From "On the Delay of Divine Justice" by Plutarch

A vision of the afterlife from the pen of Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. 46–120 CE), the Greek philosopher, biographer, and priest of Apollo at Delphi. The Vision of Aridaeus appears at the conclusion of Plutarch's treatise "On the Delay of Divine Justice," where it serves as the capstone of his argument about the workings of cosmic retribution. It tells the story of Aridaeus of Soli, a man of notorious profligacy who suffered a severe fall, lay dead for three days, and returned to life utterly transformed — bringing with him the most detailed and graphic account of Hades preserved from classical antiquity.

Before his fall, Aridaeus had sent to the Oracle of Amphilochus at Mallus to ask whether he might live a better life. The reply: "He would do better when he was dead." The Oracle proved literal. During his three days among the dead, Aridaeus — renamed Thespesius, "Sent by the Gods" — was conducted through the regions of the afterlife, witnessing the judgment of souls, the colours of their moral condition, the instruments of purification, and the great vortex through which souls descend to rebirth. The vision exceeds in scope even Plato's Vision of Er and Cicero's Dream of Scipio, and may have influenced Dante's Inferno.

Translation by G. R. S. Mead from the Bernardakis edition of Plutarch (Bibliotheca Teubneriana, Leipzig, 1891). Mead's extensive theosophical commentary on the vision has been omitted; scholars may consult the full text in his original collection, digitised by the Gnostic Society Library.

When his consciousness passed out of the body, he experienced from the change the same sort of sensation that a sailor would who had been swept overboard into deep water. Then, coming up a little, he seemed to breathe in every part of him, and to see on every side at once, as though the soul — the "single eye" — had been opened.

Of objects with which he had been previously familiar, he saw none save the stars; they were, however, of stupendous size and at enormous distances from one another, and poured forth a marvellous radiance of colour and sound, so that the soul riding smoothly in the light, as a ship in calm weather, sailed easily and swiftly in every direction.

Omitting most of the things he saw, he said that the souls of the dead, in passing from below upwards, formed a flame-like bubble from which the air was excluded; then the bubble quietly broke, and they came forth with men-like forms and well-knit frames. They, however, differed in their movements; some leaped out with wonderful lightness and darted straight up; but others kept turning round together in a circle, like spindles, bobbing up and down, with a mixed and confused motion, which recovered its balance only after a long time and with great difficulty.

As to the majority of them, he did not know who they were; he recognized, however, two or three acquaintances, and tried to join them and enter into conversation. They, however, neither heard him, nor were they themselves. Demented and panic-stricken, avoiding every look and touch, they first turned round and round by themselves; then, falling in with many in the same condition, they huddled together, drifting about in every direction confusedly, with no object in view, and uttering meaningless shouts, like war-cries, intermingled with wails and screams of fear.

Other souls, however, were to be seen above at the top of the envelope shining with joy, frequently approaching one another in friendly intercourse but avoiding the troubled souls below them. They seemed to show their dislike by drawing themselves together into themselves, and their joy and delight by expansion and extension.

In that region, he said, he saw only one soul of a relative, though he was not quite sure about it, for his kinsman had died while he was still a boy. However, the kinsman came up to him and said: "Welcome, Thespesius!" And on his replying in surprise that his name was not Thespesius, but Aridaeus, the other remarked:

"It was Aridaeus, but from henceforth it will be Thespesius — that is, Sent by the Gods — for indeed thou art not dead, but by the will of the Gods thou art come hither with thy reason about thee, whilst thou hast left the rest of thy soul, as it were an anchor, in the body. And this thou mayest now and hereafter prove to thyself by the fact that the souls of the dead cast no shadow and never close their eyelids."

On hearing this, Thespesius set himself the more to use his rational faculties, and taking a closer look he saw that he had a faint and shadowy outline attached to him, while they shone all round and were transparent, though not all in the same way. For some were like the purest full-moon light, emitting one smooth, continuous and even colour; while others had patches across them or narrow strips. Others again were quite mottled — extraordinary sights — dappled with livid spots, like adders; and others had faint scratches.

