THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO - Studyplace

48 CHAPTER V [n. 363
must listen to me. If we want a clear view of what I take to be
Glaucon's meaning, we must study the opposite side of the case,
the arguments used when justice is praised and injustice condemned.
When children are told by their fathers and all their
pastors and masters that it is a good thing to be just, what is commended
is not justice in itself but the respectability it brings. They
are to let men see how just they are, in order to gain high posi.
tions and marry well and win all the other advantages which
Glaucon mentioned, since the just man owes all these to his good
reputation.
In this matter of having a good name, they go farther still: they
throw in the favourable opinion of heaven, and can tell us of no
end of good things with which they say the gods reward piety.
There is the good old Hesiod/ who says the gods make the just
man's oak-trees 'bear acorns at the top and bees in the middle; and
their sheep's fleeces are heavy with wool,' and a great many other
blessings of that sort. And Homer 2 speaks in the same strain:
As when a blameless king fears the gods and upholds right judgment;
then the dark earth yields wheat and barley, and the trees are
laden with fruit; the young of his flocks are strong, and the sea gives
abundance of fish.
Musaeus and his son Eumolpus 8 enlarge in still more spirited
terms upon the rewards from heaven they promise to the righteous.
They take them to the other world and provide them with a
banquet of the Blest, where they sit for all time carousing with
garlands on their heads, as if virtue could not be more nobly recompensed
than by an eternity of intoxication. Others, again, carry
the rewards of heaven yet a stage farther: the pious man who
keeps his oaths is to have children's children and to leave a posterity
after him. When they have sung the praises of justice in that
strain, with more to same effect, they proceed to plunge the sinners
and unrighteous men into a pool of mud in the world below, and
set them to fetch water in a sieve. Even in this life, too, they give
1 Works ana Days, 232.
2 Oayss~y, xix. 109.
8 Legendary ligures, to whom were attributed poems setting forth the doctrines
of the mystery religion known as Orphism.