you before I die.

And now let us proceed, he said. And first of all let me be sure that
I have in my mind what you were saying. Simmias, if I remember rightly,
has fears and misgivings whether the soul, although a fairer and diviner
thing than the body, being as she is in the form of harmony, may not
perish first. On the other hand, Cebes appeared to grant that the soul
was more lasting than the body, but he said that no one could know
whether the soul, after having worn out many bodies, might not perish
herself and leave her last body behind her; and that this is death,
which is the destruction not of the body but of the soul, for in the
body the work of destruction is ever going on. Are not these, Simmias
and Cebes, the points which we have to consider?

They both agreed to this statement of them.

He proceeded: And did you deny the force of the whole preceding
argument, or of a part only?

Of a part only, they replied.

And what did you think, he said, of that part of the argument in which
we said that knowledge was recollection, and hence inferred that the
soul must have previously existed somewhere else before she was enclosed
in the body?

Cebes said that he had been wonderfully impressed by that part of the
argument, and that his conviction remained absolutely unshaken. Simmias
agreed, and added that he himself could hardly imagine the possibility
of his ever thinking differently.

But, rejoined Socrates, you will have to think differently, my Theban
friend, if you still maintain that harmony is a compound, and that the
soul is a harmony which is made out of strings set in the frame of the
body; for you will surely never allow yourself to say that a harmony is
prior to the elements which compose it.

Never, Socrates.

But do you not see that this is what you imply when you say that the
soul existed before she took the form and body of man, and was made up
of elements which as yet had no existence? For harmony is not like
the soul, as you suppose; but first the lyre, and the strings, and the
sounds exist in a state of discord, and then harmony is made last of
all, and perishes first. And how can such a notion of the soul as this
agree with the other?

Not at all, replied Simmias.

And yet, he said, there surely ought to be harmony in a discourse of
which harmony is the theme.

There ought, replied Simmias.

But there is no harmony, he said, in the two propositions that knowledge
is recollection