What a man has to say in the last hours of his life deserves attention. Most especially if that man be Socrates, awaiting execution in his jail and conversing with Pythagorean friends. He has already left the world behind, has made his philosophical will and is now quietly communing with his own truth. This is the close of the Phaedo (107D-115A), and it is expressed in the form of a myth. This is a thoughtful and elaborate statement, attributed to an authority whom Socrates (or Plato) prefers not to name. It is clothed in a strange physical garb. It is worth accepting Plato's suggestion to take it with due attention. Socrates is quietly moving into the other world, he is a denizen of it already, and his words stand, as it were, for a rite of passage:
For after death, as they say, the genius of each individual, to whom he belonged in life, leads him to a certain place in which the dead are gathered together for judgment, whence they go into the world below, following the guide who is appointed to conduct them from this world to the other: and when they have there received their due and remained their time, another guide brings them back again after many revolutions of ages. Now this journey to the other world is not, as Aeschylus says in the "Telephus," a single and straight path-no guide would be wanted for that, and no one could miss a single path; but there are many partings of the road, and windings, as I must infer from the rites and sacrifices which are offered to the gods below in places where three ways meet on earth. The wise and orderly soul is conscious of her situation and follows in the path; but the soul which desires the body, and which, as I was relating before, has long been fluttering about the lifeless frame and the world ofsight, is after many struggles and many sufferings hardly and with violence carried away by her attendant genius, and when she arrives at the place where the other souls are gathered, if she be impure and have done impure deeds, or been concerned in foul murders or other crimes which are the brothers of these, and the works of brothers in crime-from that soul everyone flees and turns away; no one will be her companion, no one her guide, but alone she wanders in extremity of evil until certain times are fulfilled, and when they are fulfilled, she is borne irresistibly to her own fitting habitation; as every pure and just soul which has passed through life in the company and under the guidance of the gods has also her own proper home.
Now the earth has divers wonderful regions, and is indeed in nature and extent very unlike the notions of geographers, as I believe on the authority of one who shall be nameless.
What do you mean, Socrates? said Simmias. I have myself heard many descriptions of the earth, but I do not know in what you are putting your faith, and I should like to know.
Well, Simmias, replied Socrates, the recital of a tale does not, I think, require the art of Glaucus; and I know not that the art of Glaucus could prove the truth of my tale, which I myself should never be able to prove, and even if I could, I fear, Simmias, that my life would come to an end before the argument was completed. I may describe to you, however, the form and regions of the earth according to my conception of them.
That, said Simmias, will be enough.
Well, then, he said, my conviction is that the earth is a round body in the center of the heavens, and therefore has no need of air or any similar force as a support, but is kept there and hindered from falling or inclining any way by the equability of the surrounding heaven and by her own equipoise. For that which, being in equipoise, is in the center of that which is equably diffused, will not incline any way in any degree, but will always remain in the same state and not deviate. And this is my first notion.
Which is surely a correct one, said Simmias.
Also I believe that the earth is very vast, and that we who dwell in the region extending from the river Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles, along the borders of the sea, are just like ants or frogs about a marsh, and inhabit a small portion only, and that many others dwell in many like places. For I should say that in all parts of the earth there are hollows of various forms and sizes, into which the water and the mist and the air collect; and that the true earth is pure and in the pure heaven, in which also are the stars-that is the heaven which is commonly spoken of as the ether, of which this is but the sediment collecting in the hollows of the earth. But we who live in these hollows are deceived into the notion that we are dwelling above on the surface of the earth; which is just as if a creature who was at the bottom of the sea were to fancy that he was on the surface of the water, and that the sea was the heaven through which he saw the sun and the other stars-he having never come to the surface by reason of his feebleness and sluggishness, and having never lifted up his head and seen, nor ever heard from one who had seen, this region which is so much purer and fairer than his own. Now this is exactly our case: for we are dwelling in a hollow of the earth, and fancy that we are on the surface; and the air we call the heaven, and in this we imagine that the stars move. But this is also owing to our feebleness and sluggishness, which prevent our reaching the surface of the air: for if any man could arrive at the exterior limit, or take the wings of a bird and fly upward, like a fish who puts his head out and sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and, if thenature of man could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the true stars. For this earth, and the stones, and the entire region which surrounds us, are spoilt and corroded, like the things in the sea which are corroded by the brine; for in the sea too there is hardly any noble or perfect growth, but clefts only, and sand, and an endless slough of mud: and even the shore is not to be compared to the fairer sights of this world. And greater far is the superiority of the other. Now of that upper earth which is under the heaven, I can tell you a charming tale, Simmias, which is well worth hearing.
