Please give me a brief review about Book 10.

The final book of The Republic begins with Socrates return to an earlier theme, that of imitative poetry. He reiterates that while he is still content with having banished poetry from their State, he wishes to explain his reasons more thoroughly. Taking a bed as his example, Socrates relates how in the world there are three levels at which phenomena occur. First and original is the level of God, who creates the bed as an idea; second is the carpenter who imitates God's idea in making a particular bed; and last is the poet or painter, whose bed imitates the imitator's.

Homer is offered as an unfortunate case. The great poet, Socrates laments, would have helped his country more truly had he taken a political role. An artist imitates that which he does not understand; the poet sings of the cobbler, but does he know the trade? Not at all. Imitation, says Socrates, is a game or sport; it is play.

Socrates warms his auditors of the common imbalance of the soul toward the affective, "the rebellious principle," ­toward grief and lamentation‹of which opportunistic poetry takes advantage. Thus it uselessly commemorates human irrationality and cowardice, and worse, for the sake of a popular audience. The audience is seduced, as it were, into feeling undesirable emotions.

The only poetry that Socrates will allow in the State is "hymns to the gods and praises to famous men." Poetry, and especially musical verse, on the other hand, is pleasurable and serves neither truth nor the State‹in fact, just the opposite. And so, after admitting his own love for poetry and Homer in particular, Socrates must leave it out.

But Socrates lifts his spirits and the spirits of his auditors by illustrating the rewards of the virtuous man. He begins, to Glaucon's incredulity, to state that the human soul is immortal. Like the healthy body, the human soul, fortified by the good, lives on eternally. The soul, Socrates continues, cannot be purely known otherwise than through the faculty of reason. And its final and greatest recompense is attained in the afterlife, when the gods‹having observed the good soul's pursuit of god-like virtues‹honor it accordingly. Whereas the unjust man suffers in life, more often in the long run than the short, and is viciously scorned by the gods thereafter.

The book closes with Socrates' long narration of the tale of Er, an ancient hero who, after being slain in battle, entered the afterlife only to return again. The tale defies facile summary except to say that every man and woman arriving in the afterlife is held accountable and judged for his or her actions. A tyrant is condemned to hell for a thousand years. The primarily righteous, however, ascend to heaven where they are made to choose their next mode of life. Some elect to return as animals, others as a famous athlete or ruler; Odysseus, for example, chooses the life of a humble man. But the choice is their own: based on the wisdom they carry with them. Finally the souls drink from the river of Forgetfulness, become oblivious, and return to earth in their new forms. Throughout the story Socrates is careful to warn Glaucon of all the pitfalls and mistakes and, most importantly, of how the account recapitulates everything they have heretofore determined in their dialogue.