Just as about divine things there are many divine reasonings in the philosophers taking their origin from Homer, so also with human affairs it is the same. First we will take up the subject of the soul. 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.