Selected Essays

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I. This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I. Author: Plutarch Translator: T. G. Tucker Release date: July 11, 2020 [eBook #62618] Most recently updated: October 18, 2024 Language: English Credits: Produced by Turgut Dincer, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTED ESSAYS OF PLUTARCH, VOL. I. *** Selected Essays of Plutarch SELECTED ESSAYS OF PLUTARCH

BY T. G. TUCKER LITT.D. (CAMB.), HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN) PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE Volume I. OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1913 HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK, TORONTO MELBOURNE AND BOMBAY

The essays here rendered into English have not been selected as the very best pieces in Plutarch’s _Moralia_, but, first, as typical examples of his writing in that kind, and, second, as covering between them a tolerably large field of interesting matter. The _Moralia_ offer us perhaps the best of all extant material for judging the civilization of the middle classes of society just before and after the year 100 of our era. From them and from Pliny’s _Letters_ we are able to form a fairly complete picture of a large part of that sounder social element which lay between the froth and the dregs.

literary style. Here it will suffice to say that the English version does not seek to be either more formal or more vivacious, either more imposing or more humorous, than the original. An attempt has been made to preserve the tone as faithfully as the substance. In making Plutarch write as he does in the following pages the translator hopes that _il ne luy a au moins rien presté qui le desmente ou qui le desdie_. It is fair to add that no modern version of the _Moralia_ has been consulted for the purposes of this rendering. In the Introduction, however, one cannot fail to owe much suggestion to Gréard and Volkmann. In the spelling of Greek proper names every modern scholar must follow his own best judgement. It does not follow that, because it is necessary to say ‘Plato’ and usual to say ‘Parmenio’, it is equally judicious to say ‘Chilo’. Nor can any safe rule be laid down for a choice between ‘Pisistratus’ and ‘Peisistratus’. Perhaps the most advisable course is to safeguard, as far as possible, the pronunciation of those who are unfamiliar with Greek, and the spelling ‘Pheidias’ may do something towards correcting the common English tendency to pronounce the first syllable as it is pronounced in ‘fiddle’. Notes upon the proper names will be found after the text by readers who may require them. The text generally adopted is that of Bernardakis in the Teubner series, but recourse has been had throughout to Wyttenbach, and in a number of places which are commonly acknowledged to be corrupt the translator has ventured on a modest emendation of his own. These places are marked in the translation by an asterisk in the margin, and the readings adopted will be found at the end of the book in an appendix on the Greek text. Critics would have saved themselves much trouble if they had observed that, though hiatus is regularly avoided in the genuine writings of Plutarch, no hiatus is created by a word ending in iota or upsilon, vowels which carry a semi-vowel glide in themselves. The orthodox order, Greek and Latin titles, and sectional references of the pieces here chosen are as follows. The English titles belong to the present version. ON BRINGING UP A BOY (περὶ παίδων ἀγωγῆς: _De liberis educandis_), 1-14 C. ON THE STUDENT AT LECTURES (περὶ τοῦ ἀκούειν: _De recta ratione audiendi_), 37 C-48 D ON FAWNER AND FRIEND (πῶς ἄν τις διακρίνειε τὸν κόλακα τοῦ φίλου: _Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur_), 48 E-74 E. ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES (γαμικὰ παραγγέλματα: _Coniugalia praecepta_), 138 B-146.

