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While I was yet speaking, Olympicus interrupting me said: You seem by this discourse of yours to infer as if the soul were immortal, which is a supposition of great consequence. It is very true, said I, nor is it any more than what yourselves have granted already; in regard the whole dispute has tended from the beginning to this, that the supreme Deity overlooks us, and deals to every one of us according to our deserts. To which the other: Do you then believe (said he) it follows of necessity that, because the Deity observes our actions and distributes to every one of us according to our merits, therefore our souls should exist and be altogether incorruptible, or else for a certain time survive the body after death? Not so fast, good sir, said I. But can we think that God so little considers his own actions, or is such a waster of his time in trifles, that, if we had nothing of divine within us, nothing that in the least resembled his perfection, nothing permanent and stable, but were only poor creatures, that (according to Homer’s expression) faded and dropped like withered leaves, and in a short time too, yet he should make so great account of us—like women that bestow their pains in making little gardens, no less delightful to them than the gardens of Adonis, in earthen pans and pots—as to create us souls to blossom and flourish only for a day, in a soft and tender body of flesh, without any firm and solid root of life, and then to be blasted and extinguished in a moment upon every slight occasion? And therefore, if you please, not concerning ourselves with other Deities, let us go no farther than the God Apollo, whom here we call our own; see whether it is likely that he, knowing that the souls of the deceased vanish away like clouds and smoke, exhaling from our bodies like a vapor, requires that so many propitiations and such great honors be paid to the dead, and such veneration be given to the deceased, merely to delude and cozen his believers. And therefore, for my part, I will never deny the immortality of the soul, till somebody or other, as they say Hercules did of old, shall be so daring as to come and take away the prophetical tripod, and so quite ruin and destroy the oracle For as long as many oracles are uttered even in these our days by the Delphic soothsayer, the same in substance which was formerly given to Corax the Naxian, it is impious to declare that the human soul can die.
