Complete Works (375 page)

“Well, Socrates, if you think that living is bad, why do you remain alive? Especially since you puzzle your brain about these things and you’re much cleverer than most of us.”

“Axiochus, you don’t give a true account of me; you think, like most Athenians, that just because I’m an inquirer I’m also an expert on something. I wish I knew these ordinary things, so far am I from knowing the [c] extraordinary ones! My remarks are but echoes of the wise Prodicus,
⁴
some purchased for half a drachma, others for two, and still others for four. (That fellow teaches nobody for free and is always repeating the saying of Epicharmus:
⁵
“One hand washes the other”—give something and take something.) Anyway, just recently he gave a performance at the house of Callias son of Hipponicus,
⁶
in which he denounced living, so much so that I came within a hair’s-breadth of writing it off; and since then, Axiochus, my soul has wanted to die.”

“What did he have to say?”

“I’ll tell you what I remember: What part of a lifetime is without its [d] portion of misery? Doesn’t the baby begin his life in pain, and cry from the first moment of birth? Certainly he lacks no occasion for suffering; hunger and thirst and cold and heat and hard knocks distress him, and he can’t yet say what the problem is; crying is his only way of expressing discomfort. When he reaches the age of seven, after having endured much physical pain, he is set upon by tyrannical tutors, teachers, and trainers; [e] and as he grows older there are scholars, mathematicians and military instructors, all a great crowd of despots. When he is enrollled among the Ephebes there is the Commander, and fear of beatings; then comes the
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Lyceum and the Academy and the gymnasium-masters with their canings and excessive punishments; and his entire youth
⁷
is spent under Supervisors of Young Men and the Committee for Young Men of the Council of the Areopagus.
⁸

“After he’s free of all that, worries immediately steal upon him, and considerations about his career in life present themselves to him. And the earlier troubles seem like child’s play, the bogey-men of babies, so to speak, compared with the later ones: military campaigns, wounds, and constant battles.

“Then old age creeps upon you unawares, into which flows everything [b] in nature that is mortal and life-threatening. And unless you repay your life quickly, like a debt, nature stands by like a money-lender, taking security, sight from one man, hearing from another, and often both. And if you survive that, you’ll be paralyzed, mutilated, crippled. Some people are physically in their prime in great old age—and their old minds enter a second childhood.

“And that is why
⁹
the gods, who understand the human condition, give [c] a quick release from life to those
¹⁰
they hold in highest regard. For example, Agamedes and Trophonius, who built the temple of the Pythian god, after praying for the best thing that might happen to them, fell asleep and never woke up. And there were also the sons of the Argive priestess,
¹¹
for whom their mother likewise prayed for some reward from Hera for their piety, since when the team of mules was late they yoked themselves to the cart and took her to the temple; that night after their mother’s prayer they passed away.

[d] “It would take too long to go through the works of the poets, who prophesy with inspired voices the events of life while deploring life itself. I shall quote only one of them, the most important one, who said,

Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness,

and,

Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is.

[e] “And what does he say about Amphiaraus?

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Whom Zeus of the aegis loved in his heart, as did Apollo, with every favor, but he never came to the doorsill of old age.
¹²

“And he who bids us,
¹³
‘Sing a dirge for the newly born; he faces so much misery’—what do you think of that? But I’ll stop now, so as not to break my promise and lengthen my speech by mentioning other examples.

“What pursuit or trade has anyone ever chosen without criticizing it [b] and chafing at its conditions? Shall we discuss the jobs of tradesmen and laborers, toiling from dawn to dusk, barely able to provide for their needs, deploring their lot and spoiling all their sleepless nights with lamentation and tears? Well, shall we talk about the job of the merchant, who sails through so many perils and is, as Bias has shown, neither among the dead nor the living: terrestrial man throws himself into the sea as if he were [c] amphibious, and is entirely at the mercy of chance. Well, is farming a pleasant occupation? Really! Isn’t it just one big blister, as they say, which always finds an excuse for pain? Now it’s drought, now it’s too much rain, now it’s blight, now it’s too much heat or frost, that makes the farmer weep.

