Summary of Cyropaedia
[1], by Xenophon of Athens, Book VIII, Chapter VII
“I invoke you, my children, in the name of the gods of our homeland, to show consideration to one another if you have any intention of pleasing me for I don’t think that you believe that when I cease to live I will become nothing. Up until now my soul was hidden to your eyes but through its actions you shall acknowledge that it did exist. Haven’t you even noticed the terrifying thoughts that torment the minds of murderers brought up by the souls of their victims and the vengeances cast upon the impious by those souls? Do you believe that the cult to the dead would have kept as is if people believed that their souls have no power? As for myself, my children, I could never be convinced that the soul that lives while in a mortal body would be extinguished when leaving that body because I see that it is the soul that vivifies these destructive bodies while inhabiting them. Also I could never be persuaded that the soul loses its ability to think at the time when it leaves a body that cannot think. It is then natural to believe that the soul, when purer and detached from matter, plentifully enjoys its intelligence. When a person dies one can see the several parts that formed the body uniting to the very elements that formed the body initially. It is only the soul that escapes our eyes both while inhabiting the body and beyond. You know that during the sleep, image of death, the soul approaches the divinity and that in such a state the soul can frequently foresee the future, undoubtedly because in such a state the soul is entirely free.
Well, if things are the way I see them and the soul outlives the body that is left behind, do what I ask you with respect to my own soul. If I am wrong; if the soul remains with the body and dies with the body you must at least respect the gods that don’t die, that see everything, that are able to do everything and sustain in the universe this immutable, inalterable order, whose magnificence and majesty are indescribable. May such a fear keep you from any action, any thought that may hurt goodness and justice… But I feel that my soul leaves me and I feel that through the symptoms that commonly announce our dissolution.”
OBSERVATION: A Spiritist would have little to add to these remarkable words, worthy of a Christian philosopher in which we find remarkably well written the special attributes of the body and the soul: the material body, destructible and whose elements disperse to return to the similar elements and that during life only acts driven by the intelligent element; then comes the soul, outliving the body, keeping its individuality and enjoying greater perceptions when separated from the body; the freedom of the soul during the sleep; finally the influence of the dead upon the living ones. One can also detect the distinction made between the gods and the divinity itself. The gods were not more than the Spirits at several stages of elevation in charge of presiding over all things of this world, according to their specialties, in the spiritual as well as in the material order of things. The gods of the homeland were the protector Spirits of the homeland as the gods of the homes were the protector Spirits of the family. The gods, or superior Spirits, did not communicate with mankind but through inferior Spirits, the so called
demons. The crowds would not go beyond this but the philosophers and the initiated ones acknowledged a Supreme Being, creator and commander of all things.
[1] The Cyropaedia, sometimes spelled Cyropedia, is a partly fictional biography of Cyrus the Great, written around 370 BC by the Athenian gentleman-soldier, and student of Socrates, Xenophon of Athens.
Wikipedia, TN
