"I, too, have been a young maiden, A tree, a bird, a mute fish in the seas."
Plato, the most illustrious of the philosophers of Greece, accords a large place to the views of Pythagoras, even amid his most sublime conceptions of the soul, and of immortality. He held that the human soul passes into the body of animals, in expiation of its crimes. Plato said that on earth we remember what we have done during our previous existences, and that to learn is to remember one's self.
"Cowards," he says, "are changed into women, vain and frivolous men into birds, the ignorant into wild beasts, lower in kind and crawling upon the earth, in proportion as their idleness has been more degrading; stained and corrupt souls animate fishes and aquatic reptiles." Again, he says: "Those who have abandoned themselves to intemperance and gluttony enter into the bodies of animals with like propensities. They who have loved injustice, cruelty, and rapine assume the bodies of wolves, hawks, and falcons. The destiny of souls has relation to the lives which they have led."
Plato held that the soul took only one thousand years to complete its journey through the bodies of animals; but he believed that this journey repeated itself ten times over, which gives a total of 10,000 years for the completion of the entire circle of existences. Between each of these periods the soul made a brief sojourn in Hades. During this sojourn it drank of the waters of the river Lethe, in order to lose the recollection of its previous existence, before re-commencing its new life.
Plato exalted the dogma of the animal metempsychosis by his grand views upon spiritual immortality and the liberty of man, ideas which even at the present time are quoted with admiration, but for whose recapitulation we have not space.
The metempsychosis holds less rank in the Platonic doctrine than in the Pythagorean and Egyptian systems. All its importance was resumed among the philosophers of the Alexandrian school, who continued, in Egypt, the traditions of the Platonic philosophy, and revived the days of the schools of Athens on the soil of the Pharaohs. Plotinus, the commentator of Plato, says, concerning the doctrine of the transmigration of souls: