Live Justly, Fare Better
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Socrates — ἐν δὴ τούτοις ἅπασιν ὃς μὲν ἂν δικαίως διαγάγῃ ἀμείνονος μοίρας μεταλαμβάνει, ὃς δʼ ἂν ἀδίκως χείρονος·
Socrates completes the ladder of lives — the tyrant sits ninth and last — and states the law that binds the whole cycle together. Within any of these lives, high or low, the soul that lives justly earns a better lot in its next incarnation, and the soul that lives unjustly a worse. The rank you are born into fixes your starting-point, but not your destiny: what you do with the life decides where the soul goes next. Justice lightens the soul and lifts its next station; injustice weights it and sinks it. The great cosmic myth of wings and heavens comes down, in the end, to a plain moral fact — how you live is what your soul becomes, life after life.
Socrates closes the hierarchy of lives — ninth and lowest is the tyrant — with the moral law that runs through the whole cycle of rebirths. In every one of these lives, the soul that lives justly is allotted a better lot next time; the one that lives unjustly, a worse. Character in one life sets the starting-place of the next.
After the soaring vision, Socrates lands the myth on ethics, and the landing is deliberate. The whole architecture of Forms, wings, and heavenly circuits exists to underwrite one homely-sounding law: live justly and your soul rises, live unjustly and it sinks, across a chain of lives ten thousand years long. This is Plato's answer to the oldest question of Greek ethics — why be just when injustice pays? — and the palinode gives it cosmic teeth. Justice is not a social contract or a prudent bargain, the thing the first two speeches kept reducing love and virtue to; it is the very weight of the soul, what determines whether the feathers grow or fall. The dikaios soul is the light one, still able to remember and rise; the adikos soul is the heavy one, sinking through worse and worse lives toward the tyrant at the bottom. And this ties the whole speech back to love. The hierarchy just given put the philosophical lover at the top, and now we learn the mechanism: a life of loving beauty rightly is a life lived 'justly' in the deepest sense — a life that keeps the soul light and remembering — while the appetite the first speeches called love is exactly the heaviness that drags a soul down the scale. Love, properly understood, is not opposed to justice or to the soul's good; it is the very engine of the ascent the whole myth has been describing. What began as a defense of a particular madness ends as a complete vision of the soul's life across time — and at its summit, and as its lightening force, stands love.
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