of human things the wise and good are weak and miserable; such an one is
like a man fallen among wild beasts, exposed to every sort of wrong and
obloquy.

Plato, like other philosophers, is thus led on to the conclusion, that if
'the ways of God' to man are to be 'justified,' the hopes of another life
must be included. If the question could have been put to him, whether a
man dying in torments was happy still, even if, as he suggests in the
Apology, 'death be only a long sleep,' we can hardly tell what would have
been his answer. There have been a few, who, quite independently of
rewards and punishments or of posthumous reputation, or any other influence
of public opinion, have been willing to sacrifice their lives for the good
of others. It is difficult to say how far in such cases an unconscious
hope of a future life, or a general faith in the victory of good in the
world, may have supported the sufferers. But this extreme idealism is not
in accordance with the spirit of Plato. He supposes a day of retribution,
in which the good are to be rewarded and the wicked punished. Though, as
he says in the Phaedo, no man of sense will maintain that the details of
the stories about another world are true, he will insist that something of
the kind is true, and will frame his life with a view to this unknown
future. Even in the Republic he introduces a future life as an
afterthought, when the superior happiness of the just has been established
on what is thought to be an immutable foundation. At the same time he
makes a point of determining his main thesis independently of remoter
consequences.

(3) Plato's theory of punishment is partly vindictive, partly corrective.
In the Gorgias, as well as in the Phaedo and Republic, a few great
criminals, chiefly tyrants, are reserved as examples. But most men have
never had the opportunity of attaining this pre-eminence of evil. They are