And we, Socrates, replied Simmias, shall be charmed to listen.
The tale, my friend, he said, is as follows: In the first place, the earth, when looked at from above, is like one of those balls which have leather coverings in twelve pieces, and is of divers colors, of which the colors which painters use on earth are only a sample. But there the whole earth is made up of them, and they are brighter far and clearer than ours; there is a purple of wonderful luster, also the radiance of gold, and the white which is in the earth is whiter than any chalk or snow. Of these and other colors the earth is made up, and they are more in number and fairer than the eye of man has ever seen; and the very hollows (of which I was speaking) filled with air and water are seen like light flashing amid the other colors, and havea color of their own, which gives a sort of unity to the variety of earth. And in this fair region everything that grows-trees, and flowers, and fruits-is in a like degree fairer than any here; andthere are hills, and stones in them in a like degree smoother, and more transparent, and fairer in color than our highly valued emeralds and sardonyxes and jaspers, and other gems, which are but minute fragments of them: for there all the stones are like our precious stones, and fairer still. The reason of this is that they are pure, and not, like our precious stones, infected or corroded by the corrupt briny elements which coagulate among us, and which breed foulness and disease both in earth and stones, as well as in animals and plants. They are the jewels of the upper earth, which also shines with gold and silver and the like, and they are visible to sight and large and abundant and found in every region of the earth, and blessed is he who sees them. And upon the earth are animals and men, some in a middle region, others dwelling about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air flows round, near the continent: and in a word, the air is used by them as the water and the sea are by us, and the ether is to them what the air is to us. Moreover, the temperament of their seasons is such that they have no disease, and live much longer than we do, and have sight and hearing and smell, and all the other senses, in far greater perfection, in the same degree that air is purer than water or the ether than air. Also they have temples and sacred places in which the gods really dwell, and they hear their voices and receive their answers, and are conscious of them and hold converse with them, and they see the sun, moon, and stars as they really are, and their other blessedness is of a piece with this.
Such is the nature of the whole earth, and of the things which are around the earth; and there are divers regions in the hollows on the face of the globe everywhere, some of them deeper and also wider than that which we inhabit, others deeper and with a narrower opening than ours, and some are shallower and wider; all have numerous perforations, and passages broad and narrow in the interior of the earth, connecting them with one another; and there flows into and out of them, as into basins, a vast tide of water, and huge subterranean streams of perennial rivers, and springs hot and cold, and a great fire, and great rivers of fire, and streams of liquid mud, thin or thick (like the rivers of mud in Sicily, and the lava-streams which follow them), and the regions about which they happen to flow are filled up with them. And there is a sort of swing in the interior of the earth which moves all this up and down. Now the swing is in this wise: There is a chasm which is the vastest of them all, and pierces right through the whole earth; this is that which Homer describes in the words,
"Far off, where is the inmost depth beneath the earth"and which he in other places, and many other poets, have called Tartarus. And the swing is caused by the streams flowing into and out of this chasm, and they each have the nature of the soil through which they flow. And the reason why the streams are always flowing in and out is that the watery element has no bed or bottom, and is surging and swinging up and down, and the surrounding wind and air do the same; they follow the water up and down, hither and thither, over the earth-just as in respiring the air is always in process of inhalation and exhalation; and the wind swinging with the water in and out produces fearful and irresistible blasts: when the waters retire with a rush into the lower parts of the earth, as they are called, they flow through the earth into those regions, and fill them up as with the alternate motion of a pump, and then when they leave those regions and rush back hither, they again fill the hollows here, and when these are filled, flow through subterranean channels and find their way to their several places, forming seas, and lakes, and rivers, and springs. Thence they again enter the earth, some of them making a long circuit into many lands, others going to few places and those not distant, and again fall into Tartarus, some at a point a good deal lower than that at which they rose, and others not much lower, but all in some degree lower than the point of issue. And some burst forth again on the opposite side, and some on the same side, and some wind round the earth with one or many folds, like the coils of a serpent, and descend as far as they can, but always return and fall into the lake. The rivers on either side can descend only to the center and no further, for to the rivers on both sides the opposite side is a precipice.
