The
most noble of the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato is that the soul
is immortal. To it in his argument Plato affixed wings. Who first
determined this? Homer says this among other things (I. xvi. 856):--

But the soul flying on its members came to Hades,--i.e. into a formless
and invisible place, whether you think it in the air or under the earth.
But in the "Iliad" he makes the soul of Patroclus stand by the side of
Achilles (I. xxiii. 65):--

The soul of wretched Patroclus came.

He makes a small speech for him in which he says this (I. xxiii. 72):--

The spirits and spectres of departed men
Drove me from them, nor allow to
Cross the abhorred river.

In the "Odyssey" through the whole account of the descent to Hades what
else does he show but that souls survive after death, and when they
drink blood can speak. For he knows that blood is the food and drink of
the spirit, but spirit is the same thing as soul or the vehicle of the
soul.

123. Most clearly he reveals that he considers man is nothing else but
soul, where he says (O. xi. 90):--

There came up the soul of the Theban
Tiresias having a golden sceptre.

Purposely he changes the word for soul to the masculine, to show that it
was Tiresias. And afterward (O. xi. 601):--

And after him I described the mighty Heracles, his phantom
I say; but as for himself he hath joy at the banquet among the
deathless gods.

For here again he showed that the semblance thrown off from the body
appeared, but no longer connected with its matter. The purest part of
the soul had gone away; this was Heracles himself.

124. Whence that seems to philosophers a probable theory that the body
is in a way the prison house of the soul. And this Homer first revealed;
that which belongs to the living he calls [Greek omitted] (from
"binding") as in this line (I. i. 115):--

Not the body nor the nature.

O. iv. 196:--

A body came to the woman.

O. xvi. 251:--

By my form, my virtue, my body.

But that which has put off the soul he calls nothing else but body as in
these lines (I. vii. 79):--

To bring home my body again.

And (O. xxiv. 187):--

The bodies lie uncared for in the hall of Odysseus.

O. xi. 53:--

And we left the body in the house of Circe.

For the same thing, while a man lives, was the bond of the soul; when he
dies it is left, as it were, his monument.

To this is rela