Phaedo.
And the earth there is
adorned with all the jewels and also with gold and
silver and everything of the
sort. For there they are in plain sight, abundant and large and in many places,
so that the earth is a sight to make those blessed who look upon it. And there
are many animals upon it, and men also, some dwelling inland, others on the
coasts of the air, as we dwell about the sea, and others on islands, which the
air flows around, near the mainland; and in short, what water and the sea are
in our lives, air is in theirs, and what
the air is to us, ether is to them. And the seasons are so tempered that people
there have no diseases and live much longer than we, and in sight and hearing
and wisdom and all such things are as much superior to us as air is purer than
water or the ether than air. And they have sacred groves and temples of the
gods, in which the gods really dwell, and they have intercourse with the gods by
speech and prophecies and visions,
and they
see the sun and moon and stars as they really are, and in all other ways their
blessedness is in accord with this.Such then is
the nature of the earth as a whole, and of the things around it. But round about
the whole earth, in the hollows of it, are many regions, some deeper and wider
than that in which we live,
some deeper but
with a narrower opening than ours, and some also less in depth and wider. Now
all these are connected with one another by many subterranean channels, some
larger and some smaller, which are bored in all of them, and there are passages
through which much water flows from one to another as into mixing bowls; and
there are everlasting rivers of huge size under the earth, flowing with hot and
cold water; and there is much fire, and great rivers of fire, and many streams
of mud, some thinner
and some thicker, like
the rivers of mud that flow before the lava in Sicily, and the lava itself. These fill the various regions as
they happen to flow to one or another at any time. Now a kind of oscillation
within the earth moves all these up and down. And the nature of the oscillation
is as follows: