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If the soul yields to this influence and descends to earth, there she takes
human form, but in higher or lower degree, according to the measure of her
vision of the truth. She may become a philosopher, a king, a trader, an
athlete, a prophet, a poet, a husbandman, a sophist, a tyrant. But whatever
her lot, according to her manner of life in it, may she rise, or sink still
further, even to a beast or plant.
Only those souls take the form of humanity that have had some vision
of eternal truth. And this vision they retain in a measure, even when
clogged in mortal clay. And so the soul of man is ever striving and
fluttering after something beyond; and specially is she stirred to
aspiration by the sight of bodily loveliness. Then above all comes the test
of good and evil in the soul.
The nature that has been corrupted would fain rush to brutal joys; but the
purer nature looks with reverence and wonder at this beauty, for it is an
adumbration of the celestial joys which he still remembers vaguely from the
heavenly vision. And thus pure and holy love becomes an opening back to
heaven; it is a source of happiness unalloyed on earth; it guides the lovers
on upward wings back to the heaven whence they came.
And now we pass to the central and crowning work of Plato,
The Republic,
or Of Justice—the longest with one
exception, and certainly the greatest of all his works.[6] It combines the humour and irony, the vivid characterisation and lively
dialogue of his earlier works, with the larger and more serious view, the
more constructive and statesmanlike aims of his later life.
Elpenor's note :
[6]
Why “certainly”? Many ancient and even modern
commentators of Plato’s put
Phaedrus to the top of his works.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
PLATO
