which must be a realm of justice and harmony. Xenophanes challenged not only the accounts of the immorality of the gods, but also the cultural standards that exalt athletic prowess over the new learning. An Olympic victory, he insisted, is less valuable for the city than the wisdom of the philosopher-poet; the latter, but not the former, can contribute to civic peace and eunomia-good government (B 2).

Alongside this rationalistic conception of nature and the gods, we find, again at the end of the sixth century, a new view of the human psyche, a view which was influenced by the doctrine of transmigration. Pythagoras (c. 560-500 B.C.E.) is the first thinker known to have introduced this doctrine into Greece. By the middle of the fifth century, in the Purifications of Empedocles (fl. c. 450 B.C.E.), transmigration provides the background for a picture of the human condition as a fall into this world of misery from a primeval state of bliss. We do not know exactly what moral conclusions were originally implied by this mystic view of the soul, but they seem to have included vegetarianism and a general distaste for violence and bloodshed. (See Empedocles B 124-125, 128, 130.) In the works of both Pindar (c. 520-c. 440 B.C.E.) and Empedocles, the fate of the soul after death was a matter of serious moral concern. Something like the Indian doctrine of karma seems to have been preached by Pythagorean and Orphic sectaries throughout the fifth century; but again the details are obscure. This tradition found its full literary expression only much later, in the judgment myths of Plato. There are early echoes of the new view in some mysterious utterances of Heraclitus: "Immortals mortal, mortals immortal; living the others' death, dead in the others' life" (B 62); "You will not find out the limits of the psyche by going, even if you traverse every path; so deep is its logos" (B 45). And similarly in a famous quotation from Euripides: "Who knows, if life is really death, but death is regarded as life in the world below?" (Euripides frag. 638, cited by Plato in Gorgias 492e).

Heraclitus is the first philosopher to have left us substantial, if enigmatic, reflection on the nature of moral experience and moral excellence. "It is not better for human beings to get all they want. It is disease that makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest" (B 110-111). "Sound thinking [or moral restraint, sophronein] is the greatest excellence and wisdom, to speak the truth and act according to nature, knowingly" (B 112). Heraclitus owed to the earlier cosmologists this concept of nature (physis) as a model for truthful speech and virtuous action. The moral interpretation is his legacy to later thinkers, particularly the Stoics. The most decisive innovation is Heraclitus's notion of cosmic law as the source and sanction for human laws: "The people must fight for their law as for their city wall" (B 44). "Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all things [or to all men?], as a city holds to its law and

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