[330d]
“You
are right,” he replied. “I assuredly am,” said
I. “But tell me further this. What do you regard as the greatest
benefit you have enjoyed from the possession of property?”
“Something,” he said, “which I might not
easily bring many to believe if I told them.1 For let me tell you,
Socrates,” he said, “that when a man begins to realize
that he is going to die, he is filled with apprehensions and concern about
matters that before did not occur to him. The tales that are told of the
world below and how the men who have done wrong here must pay the penalty
there,2 though he may have laughed them
down3 hitherto,
1 Perhaps the earliest positive expression of faith in future life and judgement for sin is Pindar's Second Olympian. See Rohde's Psyche and Adam in Cambridge Praelections. The Epicureans and sometimes the Stoics unfairly reprobated Plato's appeal here to this motive, which he disregards in his main argument and returns to only in the tenth book. Cf. 363 C-D, 386 B, 613 E ff., also 496 E, 498 D, 608 D.
2 Cf. 498 C and Pindar Ol. ii. 64. But 500 D, “there” is the realm of Platonic ideas.
3 Cf. Gorgias 523 A, 527 A.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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