wave:--on these figures of speech the changes are rung many times over. It
is observable that nearly all these parables or continuous images are found
in the Republic; that which occurs in the Theaetetus, of the midwifery of
Socrates, is perhaps the only exception. To make the list complete, the
mathematical figure of the number of the state (Republic), or the numerical
interval which separates king from tyrant, should not be forgotten.

The myth in the Gorgias is one of those descriptions of another life which,
like the Sixth Aeneid of Virgil, appear to contain reminiscences of the
mysteries. It is a vision of the rewards and punishments which await good
and bad men after death. It supposes the body to continue and to be in
another world what it has become in this. It includes a Paradiso,
Purgatorio, and Inferno, like the sister myths of the Phaedo and the
Republic. The Inferno is reserved for great criminals only. The argument
of the dialogue is frequently referred to, and the meaning breaks through
so as rather to destroy the liveliness and consistency of the picture. The
structure of the fiction is very slight, the chief point or moral being
that in the judgments of another world there is no possibility of
concealment: Zeus has taken from men the power of foreseeing death, and
brings together the souls both of them and their judges naked and
undisguised at the judgment-seat. Both are exposed to view, stripped of
the veils and clothes which might prevent them from seeing into or being
seen by one another.

The myth of the Phaedo is of the same type, but it is more cosmological,
and also more poetical. The beautiful and ingenious fancy occurs to Plato
that the upper atmosphere is an earth and heaven in one, a glorified earth,
fairer and purer than that in which we dwell. As the fishes live in the
ocean, mankind are living in a lower sphere, out of which they put their
heads for a moment or two and behold a world beyond. The earth which we