[4]
But these Greeks invent heaps of stories and among them they make out that
Cleombrotus of Ambracia threw himself down from a high wall not because he had suffered any
misfortune, but (as I see it written among the Greeks) after having read a very eloquently and
elegantly written book, of that greatest of philosophers Plato about death; the one, I
suppose, in which Socrates, on that very day on which he was to die, argues at great length
that this is death which we fancy to be life when the soul is held in shut up in the body as
in a prison and that that is life when the same soul, having been released from the bonds of
the body, flies back to that place from which it originated.
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M. Tullius Cicero. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, literally translated by C. D. Yonge, B. A. London. Henry G. Bohn, York Street, Covent Garden. 1856.
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