Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he had
previously mingled the soul of the universe he poured the remains
of the elements, and mingled them in much the same manner; they
were not, however, pure as before, but diluted to the second and
third degree. And having made it he divided the whole mixture
into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each soul
to a star; and having there placed them as in a chariot, he
showed them the nature of the universe, and declared to them the
laws of destiny, according to which their first birth would be
one and the same for all,—no one should suffer a disadvantage at
his hands; they were to be sown in the instruments of time
severally adapted to them, and to come forth the most religious
of animals; and as human nature was of two kinds, the superior
race would hereafter be called man. Now, when they should be
implanted in bodies by necessity, and be always gaining or losing
some part of their bodily substance, then in the first place it
would be necessary that they should all have in them one and the
same faculty of sensation, arising out of irresistible
impressions; in the second place, they must have love, in which
pleasure and pain mingle; also fear and anger, and the feelings
which are akin or opposite to them; if they conquered these they
would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them,
unrighteously. He who lived well during his appointed time was to
return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a
blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining
this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if,
when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he
would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in
the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from
his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of
the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of
reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made
up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form
of his first and better state. Having given all these laws to his
creatures, that he might be guiltless of future evil in any of
them, the creator sowed some of them in the earth, and some in
the moon, and some in the other instruments of time; and when he
had sown them he committed to the younger gods the fashioning of
their mortal bodies, and desired them to furnish what was still
lacking to the human soul, and having made all the suitable
additions, to rule over them, and to pilot the mortal animal in
the best and wisest manner which they could, and avert from him
all but self-inflicted evils.