With regard to the Greeks,[195] the matter is particularly plain, since we can still trace even in Plato, (427 to 347 B.C.), who, next to Our Lord Himself and to St. Paul, is doubtless the greatest and most influential teacher of full individual Immortality that the world has seen, two periods of thought in this matter, and can show that the first was without any such certain conviction. In his _Apology of Socrates_, written soon after the execution in 399 B.C., he makes his great master, close to his end, declare that death would bring to man either a complete unconsciousness, like to a dreamless sleep, or a transition into another life,--a life here pictured like to the Homeric Hades. Both possibilities Socrates made to accept resignedly, in full reliance on the justice of the Gods, and to look no further; how should he know what is known to no man?--And this is Plato’s own earlier teaching. For in the very _Republic_ which, in its chronologically later constituents, (especially in Book V, 471_c_, to the end of Book VIII, Book IX, 560_d_ to 588_a_, and Book X up to 608_b_), so insists upon and develops the truth and importance of Immortality in the strictest, indeed the sublimest sense: we get, in its earlier portions, (especially in Book II, 10_c_, to Book V, 460_c_), no trace of any such conviction. For, in these earlier passages, the Guardians in the Ideal State are not to consider what may come after death: the central theme is the manner in which Justice carries with it its own recompense; and the rewards, that are popularly wont to be placed before the soul, are referred to ironically,--Socrates is determined to do without such hopes. In those later portions, on the contrary, there is the greatest insistence upon the importance of caring, not for this short life alone, but for the soul’s “whole time” and for what awaits it after death. And in the still later parts, (as in Books VI and VII), the sublimest form of Immortality is presupposed as true and actual throughout. Thus in Greece it is not till about 390-380 B.C., and in Plato himself not till his middle life, that we get a quite definite and final doctrine of the Immortality of all souls, and of a blessed after-existence for every just and holy life here below.