From the Orphics and Pythagoreans Plato adopted also the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. According to his view a thousand years—ten times the longest span of human life—elapsed between death and rebirth, during which the wicked received their ten-fold punishment and the righteous their like reward. When the time to return on earth came around, the souls were allowed to choose their new life as they pleased, only the wicked souls, “which had never seen the truth,” could not pass into the bodies of men. The choice made and their next destiny determined, the souls passed to the plain of Forgetfulness where each must drink of the river of Lethe; in the darkness of midnight there was an earthquake and thunderstorm, and the souls were driven, like shooting stars, to their birth. Ten thousand years were required to complete the round of rebirths and to allow the soul to return to its heavenly home. But the soul of a philosopher, “guileless and true,” might secure release after three rebirths if each time he had chosen the higher life. Some incurable sinners were not allowed to return to earth, but when their souls approached the mouth of the cavern which led to the upper world, the mouth gave a mighty roar and drove them back, while fiends tortured them with all the sufferings which a fertile imagination could devise. The path of salvation therefore lay in following righteousness and justice, in choosing the good, that is, in true philosophy. At the close of the Republic Socrates relates the vision of Er the Pamphylian whose soul returned with a report of the other world, and so concludes: “And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing.”[207] With regard to the ultimate fate of the soul Plato is not wholly clear; but apparently he held that with the exception of those who had done unpardonable wrongs the souls of men, when their wanderings and rebirths were over and they had attained to purity, returned to God, to the universal reason; probably, however, he thought of their return as being without loss of individuality, for Plato lays so much stress on the individual soul that we cannot believe that he would have allowed it to lose its personality in the Absolute.