Now these rivers are many, and mighty, and diverse, and there are four principal ones, of which the greatest and outermost is that called Oceanus, which flows round the earth in a circle; and in the opposite direction flows Acheron, which passes under the earth through desert places, into the Acherusian Lake: this is the lake to the shores of which the souls of the many go when they are dead, and after waiting an appointed time, which is to some a longer and to some a shorter time, they are sent back again to be born as animals. The third river rises between the two, and near the place of rising pours into a vast region of fire, and forms a lake larger than the Mediterranean Sea, boiling with water and mud; and proceeding muddyand turbid, and winding about the earth, comes, among other places, to the extremities of the Acherusian Lake, but mingles not with the waters of the lake, and after making many coils about the earth plunges into Tartarus at a deeper level. This is that Pyriphlegethon, as the stream is called, which throws up jets of fire in all sorts of places. The fourth river goes out on the opposite side, and falls first of all into a wild and savage region, which is all of a dark-blue color, like lapis lazuli; and this is that river which is called the Stygian River, and falls into and forms the Lake Styx, and after falling into the lake and receiving strange powers in the waters, passes under the earth, winding round in the opposite direction to Pyriphlegethon, and meeting in the Acherusian Lake from the opposite side. And the water of this river too mingles with no other, but flows round in a circle and falls into Tartarus over against Pyriphlegethon, and the name of this river, as the poet says, is Cocytus.
Such is the name of the other world; and when the dead arrive at the place to which the genius of each severally conveys them, first of all they have sentence passed upon them, as they have lived well and piously or not. And those who appear to have lived neither well norill, go to the river Acheron, and mount such conveyances as they can get, and are carried in them to the lake, and there they dwell and are purified of their evil deeds, and suffer the penalty of the wrongs which they have done to others, and are absolved, and receive the rewards of their good deeds according to their deserts. But those who appear to be incurable by reason of the greatness of their crimes-who have committed many and terrible deeds of sacrilege, murders foul and violent, or the like-such are hurled into Tartarus, which is their suitable destiny, and they never come out. Those again who have committed crimes, which, although great, are not unpardonable-who in a moment of anger, for example, have done violence to a father or mother, and have repented for the remainder of their lives, or who have taken the life of another under like extenuating circumstances-these are plunged into Tartarus, the pains of which they are compelled to undergo for a year, but at the end of the year thewave casts them forth-mere homicides by way of Cocytus, parricides and matricides by Pyriphlegethon-and they are borne to the Acherusian Lake, and there they lift up their voices and call upon the victims whom they have slain or wronged, to have pity on them, and to receive them, and to let them come out of the river into the lake. And if they prevail, then they come forth and cease from their troubles; but if not, they are carried back again into Tartarus and from thence into the rivers unceasingly, until they obtain mercy from those whom they have wronged: for that is the sentence inflicted upon them by their judges. Those also who are remarkable for having led holy lives are released from this earthly prison, and go to their pure home which is above, and dwell in the purer earth; and those who have duly purified themselves with philosophy live henceforth altogether without the body, in mansions fairer far than these, which may not be described, and of which the time would fail me to tell.
Wherefore, Simmias, seeing all these things, what ought not we to do in order to obtain virtue and wisdom in this life? Fair is the prize, and the hope great.
I do not mean to affirm that the description which I have given of the soul and her mansions is exactly true-a man of sense ought hardly to say that. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of the kind is true. The venture is a glorious one, and he ought to comfort himself with words like these, which is the reason why lengthen out the tale. Wherefore, I say, let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth-in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes. You, Simmias and Cebes, and all other men, will depart at some time or other. Me already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls. Soon I must drink the poison; and I think that I had better repair to the bath first, in order that the women may not have the trouble of washing my body after I am dead.
The end has an invincible beauty, calm and serene, already shimmering with immortality, and yet preserving that light skeptical irony which makes 'a man of sense' in this world. It puts the seal of confidence on what might otherwise be really an incantation that one repeats to himself in his last moments.