Then Thespesius' kinsman pointed out everything, telling him that Adrasteia, daughter of Necessity and Zeus, had been set in highest heaven to administer retribution for all offences; and no sinner was either great enough or small enough to escape her by force or avoid her vigilance.

"There are three kinds of punishment," he continued, "each appropriate to one of the warders and executors of Adrasteia. For speedy Punishment deals with those who are chastised at once, in the body and through their bodies, but in somewhat mild fashion, since many offences are passed over as requiring purification only. In the case of those, however, whose moral cure is a more serious business, they are handed over by their conscience to Justice after their decease. And finally, in the case of those who are rejected by Justice as altogether incurable, Fury, the third and most implacable of Adrasteia's ministers, pursues them as they wander and flee, some one way, some another, and pitifully and cruelly undoes them all and thrusts them down into a state of which we can neither speak nor think.

"Of these three kinds of correction," he said, "that which is effected by Punishment, while a man is still alive, resembles a method of chastisement in vogue with the Persians, among others, when they strip the clothes and headdresses off the culprits and scourge the former, while the latter entreat them with tears to stop. In like manner, punishments by means of loss of goods and bodily suffering do not really probe the disease sharply nor reach vice itself, but for the most part touch only the reputations and sensibilities of the culprits.

"Accordingly whenever a man leaves that world for this unpunished and impure, Justice grips him by the soul just as he is, naked, unable to put anything on, and so hide and cloak his villainy, but every bit of him in full view of every one on all sides.

"And first of all he is shown to his good parents, if such they are, or to his ancestors, as an object of loathing and a disgrace to the family; whereas if his forebears are bad, he has to look on their punishments and they on his; and this continues for a long time, until he has exhausted every one of his evil tendencies in pain and toil, which in extent and intensity as much exceed all suffering in the body, as waking consciousness is more vivid than a dream. And the scars and marks of every one of their evil tendencies more or less remain on all of them.

"Observe," he continued, "the colours of the souls of every shade and sort: that greasy brown-grey is the pigment of sordidness and selfishness; that blood-red inflamed shade is a sign of a savage and venomous nature; wherever blue-grey is, from such a nature incontinence in pleasure is not easily eradicated; innate malignity with envy causes that livid discoloration in the same way as cuttlefish eject their sepia.

"Now it is in earth-life that the vice of the soul, being acted upon by the passions and reacting upon the body, produces these discolorations; while the purification and correction here have for their object the removal of these blemishes, so that the soul may become entirely ray-like and of uniform colour.

"As long as these colours are present, there are relapses into the passions, accompanied with pulsings and throbbings; with some souls faint and soon suppressed, but with others vigorously intensified.

"Of these, some by dint of repeated correction at length recover their proper disposition and condition; others again, by the strength of their intractability and their being nailed down to the love of pleasure, are carried down to the bodies of beasts.

"The former, through weakness of reason and inertia of the contemplative principle, are carried down by the practical element to birth; while the latter, lacking an instrument for their unbridled lust, long to unite desires to enjoyment and bring these together by means of any body — for out of body there is only an imperfect shadow and dream of pleasure without fulfilment."

After these explanations he was conducted by his guide at great speed across an immense space, as it seemed, nevertheless easily and directly as though supported by wings of light-rays, until, having arrived at a vast vortex extending downwards, he was abandoned by the power which supported him.

He observed also that the same thing happened to the rest of the souls there; for checking their flight, like birds, and sinking down, they fluttered round the vortex in a circle, not daring to go straight through it.

Inside it seemed to be decked, like Bacchic caves, with trees and verdure and every kind of foliage; while out of it there breathed a soft and gentle air, laden with marvellous sweet scents, making a blend like wine for topers, so that the souls feasting on the perfume were melted with delight in mutual embraces, while the whole place was wrapt in revelry and laughter and the spirit of sport and pleasure.

