⁷ ‘The Other World,’ the final myth of Phaedo, embodies all these philosophical arguments into a fantastical eschatological account, and adds to them an ethical dimension. Although the soul is immortal, it is to be judged for both the moral conduct of its earthly life and the efforts it made in that life to practise real philosophy, i.e. acquire in its corporeal life as much pure knowledge as possible. ‘Er’s Journey into the Other World’, the final myth of Republic, and ‘The Winged Soul’, the myth of Phaedrus, may be regarded as variations on the main themes that are at the core of the Phaedo myth: namely, the soul’s immortality, the judgement of souls according to their moral and philosophical earthly achievements, reincarnation as part of the punishment or reward that follows judgement, the pure knowledge that the soul acquires when it is not embodied, and the forgetting of this knowledge in earthly life.