The Myth of Er (Book X)

Of all the things we have arranged in our city, I said, I am most pleased with our rule about poetry: that we would admit no part of it that is imitative. I can say this among friends, for you will not denounce me to the tragic poets and other imitators: all such poetry seems to me to be a ruin of the minds of those who hear it, unless they have the antidote of knowing what it really is.

And yet I must speak, though a certain love and reverence for Homer, which I have had since childhood, holds me back. He seems to have been the first teacher and leader of all these fine tragedians. But a man must not be honored above the truth.

What is imitation? Take beds. There are many beds and tables, but only two forms of them: one form of bed, and one of table. The carpenter, when he makes a bed, looks to the form, and makes it. But he does not make the form itself. There are, then, three beds: one in nature, which God made; one which the carpenter makes; and one which the painter paints. The painter does not imitate the form, but only what the carpenter has made, and not as it is, but as it appears, from one side. So the imitator is third from the king and the truth. He knows nothing about what he imitates; he only knows how it looks. And so it is with the poets. Homer speaks of generals and battles, of the education of men and the governing of cities; but what city was ever better governed because of Homer? What war was won by his advice? Who were his pupils?

Worse still, poetry appeals not to the best part of the soul, but to the part that grieves and laughs and desires; it waters the passions that should wither, and makes them rule when they should be ruled.

So we must banish it from our city, all except hymns to the gods and praises of good men. For there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. But let us say this, so that poetry will not accuse us of harshness and rudeness: if poetry for pleasure can give any argument to show that it belongs in a well-governed city, we would be glad to welcome it back, for we are well aware of its charms ourselves. And we would let its defenders, who are not poets but lovers of poetry, speak for it in prose, to show that it is not only pleasant but also useful.

And now, I said, we have not yet spoken of the greatest rewards of virtue.

"There must be something unimaginably great," Glaucon said, "if it is greater than all we have said."

Have you not realized, I asked, that our soul is immortal? Everything is destroyed by its own evil: the eye by disease, wood by rot, iron by rust. The evil of the soul is injustice; yet injustice kills others, but keeps its owner very much alive. A thing that its own evil cannot destroy cannot be destroyed at all. And the rewards the just man receives in life, from gods and men, are nothing compared to what awaits him after death. I will tell you a story, not one of those long tales told to Alcinous, but the tale of a brave man, Er, the son of Armenius, a Pamphylian.

He was killed in battle, and ten days later, when the bodies of the dead were collected, already decayed, his was found still fresh. He was carried home to be buried, and on the twelfth day, as he lay on the funeral pyre, he came back to life, and told what he had seen in the other world.

He said that when his soul left his body, it traveled with many others until they came to a marvelous place, where there were two openings side by side in the earth, and opposite them two in the heavens above. Between them sat judges, who, after judging each soul, ordered the just to go up through the heavens to the right, with signs of the judgment fastened in front of them, and the unjust to go down to the left, with signs of all they had done fastened to their backs. When Er came forward, they told him that he was to be a messenger to men about the things there, and ordered him to listen and watch everything in the place.

He saw the souls departing by one opening in the heaven and one in the earth, after they had been judged; and through the other two, souls coming up out of the earth, dirty and dusty, and others coming down from heaven, clean. They went joyfully into the meadow, and camped there as at a festival, and greeted each other, and told their stories: those from below weeping and lamenting as they remembered what they had suffered in their journey of a thousand years under the earth; those from heaven describing their delights and the beauties of the sight. For every wrong a man had done, he had paid ten times over, once in every hundred years, which is the length of a human life.

He heard someone ask where Ardiaeus the Great was, a tyrant who had killed his father and his brother. "He has not come up, and he will not come," was the answer: when the tyrants tried to come out, the opening bellowed, and fiery men seized them and threw them into Tartarus.

After seven days, the souls came to a column of light stretching through heaven and earth, like a rainbow but brighter, and saw the spindle of Necessity, by which all the heavens turn: eight circles, on each a Siren singing a single note, making one harmony. Around them sat the three Fates, daughters of Necessity: Lachesis, singing the past; Clotho, the present; Atropos, the future.

When the souls arrived, a herald arranged them in order, took from the lap of Lachesis lots and models of lives, and said: "Thus says the maiden Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another cycle of mortal life, which ends in death. Your fate will not be assigned to you; you will choose your own. Let him who draws the first lot choose first a life to which he will be bound by necessity. Virtue has no master; each will have more or less of it as he honors or dishonors it. The responsibility lies with the one who chooses; God is blameless."

Then the models of lives were laid out on the ground, far more than there were souls: every kind of animal and human life, tyrannies, lives of fame and obscurity, of beauty and strength, and their opposites.

And here, my dear Glaucon, is the whole danger for a human being. That is why each of us must neglect every other study, and seek only this: to learn to distinguish the good life from the bad, and always and everywhere to choose the better.

The one who drew the first lot went at once and chose the greatest tyranny. In his folly and greed he chose it without examining it carefully, and did not notice that it was his fate to eat his own children, and many other horrors. When he examined it at leisure, he beat his breast and lamented his choice, and blamed chance and the gods and everything except himself. He was one of those who had come from heaven, having lived his previous life in a well-ordered city, and had been virtuous by habit, without philosophy. Many of those who came from heaven chose badly, because they were untrained by suffering; while those who came from the earth, having suffered themselves and seen others suffer, did not choose in a hurry.

Er said it was a sight worth seeing, pitiful and laughable and wonderful, how the souls chose their lives, mostly according to the habits of their former lives. He saw the soul that had once been Orpheus choose the life of a swan, because, having been killed by women, he hated to be born of a woman. He saw the soul of Ajax, son of Telamon, choose the life of a lion, remembering the judgment of the armor. Agamemnon chose the life of an eagle, out of hatred of the human race for what he had suffered. Atalanta, seeing the great honors of an athlete, could not pass them by. Thersites, the buffoon, put on the body of an ape.

And by chance the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all. Remembering his former labors, and having recovered from his ambition, he went around for a long time looking for the life of a private man who minded his own business, and with difficulty he found it lying somewhere, neglected by all the others. When he saw it, he said that he would have done the same if he had drawn the first lot, and he chose it gladly.

Then the souls passed beneath the throne of Necessity, and crossed the scorching Plain of Forgetfulness, and camped by the River of Unmindfulness. Each had to drink a measure of its water, and as he drank, he forgot everything. At midnight there was thunder and an earthquake, and they were carried up to their births, like shooting stars. Er was not allowed to drink; how he returned to his body he did not know, but at dawn he opened his eyes and saw himself lying on the pyre.

And so, Glaucon, the tale was saved and did not perish; and it will save us, if we are persuaded by it. We will cross the river of Lethe safely, and not defile our souls. If we follow my advice, believing that the soul is immortal and able to endure every evil and every good, we will always keep to the upward way, and pursue justice with wisdom always and in every way, so that we may be friends to ourselves and to the gods, both while we remain here and when we receive the rewards of justice, like victors gathering in their prizes; and so, both in this life and in the journey of a thousand years we have described, we may fare well.

(End of the series — The Republic)