('Republic,'X, 614 b)
It is not, let me tell you, said I, the tale to Alcinous told that I shall unfold, but the tale of a warrior
bold, Er, the son of Armenius, by race a Pamphylian. He once upon a time was slain in battle, and
when the corpses were taken up on the tenth day already decayed, was found intact, and having been
brought home, at the moment of his funeral, on the twelfth day as he lay upon the pyre, revived, and
after coming to life related what, he said, he had seen in the world beyond. He said that when his
soul went forth from his body he journeyed with a great company and that they came to a mysterious
region where there were two openings side by side in the earth, and above and over against them in
the heaven two others, and that judges were sitting between these, and that after every judgement
they bade the righteous journey to the right and upward through the heaven with tokens attached to
them in front of the judgement passed upon them, and the unjust to take the road to the left and
downward, they too wearing behind signs of all that had befallen them, and that when he himself
drew near they told him that he must be the messenger to mankind to tell them of that other world,
and they charged him to give ear and to observe everything in the place. And so he said that here
he saw, by each opening of heaven and earth, the souls departing after judgement had been passed
upon them, while, by the other pair of openings, there came up from the one in the earth souls full
of squalor and dust, and from the second there came down from heaven a second procession of souls
dean and pure, and that those which arrived from time to time appeared to have come as it were
from a long journey and gladly departed to the meadow and encamped there as at a festival, and
acquaintances greeted one another, and those which came from the earth questioned the others about
conditions up yonder, and those from heaven asked how it fared with those others. And they told
their stories to one another, the one lamenting and wailing as they recalled how many and how
dreadful things they had suffered and seen in their journey beneath the earth-it lasted a thousand
years-while those from heaven related their delights and visions of a beauty beyond words. To tell
it all, Glaucon, would take all our time, but the sum, he said, was this. For all the wrongs they had
ever done to anyone and all whom they had severally wronged they had paid the penalty in turn
tenfold each, and the measure of this was by periods of a hundred years each, so that oil the
assumption that this was the length of human life the punishment might be ten times the crime-as
for example that if anyone had been the cause of many deaths or had betrayed cities and armies and
reduced them to slavery, or had been participant in any other iniquity, they might receive in requital
pains tenfold for each of these wrongs, and again if any had done deeds of kindness and had been
just and holy men they might receive their due reward in the same measure. And other things not
worthy of record he said of those who had just been born and lived but a short time, and he had still
greater requitals to tell of piety and impiety towards the gods and parents and of self-slaughter.
