Preparation for the Gospel — Book XII

Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

1.1| The twelfth book of our Preparation for the Gospel will now, from about this point, supply what the previous book left wanting in the concord of Plato with the oracles of the Hebrews, as in the harmony of a well-tuned lyre; and it will take its start from a defense of our faith, which the many slander.

1.2| "Whether anyone rightly or wrongly finds fault with the Laconian and the Cretan constitutions would be another discussion; at any rate, what the many say about them I could perhaps tell better than either of you. For among you, if your laws have been framed even moderately well, one of the finest of the laws would be the one that forbids any of the young to inquire which of them are good and which are not, but bids all agree with one voice and from one mouth that all of them are well established, since gods laid them down, and, if anyone says otherwise, not to put up with hearing him at all; while if an old man has some reflection to make on your institutions, he is to make such remarks before a magistrate and one of his own age, with no young man present. Your bidding is most right, stranger."

1.3| Fittingly, then, the scripture of the Hebrews too anticipated this and puts faith before the understanding and contemplation of the divine scriptures, where it says: "If you do not believe, you will not understand." And again: "I believed, therefore I spoke."

1.4| Hence among us too, to those who are just being introduced and are still immature in their habit of mind, infants as it were in soul, the reading of the divine scriptures is handed on in a simpler way, along with the instruction that they must believe what is contained in them as words of God; while those who have advanced in habit and are grey-headed in understanding are permitted to go into the depths and to test the sense of what is said. These the children of the Hebrews were accustomed to call deuterotai, as being interpreters and explainers of the sense of the scriptures.

2.1| "Then after this we would say: You, Tyrtaeus, it seems, praise above all those who distinguish themselves in war against foreigners from outside. He would say so, I suppose, and agree? Of course.

2.2| But we, while granting that these are good, say that still better, and by far, are those who show themselves plainly the best in the greatest war. We too have a poet as witness, Theognis, a citizen of the Megarians in Sicily, who says: 'A faithful man is the equal of gold and silver, Cyrnus, in the hard strife of faction.'

2.3| This man, we say, proves far better than the other in the harder war, nearly as much better as justice and temperance and wisdom, joined in one with courage, are better than courage by itself alone. For no one would ever prove faithful and sound in civil strife without the whole of virtue; whereas of those who plant their feet firmly, fight, and are willing to die in war, of whom Tyrtaeus speaks, a great many are mercenaries, and most of these turn out reckless and unjust and violent and the most senseless of nearly all men, apart from a very few indeed.

2.4| Where, then, does this argument of ours now end? And what does it mean to make clear by saying this? Plainly this: that above all both the lawgiver here, who is from Zeus, and every lawgiver of even small worth, will always lay down his laws looking above all to nothing other than the greatest virtue; and this, as Theognis says, is faithfulness amid dangers, which a person might name complete justice."

2.5| Among us, too, the saving word, yoking wisdom together with faith, approves in its own sayings the man adorned with both, saying: "Who, then, is the steward who is faithful and wise?" And once more: "Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful in a few things, I will appoint you over many." In these words, then, it shows clearly that it accepts not irrational faith but faith yoked with the greatest virtues, if indeed wisdom and goodness are such.

3.1| "For it seems to me that we went through the earlier arguments at a fitting moment: that the souls of the dead possess a certain power when they have died, by which they take care of human affairs. The accounts that contain these things are true, but long. One must believe the other traditions about such matters, which are so many and so very ancient, and must believe also those who lay down in their laws that these things are so, unless they appear to be utterly senseless."

3.2| And in the book of the Maccabees it is said that the prophet Jeremiah, once released from life, is seen praying on behalf of the people, as one who takes thought for human beings on earth. Plato too says that one must believe these things.

4.1| "There are two kinds of discourse: one true, the other false. Yes. And must we educate in both, first in the false? I do not understand, he said, what you mean. You do not understand, I said, that we first tell children tales. This, taken as a whole, is false, though there is truth in it too. And we use tales with children before gymnastic exercises. That is so."

4.2| So Plato. And among the Hebrews too it is the custom to hand on the narratives of the inspired scripture to the souls of infants in a simpler way, like tales, while to those whose condition has been trained, the deeper and doctrinal contemplations of the words are given by means of the so-called "seconding" and the clarification of the thoughts that escape the many.

5.1| "Do you not know that the beginning of every work is the most important thing, especially for anyone young and tender? For that is the time when the mold is most formed and the stamp takes, which one wishes to impress on each.

5.2| Quite so. Shall we then easily allow the children to hear any chance tales that have been made up, and to receive in their souls for the most part opinions opposite to those which we think they should hold when they are grown?

5.3| We shall not allow it in the least. First, then, it seems, we must supervise the makers of tales, and whatever fine tale they make we must approve, and whatever is not, reject. And we shall persuade nurses and mothers to tell the approved ones to the children, and to shape their souls with the tales much more than their bodies with their hands. Most of those they now tell must be thrown out."

5.4| And this was guarded among the Hebrews before Plato. For those who had the divine Spirit, with discernment of spirits, tested what was said and written rightly and from the Holy Spirit, and rejected what was not of that kind, as they did the words of the false prophets. Besides, it was the habit of parents and nurses to sing to infant children the most profitable narratives drawn from the divine scriptures, as if they were tales, as a preparation for the piety they would have as grown men.

6.1| "Listen, then," they say, "to a very fine account, which you will consider a tale, I think, but I an account; for I shall tell you what I am about to tell as true."

6.2| And after a little: "The man who has passed his life justly and piously, when he dies, goes to the islands of the blessed and dwells in complete happiness, free from evils; but the man who has lived unjustly and godlessly goes to the prison of requital and justice, which they call Tartarus."

6.3| And again after a little: "Then they must be judged stripped of all these things; for they must be judged when dead. And the judge must be naked, and dead, viewing with his soul itself the very soul of each as he suddenly dies, bereft of all kin and having left behind on earth all that adornment, in order that the judgment may be just."

6.4| And next he adds: "These are the things, Callicles, which I have heard and hold to be true; and from these accounts I reckon that this follows: death is, as it seems to me, nothing other than the separation of the soul and the body, two things, from each other.

6.5| And when they have been separated, each of them nevertheless retains its own condition, the same as when the man was alive: the body its own nature, and all its treatments and experiences are plainly visible. For instance, if someone's body was large in life, by nature or by upbringing or both, his corpse is large when he dies; and if stout, stout also when dead, and so with the rest.

6.6| And if he cultivated long hair, his corpse is long-haired; or if someone was a whipping-victim and bore the marks of the blows, scars on his body from whips or other wounds in life, his body when dead can be seen to have these; or if someone's limbs were broken or distorted in life, they are so also in death.

6.7| In a word, whatever sort of body he had made himself in life, all this is plainly visible after death too, or most of it, for some time. The same, then, I think, holds of the soul, Callicles: everything is plainly visible in the soul when it has been stripped of the body, both what belongs to its nature and the experiences that came to the man's soul through his pursuit of each activity.

6.8| When, therefore, they arrive before the judge, those from Asia before Rhadamanthys, Rhadamanthys sets them before him and looks at each soul, not knowing whose it is, but often, having laid hold of the Great King or any other king, or a potentate, he has seen nothing sound in the soul, but found it scourged through and covered in scars from perjuries and injustice, which each of his actions has stamped upon his soul, and everything crooked from falsehood and boasting, and nothing straight because it was reared without truth; and he saw the soul full of disproportion and ugliness of actions from license and luxury and insolence and incontinence; and having seen it, he sent it off in dishonor straight to the prison, where on arriving it is to endure the sufferings fitting for it.

6.9| Now it is fitting that everyone who is under punishment, rightly punished by another, either become better and be benefited, or become an example to the others, so that others, seeing him suffer what he suffers, may fear and become better.

6.10| Those who are benefited and pay the penalty at the hands of gods and men are those who commit curable sins; yet the benefit comes to them through pains and sufferings both here and in Hades; for it is not possible to be set free in any other way.

6.11| But those who commit the extreme wrongs and by such wrongs become incurable, from these come the examples; and these themselves no longer benefit at all, being incurable, but others benefit who see them suffering for their sins the greatest and most painful and most fearful sufferings for all time, simply hung up there as examples in the prison in Hades, a sight and a warning to the unjust who arrive from time to time.

6.12| Among these, I say, will be Archelaus, if Polus speaks the truth, and any other tyrant of that kind. And I think that most of these examples have come from tyrants and kings and potentates and men who managed the affairs of cities; for these, through their power, commit sins that are the greatest and most impious.

6.13| Homer too is a witness to this. For he has depicted kings and potentates as those punished for all time in Hades: Tantalus and Sisyphus and Tityus. But Thersites, or any other wicked private person, no one has represented as held in great punishments as incurable; for, I think, he did not have the power; and for this reason he was happier than those who did.

6.14| But indeed, Callicles, it is from the powerful that the exceedingly wicked men come; yet nothing prevents good men from arising among them as well; and those who do so are very much to be admired. For it is hard, Callicles, and worthy of much praise, for one who has great license to do wrong, to live his life justly; and few such men arise. Yet there have been such, both here and elsewhere, and I think there will be others, good in this virtue of justly handling whatever is entrusted to one.

6.15| One has become highly renowned even among the other Greeks, Aristides the son of Lysimachus. But the many, excellent friend, become bad. Of the judges, as I was saying, when that Rhadamanthys gets hold of a man of that sort, he knows nothing further about him, not who he is, nor of what family, only that he is some wicked person; and on seeing this he dispatches him to Tartarus, marking him whether he seems curable or incurable.

6.16| And the man who arrives there suffers what is fitting. But sometimes, seeing another soul that has lived piously and with truth, of a private man or of some other, but most of all, I say, Callicles, of a philosopher who has minded his own business and not been a busybody in his life, he admires it and dispatches it to the islands of the blessed.

6.17| Aeacus does the same; and each of these holds a rod as he judges. But Minos sits in oversight alone, holding a golden scepter, as Homer's Odysseus says he saw him, holding a golden scepter, giving judgments to the dead.

6.18| I, then, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I shall show my soul to the judge in the soundest state. So, letting go of the honors of the many, and practicing the truth, I shall try in reality, as best I can, to be the best man both in living and, when I die, in dying.

6.19| And I call on all other men too, as far as I can; and you in turn I call upon to this life and this contest, which I say is worth all the contests here

6.20| and I reproach you, because you will have no power to help yourself once the trial and the judgment have come upon you of which I was now speaking, but arriving before that judge, Aegina's son, when he seizes you and leads you away, you will gape and be dizzy no less than I here, and you there, and perhaps someone will even strike you on the cheek in dishonor, and treat you with utter contempt."

6.21| Perhaps this seems to you to be told as a tale told by an old woman, and you despise it. And it would be no wonder to despise it, if by searching we could somewhere find better and truer accounts.

6.22| But as it is you see that you three, who are the wisest of the Greeks now living, you and Polus and Gorgias, cannot show that one should live any other life than this, which is shown to be advantageous there too; but in all these arguments, with the others refuted, this one account alone stays unmoved: that one must beware of doing wrong more than of suffering it, and that above everything a man must practice not to seem good but to be good, both privately and publicly."

6.23| So Plato supposed that Aeacus and Minos and Rhadamanthys would be the judges of the dead, while the divine word bears witness that all must stand before the judgment seat of God, so that each may receive the things done through the body, according to what he did, whether good or bad.

6.24| And again, he says, "on the day when God judges the secrets of men, who will repay each according to his works: to those who by patience in work seek glory and honor and incorruption, eternal life; but to those who are self-seeking and disobey the truth, and obey injustice, wrath and anger, tribulation and distress, upon every soul of man who works evil, the Jew first and also the Greek; for there is no distinction."

7.1| "Take care, however, that these things never fall into the hands of uneducated people; for there are hardly, as it seems to me, any accounts that to the many are more laughable to hear, nor, on the other hand, to the naturally gifted, more wonderful and inspiring. But being said often and always heard, over many years, they are with difficulty cleansed, like gold, with much labor."

