judge also must be naked, and dead, that he may view with his very soul the very soul of every man instantly after he has died, and isolated from all his kin, having left behind on earth all earthly adornments, so that his judgement may be just. I, therefore, realizing this situation sooner than you, have made my own sons judges, two from Asia—Minos and Rhadamanthys‚Äîand one from Europe‚ÄîAeacus. These, then, as soon as they have died, shall sit in judgement in the meadow at the parting of the ways whence the two roads lead, the one to the Islands of the Blest and the other to Tartarus. The people of Asia shall Rhadamanthys judge, while Aeacus shall judge the people of Europe; and to Minos I shall give the prerogative of pronouncing final judgement in case the other [p. 211] two be in any doubt, in order that the decision in regard to the route which men must take shall be as just as possible.' This, Callicles, is what I have heard, and believe to be true ; and from these words I draw the following inference‚Äîthat death is, as it seems to me, nothing else than the severing of two things, soul and body, from each other.’