ain,
referring to Homer's description of the judgments in Hades, he
says, "I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts,
and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in the
most healthy condition."17 "To a base man no man nor god is a
friend on earth while living, nor under it when dead," say the
souls of their ancestors to the living; "but live honorably, and
when your destined fate brings you below you shall come to us as
friends to friends."18 "We are plants, not of earth, but of
heaven."19 We start, then, with the affirmation that Plato
honestly and cordially believed in a future life.

Secondly, his ethical and spiritual beliefs, like those of nearly
all the ancients, were closely interwoven with physical theories
and local relations. The world to him consisted of two parts, the
celestial region of ideas, and the mundane region of material
phenomena, corresponding pretty well, as Lewes suggests, to our
modern conception of heaven and earth. Near the close of the
Phado, Socrates says that the earth is not of the kind and
magnitude usually supposed. "We dwell in a decayed and corroded,
muddy and filthy region in the sediment and hollows of the earth,
and imagine that we inhabit its upper parts; just as if one
dwelling in the bottom of the sea should think that he dwelt on
the sea, and, beholding the sun through the water, should imagine
that the sea was the heavens. So, if we could fly up to the summit
of the air as fishes emerging from the sea to behold what is on
the earth here and emerge hence, we should know that the true
earth is there. The people there dwell with the gods, and see
things as they really are; and what the sea is to us the air is to
them, and what the air is to us the ether is to them." Again, in
the tenth book of the Republic, eleventh chapter, the soul is
metaphorically said in the sea of this corporeal life to get
stones and shell fish attached to it, and, fed on earth, to be
rendered to a great extent earthy, stony, and savage, like the
marine Glaucus, some parts of whose body were broken off and
others worn away by the waves, while such quantities of shells,
sea weed, and stones had grown to him that he more resembled a
beast than a man. In keeping with the whole tenor of the Platonic
teaching, this is a fine illustration of the fallen state of man
in his vile environment of flesh here below. The soul, in its
earthly sojourn, embodied here, is as much mutilated and d