8.1| And among us the saving word says: "Do not give what is holy to the dogs, nor throw your pearls before the swine." And: "The natural man does not accept the things of God's Spirit, for they are folly to him." "And indeed, in the case of one man, whenever fine arguments are in his soul and accomplish nothing more, but rather the very opposite, all these I would set down as the most discordant forms of ignorance, in a city and in each one of the citizens, and not those of craftsmen, if you understand what I mean, strangers. We understand, friend, and agree to what you say.

8.2| Let this, then, be laid down as agreed and stated: that to those citizens who are ignorant in these matters no part of rule is to be entrusted, and that they are to be reproached as ignorant, even if they are very good at reckoning and have worked out all the clever things and whatever is suited to the quickness of the soul; while those who are the opposite of these are to be called wise, even if, as the saying goes, they know neither letters nor swimming, and offices are to be given to them as to men of sense.

8.3| For how, friends, could even the smallest form of wisdom exist without concord? It cannot. But the finest and greatest of concords might most justly be called the greatest wisdom, in which the man who lives by reason shares, while he who falls short is the ruin of his household and in no way a savior of the city, but on every occasion will be found in these matters to be in the opposite condition through ignorance."

8.4| Let this suffice for me from the Laws. The same writer, in the Statesman, on not being overly earnest about names and expressions, says this: "Well said, Socrates; and if you keep guard against being earnest about names, you will appear richer in wisdom as you reach old age."

9.1| The scripture of the Hebrews first introduces Moses declining the leadership of the people through the words he said to the one who spoke to him: "I beseech you, Lord, appoint another who is able, whom you will send." Then it shows Saul hiding so as not to accept the kingdom, and the prophet Jeremiah likewise declining. Hear how Plato too establishes the reasonableness of such refusal, speaking as follows:

9.2| "Is it not then already clear, Thrasymachus, that no art or office provides what is beneficial to itself, but, as we were saying a while ago, provides and prescribes what is beneficial to the one ruled, looking to the interest of the weaker, not of the stronger?

9.3| For these reasons, my dear Thrasymachus, I was also saying just now that no one is willing to rule voluntarily and take in hand the troubles of others in order to set them right, but asks for pay, because the one who is going to practice his art well never does what is best for himself, nor does he prescribe it when he prescribes according to the art, but what is best for the one ruled. For these reasons, it seems, there must be pay for those who are going to be willing to rule, whether money or honor, or a penalty if one does not rule."

10.1| According to the oracles of the Hebrews, their prophets and righteous men boldly endured the extremes of outrage and contempt and every danger; and you may learn Plato's harmonious view on this point too from these words of his, written in the second book of the Republic:

10.2| "Having set down such a man, let us in our discussion set the just man beside him, a simple and noble man, who, as Aeschylus says, wishes not to seem but to be good. The seeming must be taken away. For if he is thought just, he will have honors and gifts for being thought such. It would then be unclear whether he is such for the sake of justice or of the gifts and honors.

10.3| He must be stripped of everything except justice, and made to be in the condition opposite to the former. Doing no wrong, let him have the reputation of the greatest injustice, so that he may be tested for justice by not being softened by ill repute and what comes from it; but let him be unshaken until death, seeming to be unjust throughout life, though being just."

10.4| And after a little he adds: "It must be said, then; and even if it is said rather rudely, do not suppose that I say it, Socrates, but those who praise injustice above justice. They will say this: that the just man in such a state will be scourged, racked, bound, have both eyes gouged out, and finally, after suffering every evil, will be impaled, and will learn that one should wish not to be just but to seem so."

10.5| This Plato says in words; but in deeds, much earlier, among the Hebrews the righteous men and prophets are recorded to have suffered all that was said, who, being the most just, as though the most unjust, "were stoned, were sawn in two, died by the slaughter of the sword, went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, wandering in deserts, on mountains, in caves, and in the holes of the earth, men of whom the world was not worthy."

10.6| And the apostles of our Savior, who pursued the highest justice and piety yet were clothed with a reputation for injustice among the many, can be heard saying what they suffered: "We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men." And: "To this present hour we go hungry and thirsty, and are naked and beaten, and have no fixed abode; when reviled we bless, when persecuted we endure, when slandered we entreat; we have become like the refuse of the world."

10.7| Indeed, even to this day our Savior's noble martyrs throughout the whole inhabited world, practicing not seeming but being just and pious, have suffered all that Plato enumerated: they were scourged, endured bonds and racks, had both their eyes gouged out, and finally, after suffering every terror, were impaled. If you looked for anyone like these among the Greeks you would not find one, so that one might reasonably say that the philosopher did nothing other than prophesy through these words about those among us who shine in piety and true justice.

11.1| Moses, with certain hidden meanings, says that at the beginning of the world's constitution there came to be a paradise of God, and that in it the man was deceived through the woman by the serpent. Plato, all but recasting the very words, has himself set down, speaking allegorically in the Symposium, things that you should hear: for the paradise of God he has named the garden of Zeus; for the serpent and the deceit that came from it he has supposed Poverty plotting; for the first man, whom God's counsel and providence put forth as a newly born son, he calls Resource, the son of Metis; and in place of saying "when this world was constituted," he says "when Aphrodite was born," allegorizing the world in this way on account of the beauty about it. He says in these very words:

11.2| "When Aphrodite was born, the gods feasted, the others and also Resource, the son of Metis. And when they had dined, Poverty came to beg, as there was a feast, and she was about the doors. Resource, drunk with nectar (for there was not yet wine), went into the garden of Zeus and, heavy with it, fell asleep. Poverty then, plotting because of her own want to make a child from Resource, lay down beside him and conceived Love." Such things, then, Plato also hinted in these passages, in a manner resembling Moses.

12.1| Again Moses says: "But for Adam there was no helper like him. And God cast a trance upon Adam, and he slept, and took one of his ribs, and with flesh he filled the place. And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman." Plato, not having grasped in what sense this was said, though clearly not ignorant of the account, assigns it to Aristophanes, as a comic poet accustomed to mock even the solemn matters, introducing him in the Symposium as saying this:

12.2| "You must first learn human nature and its experiences. For our nature long ago was not as it is now, but different. First, there were three kinds of human beings, not two, as at present, male and female, but a third as well, common to both of these, of which the name survives, though the thing itself has vanished; for the androgynous was then a form and a name common to both, the male and the female."

12.3| Then next, after his customary ridicule, he adds: "Having said this, his Zeus cut the human beings in two, as people do who cut sorb-apples to preserve them, or like those who cut eggs with hairs. And whomever he cut he ordered Apollo to turn the face and half the neck around toward the cut, so that by looking at his own cutting the human being would be more orderly, and he ordered him to heal the rest."

13.1| Moses sketched the first life of the earth-born as having come to be in the paradise of God, God leading them in a life without possessions or property, all things growing for them unsown and unplowed, and they being naked, without the later clothing; hear the philosopher translating these very things, almost, into Greek speech. He says:

13.2| "God himself pastured them, taking charge, as now human beings, being another and more divine kind of creature, pasture other kinds that are inferior to them. While he pastured them there were no constitutions nor possession of wives and children; for all came back to life from the earth, remembering nothing of the former things; but all such things were absent, and they had abundant fruits from trees and much other growth, not produced by farming but given up by the earth of its own accord. Naked and without bedding, they lived mostly out in the open. For the seasons were tempered for them without hardship, and they had soft beds from the abundant grass springing from the earth. You hear, Socrates, of the life of those under Cronos; but this one, which is said to be under Zeus, the present one, you have yourself, being present, experienced."

14.1| Again Moses recorded that the serpent was more intelligent than all the wild animals, and what the serpent said to the woman, and she to the serpent, and set out the serpent's conversations; hear what Plato writes

14.2| "Now if the nurslings of Cronus, with so much leisure and with the power to converse through speech not only with human beings but with wild animals too, used all this for philosophy, associating with the animals and with one another, and inquiring of every nature whether any of them, possessing some peculiar faculty of its own, perceived something different from the rest that could contribute to the gathering of wisdom, it is easy to judge that the men of that age were infinitely better off for happiness than those of today.

14.3| But if they stuffed themselves to the full with food and drink and talked with one another and with the animals in such tales as are even now told about them, that too, in my opinion at least, is very easy to pronounce upon. Still, let us leave these things alone, until some competent informant appears who can say in which way the men of that time stood in their desires concerning the sciences and the use of discourse."

15.1| Moses, having laid down a legislation for mankind, thought he needed an account of ancient history in his preface. He recalls the flood and the life of human beings after it, then sets out the manner of life of the God-beloved men of old among the Hebrews, and of those who were otherwise found guilty of transgressions, judging that the history of these matters would be suited to the laws he was enacting.

15.2| Plato likewise, coming to the writing of his Laws, emulates Moses in the same way. At any rate, in the preface of the Laws he uses an ancient history of his own, mentioning a flood and the life after the flood. Listen to what he says as he begins the third book of the Laws: "Do the ancient accounts seem to you to have some truth in them? Which accounts? That many destructions of human beings have occurred through floods and plagues and many other things, in which only a small remnant of the human race was left. Every such thing is entirely credible to everyone.

15.3| Come, then, let us consider one of these many destructions, the one that came by the flood. What are we to think about it? That those who then escaped the destruction would perhaps be mountain herdsmen, small sparks of the human race preserved somewhere on the peaks. Clearly.

15.4| And such people must necessarily be inexperienced in the other arts, and in the contrivances that city-dwellers use against one another for gain and for contentiousness, and in all the other wicked schemes they devise against one another. Probably so. Let us suppose, then, that the cities on the plains and those lying by the sea were wholly destroyed at that time. Let us suppose it. Then all tools were lost, and if anything had been earnestly discovered that belonged to an art, or to statecraft, or to some other kind of wisdom, we shall say that all of it perished at that time."

15.5| And after other matters he says: "Let us say, then, that this was the state of human affairs at the time when the destruction came: an immense and fearful desolation, and a vast extent of abundant land."

15.6| After saying these and similar things, he proceeds to relate the lives of the people after the flood. Then, just as Moses attaches the manner of life of the God-beloved Hebrews of old to his account after the flood, so Plato likewise, after the lives of those who came after the flood, attempts to give an ancient history of the Greeks, as the other did of the Hebrews. He mentions the Trojan affairs, the first constitution in Lacedaemon, and the Persians, and the people among them, whether they lived rightly or not. Then, after the history of these, he begins the arranging of laws, taking Moses as his guide in this too.

16.1| Moses made his whole legislation and the entire constitution under him depend on reverence for the God of the universe, and made the beginning of his legislation from the Maker of all; then he taught that human goods issue from divine goods, and referred the divine goods to the Mind that leads all things, God himself, the God of the universe. Observe how the philosopher too, walking in the same footsteps, finds fault with the lawgivers of Crete and of Lacedaemon, and sets out the law that pleases Moses, speaking thus:

16.2| "In what way, then, would I have wished you to make the distinction as you spoke, and to hear it myself? Shall I tell you? Certainly, stranger. You should have said that the laws of the Cretans are not for nothing held in exceptional repute among all the Greeks. For they are right: they make those who use them happy, since they provide every good.

16.3| Goods are of two kinds, human and divine, and the former depend on the latter. If a city receives the greater, it acquires the lesser too; if not, it is deprived of both. Of the lesser goods, health leads, beauty is second, strength is third, for running and for all the other movements of the body, and fourth is wealth, not blind but sharp-sighted, provided that it accompanies wisdom.

16.4| This, again, is the first of the divine goods, the one that leads: wisdom. Second, after mind, comes a temperate state of soul; from these, mixed with courage, justice would be third, and courage fourth. All these are by nature ranked before the others, and so the lawgiver too must rank them.

16.5| After this, the lawgiver must direct that the other ordinances for the citizens look to these, and that of these the human goods all look to the divine, and the divine all to the leading Mind.