Socrates (or Plato) is not referring to the earth as we understand it. He mentions a certain place where we live, and it looks like a marsh in a hollow or maybe like the bottom of a lake, full of rocks and caverns, and sand, 'and an endless lough of mud.' The 'true earth,' which is like a ball of twelve colored pieces, is above us, and one may think that Plato refers to the upper atmosphere. He is dealing with 'another' world above us, and although there are some fantasies of lovely landscapes and animals and gems, it is in the 'Aether' as the Greeks understood it. It is above us, and centered like 'our' place, whatever that is, on the center of the universe. There, the celestial bodies have become clear to the mind, and the gods are visible and present already. If they have 'temples and houses in which they really dwell,' these look very much like the houses of the zodiac. Although some features are scrambled for keeping up an impression of the wondrous, one suspects that this is heaven pure and simple. Then comes the unequivocal geometric countersign.
That world is a dodecahedron. There is the same simile in the Timaeus (55c), and it is even said that the Demiurge had the twelve faces decorated with figures (diazographon) which certainly stands for the signs of the zodiac. Plutarch refirms this:
Is their opinion true who think that he ascribed a dodecahedron to the globe, when he says that God made use of its bases and the obtuseness of its angles, avoiding all rectitude, it is flexible, and by circumvention, like globes made of twelve skins, it becomes circular and comprehensive. For it has twenty solid angles, each of which is contained by three obtuse planes, and each of these contains one and the fifth part of a right angle. Now it is made up of twelve equilateral and equiangular quinquangles (or pentagons), each of which consists of thirty of the first scalene triangles. Therefore it seems to resemble both the Zodiac and the year, it being divided into the same number of parts as these.
It is stereometrically the number 12, also the number 30, the number 360 ('the elements which are produced when each pentagon is divided into 5 isosceles triangles and each of the latter into 6 scalene triangles') -- the golden section itself. This is what it means to think like a Pythagorean.
Plato provided a delectable image and left future critics to puzzle it out. But what stands firm is the terminology. After the Demiurge had used the first four perfect bodies for the elements, says the Timaeus, he had the dodecahedron left over, and he used it for the frame of the whole. There is no need to go into reasons, geometrical and numerological, which fitted the 'sphere of twelve pentagons,' as it was called, for the role. What counts here: it is the whole, the cosmos, that was meant. Plato had stood by the original Pythagorean tradition, which called cosmos the order of the sun, moon and planets with what it comprised. As a free-roving soul, you can look at it 'from above.' (Archidemes in the Sandreckoner still uses the term cosmos loosely in that sense, at least by way of a concession to old usage.)
To conclude: the 'true earth' was nothing but the Pythagorean cosmos and the rivers that flowed from its surface to the center and back can hardly be imagined as strictly terrestrial: although with that curious archaic intrication of earth and heaven which has become familiar and which makes great rivers flow from heaven to earth, it is not suprising one deals with fiery currents like the Pyriphlegethon connected with volcanic fire. But what is Styx? Hardly down here, with its landscape of blue. And the immense storm-swept abyss of Tartaros is not a mere cavern under the ground.
This is all the world of the dead, from the surface down and throughout. It localized as poorly as the netehr world of the Republic. The winding rivers which carry the dead and which go back on their tracks are suggestive more of astronomy than of hydraulics. The 'seesaw' swinging of the ecliptic and the sky with the seasons. Numenius of Apamea, an important exegete of Plato, comes out flatly with the contention that the other world rivers and Tartaris itself are the 'region of planets.' But Proclus, an even more important and learned exegete, comes out flatly against Numenius. Enough is known, indeed more than enough of the welter of oriental traditions on the Rivers of Heaven with their bewildering mixture of astronomical and biological imagery, which culminated in Anaximander's idea of the 'Boundless Flow,' the Apeiron, to see whence early Greece got its lore. Socrates is citing an Orphic version, whence his restraints in naming his authorities, and its strange entities, such as Okeanos and Chronos, deserve attention. What is meant here is Time. Okeanos is much more than Ocean and of other birth. Clearly associated with the upper air.
