shines forth, and becomes well-known instead of obscure, and conspicuous
instead of unknown. For knowledge is not the road to being, as some say,
but being to knowledge, for being does not create but only exhibits
things, as death is not the reducing of existence to non-existence, but
rather the result of dissolution is obscurity. So people considering the
Sun as Apollo according to hereditary and ancient institutions, call him
Delius[904] and Pythius; whereas the lord of the world of darkness,
whether god or demon, they call Hades[905] (for when we die we go into
an unseen and invisible place), and the lord of dark night and idle
sleep. And I think our ancestors called man himself by a word meaning
light,[906] because by their relationship to light all have implanted in
them a strong and vehement desire to know and to be known. And some
philosophers think that the soul itself is light in its essence,
inferring so on other grounds and because it can least endure ignorance
about facts, and hates[907] everything obscure, and is disturbed at
everything dark, which inspires fear and suspicion in it, whereas light
is so dear and welcome to it that it thinks nothing otherwise delightful
bearable without it, as indeed light makes every pleasure pastime and
enjoyment gay and cheerful, like the application of some sweet and
general flavour. But the man who thrusts himself into obscurity, and
wraps himself up in darkness and buries himself alive, is like one who
is dissatisfied with his birth, and renounces his being.

Sec. VII. And yet _Pindar_ tells us[908] that the abode of the blest is a
glorious existence, where the sun shines bright through the entire night
in meadows red with roses, an extensive plain full of shady trees ever
in bloom never in fruit, watered by gentle purling streams, and there
the blest ones pass their time away in thinking and talking about the
past and present in social converse....[909] But the third road is of
those who have lived unholy and lawless lives, that thrusts their souls
to Erebus and the bottomless pit, where sluggish streams of murky night
belch forth endless darkness, which receive those that are to be
punished and conceal them in forgetfulness and oblivion. For vultures do
not always prey on the liver of wicked persons lying on the ground,[910]
for it is destroyed by fire or has rolled away; nor does the carrying of
heavy burdens press upon and tire out the bodies of those that undergo
pu