Summary:

The final chapter. Morality has been proven to make man happier than immorality, even with appearances reversed and the gods silent. Plato now asserts that immorality is punished either in this life or afterwards and that morality is rewarded by the gods in addition to in itself. The myth can be compared to those on Symposium, Gorgias and Phaedrus.

Immortality of the soul:

Like in Phaedo the immortality of the soul must be proven. All things have one thing which causes them to degenerate from good to bad and eventually be destroyed. Immorality has been identified as harming the mind, but it has not been proven to destroy it. Thus the soul must be indestructible since its only affection cannot destroy it. Death does not destroy the mind. The number of souls is constant, as immortal entities cannot deplete or replenish. Incarnation makes the soul tripartite, otherwise it is a unity.

Myth of Er: With immortality of the soul prove, Socrates tells a tale outlining how souls are judged after death for their actions and also outlines a cosmological model. Er, son of Armenius and of Pamphylia went to the afterlife and returned to tell the tale of what happens after death. The souls of the deceased gather at a place with two openings in the earth and two openings in the sky. Judges separate moral souls to the skyward route to the right and immoral souls to the earthward route to the left into the earth. The most exceptionally evil souls are thrown into Tartarus, never to return. Aside from the recently deceased, souls arrrive from the sky and the earth. The first had a wonderful journey, the second is happy to be done with their terrible experience. Crimes in life are punished times ten.

Er arrives at the spindle that holds up the heavens. The spindle holds several whorls, each contained in the next. There are eight in total. Each whorl has different properties such as rotational speed, color etc, many are in relation to other whorls. On each whorl circle stands a Siren singing a note. «Harmony of the spheres.» The spindle serves as a cosmological model. The spindle turns in the lap of Necessity. Around the spindle sits the daughters of Necessity, the Fates: Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos. Lachesis sings the past, Clotho the present and Atropos the future. They each turn turn the whorls.

The souls pick their personal deities. «Ancient Greeks believed that everyone had a personal deity or daimon. Socrates famously would be warned by his daimon and forbidden from entering politics.» The souls also get to pick their next life from a sample. The goodest souls get to pick first, the bader last. However the order everyone will get to pick a life that suits them and will not have to choose one they would't have otherwise. Thus learning to discern good from bad in order to live our life as good as possible is critical to become happy. The choices made by the souls can be surprising. The good souls arriving from the heavens are naive and can pick bad lives such as dictatorships. The bad souls are scarred from their experience and are careful to pick better lives. «It is not enough to be theoretically good, practice is necessary to get experience with goodness. People of good backgrounds can still make good decisions if they are inexperienced with life.» People from various legends pick lives based on their earlier experiences. We see characters from the Illiad and the Oddysey make choices that suit their fates. However the choice of live one can still decide to act good.

Afterwards the souls drink from a river that makes them forget their choices. Some drink whats necessary, others excessively that they forget everything. «Do the souls from the skies drink more than those from the earth or the opposite?»

Observations:

Immortality of the soul:

The argumentation here avoids confronting that the decay and destruction of the soul can be slower than noticeable for us, as brought up in Phaedo. There is also no reason that things cannot have multiple affects that result in their degeneration and that there can only be one. Neither does it address whether the soul is destroyed with the body.

The Greeks used the same word for mind and soul, psukhe. The translation has untill now translated it as mind, but here it takes the form of soul when the discussion goes into the afterlife.

This myth should be exemplary of the poetry that would be permitted in the moral society. Representation is minimal and only goodness is praised. Badness is punished and bad people are led to become better.

What is the significance of the skyward route being to the right and the earthward route to the left? Was the association with left as bad and right as good a concept in Ancient Greece?

The myth of Er has more Pythagorean numerology with the number 10 being featured often.