16.6| As for marriages, in which they share with one another, and after that the begetting and rearing of children, both male and female, while they are young and as they advance to old age, the lawgiver must take care, honoring and dishonoring rightly. In all their dealings with one another he must watch their pains and pleasures and desires and the zeal of all their passions, keeping a careful eye on them, and blame and praise rightly through the laws themselves."

16.7| And after a little he says: "Having looked into these things, the one who lays down laws will set guardians over all of them, some proceeding by wisdom, others by true opinion, so that the Mind, binding all these together, may show them following temperance and justice, and not wealth or ambition.

16.8| This, strangers, is what I wished you to go through, and still wish: how, in what are called the laws of Zeus and of Pythian Apollo, which Minos and Lycurgus established, all these things are present, and how, having received their order, they are plain to one who is skilled in law by art and by certain customs, but to the rest of us not at all evident."

16.9| Among us too it has been said: "Seek first the kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." But Moses, long before, made his beginning from the teaching about God, and then fitted to it the constitution under him, the rules about contracts and about common life, and over all of them he set as rulers and guardians the men consecrated to God, as the oracles themselves instruct: men who are just and hate arrogance, some proceeding by wisdom, others by true opinion.

17.1| "I say, then, and I affirm, that whoever is going to be good at anything must practice that very thing from childhood, in play and in earnest, in each of the matters that belong to it. For example, one who is going to be a good farmer or builder should play at building children's houses if he is the one, or at farming if he is the other, and whoever rears each of them should provide small tools for each, imitations of the real ones. And they should also learn beforehand whatever necessary lessons must be learned in advance: the carpenter to measure and use the rule, the soldier to ride a horse while playing, or doing some other such thing. And one should try, through their games, to turn the children's pleasures and desires toward that point at which, when they arrive, they must reach their end.

17.2| The chief point of education, we say, is the right upbringing, which will draw the soul of the child at play as strongly as possible toward love of that thing in which, once grown to manhood, he will have to be complete in the excellence of the craft."

17.3| Moses anticipated this and legislated, saying: "And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart and in your soul, and you shall teach them to your sons." This it is customary for the children of the Hebrews to do: they bring up all the young from tender age in the instruction of godliness, and this is still pursued today among the Jewish nation by an ancestral custom.

18.1| "Let us not leave what we call education undefined. For now, when we reproach or praise people's upbringing, we say of one of us that he is educated and of another that he is uneducated, sometimes even of people who are thoroughly trained in retail trade, or shipping, or other such things. For, as it seems, our present discussion would not count these as education, but rather the training from childhood toward virtue, which makes one eager for and enamored of becoming a complete citizen, knowing how both to rule and to be ruled with justice.

18.2| This upbringing, it seems to me, our argument now would wish to mark off and call by itself education, while the kind that aims at money, or at some strength, or even at some other cleverness without mind and justice, is vulgar and illiberal and not worth being called education at all.

18.3| But let us not quarrel with them over a name; rather let the statement we have just agreed on stand, that those who are rightly educated generally become good, and that education must never be disparaged, since it is the first of the fairest things that come to the best men. And if it ever goes astray, but can be set right, this should always be done through life by everyone to the best of his power."

18.4| He adds in the second book of the Laws: "I call education the virtue that comes first to children: if pleasure and friendship, pain and hatred arise rightly within their souls while they cannot yet take in reason, and then, when they have taken in reason, harmonize with reason, having been rightly accustomed by the proper habits. This harmony is virtue as a whole; but the portion of it rightly nurtured in respect of pleasures and pains, so that from the start to the finish one hates what one should hate and cherishes what one should cherish: cut this off in your discourse and call it education, and in my view you would be naming it rightly."

18.5| So says Plato. But David anticipated him in the psalms, teaching us to hate what we should hate and to cherish what we should cherish, and says this: "Come, children, hear me; I shall teach you fear of the Lord. Who is the person who desires life, who loves to see good days? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn aside from evil and do what is good; seek peace and pursue it."

18.6| And Solomon likewise says: "Listen, children, to a father's instruction. For I give you a good gift; do not forget my laws." And again: "Acquire wisdom, acquire understanding; do not forget." And: "Say that wisdom is your sister, and make understanding your close friend." And: "Do not walk the ways of the impious, nor emulate the ways of the lawless." You could find countless other such things in the writings of the Hebrews, instructive toward the taking up of godliness and virtue, suitable alike for youths and for those of mature age.

19.1| The divine oracle said to Moses, "See that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain," and the sacred word says more plainly of those who served "an imitation and shadow of the heavenly things," teaching outright that the symbols given through Moses contain an image of the diviner realities in the intelligible world. Listen how Plato too explains similar things in the Republic's sixth book, writing as follows:

19.2| "The philosopher, then, by consorting with God and with order, becomes ordered and divine as far as is possible for a human being; but slander is abundant on all sides.

19.3| Quite so. And if, I said, some necessity arises for him to practice putting what he sees there into the characters of human beings, both privately and publicly, and not merely to shape himself, do you think he will prove a poor craftsman of temperance and justice and all popular virtue? Least of all, he said.

19.4| But if the many perceive that our statements about him are true, will they be angry at the philosophers and distrust us when we say that a city could never otherwise be happy unless those painters who use the divine pattern sketch it out?

19.5| They will not be angry, he said, if they perceive it. But what manner of sketching do you mean? They would take, I said, as if it were a tablet, a city and the characters of human beings, and first they would make it clean, which is not at all easy.

19.6| Yet you know that in this they would at once differ from others, in being unwilling to touch either a private person or a city, or to write laws, until they either receive it clean or make it so themselves.

19.7| Rightly so, he said. After this, do you think they would sketch the outline of the constitution? Of course.

19.8| Then, I think, as they work it out they would glance often in both directions: toward what is by nature just and beautiful and temperate and all such things, and again toward what exists in human beings. And they would work in the human likeness, mixing and blending it out of their ways of life, taking their measure from that which Homer called, when it comes to be in human beings, godlike and in the image of the gods.

19.9| Rightly, he said. And one part, I think, they would rub out, and another they would draw in again, until they had made human characters, so far as possible, dear to the gods."

20.1| "It seems to me that our argument has come round, for the third or fourth time, to the same point: that education consists in drawing and leading children toward the principle which the law pronounces right, and which the most reasonable and oldest men, from experience, agree to be truly right.

20.2| So that a child's soul may not become accustomed to delight and grieve in a way contrary to the law and to what has been laid down by the law, but may follow, delighting and grieving at the very things the old man does, for the sake of this we have what we call songs, which have in truth now become incantations for souls, earnestly designed for the harmony of which we speak; but because the souls of the young cannot bear earnestness, they are called and treated as play and song. It is just as with those who are sick and weak in body: those who care for them try to give wholesome nourishment in pleasant foods and drinks, and the unwholesome in unpleasant ones, so that they may learn to welcome the one and rightly to hate the other.

20.3| In the same way the right lawgiver will persuade the poet, and if he cannot persuade him will compel him, to compose in fine and praiseworthy words, and to portray rightly, in rhythms the gestures and in harmonies the melodies, the characters of temperate and courageous and altogether good men." It is fitting, then, that among us too the children are accustomed to practice the songs composed by the divine prophets and the hymns to God.

21.1| "You compel the poets to declare that a good man who is temperate and just is blessed and happy, whether he is big and strong, or small and weak, and, again, whether he is rich or not; but if one is richer than Cinyras and Midas yet unjust, he is wretched and lives in distress.

21.2| And, the poet says to you, if he speaks rightly, I would neither mention nor count as a man one who does not do and acquire all the things called noble together with justice, and who, being such a man, would strive for the foe, standing near; but being unjust, he would not dare to look on bloody slaughter, nor win in running against Thracian Boreas, nor would any other of the things called good ever come to him. For what the many call good is not rightly so called.

21.3| It is said that health is best, beauty second, and wealth third; and countless other goods are named: to see and hear keenly and to have all the senses acute, and further to do as one pleases when one is a tyrant, and the very end of all blessedness, to possess all these things and to become immortal as quickly as possible.

21.4| But you and I, I think, say this: that all these things are the best possessions for just and holy men, but for the unjust they are all the worst, beginning with health. And indeed to see and to hear and to perceive and altogether to live is the greatest evil for one who is immortal for all time and possesses all the so-called goods except justice and all virtue, and a lesser evil if such a person survives for as short a time as possible.

21.5| These things, I think, you will persuade and compel the poets among you to say, as I do, and further to educate your young in this way by giving them rhythms and harmonies that follow along with them. Do you see? For I say plainly that the things called evils are goods for the unjust but evils for the just; and the goods are truly good for the good, but evil for the evil. So, as I asked, do you and I agree, or how?"

21.6| This is not far from the psalms of David, who, anticipating it, composed by the divine Spirit in songs and hymns an instruction on who is truly blessed and who is the opposite. That is why his book begins with the words "Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the impious," and what follows. Plato, changing this, says that the poets must say "that the good man, if he is temperate and just, is happy and blessed; but if he is unjust, he is wretched." And David again set this out in the psalms in some such way as this: "If riches flow, do not set your heart on them." And again: "Do not be afraid when a man grows rich, or when the glory of his house is multiplied." At leisure you could find each of the things the philosopher said lying in the very same words throughout the whole sacred Scripture of the psalms.

22.1| "It is supremely worthy of a lawgiver and of a statesman. But you may find other poor things there. This, however, concerning music, is true and worth considering: that it was possible to legislate with confidence on such matters, laying down melodies that by nature supply what is right. This would be the work of a god or of some divine man."

22.2| It is fitting, then, that among the Hebrews too it was laid down that in the divine teachings they should accept no other hymns and songs than those composed by the divine Spirit through the divine and prophetic men, and the melodies suited to them, sung in their customary manner.

23.1| "I too grant the many this much, that music must be judged by pleasure, though not the pleasure of any chance person; rather that Muse is probably the fairest which delights the best and sufficiently educated, and above all the one who excels in virtue and education.

23.2| We say that the judges of these things need virtue because they must share in wisdom generally, and in courage too.

23.3| For the true judge must not judge by taking his lesson from the audience, thrown into confusion by the uproar of the crowd and by his own lack of education; nor again, though he knows the truth, through unmanliness and cowardice carelessly pronounce a false verdict with the very mouth by which he invoked the gods when he was about to judge. For the judge sits not as a pupil but as a teacher of the spectators, as is just, and to oppose those who render pleasure to the spectators in an improper and wrong way."

23.4| Among the Hebrews too in ancient times it was not for the multitude to judge the words uttered by divine inspiration and the inspired songs. There were a few, rare men, who themselves shared in the divine Spirit that discerns what is said, and to them alone it was permitted to approve and consecrate the prophets' books, and to reject those of men not of that kind.

24.1| "What our argument wanted at the outset, to show that the aid given to Dionysus' chorus is well spoken of, it has said as far as it could. Let us consider whether this has been done. Such a gathering becomes necessarily noisy, and ever more so as the drinking goes on; this we supposed at the start must happen in the case of what we are now describing. Necessarily.

24.2| Everyone is lifted above himself, and rejoices, and is filled with freedom of speech and deafness to his neighbors, and thinks himself fit to rule himself and everyone else. Of course.

24.3| Did we not say that when this happens, the souls of the drinkers, like iron, become heated and grow softer and younger, so that they are easily led by one who can and knows how to train and mold them, just as when they were young?

24.4| And this molder is the same as before, the good lawgiver, whose laws must be laws of the drinking party, capable of making that man who has become hopeful and bold and more shameless than he should be, and who is unwilling to submit to order and to the proper share of silence and speech and drinking and music, willing to do the very opposite of all this; and capable of sending in, to contend against his unseemly boldness as it enters, the finest fear, with justice, which we have called reverence and shame, a divine fear. So it is. And of these laws the guardians and fellow-craftsmen are the quiet and sober."

