Chapter LIV.—Whither Does the Soul Retire When It Quits the Body?  Opinions of Philosophers All More or Less Absurd. The Hades of Plato.

To the question, therefore, whither the soul is withdrawn, we now give an answer. Almost all the philosophers, who hold the soul’s immortality, notwithstanding their special views on the subject, still claim for it this (eternal condition), as Pythagoras, and Empedocles, and Plato, and as they who indulge it with some delay from the time of its quitting the flesh to the conflagration of all things, and as the Stoics, who place only their own souls, that is, the souls of the wise, in the mansions above. Plato, it is true, does not allow this destination to all the souls, indiscriminately, of even all the philosophers, but only of those who have cultivated their philosophy out of love to boys. So great is the privilege which impurity obtains at the hands of philosophers!  In his system, then, the souls of the wise are carried up on high into the ether: according to Arius,309    An Alexandrian philosopher in great repute with the Emperor Augustus. into the air; according to the Stoics, into the moon. I wonder, indeed, that they abandon to the earth the souls of the unwise, when they affirm that even these are instructed by the wise, so much their superiors.  For where is the school where they can have been instructed in the vast space which divides them? By what means can the pupil-souls have resorted to their teachers, when they are parted from each other by so distant an interval?  What profit, too, can any instruction afford them at all in their posthumous state, when they are on the brink of perdition by the universal fire? All other souls they thrust down to Hades, which Plato, in his Phædo,310    Phædo, pp. 112–114. describes as the bosom of the earth, where all the filth of the world accumulates, settles, and exhales, and where every separate draught of air only renders denser still the impurities of the seething mass.

CAPUT LIV.

Quo igitur deducetur anima, jam hinc reddimus. Omnes ferme philosophi, qui immortalitatem animae, qualiter volunt, tamen vindicant, ut Pythagoras, 0741C ut Empedocles, ut Plato, quique aliquod illi tempus indulgent ab excessu usque in conflagrationem universitatis, ut Stoici, suas solas, id est sapientum animas, in supernis mansionibus collocant. 0742A Plato quidem non temere philosophorum animabus hoc praestat, sed eorum qui philosophiam scilicet exornaverint amore puerorum. Adeo etiam inter philosophos magnum habet privilegium impuritas. Itaque apud illum in aetherem sublimantur animae sapientes; apud Arium, in aerem ; apud Stoicos, sub lunam. Quos quidem miror, quod imprudentes animas circa terram prosternant, cum illas a sapientibus multo superioribus erudiri adfirment. Ubi erit scholae regio, in tanta distantia diversoriorum? qua ratione discipulae ad magistras conventabunt , tanto discrimine invicem absentes? Quis autem illis posthumae eruditionis usus ac fructus jamjam conflagratione perituris? Reliquas animas ad inferos dejiciunt. Hos Plato velut gremium 0742B terrae describit, in Phaedone, quo omnes labes mundalium sordium confluendo, et ibi desidendo exhalent, et quasi coeno immunditiarum suarum crassiorem haustum et privatum illic aerem stipent.