Scars on the body
SocratesThis, Callicles, is what I heard, and I believe it is true; and from these accounts I reason that something of this sort follows. Death, as it seems to me, is in fact nothing other than the separation of two things, the soul and the body, from each other; and when, then, they have been separated from each other, each of the two keeps its own condition hardly less than it did when the person was alive: the body keeps its own nature, and the ways it was tended and what it underwent, all plain to see. For instance, if someone’s body was large by nature or by nourishment or both while he was alive, his corpse too is large when he has died; and if he was fat, it is fat after his death as well, and so with the rest; and again, if he made it his pursuit to wear his hair long, his corpse too has long hair.
Again, if someone was forever getting the whip and, while alive, bore the traces of the blows as scars on his body, from whips or from other wounds, then when he is dead too his body can be seen to have them; or if someone’s limbs were broken or twisted while he was alive, in the dead man too these same things are plain to see. In a word, whatever the body had been shaped into while it lived, all that is plain to see after he has died as well, either all of it or most, for some time. So this same thing, it seems to me, holds, then, for the soul too, Callicles: everything is plain to see in the soul once it has been stripped of the body, both what belongs to its nature and what it underwent—all that the person came to have in his soul through his pursuit of each thing.