“Well, how about highly respected politics? (I’m skipping over many cases.) How many dreadful things is it dragged through, feverishly quivering and throbbing, sometimes with joy, sometimes with painful failure, [d] worse than a thousand deaths? How could anyone be happy living for the masses, when he is whistled for and lashed, like the electorate’s pet horse, driven from office, jeered, fined, and killed?
¹⁴
Well then, Mr. Politician Axiochus, how did Miltiades die? How did Themistocles die? How did Ephialtes die?
¹⁵
How did the ten commanders recently die, when I refused to refer the question to the people?
¹⁶
I didn’t think it was proper for me to preside over a mad mob, yet on the next day the party of Theramenes and Callixenus suborned the presiding officers of the meeting and secured a condemnation against the men without a trial. Indeed, you
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and Euryptolemus were the only ones to defend them, of the thirty thousand citizens in the Assembly.”

“That’s quite right, Socrates, and since then I’ve had enough of the speaker’s platform, and I think that nothing is more irksome than politics. That’s clear to everyone involved. You speak, of course, as a distant observer, but those of us who go through the experience know it perfectly well. The electorate, my dear Socrates, is an ungrateful, fickle, cruel, malicious, and boorish thing: a club, so to speak, of violent fools, drawn from the rabble in the street. And he who associates himself with it is even [b] more contemptible by far.”

“Well, Axiochus, since you regard the most reputable calling of all as more to be rejected than all the others, what are we to think of life’s other pursuits? Shall we not escape from them?

“Once I also heard Prodicus say that death concerns neither the living nor those who have passed away.”

“What do you mean, Socrates?”

“As far as the living are concerned, death does not exist; and the dead do not exist. Therefore death is of no concern to you now, for you are not dead, nor, if something should happen to you, will it concern you, for you [c] will not exist. To be upset for Axiochus, about what neither does nor will concern Axiochus, is pointless distress, just as if you were to be upset about Scylla, or the Centaur, which, as far as you’re concerned, neither exist now, nor will exist later, after your death. What is fearful exists for those who exist; how could it exist for those who don’t?”

“You’ve taken those clever ideas from the nonsense that everybody’s [d] talking nowadays, like all this tomfoolery dreamed up for youngsters. But it distresses me to be deprived of the goods of life, even if you marshal arguments more persuasive than those, Socrates. My mind doesn’t understand them and is distracted by the fancy talk; they go in one ear and out the other; they make for a splendid parade of words, but they miss the mark. My suffering is not relieved by ingenuity; it’s satisfied only by what [e] can come down to my level.”

“That’s because, Axiochus, you’re confusing the perception of fresh evils with the deprivation of goods, without realizing it, forgetting that you
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will have died. What distresses someone who is deprived of good things is having them replaced by bad things, and someone who doesn’t exist cannot even conceive of the deprivation. How could anyone feel distress whose condition provides no awareness of anything distressing? If you hadn’t started out, Axiochus, by ignorantly supposing, somehow or other, that the dead also have some sensation, you could never have been alarmed by death. But in fact you refute yourself; because you’re afraid to be deprived of your soul, you invest this deprivation with a soul of its own; and you dread the absence of perception, but you think you will perceptually grasp this perception that is not to be.

[b] “As well as many other fine arguments for the immortality of the soul, a mortal nature would surely not have risen to such lofty accomplishments that it disdains the physical superiority of wild animals, traverses the seas, builds cities, establishes governments, and looks up at the heavens and sees the revolutions of the stars, the courses of sun and moon, their risings and settings, their eclipses and swift restorations, the twin equinoxes and [c] solstices, and Pleiades storms, summer winds, torrential downpours, and the violent course of tornadoes, and establishes for all eternity a calendar of the states of the universe, unless there really were some divine spirit in the soul which gives it comprehension and insight into such vast subjects.