24.5| It is fitting, then, that among ourselves too it has been handed down to sing at banquets songs and hymns composed to God, while the guardians among us see to the proper order.

25.1| "If a city, as though the matter were serious, will adopt the practice now described, under laws and order, as an exercise for the sake of temperance, and will not abstain from the other pleasures in the same way and on the same principle, devising means to master them, then all these should be used in this manner. But if it is as a game, and anyone who wishes is to be allowed to drink whenever he wishes, and with whomever he wishes, in company with any other pursuits whatever, I would not cast my vote that this city or this man should ever make use of drunkenness. Rather, I would go still further than the practice of the Cretans and Lacedaemonians and add my support to the Carthaginian law, that no one in a campaign should ever taste this drink, but should drink only water for the whole of that time; and that in the city neither a male nor a female slave should ever taste it, nor magistrates in the year during which they hold office, nor again pilots or judges while on duty should taste wine at all, nor anyone who comes to a council to deliberate on any matter of weight; nor anyone at all by day, except for bodily training or illness, nor again by night when a man or a woman is planning to beget children. And one could name very many other cases in which wine should not be drunk by those who have mind and law on their side; so that by this reasoning no city would need many vineyards, and the other farm work and the whole way of life would be regulated."

25.2| And Moses, anticipating that priests must not taste wine during the sacred service, legislates, saying: "And the Lord spoke to Aaron, saying: You shall not drink wine and strong drink, you and your sons with you, when you go into the tent of testimony, or when you approach the altar, so that you do not die; it is an eternal statute for your generations." And the same lawgiver legislates for those who make a vow, saying: "A man or woman who makes a great vow to purify themselves with a purity for the Lord shall be purified from wine and strong drink; and vinegar from wine and vinegar from strong drink he shall not drink." Solomon too keeps rulers and judges from its use, saying: "Do everything with counsel, drink wine with counsel. Rulers are hot-tempered; let them not drink wine, lest in drinking they forget wisdom and their labors." And the apostle permits it to Timothy for the sake of illness, saying: "Use a little wine for your stomach and your frequent infirmities."

26.1| "If, then, some necessity compelled the highest in philosophy to take charge of a city, either it has happened in the boundless past, or now exists in some barbarian place far outside our sight, or will happen hereafter, then on this point we are ready to contend in argument that the constitution we have described has existed, and does exist, and will exist, once the Muse herself becomes mistress of a city. For it is not impossible for it to come about, nor do we speak of impossible things."

27.1| "And as for a man with regard to himself, must he think of himself as an enemy toward an enemy, or what do we still say? O Athenian stranger (for I would not wish to call you [….]; you seem to me to deserve rather to be named after the goddess), you have brought the argument back to its beginning and made it clearer, so that you will more easily discover that it was just now rightly said by us that all are enemies to all, both publicly and each privately to himself.

27.2| What do you mean, my admirable friend? Here too, stranger, to conquer oneself is the first and best of all victories, and to be defeated by oneself is at once the most shameful and the worst. For these things indicate that there is a war in each of us against ourselves."

27.3| And after other matters he adds to these: "Let us suppose, then, that each one of us is a single person? Yes. And that he possesses in himself two counselors, opposed to each other and unreasoning, which we call pleasure and pain? So it is. And in addition to these two, opinions about the future, whose common name is expectation, and whose special names are fear, which is the expectation before pain, and confidence, which is that before its opposite. And upon all these there is reasoning as to which of these is better or worse; and once this becomes the common decree of a city, it is called law."

27.4| And next he says: "This we know, that these passions within us, like sinews or strings, pull us and, being opposed to one another, draw against each other toward opposite actions, where virtue and vice lie divided. For the account says that one must always follow one of the pulls and never fall away from it, drawing against the other sinews; and this is the leading-string of reasoning, golden and sacred, called the common law of the city, while the others are hard and iron, and this one is soft, being golden, and the others are like various kinds. One must always join in with the fairest leading of the law; for since reasoning is noble, gentle and not violent, its leading needs helpers, so that the golden kind in us may conquer the other kinds. And so the story of virtue about our being marvels would be preserved, and what is meant by being superior or inferior to oneself would become somewhat clearer, and, as for city and private person, that the private person must take within himself the true account of these pulls and live following it,

27.5| and a city, receiving the account from one of the gods or from the one who knew these things, and establishing it as law, must deal with itself and with other cities; in this way vice and virtue would be made plainer to us, and more sharply distinguished."

27.6| Among us too the divine word teaches similar things, saying: "I delight in God’s law according to the inner man, but I see a different law in my members, at war with the law of my mind." And once more: "their thoughts meanwhile accusing or even defending one another," and whatever else is similar to these.

28.1| "We remember, however, that we agreed earlier that if the soul should prove to be older than the body, the things belonging to the soul would likewise be older than those belonging to the body. Quite so. And characters, dispositions, wishes, reasonings, true opinions, cares and memories would have come to be before the length, breadth, depth and strength of bodies, if indeed the soul is before the body. Necessarily.

28.2| Is it then necessary to agree next that the soul is the cause of good things and of bad, of fair and shameful, just and unjust, and of every opposite, if we are to set her down as the cause of all things?" Let these things from the tenth book of the Laws be set before us. Moses agrees with them, saying often in the laws: "And if a soul should sin and commit a trespass," and whatever is said similarly by him.

29.1| The Hebrew Scripture says of the man who earnestly philosophizes: "It is good for a man to take up the yoke while young; he will sit alone and be silent, because he has taken it up upon himself." And it tells of the God-beloved prophets, how through the height of their philosophy they passed their lives in deserts, on mountains and in caves, keeping their minds on God alone. Listen to Plato, how he too extols such a manner of life, discoursing somewhat as follows about the man who philosophizes in the highest degree:

29.2| "Let us speak, then, as it seems, since you think so, about the foremost; for why should one speak of those who dally poorly in philosophy? These men, from their youth, first of all do not know the way to the marketplace, nor where there is a law court, or a council chamber, or any other public gathering-place of the city. They neither see nor hear laws and decrees, whether spoken or written. The eagerness of political clubs for offices, and meetings and dinners and revels with flute-girls, do not occur to them even in a dream.

29.3| Whether something in the city has turned out well or badly, or what evil has befallen someone from his ancestors, on the male or the female side, escapes him more than the number of cups in the sea, as they say. And he does not even know that he does not know all this. For he does not hold back from these things for the sake of a good name; in truth only his body lies and sojourns in the city, while his mind, regarding all these things as small and nothing and despising them, flies everywhere, as Pindar says, measuring the things beneath the earth and the surfaces of the plane, studying the stars above the sky, and searching out the whole nature of each of the things that are as a whole, never stooping to anything near at hand.

29.4| What do you mean by this, Socrates? Just as, Theodorus, when Thales was studying the stars and looking upward, he fell into a well, and a witty and charming Thracian servant girl is said to have mocked him, saying that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but that what lay before him and at his feet escaped his notice.

29.5| The same jest serves against all who spend their lives in philosophy. For in truth such a man escapes the notice of his neighbor and the one next door, not only in what he is doing but almost in whether he is a human being or some other creature. But what a human being is, and what it befits such a nature to do or suffer that is different from other things, he investigates and takes trouble to search out. You understand, I think, Theodorus, or not?

29.6| I do, and you speak truly. And so, my friend, such a man, in private dealings with each person and in public, as I said at the beginning, when he is compelled in a law court or somewhere else to speak of what is at his feet and before his eyes, provokes laughter not only among Thracian girls but among the rest of the crowd, falling into wells and every kind of perplexity through inexperience, and his awkwardness is terrible, giving the impression of stupidity.

29.7| In abuse he has nothing of his own with which to abuse anyone, since he knows no evil of anybody, not having made it his study; being at a loss, then, he appears ridiculous. And in praises and in the boasting of others, he is plainly seen to laugh, not in pretense but in truth, and so seems to be a fool.

29.8| When a tyrant or king is being praised, he thinks he is hearing one of the herdsmen, a swineherd or shepherd or cowherd, being congratulated for the large quantity of milk he draws; but he considers that these rulers tend and milk a more difficult and treacherous animal than those.

29.9| And he thinks that such a ruler must become just as boorish and uneducated, for lack of leisure, as the herdsmen, with his wall thrown around him like a sheepfold on a mountain. And when he hears that someone owns ten thousand plethra of land or more, as one who has acquired wonderful tracts, it seems to him a very small amount to hear, since he is accustomed to look upon the whole earth.

29.10| And when they sing the praises of lineage, how some man is high-born because he can show seven wealthy grandfathers, he thinks the praise altogether dull and short-sighted on the part of people who, through lack of education, cannot always look at the whole, nor reckon that everyone has had countless tens of thousands of grandfathers and ancestors, among whom there have been rich and poor, kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks, many times ten thousand over, for anyone at all. But when they take pride in a list of twenty-five ancestors and trace themselves back to Heracles, son of Amphitryon, the pettiness of it seems absurd to him; that the twenty-fifth above Amphitryon was such as his fortune made him, and the fiftieth from him likewise, he laughs, since they cannot reckon this or rid their foolish souls of vanity.

29.11| In all these matters such a man is laughed at by the many, partly because he seems to carry himself haughtily, and partly because he is ignorant of what lies at his feet and at a loss in every particular. You describe exactly what happens, Socrates.

29.12| But when, my friend, he himself draws someone upward, and someone is willing to step out of "What wrong do I do you, or you me?" into the inquiry about justice and injustice, what each of them is and how they differ from everything else and from each other; or out of "Is a king happy who has much gold?" into the consideration of kingship and of human happiness and misery as a whole, what sort of things they are and in what way it befits human nature to acquire the one and escape the other; when about all these matters that small, sharp, litigious soul in turn must give an account, the tables are turned. Dizzy from hanging at a height and looking down from on high, unaccustomed as he is, he is distressed and at a loss and talks like a barbarian. He provokes no laughter among Thracian girls, nor among any other uneducated person, since they do not perceive it, but among all who have been brought up in the opposite way to slaves.

29.13| These, Theodorus, are the ways of each: the one truly reared in freedom and leisure, the one you call a philosopher, who is not to be blamed if he seems simple and good for nothing when he falls into servile tasks, as when he does not know how to pack a bedroll, or to season a dish, or to make flattering speeches; the other, able to carry out all such services briskly and sharply, but not knowing how to fling his cloak over the right shoulder in the manner of a free man, nor having grasped the harmony of speech so as to sing rightly the true life of gods and of blessed men.

29.14| If, Socrates, you could persuade everyone of what you say, as you do me, there would be greater peace and fewer evils among human beings. But it is not possible for evils to be destroyed, Theodorus; for there must always be something contrary to the good. Nor can they have their seat among the gods; of necessity they haunt mortal nature and this region.

29.15| Therefore we should try to flee from here to there as quickly as we can. Flight is becoming like God, as far as possible; and becoming like him is becoming just and holy with wisdom. But, my excellent friend, it is not at all easy to persuade people that the reason the many give for avoiding vice and pursuing virtue, namely that one should practice the one and not the other so as not to seem bad and to seem good, is not the true reason.

29.16| For this is what is called an old wives' chatter, as it seems to me. The truth we state in this way: God is in no way and in no respect unjust, but as just as possible, and nothing is more like him than whichever of us becomes as just as possible. It is here that the true cleverness of a man lies, and his worthlessness and unmanliness.

29.17| For knowledge of this is wisdom and true virtue, and ignorance of it is plain folly and vice; the other kinds of cleverness and seeming wisdom, when they appear in political authority, are vulgar, and in the crafts, banausic. So for the man who acts unjustly and speaks or does unholy things, by far the best course is not to grant that he is clever through his villainy.

29.18| For they glory in the reproach, and think they are hearing that they are not mere nonsense, burdens of the earth, but men such as should be in a city that is to be saved. We must therefore tell them the truth, that they are the more what they do not think they are because they do not think so. They do not know the penalty of injustice, the one thing they should least of all fail to know. It is not what they suppose, blows and death, which they sometimes suffer when they have done no wrong, but one which it is impossible to escape.

