rtal, if mortal man may." [1]

It is largely to Plato that we owe the idea of immortality as it exists
in the mind of the civilized world to-day. The belief in a continued
existence beyond death is much older; it is seen in the Iliad, where the
appearance of the dead Patroclus to Achilles in a dream is accepted as
the assurance of a shadowy and forlorn hereafter; and in the Odyssey the
visit of the hero to the land of shades is portrayed with a free and
gloomy imagination. It was a belief which among the earlier Greeks had
little power either to console or to guide. In the age of Socrates, it
seems to have signified little in the minds of the orthodox and pious.
The great tragedians, who sublimate the popular mythology, for the most
part regard the after-life as only a sad inevitable sequel; and to be
snatched back from it for even a brief reprieve, like Alkestis, is
miraculous good fortune. The greatest of the tragedians in his highest
reach, Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, invests the departure of the
hero, who has been purified by suffering, with a mystic radiance, a
"light that never was on sea or land," the promise as it were of some
future too sublime for mortal words. But the philosophy of Socrates was
directed rather to the clear penetration of the method and secret of
earthly life, than to any vision of the hereafter. It is noticeable that
Xenophon, the loyal disciple and biographer of Socrates, himself of the
best type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from the
charge of irreligion,--Xenophon, in all the story of the master's life
and death, gives not a hint of any future hope. But Plato developed the
idea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle,
superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either its
servant or master--a principle which manifests itself in thought,
aspiration, virtue; which has existed before the body and will exist
after it; which chooses for itself an upward or downward path; and which
rightly tends to a celestial and immortal destiny. The thought never won
universal acceptance even among philosophers; it had only an indirect and
slight effect on the Stoicism which was the best religious product of
ancient philosophy. But it wrought by degrees all effect on the thinking
of mankind. While the lofty faith of the Egyptian passed away leaving no
visible fruit, the idea of Plato slowly suffused with its light and
warmth the c