as required, and he who
drank forgot all things. Er himself was prevented from drinking.
When they had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there were
thunderstorms and earthquakes, and suddenly they were all driven divers
ways, shooting like stars to their birth. Concerning his return to the
body, he only knew that awaking suddenly in the morning he found himself
lying on the pyre.

Thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved, and will be our salvation, if we
believe that the soul is immortal, and hold fast to the heavenly way
of Justice and Knowledge. So shall we pass undefiled over the river
of Forgetfulness, and be dear to ourselves and to the Gods, and have
a crown of reward and happiness both in this world and also in the
millennial pilgrimage of the other.

The Tenth Book of the Republic of Plato falls into two divisions: first,
resuming an old thread which has been interrupted, Socrates assails the
poets, who, now that the nature of the soul has been analyzed, are
seen to be very far gone from the truth; and secondly, having shown the
reality of the happiness of the just, he demands that appearance shall
be restored to him, and then proceeds to prove the immortality of the
soul. The argument, as in the Phaedo and Gorgias, is supplemented by the
vision of a future life.

Why Plato, who was himself a poet, and whose dialogues are poems and
dramas, should have been hostile to the poets as a class, and especially
to the dramatic poets; why he should not have seen that truth may
be embodied in verse as well as in prose, and that there are some
indefinable lights and shadows of human life which can only be expressed
in poetry--some elements of imagination which always entwine with
reason; why he should have supposed epic verse to be inseparably
associated with the impurities of the old Hellenic mythology; why
he should try Homer and Hesiod by the unfair and prosaic test of
utility,--are questions which have always been debated amongst students
of Plato. Though unable to give a complete answer to them, we may
show--first, that his views arose naturally out of the circumstances
of his age; and secondly, we may elicit the truth as well as the error
which is contained in them.

He is the enemy of the poets because poetry was declining in his own
lifetime, and a theatrocracy, as he says in the Laws, had taken the
place of an intellectual aristocracy. Euripides exhibited the last phase
of the tragic drama, and in him