29.19| What do you mean? Since, my friend, two patterns stand in reality, the divine, most happy, and the godless, most wretched, they do not see that this is so, and through folly and extreme senselessness they fail to notice that by their unjust actions they are growing like the one and unlike the other. For this they pay the penalty, living the life that corresponds to what they are becoming like.

29.20| Should we tell them that, unless they are freed from their cleverness, then when they die that place which is clean of evils will not receive them, and here they will always have the life that matches their own likeness, evil among evil, they will hear this as the talk of fools, being clever and unscrupulous as they are.

29.21| Very much so, Socrates. I know it, my friend. Yet one thing happens to them: when they must give and receive an account in private of the things they criticize, and are ready to hold out courageously for long instead of fleeing in cowardice, then, strangely, my good friend, they end by not satisfying even themselves about what they say, and that rhetoric of theirs somehow withers away, so that they seem no different from children."

30.1| Among us too it is said about all the sophistry that exists among human beings: "For the wisdom of this world is folly in God's sight. For it stands written: I shall do away with the wisdom of the wise, and shall reject the understanding of the intelligent. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?"

30.2| And that those who philosophize according to God must think nothing petty, we are taught in the words: "as we look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal."

30.3| And that evil circles about the earth and mortal life, the divine word says somewhere: "making the most of the time, for the days are evil," and "sufficient for the day is its own evil." The prophet also says: "Cursing and theft and adultery and murder have poured out over the earth, and they join blood to blood."

30.4| And on fleeing from here to God, Moses says: "You shall walk after the Lord your God, and cling to him." The same man teaches imitation of God, saying: "You shall be holy, for the Lord our God is holy."

30.5| David, knowing that God is just and urging us to become his imitators, says: "The Lord is just, and he has loved righteous deeds." The same man taught contempt for wealth, saying: "If riches flow, do not set your heart on them." And: "Do not be afraid when a man becomes rich and as the glory of his house increases, for when he dies he will take nothing of it all, nor will his glory go down with him."

30.6| He also taught us not to marvel at the rulers among human beings, in these words: "Do not put your trust in rulers, in sons of men, who cannot bring salvation. His spirit will go out, and he will return to his earth; on that day all his plans will perish."

31.1| "As for a lawgiver of even the slightest worth: even if this were not so, as the argument has now proved it to be, yet if he would have dared to tell the young any other falsehood for their good, is there any falsehood he could ever have told that is more profitable than this, and better able to make everyone do all things justly, not by force but willingly? Truth is noble, stranger, and lasting; yet it seems not easy to persuade people of it."

31.2| You could find countless such things in the Scriptures of the Hebrews, as when God is said to be jealous, or asleep, or angry, or subject to other human passions, passages taken up in this manner for the benefit of those who need it.

32.1| "Is what we said before, then, agreed between us? About what? That every man and child, free and slave, female and male, and the whole city as a whole, should never cease chanting to itself these things which we have gone through, changing them in one way or another and providing every sort of variety, so that the singers feel an insatiable pleasure in the hymns. How could it not be agreed that these things should be done so?"

32.2| And in the fifth book of the Republic he writes similar things, saying: "Do you know of anything practiced by human beings in which the male sex is not better than the female in all these respects? Or shall we go on at length, speaking of weaving and the care of cakes and stews, in which the female sex seems to be something, and in which it is most ridiculous of all to be beaten?

32.3| You speak truly, he said, that one kind is far outdone by the other in practically everything; yet many women are better than many men in many things; but on the whole it is as you say. Then, my friend, there is no pursuit of those who administer the city that belongs to woman because she is a woman, nor to man because he is a man, but the natures are scattered alike through both kinds of creature, and woman shares by nature in all pursuits, and man in all, though in all of them woman is weaker than man.

32.4| Certainly. Shall we then assign everything to men and nothing to woman? How could we? But there is, I think, as we shall say, one woman who is medical and another who is not, one musical and another unmusical by nature. Of course. And is there not one who is athletic and warlike, and another unwarlike and no lover of exercise? I think so. And what of one who is a philosopher and one who hates philosophy? One spirited, another without spirit? These too exist.

32.5| So there is a woman suited to be a guardian, and another not. Or was it not a nature of this kind that we selected also among the men fit to be guardians? Just such a one.

32.6| Then the nature of woman and of man is the same with regard to guarding the city, except that the one is weaker and the other stronger. So it appears. Then women of this kind must be chosen to live with such men and to guard with them, since they are capable and akin to them in nature."

32.7| Fittingly, then, our own teaching also receives every kind, not only of men but of women, not only of free persons and slaves but of barbarians and Greeks, into instruction and philosophy according to God.

33.1| "Let us consider it in this way. Suppose someone praised goat-rearing, and the animal itself as well, as a fine possession, while another, having seen goats pasturing without a goatherd in cultivated fields and doing damage, found fault with them, and seeing any herd without a ruler, or with bad rulers, blamed it in the same way: should we hold that the blame of such a man is ever sound about anything at all? How could we?" And after a little:

33.2| "What of one who praises or blames any partnership whatever, which is by nature meant to have a ruler and is useful with him; if he has never seen it rightly in partnership with a ruler, but always without a ruler or with bad rulers, do we think that such observers of such partnerships will find anything good to blame or to praise? How could they?"

33.3| So also among us: if some should be seen doing wrong without a leader and ruler, or under bad rulers, one must not on that account blame our whole school, but rather admire the godly manner of life from those who pursue it rightly.

34.1| In the Proverbs of Solomon it is said briefly: "The memory of the just is with praises, but the name of the impious is extinguished," and again: "Do not call a man blessed before his death." Listen how Plato explains the meaning, saying in the seventh book of the Laws:

34.2| "Of the citizens, all who end their lives having accomplished fair and laborious works with their bodies or souls and having proved obedient to the laws, it would be proper for them to receive praises. Of course.

34.3| But to honor with praises and hymns those still living is not safe, until someone has run the whole course of his life and set a fair end to it. Let all this be common to us for men and women who have become conspicuously good."

35.1| "Give me neither wealth nor poverty," says Solomon in Proverbs; and Plato, in the fourth book of the Republic, says: "We have found, it seems, other matters for the guardians, which they must guard against in every way, so that they never slip unnoticed into the city. What are these? Wealth, I said, and poverty: the one producing luxury and idleness and innovation, the other illiberality and wrongdoing in addition to innovation." Wrongdoing is every dishonorable action.

36.1| Again, when Moses says in the laws, "Let each fear his father and his mother," and "Honor your father and your mother, that it may be well with you," Plato likewise, like Moses, speaks of both honoring and fearing, somewhat thus in the Laws: "Everyone with sense fears and honors the prayers of parents, knowing that they have often been fulfilled for many." And again in another place he says: "Let everyone show reverence in deed and word to one older than himself. And whoever is twenty years ahead in age, man or woman, let him consider as father or mother and treat with reverent care."

37.1| When Moses in the laws forbids Hebrews to be slaves to Hebrews, saying, "If you acquire a Hebrew boy, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall send him away free," Plato likewise says in the Republic: "Then they are not to hold a Greek as a slave themselves, and are to advise other Greeks likewise? Certainly, he said; they would turn rather against the barbarians and keep their hands from one another."

38.1| "Let no one move the boundaries of land, whether of a neighbor who is a fellow citizen, or of one who shares his border when he holds land at the frontier next to a foreigner, considering that this is truly to move what must not be moved." And next he says: "Whoever works the land of his neighbor by overstepping the boundaries shall pay for the damage, and for the sake of curing his shamelessness and illiberality at the same time, he shall pay the injured party another sum double the damage."

39.1| "In a word, let a father's disgraces and punishments follow none of his children, unless a man's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather in succession have all been convicted on a capital charge."

40.1| When Moses says in his law, "If anyone steals a calf or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, he shall repay five calves in place of the calf, and four sheep in place of the sheep; but if the stolen thing is left over and is found in his hand, from calf and ass to sheep, he shall pay back double alive," listen how Plato follows these things, saying: "For a thief, whether he steals much or little, let there again be one law and one penalty in the verdict for all. First, the stolen property must be repaid double, if anyone is convicted of such a charge and has other property sufficient to pay it besides his allotment; if not, let him be bound until he pays or persuades the one who won the verdict."

41.1| Again, when Moses says, "If the thief is found in the breach and is struck and dies, there is no murder for him," Plato agrees in this too, saying: "If anyone catches a thief who has come into a house at night to steal goods and kills him, let him be clean; and if he kills a footpad in self-defense, let him be clean.

42.1| But if a beast of burden or some other animal kills anyone, except such as do so while competing in the public games, let the relatives prosecute the killer for the murder; and let those of the country wardens, whichever and as many as the relative appoints, adjudicate, and when the animal is condemned, let them put it to death and cast it out beyond the borders of the country." So Plato. But Moses, anticipating, says: "If a bull gores a man or woman and they should die, the bull is to be stoned with stones, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the bull's owner shall be innocent."

43.1| The prophetic Scripture says: "Son of man, see, the house of Israel has become to me all mixed together, bronze and tin and iron and lead; amid the furnace they are mixed with silver. Therefore say: Thus says the Lord: Because you have all become one mixture, therefore I will take you in, as silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin are taken into the midst of a furnace, to blow fire upon them, to melt them." Plato likewise; listen to what he says:

43.2| "Hear, then, the rest of the story. All of you in the city are brothers, as we shall tell them in telling the tale; but the god who molded you mixed gold into the birth of those among you who are fit to rule, because they are the most honorable; silver into those who are auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other craftsmen.

43.3| Since you are all kin, for the most part you will beget children like yourselves, but sometimes a silver child may be born from gold, and a golden offspring from silver, and so all the others from one another.

43.4| So to the rulers first and above all the god gives this command: that there be nothing of which they are such good guardians, and nothing they watch so closely, as the offspring, to see which of these metals is mixed in their souls; and if their own offspring is born with a mixture of bronze or iron, they shall in no way pity it, but, assigning it the honor that befits its nature, shall thrust it out among the craftsmen or the farmers; and if again from these a child is born that is mixed with gold or silver, they shall honor it and raise it up, some to be guardians and some auxiliaries, since there is an oracle that the city will be destroyed when an iron or bronze guardian guards it. Have you, then, any device by which they might be made to believe this tale?"

44.1| The prophecy among the Hebrews says to those who preside over the people: "O shepherds of Israel, do shepherds pasture themselves? Is it not the sheep that shepherds pasture? Behold, you eat the milk, and slaughter the fat, and clothe yourselves with the wool, and you do not feed my sheep; the lost you did not seek, the broken you did not bind up, the straying you did not bring back." And the Savior's word says: "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, but the hired hand, who is not a shepherd and does not own the sheep, leaves them." Hear Plato too, in the first book of the Republic, on how he explains these things:

44.2| "But now you see, Thrasymachus (for let us look again at what went before), that having first defined the true physician, you did not think it necessary later to keep strictly to the true shepherd, but you suppose that he fattens the sheep, to the extent that he is a shepherd, not looking to what benefits the sheep most, but, like a guest at a dinner about to be feasted, looking to the feasting, or again to selling them, like a money-maker rather than a shepherd. But the shepherd's art is surely concerned with nothing else than that for which it is appointed, how to provide what is best for it, since its own affairs, so as to be the best, are surely sufficiently provided for, so long as nothing is wanting to its being the shepherd's art. So I thought just now that we had to agree that every rule, in so far as it is rule, considers the best for no one other than the one ruled and cared for, in political and in private rule alike. But do you think that the rulers in the cities, those who truly rule, rule willingly?"

45.1| The prophecy among the Hebrews says: "From fear of you, Lord, we conceived in the womb and were in labor and gave birth to a spirit of salvation." Plato in the Theaetetus makes Socrates say: "Those who associate with me suffer the same as women in labor; for they are in travail and are filled with perplexity night and day far more than they are. And this travail my art is able to rouse and to allay."

46.1| The prophet Ezekiel said: "The Lord's hand came upon me, and I saw, and see, a lifted wind came from the north," and next he said: "And in the midst, as the likeness of four living creatures. And their appearance bore upon them the likeness of a man, and four faces to each one. And the likeness of their faces: the face of a man, and a lion's face on the right for all four, and a calf's face on the left for all four, and the face of an eagle for all four." And Plato likewise; listen to what he says:

46.2| "Now then, I said, let us converse with him, since we have agreed on what power each has, doing wrong and doing justly. How? he said. By molding in speech an image of the soul, so that the one who says these things may know what he was talking about. What sort of image? he said. One of those, I said, such as the ancient natures that are told of in myth, the Chimaera, Scylla, Cerberus, and many others of this kind, in which many forms are said to have grown together as one.

46.3| So they are said, he replied. Mold, then, one form of a many-colored, many-headed beast, with a circle of heads of tame and wild animals, able to change and to grow all these out of itself. That is a task for a clever molder, he said; but since speech is more easily molded than wax and the like, let it be molded.

46.4| Now one other form, of a lion, and one of a man; and let the first be far the largest, and the second second. That is easier, he said, and it is molded. Join them, then, into one, the three of them, so that they grow together somehow with one another. They are joined, he said. Now mold around them on the outside the image of one of them, namely that of the man, so that to anyone who cannot see what is within but sees only the outer covering, it appears to be one creature, a human being.

46.5| It has been molded around, he said. Let us say, then, to the one who says that it profits this man to do wrong and that doing just things does not benefit him, that he is saying nothing else than that it profits him to feast the manifold beast and make it strong, and the lion and everything about the lion, but to starve the man and make him weak, so that he is dragged wherever either of those leads, and does not accustom one to the other or make them friends, but lets them bite one another and fight and devour each other.

46.6| Quite so, he said; that is just what the one who praises wrongdoing would say. And again, would not the one who says that justice pays maintain that we should do and say whatever will give the man within the man the greatest mastery, so that he will care for the many-headed creature like a farmer, nourishing and taming the tame heads and preventing the wild ones from growing, making the lion's nature his ally, and caring for all in common, making them friends to one another and to himself, and so rear them? Yes, that is exactly what the one who praises justice says."

47.1| The whole nation of the Hebrews was divided into twelve tribes, and Plato likewise legislates that this be observed among his own citizens, saying: "Let the whole country be divided, as far as possible, into twelve equal parts. And let each tribe, assigned by lot to its part, furnish each year five country wardens and tribe-leaders." And again he says: "Let the generals who have been chosen propose for themselves twelve commanders of divisions, one commander for each tribe."

48.1| There was long ago among the children of the Hebrews a royal mother city, situated far from the sea, settled in the mountains, and possessing a land that bears everything; and Plato says in the Laws that the city to be founded by him should be of that kind. He speaks thus:

48.2| "What I want to ask about it further is this: will it be on the sea or inland? The city, stranger, about which we have just been speaking is some eighty stades from the sea. What of it? Are there harbors near it, or is it altogether without a harbor? It is as well supplied with harbors on that side as can be, stranger.

48.3| Wonderful! What of the country around it, does it bear everything, or does it lack some things? It lacks almost nothing. Will there be a neighboring city near it? Not at all, which is why it is being settled; for some ancient emigration from the place left this country empty for an incalculable time. What of plains and mountains and forest, how has each fallen to us? It resembles the nature of all the rest of Crete. Would you call it rougher or flatter? Rougher, certainly.

48.4| Then it would not be incurable as regards the acquisition of virtue. For if it were to be on the sea and well supplied with harbors and not productive of everything, but needing many things, it would need some great savior and certain divine lawgivers, unless it were to have many varied and base characters, being born with such a nature; but as it is, it finds consolation in the eighty stades.

48.5| Yet it lies nearer the sea than it should, about as much as you say it is better supplied with harbors. Still, this too is to be welcomed. For the sea near a land is pleasant day by day, but in truth it is a salty and bitter neighbor; for filling it with trade and money-making through shopkeeping, it breeds shifty and untrustworthy habits in the souls, and makes the city untrusting and unfriendly to itself, and the same toward other people. But against this it has the consolation of being productive of everything; and being rugged, it clearly could not be both abundant in yield and productive of everything at once. For if it had this, it would furnish a large export, and would be filled in turn with coinage of silver and gold; and there is, one might say, no greater evil for a city, in view of acquiring noble and just characters." But since so much has now been demonstrated, let us consider how Plato, having accepted the manner of education among the Hebrews through what we have said, rejects the Greek, writing thus in the tenth book of the Republic:

49.1| "Let it be said to you here among ourselves (for you will not denounce me before the tragic poets and all the other imitators), that all such things seem to be a corruption of the mind of those who hear them, unless they have as an antidote the knowledge of what they really are. What do you have in mind? he said. I must speak, I said, though a certain friendship and reverence for Homer, which I have had from boyhood, prevents me from saying it.

49.2| He appears to have been the earliest teacher, the leader, of all these fine tragic poets. But a man must not be honored before the truth, and what I say must be said. By all means, he said."

49.3| Then he continues: "Concerning other matters, then, let us not demand an account of Homer, or of any other poet, by asking whether any of them was a physician and not merely an imitator of medical language, what patients any poet, ancient or recent, is said to have restored to health, as Asclepius did, or what pupils of medicine he left behind, as Asclepius left his descendants; nor again let us question him about the other arts, but let them go.

49.4| But about the greatest and fairest things which Homer undertakes to speak of, wars and generalships and the governing of cities, and the education of human beings, it is surely right to ask him and inquire: Dear Homer, if you are not third from the truth in matters of virtue, a maker of images, whom we defined as an imitator, but even second, and were able to know what practices make human beings better or worse, privately and publicly, tell us which of the cities was better governed because of you, as Lacedaemon was because of Lycurgus, and many other cities, great and small, because of many others.

49.5| Which city credits you with having been a good lawgiver and having benefited them? Italy and Sicily credit Charondas, and we credit Solon; who credits you? Can he name any? I think not, said Glaucon; at any rate none is mentioned, even by the Homerids themselves. But is any war remembered from Homer's time as having been fought well under his command or counsel? None.

49.6| But are many inventions and ingenious devices for works of crafts or other practical affairs reported of him, as of a wise man, as in the case of Thales of Miletus and Anacharsis the Scythian? There is nothing of the kind.

49.7| But then, if not publicly, is Homer said to have been, in his own lifetime, a private leader in education for certain people, who loved him for his company and handed down to later ages a Homeric way of life, as Pythagoras himself was especially loved for this, and his successors even now, calling their way of life Pythagorean, seem to be distinguished in some way among others?

49.8| Nothing of that kind is said either, he replied. For Creophylus, Socrates, Homer's companion, would appear still more ridiculous in point of education than in his name, if what is said about Homer is true.

49.9| For it is said that Homer was greatly neglected by him, in Homer's own lifetime. So it is said, I answered. But do you think, Glaucon, that if Homer had truly been able to educate people and make them better, being capable not of imitating these matters but of knowing them, he would not have made many companions and been honored and loved by them?

49.10| Yet Protagoras of Abdera, Prodicus of Ceos, and a great many others can, by private association, convince their contemporaries that they will be unable to manage either their household or their city unless these men oversee their education, and for this wisdom they are so dearly loved that their companions all but carry them about on their heads.

49.11| Would Homer's contemporaries, if he had been able to benefit men toward virtue, or Hesiod's, have let them wander about reciting, and would they not have clung to them more than to gold, and compelled them to stay in their homes, or, failing to persuade them, have attended them as tutors wherever they went, until they had received a sufficient education?

49.12| You seem to me to be speaking entirely truly, Socrates. Shall we then lay down that, beginning with Homer, all the poets are imitators of images of virtue and of the other things they write about, and do not lay hold of the truth? But, as we said a moment ago, the painter will make a cobbler who seems to be one, though he himself knows nothing of cobbling, and to people who know nothing either, who judge from colors and shapes?

49.13| Certainly. So too, I think, we shall say that the poet applies with names and phrases certain colors of each of the arts, understanding nothing but only imitating, so that to others of the same kind, who judge from his words, it seems, whether he speaks of cobbling or of generalship or of anything else in meter and rhythm and harmony, to be very well said;

49.14| so great a charm do these things have by nature. For when the works of the poets are stripped of the colors of music and spoken by themselves, I think you know how they appear. You have seen it, have you not? I have, he said."

49.15| This being so, I judge it good to go through a few of Plato's words in which he establishes more rationally his account of God and providence, taking his stand in this too with the doctrines of the Hebrews. Let us first see how he sets out the opinions of the godless:

50.1| "Some say that all things that come to be, have come to be, and will come to be, do so partly by nature, partly by art, and partly by chance. Is that not well said? It is likely, at any rate, that wise men speak rightly. Let us, however, follow them and consider what in the end those on that side have in mind.

50.2| Certainly. It seems, they say, that nature and chance produce the greatest and fairest of them, and art the smaller ones; art, receiving from nature the generation of the great and primary works, molds and fashions all the very small things which we all call products of art.

50.3| What do you mean? I will say it still more clearly. Fire, water, earth and air, they say, all come to be by nature and by chance, and none of them through art. And the bodies that come after these, those of earth, sun, moon and stars, have come about through these, which are altogether soulless. Each of them, borne along by chance, by the force of their powers, as they happened to fit together suitably in some way, hot with cold, dry with moist, soft with hard, and everything that was mixed by chance from necessity in the blending of opposites, in this way and by these means has produced the whole heaven and everything in the heaven, and also all animals and plants, all the seasons having come from these; not through mind, they say, nor through any god, nor through art, but, as we put it, by nature and chance.

50.4| Art, coming later out of these, itself mortal and born of mortals, has later produced certain playthings that do not much share in truth, but are images akin to themselves, such as painting produces and music and the arts that accompany them. And if any of the arts produce anything serious, these are such as have shared their power with nature, like medicine and farming and gymnastics. And politics, they say, shares only a small part with nature, and for the most part with art. So also all lawgiving is not by nature but by art, and its enactments are not true.

50.5| What do you mean? Gods, blessed friend, these men say first of all exist by art, not by nature, but by certain laws, and different ones in different places, according as each people agreed among themselves in making laws. And indeed the fair things are one thing by nature and another by law; and as for the just things, they do not exist at all by nature, but people continually dispute about them and keep changing them; and whatever they change, and whenever, each is then authoritative, arising by art and by laws, but not by any nature.

50.6| All these things, friends, come from wise men to the young, whether private men or poets, who say that the most just thing is whatever one prevails in by force. Hence impieties befall young men, as though there were no gods such as the law commands us to think, and factions arise because of these things, as they draw people toward the life that is right by nature, which is truly to live as master over others and not to be a slave to others according to law. What a speech you have gone through, stranger, and what a corruption of young people, in public, in cities, and in private homes!"

50.7| And after other matters he says: "But now, Cleinias, tell me again, for you must be a partner in the discussion. For the man who says these things evidently holds that fire and water and earth and air are the first of all things, and he calls these very things nature, and says soul came later out of them. It seems he not merely evidently holds this but is really declaring it to us in his argument. Quite so.

50.8| Have we then, by Zeus, discovered as it were a fountain of senseless opinion among all the men who have ever touched on inquiries about nature? Look carefully, examining every argument; for it is no small difference if those who take up arguments are shown to be impious and to lead others, and not even to use the arguments well, but to use them erroneously. It seems to me, then, that this is so. You speak well; but in what way? Try to explain. It seems that we must take up arguments of a less familiar kind."

50.9| And after a little he adds: "Nearly all of them, my friend, appear to have been ignorant of what the soul is and what power it has, both in its other aspects and especially in its origin: that it is among the first of things, having come to be before all bodies, and that it governs the change and rearrangement of them all more than anything. If this is so, must not things akin to soul have come to be before those that belong to body, since the soul is older than body? Necessarily.

