body, with the addition of a certain not unnecessary description of the spheres and stars, an appearance of circumstances indicating things of the same kind is related by the Scipio of Cicero, as having been brought before him in sleep.
VI. Tully is found to have preserved this arrangement with no less judgment than genius. After, in every condition of the Commonwealth, whether of leisure or business, he has given the palm to justice, he has placed the sacred abodes of the immortal souls, and the secrets of the heavenly regions, on the very summit of his completed work, indicating whither they must come, or rather return, who have managed the republic with prudence, justice, fortitude, and moderation. But that Platonic relater of secrets was a man of the name of Er, a Pamphylian by nation, a soldier by profession, who, after he appeared to have died from wounds received in battle, and twelve days afterward was about to receive the honors of the funeral pile with the others who were slain at the same time, suddenly either recovering his life, or else never having lost it, as if he were giving a public testimony, related to all men all that he had done or seen in the days that he had thus passed between life and death. Although Cicero, as if himself conscious of the truth, grieves that this story has been ridiculed by the ignorant, still, avoiding giving an example of foolish reproach, he preferred speaking of the relater as of one awakened from a swoon rather than restored to life.
VII. And before we look at the words of the dream we must explain what kind of persons they are by whom Cicero says that even the account of Plato was ridiculed, who are not apprehensive that the same thing may happen to them. Nor by this expression does he wish the ignorant mob to be understood, but a kind of men who are ignorant of the truth, though pretending to be philosophers with a display of learning, who, it was notorious, had read such things, and were eager to find faults. We will say, therefore, who they are whom he reports as having levelled light reproaches against so great a philosopher, and who of them has even left an accusation of him committed to writing, etc. The whole faction of the Epicureans, always wandering at an equal distance from truth, and thinking everything ridiculous which they do not understand, has ridiculed the sacred volume, and the most venerable mysteries of nature. But Colotes, who is somewhat celebrated and remarkable for his loquacity among the pupils of Epicurus, has even recorded in a book the bitter reproaches which he aims at him. But since the other arguments which he foolishly urges have no connection with the dream of which we are now talking, we will pass them over at present, and attend only to the calumny which will stick both to Cicero and Plato, unless it is silenced. He says that a fable ought not to have been invented by a philosopher, since no kind of falsehood is suitable to professors of truth. For why, says he, if you wish to give us a notion of heavenly things and to teach us the nature of souls, did you not do so by a simple and plain explanation? Why was a character invented, and circumstances, and strange events, and a scene of cunningly adduced falsehood arranged, to pollute the very door of the investigation of truth by a lie? Since these things, though they are said of the Platonic Er, do also attack the rest of our dreaming Africanus.
