feasted on them, it again enters into the interior of heaven, and returns home. 59. And on its return, the charioteer having taken his horses to the manger, sets ambrosia before them, and afterwards gives them nectar to drink. And this is the life of the gods. But, with respect to other souls, that which best follows and imitates a god, raises the head of its charioteer to the outer region, and is carried round with the rest in the revolution, yet is confused by its horses, and scarcely able to behold real existences; but another at one time rises, at another sinks, and owing to the violence of the horses, partly sees, and partly not. The rest follow, all eager for the upper region, but being unable to reach it they are carried round sunk beneath the surface, trampling on and striking against each other, in endeavouring to get one before another. Hence the tumult, and struggling, and sweating is extreme; and here through the fault of the charioteers many are maimed, and many break many of their feathers; and all of them having undergone much toil depart without having succeeded in getting a view of that which is, and after their departure they make use of the food of mere opinion. 60. And this is the reason for the great anxiety to behold the field of truth, where it is; the proper pasture for the best part of the soul happens to be in the meadow there, and it is the nature of the wing by which the soul is borne aloft, to be nourished by it; and this is a law of Adrastia[124], that whatever soul, in accompanying a deity, has beheld any of the true essences, it shall be free from harm until the next revolution, and if it can always accomplish this, it shall be always free from harm: but whenever from inability to keep up it has not seen any of them, and from meeting with some misfortune, has been filled with oblivion and vice, and so weighed down, and from being weighed down has lost its wings, and fallen to the earth, then there is a law that this soul should not be implanted in any brutal nature in its first generation, but that the soul which has seen most, should enter into the germ of a man who will become a philosopher or a lover of the beautiful, or a votary of the Muses and Love; but that the second should enter into the form of a constitutional king, or a warrior and commander, the third into that of a statesman, or economist, or merchant, the fourth into one who loves the toil of gymnastic exercises, or who will be employed in healing the body, the fifth will have a prophetic life or one connected with the mysteries, to the sixth the poetic life or some other of those employed in imitation will be best adapted, to the seventh a mechanical or agricultural life, to the eighth the life of a sophist or mob-courtier, to the ninth that of a tyrant. 61. But among all these, whosoever passes his life justly afterwards obtains a better lot, but who unjustly, a worse one. For to the same place, whence each soul comes, it does not return till the