Okeanos can be compared to Acheloes, the primal river of water that was often conceived as a serpent with human head and horns. The procreation element in any body was the psyche, which appeared in the form of a serpent. Okeanos was the primeval psyche and this would be conceived as a serpent in relation to procreative liquid. Home refers allusively to the conception shared by his contemporaries, the universe had the form of an egg girt about by 'Okeanos, who is the generation of All' We can perhaps also better understand why in this Orphic version the serpent was called Chronos and why, when asked what Chronos was, Pythag oras answered that it was the psyche of the universe. According to Pherekydes it was from the seed of Chronos that fire and air and water were produced.
The great Orphic entity was Chronos Aion, commonly understood as 'Time Unbounded.' We can see in Aion the procreative fluid with which the psyche was identified, the spinal marrow believed to take serpent form. Aion certainly also meant 'a period of time,' and age, hence 'world-age' and later 'eternity,' and there is no reason to think that the biological meaning must have been prior and dominant. It is known that for the Orphics Chronos was mated to Ananke, Necessity, which also, according to the Pythagoreans, surrounds the universe. Time and Necessity circling the universe, this is a fairly clear and fundamental conception; it is linked with heavenly motions independently from biology, and it leads directly to Plato's idea of time as 'the moving image of eternity.'
Hesiod's description of Okeanos (Theogony 790ff.): 'With nine swirling streams hi winds about the earth and the sea's wide back, and then falls into the main; but the tenth flows out from a rock, a sore trouble to the Gods.' That dreaded tenth is the river of Styx. Okeanos is of another birth than our Ocean, and should not be viewed in mundane terms. The attributes of Okeanos in the literature are 'deep-flowing,' 'flowing-back-on-itself,' 'untiring,' 'placidly flowing,' 'without billows.' These images suggest silence, regularity, depth, stillness, rotation -- what belongs really to the starry heaven. The Okeanos of myth preserves these imposing characters of remoteness and silence. He was the one who could remain by himself when Zeus commanded attendance in Olympus by all the gods. It was he who sent his daughters to lament over the chained outcast Prometheus, and offered his powerful mediation on his behalf. He is the Father of Rivers; he dimly appears in tradition, indeed, as the original god of heaven in the past. He stands in an Orphic hymn as 'beloved end of the earth, ruler of the pole,' and in that famous ancient lexicon, the Etymologiucm magnum, his name is seen to derive from 'heaven.'
Socrates' inimitable habit of discussing serious things while telling an improbable story makes it very much worth while to take a closer look at his strange system of rivers.
It appears again in Virgil, almost as a set piece. The Aeneid is noble court poetry, and was not intended to say much about the fate of souls. Yet while retaining conventional imagery and the official literary grand style which befitted a glorification of the Roman Empire, it repays attention to its hints, for Virgil was not only a subtle but a very learned poet. Thus, while Aeneas' ingress into Hades begins with a clangorous overture of dark woods, specters, somber caves and awesome nocturnal rites, which betoken a reald escent into Erebus below the earth, he soon finds himself in a much vaguer landscape. 'On they went dimly, beneath the lonely night amid the gloom, through the empty halls of Dis and his unsubstantial realm, even as under the grudging light of an inconstant moon lies a path in the forest.'
The beauty of the lines disguises the fact that the voyage really is not through subterranean caverns crowded with the countless dead, but through great stretches of emptiness suggesting night space, and once the party has crossed the rivers and passed the gates of Elysium thanks to the magic of the Golden Bough, they are in a serene land 'whence, in the world above, the full flood of Eridanus rolls amid the forest.' Now Eridanus is and was in heaven -- surely not, in this context, on the Lombard plain. And here also 'an ampler aether clothes the meads with roseate light, and they know their own sun, and stars of their own.' There is no mention here of the 'pallid plains of asphodel' of Homeric convention. Those hovering souls, 'peoples and tribes unnumbered,' are clearly on the 'true earth in heaven,' for it is also stated that many of them await the time of being born or reborn on earth in true Pythagorean fashion. And there is more than an Orphic hint in the words of Anchises: 'Fiery is the vigor and divine the source of those life-seeds, so far as harmful bodies clog them not. . .' But when they have lived, and died, 'it must needs be that many a taint, long linked in growth, should in wondrous use become deeply ingrained. Therefore, they are schooled with penalties, for some the stain of guilt is washed away under swirling floods or burned out in fire. Each of us suffers his own spirit.' Some remain in the beyond and become pure soul; some, after a thousand years (this comes from Plato) are washed in Lethe and then sent to life and new trials.
