the Wheel of Birth: Reincarnation and Fate Soul in Greek Philosophy

"For I have once already been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a mute fish leaping from the sea." -Empedocles, Purifications (DK 31 B 117) The Greeks thought the soul comes back. This is the history of that idea - not a defense of it. For a thousand years-from the gold tablets buried with Orphic initiates to the last Platonists of Alexandria-Greek thought held that the soul does not begin at birth and does not end at death. This book reconstructs that history. It begins in religion: an inherited guilt, the body as tomb, and the tablets that tell the dead soul which spring to drink from. It follows the idea into philosophy with Pythagoras, who made it a way of life, and Empedocles, who sang his own past lives. It gives Plato a part of his own-six dialogues, the Myth of Er, the winged chariot, the doctrine that to learn is to remember. Then the long aftermath: Aristotle's refusal, the Stoic cosmos, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists. It also clears the ground. Reincarnation was never Christian doctrine, and the council of 553 did not suppress it-one of the most persistent myths in the history of ideas, examined here against the sources. Seventeen chapters, with a glossary of Greek terms, a chronology, a table of the principal sources, and a bibliographical note. A study of what the Greeks actually said: with rigor, without belief and without disdain.