50.10| Opinion, then, and care and mind and art and law would be prior to the hard and the soft, the heavy and the light; and the great and first works and actions would be those of art, being among the first, while things by nature and nature itself, which they wrongly so name, would be later than this and would take their start from art and mind. How wrongly?

50.11| By nature they wish to mean the generation of the first things. But if soul is shown to be first, not fire or air, soul having come to be among the first, it would be most correctly said to exist preeminently by nature. This is so if one can show that soul is older than body, but in no other case. You speak most truly.

51.1| Come then, if we must ever call upon a god, let that be done now; for the proof of their own existence let them be called upon with all earnestness; and holding to this as to a sure cable, let us step into the present argument. And when I am questioned on such matters with questions like these, it seems to me safest to answer as follows.

51.2| Stranger, when someone asks, does everything stand still and nothing move, or the exact opposite of this? Or do some things move and others remain? I shall say that some move and others remain. Is it not in some place that the things which stand are standing and the things which move are moving? Of course. And some of them would do this in one position, others in several.

51.3| You mean, we shall say, that those which have the power of the things that stand still, in the middle, move in one place, as the rotation of the so-called stationary circles turns? Yes."

51.4| And next he adds: "Let us say this too, and answer again to ourselves. If all things were somehow to come together and stand still, as most of those thinkers dare to say, which of the motions mentioned must come first among them?

51.5| The one that moves itself, of course. For it will never be changed beforehand by another, since there is no change in them beforehand.

51.6| We shall say, then, that the self-moving motion, the origin and first of all motions, arising among things at rest and existing among things in motion, is of necessity the oldest and strongest of all changes, and that which is altered by another and moves others is second. You speak most truly.

51.7| Now that we have reached this point in the argument, let us answer this. What? If we see this motion come to be in something earthy or watery or fiery, separate or mixed, what shall we say is in such a thing as its condition?

51.8| Are you asking whether we shall call it living, when it moves itself? Yes. Living, of course. And what of when we see a soul in things: must we not agree that it is the same as this, life? It is nothing else. Come now, by Zeus, would you not be willing to think of three things about each thing?

51.9| What do you mean? One, its essence; one, the definition of its essence; and one, its name. And also two questions concerning everything that is. How? Sometimes each of us proposes the name and asks for the definition itself, and sometimes proposes the definition and asks for the name. Is this what we now wish to say?

51.10| What is it? Something is divided into two equal parts, in other things and in number. For this, in number, the name is "even," and the definition is "a number divisible into two equal parts." Yes.

51.11| That is what I mean. Do we not, then, call it the same thing either way, whether, when the definition is requested, we give the name, or, when the name is requested, we give the definition, calling it "even" by name and "a number divided into two equal parts" by definition, being one and the same? Quite so.

51.12| What is the definition of that whose name is soul? Do we have any other than the one just stated, the motion able to move itself? Do you say that moving itself is the definition of the same essence whose name is what we all call soul?

51.13| I do. If this is so, do we still feel that it has not been sufficiently shown that the soul is the same as the first origin and motion of the things that are, have been, and will be, and of all their opposites, since it has been revealed as the cause of all change and motion for everything? No, it has been shown most sufficiently that soul is the most ancient of all things, having come to be the origin of motion.

51.14| Is not the motion that arises in one thing because of another, and which never provides any self-motion in itself, second, and as many places down the count as one cares to number it, being the change of a truly soulless body? Rightly.

51.15| Then we would have spoken rightly and properly, most truly and completely, in saying that soul came to be before body, and that body is second and later, ruled by soul as ruler according to nature. Most truly.

51.16| We remember, however, that we agreed earlier that if soul should prove older than body, the things of soul would be older too than those of body. Quite so.

51.17| And characters and dispositions and wishes and calculations and right opinions and cares and memories would have come to be before the length, the breadth, the depth, and the strength of bodies, if soul is before body. Necessarily.

51.18| Is it then necessary to agree next that soul is the cause of good things and of bad, of fair and shameful, just and unjust, and of all contraries, if we are to set her down as the cause of all things? How could it not be?

51.19| Since soul manages and inhabits all things that are moved in every direction, is it not necessary to say that she manages the heaven too? Of course. One soul, or more than one? More; I will answer on behalf of you both: let us posit no fewer than two, the one beneficent and the one able to work the opposite.

51.20| You have spoken quite rightly. Good. Soul, then, leads all things in heaven and on earth and in the sea by her own motions, whose names are wishing, examining, caring, deliberating, forming opinions rightly or falsely, rejoicing, grieving, being confident, fearing, hating, loving, and by all the motions akin to these or primary, which take up in turn the secondary motions of bodies and lead all things to growth and decay, to separation and combination, and the heat, cold, heaviness, lightness, hard and soft, white and black, harsh and sweet and bitter that follow upon these; and in all the things she uses, soul, when she always takes mind to herself, a divine mind, guides all things rightly and happily as a god among gods, but when she consorts with folly, she brings about the opposite of all this.

51.21| Shall we set these things down as so? Or do we still hesitate whether they may be otherwise? Not at all. Shall we say, then, that the kind of soul that has become master of heaven and earth and the whole revolution is the prudent and virtue-filled kind, or the kind that has neither? Do you want us to answer this way? How?

51.22| If, my admirable friend, we say that the whole course of heaven and its motion, and that of all the things in it, has a nature like the movement and revolution and reasoning of mind, and proceeds in kindred fashion, it is clear that we must say the best soul takes care of the whole cosmos and leads it along that sort of path. Rightly.

51.23| But if it goes mad and disorderly, then the bad soul. This too is quite right. What, then, is the nature of the motion of mind? This is now a hard question, my friends, to answer with understanding. That is why it is fair that I should now share the answering with you. You speak well.

51.24| Let us not, then, make our answer as though we looked straight at the sun, bringing night upon ourselves at midday, as if we should ever see and know mind adequately with mortal eyes; it is safer to look at an image of what is asked about.

51.25| What do you mean? Let us take from the ten motions the one that mind resembles, which I will recall to you and so make the answer in common. You put it very well. We remember, then, this much of what we said then, that we posited of all things that some move and others remain. Yes.

51.26| And of those that move, some move in one place and others are carried in several. So it is. Of these two motions, the one carried in a single place must always move about some center, like wheels turned on a lathe, being a kind of imitation of circles, and must in every way be as closely akin and similar as possible to the revolution of mind.

51.27| What do you mean? When we say that mind and the motion carried in one place both move in the same way, and in the same manner, in the same place and about the same things, in relation to the same things, according to one principle and one order, likening them to the movements of a sphere turned on a lathe, we shall never be shown to be poor makers of fair images in speech.

51.28| You speak most rightly. And this other motion, which is never in the same manner nor in the same way nor in the same place nor about the same things nor in relation to the same things, nor carried in one place, nor in order, nor in arrangement, nor in any principle, would be akin to utter folly.

51.29| It would indeed, most truly. Now it is no longer hard to say plainly that, since it is soul that carries everything around for us, we must say that it is of necessity either the best soul or its opposite that carries around the revolution of heaven, caring for it and ordering it.

51.30| But, stranger, from what has been said it would be impious to say anything other than that one soul, or more than one, possessing all virtue, carries them around. You have followed the arguments most finely, Cleinias. Now follow this further point as well.

51.31| What is it? The sun and moon and the other stars, if soul carries all around, does she not carry each one? Of course. Let us make our account about one of them, and it will be seen to fit all the stars.

51.32| Which? Every man sees the body of the sun, but no one sees its soul; nor indeed the soul of any other body, whether of a living or a dead animal; but there is great hope that this kind of thing is altogether by nature imperceptible to all the senses of the body and is intelligible. By mind alone and thought, then, let us grasp the following about it.

51.33| What? If a soul carries the sun around, we shall hardly miss the mark in saying that she does so in one of three ways. Which?

51.34| Either she is within this round visible body and conveys it in every direction, as the soul in us carries us about everywhere; or, having obtained from somewhere outside a body of fire or of some air, as some say, she pushes body with body by force; or, third, being herself bare of body but possessed of certain other surpassing powers, she guides it in some marvelous way. Yes. It is necessary that soul do one of these things in conducting all."

51.35| The philosopher said these things in the tenth book of the Laws. And in the Philebus, listen how he establishes the same thought: "All the wise agree, truly exalting themselves, that mind is king for us of heaven and earth. And perhaps they speak well; but, if you like, let us conduct the inquiry into this kind itself at greater length.

51.36| Say it as you wish, and do not count the length against us, Socrates, as though you would be hated for it. You have spoken well. Let us begin somehow by asking this. How? Whether, Protarchus, we are to say that the universe and this thing called the whole is governed by the power of the irrational and the random and what happens to happen, or on the contrary, as those before us said, that mind and a certain marvelous wisdom arrange it and steer it?

51.37| The two are nothing alike, admirable Socrates. For what you now say seems to me not even holy; but to say that mind orders all these things is worthy of the sight of the cosmos, of sun, moon, and stars, and of the whole revolution, and I would never say otherwise about them, nor would I seem to.

51.38| Do you want us, then, to agree with what was agreed earlier, that these things are so? And not to think that we should merely repeat other people's statements without risk, but also to share the risk and take part in the blame, when some clever man says that these things are not so but disordered? How could I not want that? Come, then, observe the argument that now approaches us on this.

51.39| Only say it. The things that concern the nature of the bodies of every living creature, fire and water and breath, and earth, as sailors in a storm say, we see present in their composition? Certainly. For we are truly storm-tossed by perplexity in the present discussion. Come, take this about each of the things in us.

51.40| What is it? That each of these is present in us as something small and poor and by no means pure, and with a power not worthy of its nature. Taking it in one case, think the same about all. For example, there is fire in us, and there is fire in the universe.

51.41| Of course. Is not the fire in us small and weak and poor, while that in the universe is wonderful in quantity and in beauty and in every power belonging to fire? You speak very truly. What then? Is the fire of the universe nourished and generated and ruled by the fire in us, or on the contrary does my fire and yours and that of all other living creatures get all this from that? That is not even a question worth answering.

51.42| Rightly. You will say the same, I think, of the earth in living creatures here and the earth in the universe, and of all the other things I asked about a little while ago; you will answer in this way. What sane person answering would ever appear to answer otherwise?

51.43| Hardly anyone. But follow what comes next. Have we not looked at all these things just now named, put together into one, and called it a body? Of course. Take the same view of this which we call the cosmos; for in the same way it would be a body, being composed of the same things. You are quite right.

51.44| Is, then, the body in us nourished from this body as a whole, or is it from the body in us that this is nourished and has received all that we have just said of them and holds it? That too is another question not worth asking, Socrates. What then? Is this next one worth asking? Or what will you say?

51.45| Tell me what it is. Shall we not affirm that the body in us has a soul? Clearly we shall. From where, dear Protarchus, did it get it, unless the body of the universe, being ensouled, happened to have the same things as this and still, in every way, fairer? Clearly from nowhere else, Socrates.

51.46| For we do not suppose, Protarchus, that those four, limit and unlimited and the mixed, and the fourth kind present in all things, the class of cause, which in us supplies soul and produces training of the body and, when the body falls ill, medicine, and in other things composes other things and is called by every kind and variety of wisdom, while these same things exist in the whole heaven and in great parts, and in addition fair and pure, nevertheless in these the nature of the fairest and most honorable things was not contrived. That would be quite unreasonable.

51.47| If not that, then following that other account we should speak better, saying, as we have often said, that there is in the universe much of the unlimited and sufficient limit, and over them a cause that is no poor one, which orders and arranges years and seasons and months, most justly called wisdom and mind. Yes, most justly.

51.48| Wisdom and mind, however, could never come to be without soul. No, they could not. Then you will say that in the nature of Zeus a royal soul and a royal mind arise through the power of the cause, and in other gods other fair things, in whatever way each is pleased to be spoken of."

