When Plutarch has sufficiently established ‘to demonstration’ the ‘probability’ of his position, he adds, at the urgent desire of the company, a myth, which he had already offered to produce. The ‘myth’ is a device of which Plato has many examples, intended to give symmetry to the Dialogue, ‘that it may not go about without a head’. But it is more than a literary device; it is a satisfaction of the desire for something poetical and constructive which mere Dialectic can never feed. The myth about Thespesius here must be compared with that of Timarchus in the _Genius of Socrates_ and with the traveller’s tale of the Island of Cronus in the _Face in the Moon_.[199] Of Platonic myths, we are first reminded of that of Er, which closes the _Republic_, and raises to a higher plane the question whether the just man or the unjust has the best of it. There are necessarily strong points of resemblance to the magnificent judgement myth of the _Gorgias_, and much of the imagery recalls the _Phaedo_. The _Timaeus_ is not perhaps so conspicuously before Plutarch’s mind here as it is in other works. While there is so much which can be referred to Plato, there is nothing to suggest that Plutarch set himself to make a patchwork out of the stores of his retentive memory, still less that he sought to imitate the master from whose genius his industrious and curious mind lay poles apart. His honesty and his common-sense forbade any such attempt. It is fortunate that we possess a fragment (redeemed for Plutarch by Wyttenbach) of a Dialogue with the same speakers, and perhaps intended to follow immediately, in which, as though in ‘calculated contrast’, writes M. Gréard (p. 292), to the grim details contained in the Dialogue before us, we have a delightful picture of what awaits the just beyond the grave, the truly ‘initiate’. As all the questions discussed in the main Dialogue are raised in old Greek writers, Homer, Pindar, the Tragedians, supplemented by the philosophers, and the myth, in its stern imagery, is on all fours, for instance, with the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, so the comfortable vision of the initiate in the fragment is anticipated by Greeks who wrote four hundred or five hundred years before. Thus we have the lines of the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes (154 foll., tr. G. Murray): _Then you will find a breath about your ears Of Music, and a light about your eyes Most beautiful—like this—and myrtle groves, And joyous throngs of women and of men, And clapping of glad hands._ And the still more famous picture of Pindar (_Ol._ 2, 68-74, tr. G. Moberly):