As I was reading the speech about the chariot and its two horses in _Phaedrus_, I noticed that there were a great many numbers being mentioned:
~ "no soul returns to the place from which it came for ten thousand years" (524).
~ The exception to this is the philosopher. "If, after the third cycle of one thousand years, the last-mentioned souls have chosen such a life three times in a row, they grow their wings back, and they depart in the three-thousandth year" (524).
~ There are four kinds of divinely given madness (522-3).
~ And there are nine sorts of souls that are respectively put into different sorts of people: 1.) lover of wisdom or beauty; 2.) lawful king or warlike commander; 3.) statesman, etc.; 4.) trainer or doctor; 5.) prophet or priest of the mysteries; 6.) poet or other manifestation of a representational artist; 7.) manual laborer or farmer; 8.) sophist or demagogue; 9.) tyrant (526).
I know a little about numerology in the Jewish tradition, so the numbers were sticking out for me. I Googled it to see what numbers meant to the Greeks. They seem to have something kind of similar to the Jewish tradition in that every letter is assigned a numeric value, so every name can be added up to equal a certain number. But individual numbers also seem to represent the gods and seem also to be linked to astrology.
Three is the number of Hermes, who is described by http://www.numeralgame.64g.ru/num/num5en.htm as "the intermediary between three worlds: world of gods, world of people, world of death." I was wondering if that's the significance of the three in the philosopher's stay.
Nine, listed at the same page mentioned above, is the number of Aphrodite.
I was curious about the numbers because I figured that they had some sort of significance. I couldn't imagine them being just random. I don't know enough about Greek myth and mysticism to know the meanings, though.
Sophists certainly rank very low on the scale of souls--whatever the numbers mean.