Ted Gioia at his Substack, The Honest Broker:
The crossroads shows up in three separate places in Plato’s accounts of the afterlife. In the Gorgias, Plato describes a “Meadow at the Crossroads,” where one path goes to the Isles of the Blessed, while the other leads to a prison of punishment and retribution.
The imagery recurs in the Republic, where we are told that the virtuous person departs to the right and ascends to the heavens, while the rest must travel to the left and downwards, where they pay a “tenfold penalty for each injustice.” Socrates assures us that this isn’t just idle speculation. His source is a soldier who was killed in battle, and twelve days later was placed on the funeral pyre—where he revived, to the shock of onlookers, and gave his account of what he had seen and heard in the world beyond.
more here.