52.1| "As for the man who thinks that the gods exist but do not care for human affairs, he must be consoled. Excellent friend, we should say, that you believe in gods, perhaps some divine kinship draws you to what is natural to you, to honor them and to hold that they exist; but the fortunes of wicked and unjust men, in private and in public, which are in truth not happy but are greatly accounted happy in opinion, are leading you, out of all harmony, toward impiety, celebrated wrongly as they are in the songs of the Muses and in all kinds of speeches.

52.2| Or perhaps, seeing the impious reach an old age and leave their children's children in the highest honors, you are troubled now, when you have seen in all these cases, or perceived by hearsay, or indeed have yourself been an eyewitness to some of them, of many impieties and terrible deeds committed by some men, and you see that for these very things they have risen from small beginnings to tyrannies and the greatest positions. Then, because of all such things, you plainly do not wish to blame the gods as their causes, on account of kinship; but being led by unreasoning and unable to be angry at the gods, you have come to this state, that you think they exist but despise and neglect human affairs.

52.3| So that the present doctrine may not bring on you a still greater affliction of impiety, but that we may, if we can, ward it off with arguments as it approaches, let us try to join on the argument that follows and use it now—the one with which, at the start, we argued our case through against the man who does not believe in gods at all.

52.4| And you, Cleinias and Megillus, answer on behalf of the young man, as in the earlier stages, and take up the argument in turn; and if any difficulty arises in the discussion, I will, as I did just now, take you up and carry you across the river. You are right; do as you say, and we for our part will do what you say as far as we can.

52.5| But perhaps it will not be hard to show this much, that the gods care for small things no less than for things that excel in size—indeed more. For he heard, and was present, when it was said just now that, being good and possessed of every virtue, they have the care of all things as most properly their own. And he heard it very well.

52.6| Next, then, let us examine together what virtue of theirs we mean when we agree that they are good. Come, shall we say that to be temperate and to possess intelligence belongs to virtue, and the opposites to vice? We shall. And what of this? That courage belongs to virtue, and cowardice to vice?

52.7| Certainly. And that some of these things are shameful and some noble? Necessarily. And shall we say that of these, whatever is base belongs to us, if to anyone, but that the gods have no share, great or small, in anything of the sort? Everyone would agree to that as well.

52.8| What next? Shall we put negligence and idleness and indulgence on the side of the soul's virtue? Or what do you say? How could we? On the opposite side, then? Yes. So the opposites of these on the opposite side? The opposite. What then? The man who lives in indulgence, negligent and idle, whom the poet said was most like the stingless drones—would every such man be, in our eyes, of that kind?

52.9| You have put it very rightly. Then we must not say that God has a character of the kind he himself hates, and anyone who tries to utter any such thing about him must not be allowed. Certainly not; how could he? Now take someone whose business it is to act and to take special care of something, and who cares for the great things of that class but neglects the small: by what reasoning could we praise such a man without striking an utterly false note? Let us consider it this way. Does not one who acts in this manner, whether god or man, do so in one of two ways? Which two do we mean?

52.10| Either because he thinks it makes no difference to the whole if the small things are neglected, or out of laziness and indulgence, if it does make a difference but he neglects them anyway; or is there some other way in which neglect comes about? For surely, when it is impossible to care for everything, there will be no neglect of small or great things on the part of one who does not take care—namely, where a god or some worthless person falls short in power and is unable to care. How could there be?

52.11| Now let the two answer the three of us—both of them agreeing that there are gods, but the one holding that they can be won over by entreaty, the other that they neglect small things. First, you both say that the gods know, and see, and hear everything, and that nothing is able to escape them of all that falls within the reach of senses and knowledge. Do you say that it is so, or how? So.

52.12| And what of this: that they can do everything of which mortals and immortals alike have the power? How could they fail to grant that this too is so? And furthermore the five of us have agreed that they are good and the best. Very much so. Then will they not agree that it is impossible for them, being such as we say, to do anything whatever out of laziness and indulgence? For among us idleness is born of cowardice, and laziness of idleness and indulgence.

52.13| What you say is quite true. Then no god neglects anything through idleness and laziness, for cowardice has no part in him. You speak most rightly. What remains, then, if they do neglect the small and the few things in the universe, is that they would do so because they know that none of such things needs any care at all; or what else remains, except that they know the opposite? Nothing.

52.14| Then, my excellent and good friend, shall we take you to be saying that they neglect through ignorance when they ought to care—or that they know they ought, and, as the basest of men are said to do, though they know that something else is better than what they do, they fail to do it because they are overcome by some pleasures or pains?

52.15| How could they? Now human affairs share in a living nature, and man is the most god-fearing of all living creatures. So it seems. And we say that all mortal creatures, or rational ones, are possessions of the gods, as is the whole heaven. How could we not?

52.16| Then let someone call these things small or great in the eyes of the gods; in neither case would it be fitting for those who possess us to neglect us, since they are most careful and the best. For let us consider this too, in addition to these points. What is that? The matter of perception and of power: are they not by nature opposed to one another in respect of ease and difficulty? How do you mean?

52.17| To see and to hear small things is harder than to see and hear great ones, whereas to carry, to master, and to care for small and few things is easier for anyone than to do the same with their opposites. Very much so. Now take a physician charged with treating some whole, who is both willing and able: if he takes care of the great parts and neglects the members and the small ones, will the whole ever be in good condition for him? By no means.

52.18| Nor again, for pilots or generals or household managers or any statesmen, or anyone else of the sort, are many or great things possible apart from the few and the small; for even masons say that the big stones do not sit well without the small ones. How could they?

52.19| Let us never, then, think God inferior to mortal craftsmen, who, the better they are, the more exactly and completely they accomplish the works that belong to them, small and great alike, by a single art; nor think that God, who is most wise, and willing and able to care, cares in no way for the things it is easier to care for, the small ones, like some idle or cowardly man who is lazy to avoid toil, and cares only for the great.

52.20| Let us by no means accept such an opinion about the gods, stranger; for the thought we would be thinking would be in no way either holy or true. I think we have now already argued moderately well, and at some length, against the man who is so fond of blaming, on the subject of the gods' neglect. Yes. Having compelled him by our arguments to agree that he is not speaking rightly. But he seems to me to need incantations as well, and some further tales. Of what sort, my good friend?

52.21| Let us persuade the young man by argument that for the one who cares for the universe, all things have been arranged with a view to the preservation and virtue of the whole, and that each of its parts, according to its power, undergoes and does what is fitting. Rulers have been appointed over each of these parts for every least act and suffering, and they have carried the division down to the very last point:

52.22| of which your own small portion too, stubborn man, always tends toward the whole and keeps it in view, however very small it is. But you fail to see in this very matter that every coming-into-being happens for the sake of that whole, so that a blessed existence may belong to the life of the universe, and that it comes into being not for your sake, but you for the sake of it. For every physician and every skilled craftsman works everything for the sake of the whole, aiming at what is best in common, and makes the part for the sake of the whole, not the whole for the sake of the part.

52.23| But you are vexed, not knowing how what is best for the whole in your case turns out best for you as well, so far as the common origin allows. And since the soul, always joined to a body, now to one and now to another, undergoes changes of every kind, either through itself or through another soul, nothing else is left for the draughts-player to do except to shift the character that has become better to a better place, and the worse to a worse one, so that each may receive the lot that is fitting.

52.24| What do you mean? I mean the way in which the gods' ease in caring for all things would be reasonable. For if someone, always looking to the whole, were to mold and refashion everything—making, for example, living water from fire, and not many things from one or one from many, once they had a share in a first, second or even third coming-into-being—the reshaping would be endless in its multitudes. But as it is, there is a wonderful ease for the one who cares for the universe.

52.25| How do you mean this? Like this. When the king saw that all our actions are ensouled, and that they contain much virtue and much vice, and that what came into being, soul and body, is indestructible but not eternal, like the gods established by law—for there would never be a generation of living creatures if one of these two were destroyed—and when he considered that what is naturally always beneficial is the soul's good, but the evil is harmful, seeing all this he devised where each part should be placed so that virtue would conquer and vice be defeated in the whole most easily, most surely and best.

52.26| So with all this in view he has contrived what seat, and what regions, whatever becomes of a given character must always take up and inhabit; but the causes of becoming of this or that character he left to the wills of each one of us. For according to what we desire, and whatever sort of soul we have, so for the most part each of us becomes of that kind in every case. That is likely, at any rate.

52.27| Everything, then, that has a share of soul changes, having in itself the cause of the change; and as it changes it is carried along according to the order and law of fate. Those whose characters change in smaller ways move less far along the surface of the land, but those who change more and do greater wrong fall into the depth, to the places called the lower ones, which men, naming them Hades and such names connected with it, greatly fear, and dream of both while they live and when they are released from their bodies. When a soul changes by a greater degree toward vice or virtue, having grown strong through its own will and its association, then if it has mixed with divine virtue it becomes exceptionally of that kind, and changes its place wholly to a holy one, being carried across to some better place; but when the opposite, it relocates its life to the opposite.

52.28| This is the judgment of the gods who hold Olympus, my child and young man, you who think yourself neglected by the gods: as you become worse you go to the worse souls, and as you become better you go to the better, and in life and in all your deaths you suffer and do what it is fitting that like should do to like.

52.29| Neither you nor any other man who has come to grief will ever boast of having escaped this judgment of the gods—the judgment which those who ordained it ordained above all others, and which one must altogether guard against. For you will never be overlooked by it. You will not be so small that you could sink into the depths of the earth, nor, becoming lofty, fly up to heaven; but you will pay the fitting penalty, whether remaining here, or passing through to Hades, or even being carried over to a still holier place than these.

52.30| And the same account will apply to you about those whom you saw rise from small to great after committing impieties or some such acts, and supposed that they had turned from wretched to happy; and in their deeds, as in mirrors, you thought you had seen the neglect of all the gods, not knowing how their end contributes to the whole. And you, bravest of men, think you need not know it at all—yet whoever does not know it could never even glimpse its outline, nor be able to contribute any argument about life and about happy or unhappy fortune.

52.31| If Cleinias here and this whole council of elders persuade you of these things, that you do not know what you are saying about the gods, then God himself would rightly help you; but if you still need further argument, listen to us as we speak to the third man, if you have any sense at all."

52.32| The sense of this, if not the words, has been laid down beforehand in the oracles of the Hebrews, with the thought compressed very concisely into a few words. For the saying "You will not be so small that you could sink into the depths of the earth, nor, becoming lofty, fly up to heaven" would be like what is in David, which runs as follows: "Where shall I go from your Spirit, and from your face where shall I flee? If I ascend into heaven, you are there; if I go down into Hades, you are present.

52.33| If I take up wings and settle at the farthest ends of the sea, even there your hand will lead me." And so too the words "The heavens recount the glory of God, and the firmament announces the work of his hands." And again in Isaiah: "Raise your eyes to the height, and see who has shown forth all these things." And: "By the greatness and beauty of created things, their Author is perceived by analogy." And: "For his invisible attributes are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood through the things he has made: his eternal power and divinity." The verse "I was jealous of the lawless, seeing the peace of sinners" also seems to have been recast by Plato, as I judge, in these words: "The same argument would apply for you also to those whom you saw grow great from small beginnings after committing impious deeds, or doing something of the kind, and so supposed that they had moved out of misery into happiness." And all the other things said in a similar way to these anticipated, in the words of the Hebrews, the exposition that Plato set out at length. Indeed, if you examine each of them in detail and with care, you will find it in agreement with the writings of the Hebrews. And by the words of the Hebrews I understand not only the oracles given through Moses, but also those of the other men who came after Moses and were dear to God, whether prophets or apostles of our Savior, whose agreement in doctrine may fairly entitle them to one and the same name.

Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/eusebius/086-preparation-for-the-gospel-book-xii#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.

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