Thespesius' guide told him that this was the way by which Dionysus ascended to the Gods and afterwards took up Semele; it was called the Place of Oblivion.

Therefore he would not suffer Thespesius to stay there, though he wished to do so, but forcibly dragged him away; explaining how that the rational element of the soul was melted and moistened by pleasure, while the irrational and that which tends to body, being thus moistened and made fleshly, awakens the memory of the body, and from this memory comes a yearning and desire which drag down the soul into generation — the soul being weighed down with moisture.

Then Thespesius, after taking another journey as great as the former one, seemed to see in the distance a huge basin, with streams flowing into it: one whiter than the foam of the sea or snow; another like the purple which the rainbow sends forth; while others were tinged with other colours, each at a distance having its own splendour.

But when they came closer, the basin itself — the surroundings disappearing and the colours growing fainter — lost its varied colouring and retained only a white brilliance. And he saw three beings seated together, forming a triangle one with the other, mixing the streams in definite proportions.

Thespesius' soul-guide thereupon informed him that Orpheus had advanced as far as this when he went in search of the soul of his wife, but, through not remembering correctly, had spread an erroneous report that the Oracle at Delphi was shared by Apollo and Night, whereas Apollo had nothing to do with Night.

"But that which you see," he said, "is the common oracle of Night and Selene, which eventuates nowhere on the earth in one particular seat, but meanders in every direction manwards in visions and images. It is from this that dreams, after being mixed, as you see, spread abroad a mixture of the simple and true with the complex and fallacious.

"As for the Oracle of Apollo," he continued, "you have not seen it, nor will you be able to do so, for the stern-cable of your soul does not give or slacken further upwards, but drags it down through being made fast to the body."

At the same time his guide brought him closer and tried to show him the light which streamed from the Tripod, as he explained, through the Bosom of Themis and rested upon Parnassus.

But though he longed to see, he could not because of the dazzling nature of the light. As he passed, however, he caught a woman's high voice in rhythmic verse prophesying — among other things apparently the time of his own death.

His guide told him that this was the voice of the Sibyl, who sings of things to come as she circles in the face of the Moon. He would therefore have liked to hear more, but was driven in the opposite direction by the Moon's impetus, as in the eddies of a whirlpool. So he heard but little, but that little contained a prophecy about Mount Vesuvius and the destruction of Dicaearcheia by fire, and a scrap about the reigning Emperor, which ran:

"Being good, by sickness will he leave his throne."

After this they turned back to see the punishments. And first of all nothing but distressing and pitiful sights met their eyes; till suddenly Thespesius, without at all expecting it, came across his own friends, kinsfolk and intimates in torment; and they in their terrible sufferings and unseemly and painful chastisements lamented and wept aloud to him.

And last of all he looked down upon his own father emerging from some sort of a pit, covered with marks and scars, stretching out his hands to him; he was no longer allowed to keep silence, but compelled by the authorities to confess that his hands were stained with the blood of some wealthy strangers he had poisoned. On earth he had completely succeeded in escaping detection, but in the after-state all was brought home to him; for part of his crimes he had already been punished, but for the rest he had still to suffer.

But so great were Thespesius' consternation and terror, that he dared not intercede or entreat for his father. When, however, he would have turned and fled, he could no longer see his gentle and familiar guide, but was thrust forward by others of terrifying appearance, and as though there were no choice but to go through with the business.

Thus he had to see that the shades of those who were known to be bad and had been punished in earth-life did not get such a dressing, as they had already done hard labour for their irrational and passionate natures; whereas those who had passed their lives in undetected vice, under cloak and show of virtue, were forced by those who surrounded them to turn their souls inside out in throes of pain, wriggling in unnatural contortions, just as sea-polyps turn themselves inside out after swallowing the hook.

Some of these they flayed, and peeling off their skins showed them covered with spots and festering sores, owing to the diseased condition of their rational and ruling principle. Others, he said, he saw entwined like snakes, two, three, or more together, malevolently devouring one another in revenge for what they had suffered or done to each other while living.

