17
Empedocles, when he prefaces to his philosophy thus,— This old decree of fate unchanged stands,— Whoso with horrid crimes defiles his hands, To long-lived Daemons this commission’s given To chase him many ages out of heaven. Into this sad condition I am hurled, Banished from God to wander through the world,— does not here only point at himself; but in what he says of himself he shows the condition of us all, that we are pilgrims and strangers and exiles here in this world. For know, says he, O men, that it is not blood nor a spirit tempered with it that gave being and beginning to the soul, but it is your terrestrial and mortal body that is made up of these. And by the soft name of pilgrimage, he insinuates the origin of the soul, that comes hither from another place. And the truth is, she flies and wanders up and down, being driven by the divine decrees and laws; and afterwards, as in an island surrounded with a great sea, as Plato speaks, she is tied and linked to the body, just like an oyster to its shell, and because she is not able to remember nor relate, From what a vast and high degree Of honor and felicity she has removed,—not from Sardis to Athens, not from Corinth to Lemnos or Scyros, but having changed heaven and the moon for earth and an earthly life,—if she is forced to make little removes here from place to place, the soul hereupon is ill at ease and troubled at her new and strange state, and hangs her head like a decaying plant. And indeed some one country is found to be more agreeable to a plant than another, in which it thrives and flourishes better; but no place can deprive a man of his happiness, unless he pleases, no more than of his virtue and prudence. For Anaxagoras wrote his book of the Squaring of a Circle in prison; and Socrates, just when he was going to drink the poison that killed him, discoursed of philosophy, and exhorted his friends to the study of it; who then admired him as a happy man. But Phaëton and Tantalus, though they mounted up to heaven, yet, the poets tell us, through their folly fell into the extremest calamities.
