Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Now further, if the living come from the dead, they must surely come one by one from one by one. The souls of individual bodies, then, ought to return, each single soul, into a single body. But if two, or three, or five souls at once are drawn back into one and the same womb, then the living do not come from the dead, since it is not one from one. And by this very fact the pattern of the original creation is stamped anew, seeing that even now several souls are produced from a single act. [2] Again, since souls depart at every different age, why do they all return at one and the same age? For all are steeped from infancy, so that it is an infant that returns. But how can it be that a man who died an old man comes back an infant? If the soul, reversing its age, dwindles once it is outside the body, how much more should it come back, a thousand years later, further advanced—or at the very least, of the same age it was when it died, so as to recover the span of years it had left behind? [3] But even granting that the very same souls were always cycling back—though not, admittedly, into the same bodily shapes, nor admittedly into the same allotments of fate—they ought at least to carry back with them their former traits of character, pursuits, and affections; otherwise it would be an idle claim that they are the same souls, lacking as they would the very marks by which their sameness could be proved. ‘How do you know,’ you say, ‘whether this in fact happens secretly, but the condition of the thousand-year span destroys the capacity for recognition, since they return to you unrecognized?’ But I do know it does not happen so, since you throw Pythagoras-as-Euphorbus in my face. [4] For look: it is plain enough, even from the very glory of the shields dedicated to him, that Euphorbus was a soul made for soldiering and war. Pythagoras, on the other hand, was so sedentary and unwarlike that he actually shunned the battles then raging in Greece, preferring the quiet of Italy, devoted to geometry and astronomy and music—a stranger to Euphorbus's pursuits and passions entirely. Moreover, that Pyrrhus, I mean Euphorbus, made his living by deceiving fish, whereas Pythagoras, quite the opposite, abstained even from eating them, along with all living creatures. Aethalides, again, and Hermotimus tucked into the common bean along with the rest of the diet, while Pythagoras forbade his disciples to so much as walk through a bean-field. [5] How, then, can these be recovered as the same souls, when they will be proved the same neither in character, nor in habits, nor even now in diet? Out of the whole vast population of Greece, only four souls, as it happens, are on record! But why speak only of Greece's population—why do metempsychosis and metensomatosis not occur daily out of every nation, every age, every rank, indeed every sex? Why does Pythagoras alone recognize himself as someone else, and not I as well? [6] Or if it is a privilege of philosophers—and of Greek philosophers at that, as though Scythians and Indians did not also philosophize—why does Epicurus remember no former self, nor Chrysippus, nor Zeno, nor even Plato himself, whom we might otherwise have supposed to be Nestor reborn, on account of the honeyed eloquence?