sapientum convivium_), 146 B-164 D. ON GARRULOUSNESS (περί ἀδολεσχίας: _De garrulitate_), 502 B-515. CONCERNING BUSYBODIES (περὶ πολυπραγμοσύνης: _De curiositate_), 515 B-523 B. ON MORAL IGNORANCE IN HIGH PLACES (πρὸς ἡγεμόνα ἀπαίδευ τον: _Ad principem ineruditum_), 779 D-782 F. ON OLD MEN IN PUBLIC LIFE (εἰ πρεσβυτέρῳ πολιτευτέον: _An seni respublica gerenda sit_), 783 B-797 F. INTRODUCTION The age in which Plutarch was educated and in which he wrote his _Ethica_ is, from the literary point of view, closely similar to the so-called ‘Augustan’ age of English writing. Of all the periods of English style and thought, he would probably have found himself most at home in that of Pope, Addison, and Steele, or in its continuation with Goldsmith and Johnson. He flourished at a time when intellectual interests were remarkably keen, if not very profound; when literature, if for the most part it ventured on no high imaginative flights, did at least aim at some practical bearing upon the conduct of life; when men found entertainment, and probably some measure of moral or social help, in the readable essay or the friendly epistle; when facts, merely as such, were accepted as interesting if interestingly set forth; and when Philosophy, if she deigned to keep her feet upon the ground and to speak as one of the mortals, met with a due welcome from either sex. An eighteenth-century Plutarch might conceivably have written the moral papers of Johnson without Johnson’s ponderousness, or have contributed to the _Spectator_ papers more full than Addison’s of those ‘ideas’ in which Matthew Arnold found that writer so deficient. He might have written, though in a prose form, the _Essay on Man_, being meanwhile as willing as Pope to owe the bulk of his matter to other minds, but not so willing as Pope to play the expositor without first playing the earnest and critical student. Plutarch did not, so far as we are aware, try his hand at verse. To judge by his comments upon poetic duty and by his quotations—which are regularly taken from the best writers of a classical age already far remote—his conception of the poetic office was too exalted to permit of his dabbling in that domain. Had he done so, and had he followed the fashion of his times, he would perhaps have come nearer to our ‘Augustans’ even than in his prose. In poetry it was the age of description, reflection, satire, and moralizing, in the highest degree sensible, studiously informed with ‘wit’—in the broader Queen Anne sense of that word—and characterized by extreme deftness of pointed and quotable phrase, but in no sense creative, imaginative, or inspired. Its ideal contents consisted of ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’. The attitudes of both prose-writer and poet belonged to the intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the period, and so far as that spirit finds an individual embodiment in the Greek half of the Roman Empire, it finds him in Plutarch of Chaeronea. It would be difficult to suggest with any precision the place which Plutarch might have filled in Victorian literature. A distinguished and popular ‘man of letters’ and an educator of public opinion he assuredly would have been. Given a width of reading, a persistent self-culture, and a careful but unpedantic style, corresponding to those which he practised in his own generation, he might have made—as he did then—an admirable biographer and essayist. He might have been a contributor of substantial papers to the quarterlies and other higher reviews. He might, and probably would, have been an eminent lecturer; possibly, with a broad practical Christianity substituted for his broad practical Platonism, a preacher not only eminent but also in the best sense popular. He would certainly have made a brilliant expositor of whatever he undertook to expound. He was no Plato or Aristotle; he would have been no Carlyle or Herbert Spencer; but he might have been much that Macaulay was outside of politics. As to the date of Plutarch’s birth there can be no certainty. Approximately it may be put down as A. D. 48. It is accepted that his death did not occur before the year 120; it may have taken place somewhat, though not much, later. Born in the days of Claudius, he lived through the reigns of Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan, and saw at least the first three years of the rule of Hadrian. He must have been nearly fifty before the last tyrant of the early Empire fell, but the remainder of his life was spent under the most beneficent régime, and amid the greatest peace and prosperity, ever experienced in the ancient world. The _pax Romana_ was at its profoundest, the sense of security at its fullest; the fact of general well-being was everywhere most palpable. There was at the same time, or in consequence, a vigorous revival of intellectual life. At no period of antiquity would it have been possible for a man of studious habits and of mild and genial disposition to enjoy a leisure so undisturbed or a society so free from those forms of preoccupation which preclude an engrossing interest in things purely of the mind. For the orator who is fired by the natural heat of democratic politics, for the patriotic poet from whom thrilling verse must be wrung by the wrongs, the decline, or the yet unrealized aspirations of his country, there was indeed no stimulation or scope. But for the cultivation of the humanities, for the indulgence of a taste for art and _belles-lettres_, for the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, for the search after interesting knowledge—physical, mathematical, antiquarian, historical, philological—and for the thoughtful observation of men and manners, the time was almost ideal. In the absence of anxious and absorbing problems of the present there was leisure for a contemplative and critical survey of the past, and for making acquaintance with ‘the best that had been thought and said’ by it. Since the immediate human environment was no longer distracted and distracting with the clamorous urgencies of