Gorgias

Soc.

Well, well, as you say, life is strange. For I tell you I should not wonder if Euripides’ words were true, when he says:

1. Who knows if to live is to be dead,
2. And to be dead, to live?

Eur. Polydus[*](Eur. fr. 638.) and we really, it may be, are dead; in fact I once heard sages say that we are now dead, and the body is our tomb,[*](The sage was perhaps Philolaus, a Pythagorean philosopher contemporary with Socrates. The phrase σῶμα σῆμα, suggesting a mystical similarity between body and tomb, was part of the Orphic doctrine.) and the part of the soul in which we have desires is liable to be over-persuaded and to vacillate to and fro, and so some smart fellow, a Sicilian, I daresay, or Italian,[*](Sicilian may refer to Empedocles; Italian to one of the Pythagoreans.) made a fable in which—by a play of words[*](The play is with πιθανόν and πίθον:πειστοκόν is added to explain that πιθανόν is not used in its ordinary active sense of impressive.)—he named this part, as being so impressionable and persuadable, a jar, and the thoughtless he called uninitiate:[*](The σοφός seems to have falsely derived ἀμυήτους from μύω (= close), with the meaning unclosed, in order to connect it with the notion of cracked or leaky.) in these uninitiate that part of the soul where the desires are, the licentious and fissured part, he named a leaky jar in his allegory, because it is so insatiate. So you see this person, Callicles, takes the opposite view to yours, showing how of all who are in Hades—meaning of course the invisible—these uninitiate will be most wretched, and will carry water into their leaky jar with a sieve which is no less leaky. And then by the sieve, as my story-teller said, he means the soul: and the soul of the thoughtless he likened to a sieve, as being perforated, since it is unable to hold anything by reason of its unbelief and forgetfulness. All this, indeed, is bordering pretty well on the absurd; but still it sets forth what I wish to impress upon you, if I somehow can, in order to induce you to make a change, and instead of a life of insatiate licentiousness to choose an orderly one that is set up and contented with what it happens to have got. Now, am I at all prevailing upon you to change over to the view that the orderly people are happier than the licentious or will no amount of similar fables that I might tell you have any effect in changing your mind?

Call.

The latter is more like the truth, Socrates.

Soc.

Come now, let me tell you another parable from the same school[*](Probably of Pythagoras.) as that I have just told. Consider if each of the two lives, the temperate and the licentious, might be described by imagining that each of two men had a number of jars, and those of one man were sound and full, one of wine, another of honey, a third of milk, and various others of various things, and that the sources of each of these supplies were scanty and difficult and only available through much hard toil: