When it comes to human beings, Socrates and Machiavelli have two totally opposite opinions. In Plato's Meno, he believes that being human is something you are born into thanks to the work of the goddess Persephone: you are recycled into a new life based on the previous one, and everything you know was learned in your past life. He therefore also strongly disagrees with the idea that man is like a machine. Unlike Socrates, in Machiavelli's The Prince he believes that there is a clear division between human beings: there are the eaters and the eaten and you can choose who you want to be. In other words, Socrates believes that you are who you are because you were born into it, while Machiavelli believes that you can choose who you want to be in life. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In Machiavelli's Prince and Plato's Meno, discussions about what it means to be human have very different contents. Plato describes a vivid depiction of his views on what it means to be human through the story of Persephone. It states that you were born into a recycled life and that directs you into the current life. Machiavelli on the other hand believes that there is a choice in life and that it is not as simple as Plato's definition. Both philosophers offer examples to make sense of their definition, and in context it makes sense; however neither philosopher can fully answer the question, as both have valid arguments in the examples they support. Plato believes in a cycle of life, arguing that "the soul is immortal and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and here." in the house of Hades there is nothing in which he has not learned" (Meno, 17). In this way Plato demonstrates much of his argument about what it means to be human. It describes that there is a soul and that the soul is that which assimilates all things learned. Plato's idea of ​​a soul in this quote illustrates that nothing is learned, but remembered. This is because the soul has already experienced and learned things in past forms, and in this lifetime the person must remember all these things. Socrates then leads the discussion to the concept of destiny. It reestablishes that all things were learned in past life forms and remembrance occurs in the present life. Fate pushes her way into the conversation when she states that being human in this current life was not a choice. He believes that you must relearn from your past life experiences in order to use the predetermined life you are currently living. This is in refutation to Meno's definition that the human is mechanical in nature. Perhaps this would have been more convincing to Machiavelli who found part of this model to be true. Machiavelli best describes two views on human nature when he clarifies two ways to obtain a principality. He discovers that a prince can acquire his dominion through a bloodline or obtain it in some way. He then adds that in the case of the latter the concept of "eater" and "eaten" is present. In other words, the eater represents the prince who wishes to control power over others and the eaten represents all the subjects. However, this does not mean that eaters want to be bossed around or oppressed, just that in nature they will inevitably encounter this treatment. This is found when Machiavelli describes that “the people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, but have a great desire to command and oppress the people” (Machiavelli 38). He is making it clear that man has an individual intention and, in the case of the prince, "wants" to control the subjects. In contrast, the eaten subjects do not wish to be.