external or internal strife and danger, it was possible to look abroad over a wider field, to contemplate the more spacious world of man and his work, of Nature and her facts, beauties, and marvels. It was therefore the age of the encyclopaedist, the traveller, the commentator, the describer, the collector—collector of curiosities, of objects of art, of books, of stories from history, of apophthegms, of pointed and interesting quotations. The prevailing aim was mental and social culture. This was the one object of education, however much its professors might dissent from each other according to the degrees of philistinism in their respective temperaments. The aim of contemporary education—generally realized with more definiteness than educational aims are wont to be in modern times—was to turn the pupil into a gentleman, to equip him for the art of living and conducting himself as such. There could, of course, hardly fail to be those who regarded this _kalokagathia_ too much from the exterior point of view, while others fixed their attention more decidedly, and often perhaps too exclusively, upon the inward and spiritual grace. There were also considerable differences between the Greek and Roman conceptions of a gentleman. But in the main this end was universally avowed—to turn the raw material of the boy into a man both capable and clubbable, whether from a public or a private standpoint. The things to be sought were the right accomplishments, the right morals, and the right manners. The accomplishments included, beyond all else, literary information and culture, argumentative dexterity, and a capacity for speech. The right morals were based mainly upon reasoned self-command. The right manners were chiefly those of urbanity, dignity, and that care of the person, the voice, the dress, and the deportment upon which all ages have insisted according to their several lights or tastes. It might be that the teaching ‘philosopher’, whose concern was with the soundness of the morals, had his quarrel with the teaching ‘sophist’, whose business was with the rhetoric and its excellence for exhibition purposes or for the gaining of various forms of influence. The philosopher might think the sophist superficial, showy, and often actually pernicious, while the sophist might look upon the philosopher as visionary, pedantic, and often a positive clog upon practical efficiency. Nevertheless no typically cultured person of the day would have questioned that, in order to be complete—or, as Coleridge calls it, ‘orbicular’—education must include its due measure of both forms of teaching. After his years of infancy the boy, under the supervision of his _paedagogus_—ideally a slave of superior character, but too often a person who was merely useless for harder work—passed into a school, where he was first taught his letters and then proceeded to the reading, learning, and recital of classical poetry, to the study of music, and to some acquaintance with elementary arithmetic and geometry. Next, taken in hand by the rhetorical teacher in a higher school, he was made to write and deliver descriptions and essays, mostly on trite and unreal themes of a historical or pseudo-historical nature, to develop his powers of invention on either side of a chosen topic, and to cultivate a fastidious diction, pointed phrase, and the elocutionary arts and graces. From artificial harangues and the ‘speaking of a piece’ he advanced to the imaginary pleading of forensic cases, in which the law was often as fictitious as the facts. When, upon reaching the age for assuming the _toga virilis_, he was emancipated from the custody of the _paedagogus_ and the discipline of the school, his formal education commonly ceased. If he proceeded further, as many did, to what may be considered as the equivalent of a university course, he might elect to study philosophy, to study ‘sophistic’, or to dally with both in such measure as seemed likely to set off the abilities or consolidate the culture of a gentleman. Even in the more mature years of life the intellectually-disposed grandee had a habit of maintaining near his person a salaried philosopher as a kind of domestic monitor, and audiences of wealth and fashion readily gathered in Rome and elsewhere to listen to lectures on philosophy by professors who properly understood the art of clear and pleasant exposition. For the most part the typical Roman, less genuinely impassioned than the Greek for thought pure and simple, looked upon any ‘specializing’ in philosophy as likely to lead either to too cloistered a virtue or to the acquisition of eccentric, if not dangerous, views. A certain modicum of philosophical knowledge might be an adornment to life, and a certain modicum of philosophical training might impart a steadiness to character, but the study must not be pursued to the point at which the student himself stood in danger of becoming a ‘philosopher’. With the Greeks philosophical specializing was commonly subject to no such reprehension, partly because of the inborn Hellenic ardour for study and esteem of learning, partly because in this domain, even more than in the rhetorical, the Greeks were the accepted teachers throughout the Roman sphere. This, or nearly this, was the attitude of the educational world in the first decades of the second century, and it was in this world that Plutarch of Chaeronea became a figure of special eminence and distinction. For in whatever light the modern reader may regard Plutarch as a man of letters, to his own times he was first and foremost an educator. It is from this point of view that we must consider both his _Parallel Lives_ and his _Moral Essays_, if we are to perceive in them that unity of character and purpose which he intended all his work to possess. Plutarch, then, was born about A. D. 48 in the very heart of Greece, at the comparatively small town of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of the decisive victory of the Macedonians over the southern Greeks, and also of that in which the forces of Mithridates were