“And so, Axiochus, you pass away, not into death, but into immortality, nor will you have good things taken from you, but a purer enjoyment of [d] them, nor pleasures mixed with the mortal body, but entirely undiluted by pains. For once you are released from this prison cell, you will set forth yonder, to a place free from all struggle, grief, and old age, a tranquil life untroubled by anything bad, resting in undisturbed peace, surveying Nature and practicing philosophy, not for a crowd of spectators, but in the bountiful midst of Truth.”

[e] “Your argument has converted me to the opposite point of view. I no longer have any fear of death—I almost long for it, if I may imitate the orators and use a hyperbole. I have traveled
¹⁷
the upper regions for ages past and shall complete the eternal and divine circuit. I was being weak, but I’ve got a grip on myself and become a new man.”

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“Then perhaps you’d like another argument, which was related to me by Gobryas, a Persian sage: he said that his grandfather Gobryas (who, when Xerxes made his crossing, was sent to Delos to guard the island sanctuary where two deities were born) learned from some bronze tablets, which Opis and Hecaërge had brought from the Hyperboreans, that the soul, after its release from the body, goes to the Place Unseen, to a dwelling beneath the earth. Here the palace of Pluto is not inferior to the court of [b] Zeus, since the earth occupies the center of the universe and the vault of heaven is spherical, and half of this sphere fell to the celestial gods, and the other half to the gods under the earth, some of them brothers, others children of brothers. The gates on the way to Pluto’s palace are protected by iron bolts and bars. When the gates swing open, the river Acheron, and then the river Cocytus, receives those who are to be ferried across to Minos and Rhadamanthus, in what is called the Plain of Truth. There sit [c] judges who interrogate everyone who arrives about what kind of life he has lived and what sorts of activities he engaged in while he dwelled in his body. It is impossible to lie.

“Now those who were inspired by a good daemon during their lifetimes go to reside in a place for the pious, where the ungrudging seasons teem with fruits of every kind, where fountains of pure water flow, where all sorts of meadows bloom with many kinds of flowers, with philosophers discoursing, poets performing, dances in rings, musical concerts, delightful [d] drinking-parties and self-furnished feasts, undiluted freedom from pain and a rich diet of pleasure; nor does fierce cold or heat ever occur, but through it wafts a temperate breeze, infused with the gentle rays of the sun.

“There is a certain place of honor for those who are initiated, and there they perform their sacred rites. Why should you not be the first in line for this privilege, you who are ‘kin to the gods’? Legend tells us that [e] Heracles and Dionysus, before their descents into the realm of Hades, were initiated in this world, and supplied by the Eleusinian goddess
¹⁸
with courage for their journeys yonder.

“But those who have wasted their lives in wickedness are led by the Erinyes to Erebus and Chaos through Tartarus, where there is a place for the impious, and the ceaseless water-fetching of the Danaids, the thirst of Tantalus, the entrails of Tityus eternally devoured and regenerated, and the never-resting stone of Sisyphus, whose end of toil is a new beginning.
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Here, too, are people being licked clean by wild beasts, set on fire constantly by the Avengers, and, tortured with every kind of torture, consumed by everlasting punishment.

“That is what I heard from Gobryas, but you must decide for yourself, Axiochus. I am moved by argument, and I know only this for sure: every soul is immortal, and also, when removed from this place, free from pain. So whether above or below, Axiochus, you ought to be happy, if you have lived piously.”

“I’m too embarrassed to say anything to you, Socrates. I’m so far from fearing death that now I actually passionately desire it. That’s how much I’ve been affected by this argument, as well as by the one about the heavens. Now I despise life, since I’m moving to a better home.

“And now I’d like to go over what you’ve said, quietly and by myself. But after midday, Socrates, please visit me.”

“I will do what you ask. And now I’ll go back to my walk to the Cynosarges, where I was going when I was summoned here.”

1
. The Cynosarges was a gymnasium outside the Athenian city wall; the Ilisus was a river in whose stream bed was a spring called Callirhoe.

2
. Axiochus was the uncle of the famous Alcibiades; Clinias and Charmides, both remarkably handsome young men, appear in
Euthydemus
and
Charmides
, respectively, as members of the Socratic circle.