“Lingering and sitting by a new made grave

As loath to leave the body that it lov’d...”

-Milton, Comus

In Plato’s Phaedo he relates Socrates telling Cebes about souls prowling about tombs and sepulchers, that souls who had not departed in purity haunted the living. These souls where those that were obsessed with the physical pleasures of the world. Repressed 19th Century translators took this to mean sex. But the notion includes, athletics, culinary activities, sexual activity, domestic furnishing and drug/alcohol use.

Plutarch, in his Life of Cimon, relates the haunting of a brutal and unjust conqueror, Pausanias. This Spartan king, sent to chastise the Persians in near Asia and Northeastern Hellas, became a terrible tyrant. This would be the habit of Spartans in far away lands, their application of the tyranny they held at home over the Helots, being the enslaved Messenian race. Pausanias, and his successors, ruled the crossing to Asia with great cruelty, especially to other Greeks. [1] Alexander would make a point, as Hegemon, following Phillip in this, to treat Sparta without cruelty, to ignore or exclude that once great and now traitor state, client of Babylonian bankers, and at the same time show kindness and respect where Sparta had been cruel. Phillip and Alexander, men who ruled from the front ranks of battle, where renown for giving good burial to enemy dead. There is scant possibility that Alexander and his men had not been told the tale of Cleonike and Pausanias.

While governing Byzantium [2], at the Asiatic crossing, Pausanias demanded of two parents their daughter to deflower. Dreading his cruelty, they sent her. Her name was Cleonike [Lion-victory]. This reader suspects her name was prophetic or posthumous. To cloak her modesty, Cleonike asked his slaves outside the chamber to put out the lights. They did so, resulting in her stumbling on a lamp. Pausanias, rightfully fearing an assassin, then killed her in the dark.

Pausanias was ever after haunted by the girl’s ghost. The tyrant never had a restful sleep, but was haunted by her ghost with the words,

“Come meet your doom

By pride are men undone.”

Pausanias “fled to the Oracle of the Dead at Heraclea, raised the ghost of Cleonike, and pleaded to be reconciled with her.” She assured him that as soon as he returned to Sparta he would be “freed.” And he was, for he was executed for his many betrayals of his kingly station, crimes that were not all personal, some national. Ironically, by the youth of Phillip, when he was prisoner of Thebes, Sparta the nation, would fall into a moral state of becoming the premier traitor to their own race in return for money and ease. [3]

In the same book Plutarch relates the ghost of a bandit named Damon, who ravaged the country about the region where Phillip and Alexander conquered Greece in that station of Boetia held by Thebes. Slain by his oppressed neighbors by craft, they and their descendants, were said to be haunted by his ghost. Thebes was thought to be accursed of old, with the great epic Seven against Thebes and the burial-focused tragedy Antigone set there. It would also be the place where Alexander permitted his lesser angel to be unleashed at scale.

Plutarch, in A Discourse Concerning Socrates’s Daemon, tells of Timarchus. This story, related in Late Antiquity, seems, like the others told by Plutarch, to have been drawn from archives, probably at Athens, extant in his time. Athens was the key, traitor enemy to Greece in Alexander’s time. Much of Plutarch’s scholarship in Alexander was drawn from Athenian sources dedicated to marring the memory of Alexander and of the Macedonian race. Athens was the forward base for Babylonian money power from 700 B.C., with Solon the only man to stand up to it in the late 600s. Even than, it required him to go into exile to save his skin. Socrates, was commanded to commit suicide by the financial cliques ruled from Babylon at the time when Macedonian kings were being exterminated by Babylonian-backed tribes and states in order to maintain control of precious metal sources. Macedonia was the mining supply head. Athens was the forward accounting office. [3]

The Boetians [4] were sent by Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi to seek the Oracle of Trophonius at Lebadea. Timarchus entered the cave and stayed two nights and one day. His friends feared for his life. On his return, he related a trance state engulfing him and that his soul flew out of his head. It is clear from this relation that the ancients thought the soul was housed in, or anchored to the body at, the head.

The vision of Timarchus took him to a place where there was no earth. He beheld a sea of vary colors and depths, sometimes calm, sometimes stormy. About this sea floated certain islands. This is not contradictory with Thespesius’ vision of great stars in an ether. To a nautical person [4] a vision of the cosmos might seem in dreams like islands on a sea. Or, perhaps this was a more metaphoric vision. Beneath him was a vast abyss, a chasm up which wafted moans of the doomed.

An “invisible being” spoke to him and offered guidance. The guide noted about the heavenly isles, that those belonged to the gods.

He then maps the four divisions of all things and applies them to life and the hereafter. [5]

The moon is said to differ from all other heavenly bodies by having earthly demons in it, not on it, but in it. Note that the Iroquois, under Nordic influence, has a cosmology in which an old crone lived upon the moon to receive the dead, and that she had a murderous son who came to earth to reap souls.

The description of the soul as having two parts, is congruent with that of Er and Thespesius. The soul is in the body, with the mind tethered to it by a silvery cord of light. Some souls can plunge entirely into the body and be lost in it like an animal. Thus the higher portion of the soul is the mind, which uses the cord or tether to direct “the subsiding part of the soul.”

The invisible being tells of Hemodorus the Clazomenian, a man who could loose his mind/daemon/genius from his soul, journey [remote view] about the world, and come back to inform the subsidiary portion of the soul. The seer’s body was delivered by his traitor wife to enemies, who “burned his house while he was out.” The killers where then cursed to the deepest pit of Hell, the punishment zone, rather than the pallid residence of the decently departed. The angel noted that the spirit would have known this and returned to join the soul for the exit of the burning body.

The visit ended with the guide saying, “But this, youth, you shall more clearly perceive three months hence; now depart.”

Timarchus turned around to discover the guide, but a violent pressure squeezed his head causing the loss of consciousness. He awoke in the cave where he lie down and returned to his fellows. Three months later, Timarchus died. He was buried next to his friend, Lampocles, the son of his teacher, Socrates. Socrates means “Body-taker.” This reader wonders if this had to do with his famed wrestling, or his more famed wrestling away of the mind from the body’s petty concerns? [6]

In any case, Socrates was the teacher of Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander. In seeking to understand Alexander, we ignore the esoteric notions embedded in his worldview at our disadvantage.

1.) See Xenophon, last two books of the Anabasis. Pausanias is depicted in fiction by Gene Wolfe in Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete.

2.) Near Abidos, Troy and Amphipolis, ports of the crossing seas, later known as Constantinople and now Istanbul.

3.) Undertaken, 2026, JL. It was the subtext of Arrian’s account that spurred both the Alexander projects, and this book on ancient conspiracies.

4.) Upper class Greeks were all experienced with transport by sea.

5.) See Ovid’s four ages and Hesiod’s 4 ages: Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron

6.) Through the entire period that would have constituted the lives of Timarchus and Lompocles Athens was at war with Sparta or occupied by enemy garrison, often besieged, and subject to famine and increased incidents of related disease.