At the end of this early dialogue, Plato does something unprecedented: he provides a myth of the afterlife.[32] This will become a kind of trademark of Plato’s dialogues of the middle period, which often end with such myths. Whatever else they are meant to do, they offer a glimpse of an extended moral realm in which good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior is punished. However unfair life may be, there will come a reckoning for every soul, ensuring a just outcome at the cosmic level.
In the present story, the gods provide a last judgment, in which the souls of mortals are judged for their actions in mortality. At first, Plato tells us, they judged humans while they were yet alive, on their last day. But they tended to be unduly influenced by the finery of the rich and powerful. So Zeus decreed that mortals should be judged after they were dead, when they were naked, and indeed bereft of their bodies; their exposed souls would bear the marks of their bad deeds which the judges, who were themselves just men who had died, would scrutinize those who were brought before them for justice and injustice.
There were three judges: Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, and Minos. The judgment would take place at a crossroads, where one path led to the Isles of the Blessed, the abode for just persons, and one down to Tartarus, for unjust persons. In the latter place the souls of the unjust would be punished for their wicked deeds. For some of them it would be a kind of purgatory, after which their punishment would end; for others, the incurable, the punishments would never end. Socrates speculates that the worst and most incurable offenders tend to come from the ranks of tyrants like Archelaus, a usurper admired by Polus who literally got away with murder and other horrific crimes.[33] Born a slave he clawed his way to the top over the bodies of those who stood in his way. A paradigm success story for Polus, he is an object lesson in moral turpitude for Socrates and Plato. In fact, the tyrant Archelaus extended an invitation to Socrates to visit his court; Socrates turned him down (see Socrates 18.4*).[34]
Plato’s myth is an illustration of the truth that “In all the stories, this account alone survives refutation: that a man must avoid doing wrong rather than being wronged and, more than anything, take care not to seem but to be good, both in private and in public.”[35] Here we begin to see Plato as a moralist, instructing us as to how we should behave, and enlisting the gods as guardians of morality. This is not Socrates’ approach, but it is meant to reinforce the Socratic method of refutation (which Plato calls attention to in his statement).
We glimpse here the outlines of a cosmology in which principles of natural and divine law repair the injustices of mortal life. If Socrates was satisfied that the moral state of one’s soul was its own reward or punishment, Plato is not. We must believe, he suggests in the Gorgias, in eternal souls which receive a fitting recompense to their lives in their mortal bodies. The world could not be an orderly or rational place unless it embodied a moral order.
[32] Plato Gorgias 523a-527e.
[33] Plato Gorgias 525a, 470d-471d.
[34] Aristotle Rhetoric 1398a24-26. In fact Archelaus came to a bad end, murdered by a lover (ps.Plato Alcibiades II 141d-e—perhaps poetic justice, but he was never held accountable for his crimes. He reigned from 413 to 399, so after the presumed dramatic date of the Gorgias; see Nails 2002: 333; Thucydides 2.100.2.
[35] Plato Gorgias 527b.