The Scythian or Consul (7)

How can you know that up there there is a happiness and the like worth enduring everything to attain? You yourself have not yet been up there, I suppose?

I believe what my teacher says. He is already right at the top and knows very well.

What in Heaven’s name did he say about conditions there? What did he say this happiness there was? Some sort of riches, I suppose, and glory, and pleasures beyond compare?

Hush, friend! These have nothing to do with the life in Virtue.

If not these then, what does he say are the good things which those who complete their training will get?

Wisdom, courage, beauty itself, justice itself, the sure certainty of knowing everything as it really is. Riches and glories and pleasures and bodily things are all stripped off the climber and left down below before he makes his ascent. Think of the story of Heracles when he was burned and deified on Mount Oeta: he threw off the mortal part of him that came from his mother and flew up to heaven, taking the pure and unpolluted divine part with him, the part that the fire had separated off. So philosophy like a fire strips our climbers of all these things that the rest of mankind wrongly admires; they climb to the top and are happy; they never even remember