To see the soul as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity—and then her beauty will be revealed.... We must remember that we have seen her only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there must we look.
Where then!
At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she is, and know ... what her nature is.
Plato (Republic, Bk. 10, Jowett’s translation).
Apart from the intrinsic interest of such a passage, the picture of the old sea-god, with long hair and long beard, his body ending in a scaly tail, battered about by the waves, and overgrown with seaweed and shells, is very curious. Without discussing how far the great philosopher himself or some other advanced thinkers believed in such divinities, it must be remembered that to the Greeks generally the gods were very real personages.
Youth’s quick and warm, old age is slow and tame,
And only Heaven can fairly halve their blame.
To-day the passionate roses breathe and blow
And ask no counsel from to-morrow’s snow,