[469d]
not to advance on the living foe, as if they were doing
something needful when poking1 about the dead? Has not this
snatching at the spoils ere new destroyed many an army?”
“Yes, indeed.” “And don't you think it
illiberal and greedy to plunder a corpse, and is it not the mark of a
womanish and petty2 spirit to deem the body
of the dead an enemy when the real foeman has flown away3 and left behind
only the instrument4 with which he fought?
1 κυπτάζωσι: cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Nubes 509.
2 Cf. Juvenal, Satire xiii. 189-191.
3 ἀποπταμένου: both Homer and Sappho so speak of the soul as flitting away.
4 The body is only the instrument of the soul. Cf. Socrates' answer to the question,“How shall we bury you?”Phaedo 115 C ff. and the elaboration of the idea in Alc. I. 129 E, whence it passed in to European literature.
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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