Secret of Secrets

O ALEXANDER: In your letter you were asking three things of me; desiring to gratify you, I will first speak of the eternity of the soul, and afterward of the others. Socrates often spoke of this with his disciples, and he rebuked them greatly because they said that souls die with the body, because thus the good and the evil would be equals after death, and all reason for living would be taken away. For what should one labor for the sake of virtues and speculative sciences and seek them? Whence to suppose that the rational soul is mortal is the cause of all evils coming to mortals. It is said in the Phaedo that Socrates complained that the soul is buried in the body and held there as if in a prison, and he brought forth that ancient eulogy in which it is said:

We have been in a certain prison since we arrived.

Therefore, he called the body a cave, and Empedocles called it a cavern, and he said that the departure of the soul from here is the solution of chains and the flight from the cave. And to Axiochus who was suffering, Socrates persuaded him not to fear death on account of the immortality of the soul, which is rewarded according to merit after the exit from this mortal body, to such an extent that Axiochus, who was previously fearing death from his words and lamenting that he was being deprived of these goods, now desired death, so that his soul might be liberated from this prison. Nor is it true, as it is said in the Timaeus, that souls return into new bodies to pay for punishments. For what is the need for souls to be snatched from the shackles of the body if they are to be thrust into another body? For death would be idle. For it would be necessary to prolong the life of evil men only so far as their tortures would be propagated. Father Socrates previously taught the immortality of the rational soul, and [he taught] that after the separation from the body, those which were endowed with virtues would rejoice in pleasantness and celestial harmony, and