This is exactly Socrates' belief. The words 'above' and 'below' are carefully equivocal, here as there, to respect popular atavistic beliefs or state religion, but this is Plato's other world.
Virgil offers even more wisdom. In the Georgics (1.242f.) It is said: 'One pole is ever high above us, while the other, beneath our feet, is seen of black Styx and the shades infernal.' What can it mean, except that the Styx flows in sight of the other pole?
Dante too picked up this theme. As Dante and the shade of Virgil make their way through the upper reaches of Hell (Inferno VII.102) they come across a little river which bubbles out of the rock. 'Its water was dark more than grey-blue'; it is Styx, and as they go along it they come to the black Stygian marsh, where are immersed the souls of those who hated 'life in the gentle light of the sun' and spent in gloom and spite. Then they have to confront the walls of the fiery city of Dis, the ramparts of Inner Hell, guarded by legions of devils, by the Furies with the dreadful Gorgon herself. It takes the intervention of a Heavenly Messenger to spring the barred gates with the touch of his wand (a variant of Aeneas' Golden Bough) to admit the wanderers into the City of Perdition. As they proceed along the inner circle, there is a river of boiling red water, which eventually will turn into a waterfall plunging toward the bottom of the abyss. At this point Virgil remarks (VIX.85): 'Of all that I have shown you since we came through the gate that is closed to none, there is nothing you have seen as notable as this stream, whose vapors screen us from the rain of fire.' Those are weighty words after all that they have gone through; then comes the explanation, a rather far-fetched one: 'In the midst of the sea,' Virgil begins, 'there lies a ruined country which is called Crete, under whose king the world was without vice.' there, at the heart of Mount Ida where Zeus was born of Rhea, there is a vast cavern in which sits a great statue. Dante is going back there to an ancient tradition to be found in Pliny, that an earthquake broke open a cavern in the mountain, where a huge statue was found, of which not much was said, except that it was 46 cubits high; but Dante supplies the description from a famous vision of Daniel, when the prophet was asked by King Nebuchadnezzar to tell him what he had seen in a frightening dream that he could not remember. 'This great image, whose size was immense, stood before thee, and the form thereof was terrible. The image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of bronze. His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.'
Dante embellished on the vision. The four metals stand for the four ages of man, and each of them except the gold (symbol of the Age of Innocence) is rent by a weeping crack from whence issue the rivers which carry the sins of mankind to the Nether World. They are Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon. We have noted that he describes the original flow of Styx as dark gray-blue, or steel-blue, just as written in Hesiod and remarked upon by Socrates. Phlegethon follows quite exactly what Socrates had to say about Pyriphlegethon, the 'flaming river.' In the Phaidon we see a low-placed fiery region traversed by a stream of lava, which even sends off real fire to the surface of the earth. Whereas some interpreters thought it flowed through the interior of our earth, others transferred Pyriphlegethon, as well as the other rivers, into the human soul, but there is little doubt that it was originally a stream of fiery light in heaven, as Eirdanus was. In any case, the flaming torrent, as the Aeneid calls it, goes down in spirals carefully traced in Dante;s topography, until it cascades down with the other rivers to the icy lake of Cocytus, 'where there is no more descent,' for it is the center, the Tartaros where Lucifer himself is frozen in the ice. (Dante has been respectful of the Christian tradition which makes the universe, so to speak, diablocentric.) But why does he say that the fiery river is so particularly 'notable'?
The so-called, 'Third Vatican Mythographer' may provide an answer. This manuscript of late antiquity states that the circular territory occupied by the Red River in Hell was meant 'by certain writers' to be the exact counterpart of the circle of Mars in the skies 'because they make the heavens to begin in the Nether World' (3.6.4). So, Numenius was correct, the rivers are planetary. Dante subscribed to this doctrine and worked it out with a wealth of parallel features. Mars to him was important because, centrally placed in the planetary system, he held the greatest force for good or evil in action. As the central note in the scale, he can also become the harmonizing force. Both Hermetic tradition and Dante himself are very explicit about it.
BackLast modified: Thurs Nov 19, 1998 / Jeremiah Genest