There were further three lakes alongside one another: one of boiling-hot gold; one of lead, bitterly cold; another of iron, terribly hard. And there were spirits on duty who, just like smiths with tongs, put in and took out the souls of those who suffered from the vice of insatiable greed and avarice.

After they had been made red-hot and transparent by firing them in the gold lake, they thrust them into the lead one and gave them a bath in it; and after they had been frozen there and made as hard as hail, they further transferred them into the lake of iron; there they became terribly black, and after being smashed up by its hardness and crushed to atoms, they changed their shapes. They were then in this state taken back to the gold lake, suffering, he said, terrible agonies in their transformations.

But the most pitiable sufferings of all, Thespesius declared, were those of the souls who, when they seemed to have at last got their discharge from Justice, were arrested again. These were the souls of those whose crimes had been visited on their children or descendants.

For whenever one of the latter happened to come up, he fell upon the criminal in a rage, crying out against him and showing him the marks of his sufferings, reproaching him and pursuing after him. And though he tried to get away and hide himself, he could not; for the chastisers speedily hunted them back to Justice and constrained them all over again, in spite of their pitiful cries for mercy owing to what they already knew of the punishments in store.

And to some of them, he said, many of the souls of their descendants attached themselves, just like bees or bats, crowding thick upon each other, and gibbering in anger at the memory of what they had suffered through them.

Last of all he saw the souls of this class who were returning to birth, being forcibly turned into all sorts of beasts, having their shapes changed by the shapers of animals, with blows of curious instruments. In some cases they hammered the whole of their parts together; in others they twisted them back, and some parts they planed off smooth and got rid of them entirely, so that they might be fitted to other habits and modes of life.

Among them he saw the soul of Nero in a bad state generally and pierced with red-hot nails. The smiths had in hand for it the form of a viper, in which it would be conceived and come to life by gnawing itself through its mother. Hereupon, he said, a great light suddenly shone forth, and a voice from the light was heard giving orders to change it into a milder type, and devise a creature that croaks round marshes and lakes; he had been already punished for his crimes, and now some favour was due to him from the Gods for having freed Greece, the most excellent nation of his subjects and the one dearest to the Gods.

This was as far as Thespesius got in his vision. When, however, he was going to turn back, he had a most terrible fright; for a woman of amazing form and size seized hold of him, with the words: "Come thou to me so that thou mayest the better remember the details" — and she was just going to use on him a red-hot stylus, like encaustic painters, when another woman stopped her.

Then, as though he were suddenly sucked through a tube by a terribly strong and violent in-breath, he lit in his body, and woke up just as they were on the point of burying him.

Colophon

The Vision of Aridaeus is drawn from Plutarch's moral essay "On the Delay of the Deity in Punishing the Wicked" (Greek: Περὶ τῶν ὑπὸ τοῦ θείου βραδέως τιμωρουμένων), where it serves as the dramatic culmination of a Platonic dialogue set in the Portico of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The text used is the Bernardakis edition (Bibliotheca Teubneriana, Leipzig, 1891), translated by G. R. S. Mead.

Mead's extensive theosophical commentary — covering the Karmic Powers, the colours of souls, the Basin of Dreams, the mysteries of metempsychosis, and parallels to the Pistis Sophia and Gnostic tradition — has been omitted from this archival text to preserve the vision as a standalone narrative. The full commentary is available in Mead's original collection, digitised by the Gnostic Society Library at gnosis.org.

Hand-read, cleaned, and restored from the _Needs Work staging area by the Sub-Miko of Tianmu. Work done: extracted the vision text from Mead's surrounding commentary (~180 lines of introduction and ~180 lines of post-vision analysis removed), normalised Mead's diacritical apostrophe convention to standard English spellings (Arid'us → Aridaeus, Semel' → Semele, Sel'n' → Selene, L'th' → Lethe, Dic'archeia → Dicaearcheia, daim'n → guide), rejoined one page-boundary sentence split, removed bracketed editorial markers, and wrote the blockquote and colophon. Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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