The Isles of the Blessed
SocratesSo, as I was saying, when that Rhadamanthus takes hold of someone like this, he knows nothing else about him at all, neither who he is nor whose son, only that he is someone wicked; and having discerned this he sends him off to Tartarus, setting a mark on him to show whether he seems curable or incurable; and the man, once he arrives there, suffers what is fitting. Sometimes, though, he looks upon another soul that has lived piously and with truth, a private man’s or anyone else’s—most of all, I for my part say, Callicles, a philosopher’s who minded his own business and was no busybody in his life—and he admires it and sends it off to the Isles of the Blessed. Aeacus too does these same things—each of the two holds a staff as he judges—while Minos sits overseeing, the only one holding a golden sceptre, as Homer’s Odysseus says he saw him—“holding a golden sceptre, giving judgement to the dead”. Now I, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and I consider how I will show the judge my soul as healthy as it can be; so letting go of the honours of the many, I will try, by practising the truth, really to be the best I can, both in living and, when I die, in dying.