[
619a]
both for life
and death. And a man must take with him to the house of death an
adamantine
1 faith in this, that even
there he may be undazzled
2
by riches and similar trumpery, and may not precipitate himself into
tyrannies and similar doings and so work many evils past cure and suffer
still greater himself, but may know how always to choose in such things the
life that is seated in the mean
3 and shun the
excess in either direction, both in this world so far as may be and in all
the life to come;
[
619b]
for this is the
greatest happiness for man.
“And at
that time also the messenger from that other world reported that the prophet
spoke thus: ‘Even for him who comes forward last, if he make his
choice wisely and live strenuously, there is reserved an acceptable life, no
evil one. Let not the foremost in the choice be heedless nor the last be
discouraged.’ When the prophet had thus spoken he said that the
drawer of the first lot at once sprang to seize the greatest tyranny,
4 and that in his folly and
greed he chose it
[
619c]
without sufficient
examination, and failed to observe that it involved the fate of eating his
own children, and other horrors, and that when he inspected it at leisure he
beat his breast and bewailed his choice, not abiding by the forewarning of
the prophet. For he did not blame himself
5 for his woes, but fortune and the gods and anything except
himself. He was one of those who had come down from heaven, a man who had
lived in a well-ordered polity in his former existence,
[
619d]
participating in virtue by habit
6 and not by philosophy;
and one may perhaps say that a majority of those who were thus caught were
of the company that had come from heaven, inasmuch as they were unexercised
in suffering. But the most of those who came up from the earth, since they
had themselves suffered and seen the sufferings of others, did not make
their choice precipitately. For which reason also there was an interchange
of good and evil for most of the souls, as well as because of the chances of
the lot. Yet if at each return to the life of this world
[
619e]
a man loved wisdom sanely, and the lot of his choice did
not fall out among the last, we may venture to affirm, from what was
reported thence, that not only will he be happy here but that the path of
his journey thither and the return to this world will not be underground and
rough but smooth and through the heavens. For he said that it was a sight
worth seeing to observe how the several souls selected their lives.