routed by Sulla. His family must have been of high local standing, and the fact that his father—a man of cultivated tastes and refined manners—was the owner of the ‘finest kind of horses’ is enough to show, to those who appreciate the significance of the word _hippotrophia_, that he must have been possessed of considerable means. The same conclusion may be drawn both from what Plutarch himself incidentally reveals concerning his brothers, Lamprias and Timon, as well as other members of the family circle, and also from what is known of his own life and upbringing. That as a boy he passed through the orthodox curriculum, is obvious from his wide acquaintance with literature and his intelligent, if not particularly profound, references to both music and mathematics. When of an age to receive an education in philosophy, he was placed, or placed himself, chiefly under the distinguished Ammonius, an Alexandrian philosopher of a broad semi-Platonist, semi-Peripatetic school, who had become established in a prominent intellectual and public position at Athens. It was the accepted rule for the student to attend, but not necessarily to confine himself to, the lectures of a selected teacher. Often he lived in that teacher’s house, or at least, in intimate connexion therewith. If the philosopher was strictly conscientious he felt it his duty to watch over the developing character of his pupil, to visit him with any deserved reproof,[1] to serve as his father confessor, to answer his questions, and to meet his moral and intellectual difficulties. The familiar phrase ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’ perhaps describes the relations with unusual exactness. We find both Plutarch and his brother in the company of Ammonius at Delphi when Nero, in the year 66, graced that city with his imperial and artistic presence. His formal education completed, we discover little of the younger manhood of Plutarch, except that he must have been in high local estimation, partly, perhaps, from the position of his family, but doubtless no less on account of his own conspicuous gifts. Had this not been the case, he would hardly have been appointed as one of a delegation of two sent on a mission to the Roman proconsul of the province. At what age he was first entrusted with civic functions as aedile, or with a Delphic priesthood (then merely a ceremonial office open to any layman), or with other public positions, we cannot say. We can only be sure that to his learning he added a recognizable capacity for public business. However many hours he may have devoted to study and to the compilation of those ample commonplace-books which evidently served him in such good stead, he prided himself on carrying his philosophic attainments into the local Chamber or on to the local platform. In his judgement this procedure was not only a vindication of philosophy and a method of keeping the faculties energetic; it was also a patriotic duty. As has been already said, this was an age of travel. Facilities of transport were plentiful; the seas and main roads were secure from pirate or enemy; journeys were at least as expeditious as at any modern time until the employment of steam. We know of visits made by Plutarch to Alexandria, various parts of Greece, Rome, and the north of Italy. Rome he must have visited at least twice, and in this metropolis and ‘epitome of the world’ he made acquaintance with a large circle of men of distinction, transacted public business (presumably on behalf of his native town, of which he may have been sent as representative), delivered lectures,[2] and apparently acted as a sort of consulting physician to morally perturbed members of Roman society. He must have spoken always in Greek, for he confesses that—like most other Greek writers—he had given almost no attention to Latin; nor is any such avowal needed from a person who, even after looking into the language, believed _sine patris_ to be the Latin for ‘without a father’. Greek, however, was then as much the universal language of the cultured as, until recently, French was the universal accomplishment of fashion, diplomacy, and the traveller. The Rome with which Plutarch was immediately acquainted was the Rome of Vespasian and of the earlier half of Domitian’s reign. Had his sojourn in the capital taken place some fifteen or twenty years later, it is in the highest degree probable that he would have been further known to us through an acquaintance with Pliny or some other Roman writer of that date. That a Greek, and especially one who had a difficulty in reading Latin, should make no mention of contemporary Latin authors—that in his heart he should rather despise them—is only characteristic of the Hellenic attitude of the time. But that the amiable Pliny, who has an appreciative word to say of almost every one within his social horizon, including comparatively obscure philosophers like Euphrates, should say nothing of so eminent a figure as Plutarch, amounts to evidence that the two had never met. A man who could make close friends of consulars like Sosius Senecio and Mestrius Florus, and who enjoyed an intimacy with Paccius and Fundanus, could not have failed to win the notice of the Horace Walpole of his day. Quintilian, Silius, Statius, Martial, Pliny, Suetonius, and Juvenal were all writing when Plutarch was already the coryphaeus of Greek culture, and if not one of them mentions his name, it is because he was living in remote Chaeronea and forgathering only with his chosen circle of philosophers, men of letters, artists, or musicians in that town or in Athens, Corinth, and other Greek centres near at hand. To Chaeronea Plutarch must have retired by middle life. There he married Timoxena, a lady of position, but of quiet tastes, had issue four sons and a daughter, identified himself with the civic and religious concerns of his town, delivered lectures, imparted instruction on the lines of a modified or latitudinarian Platonic philosophy, industriously read the books in his moderate but useful library, made copious extracts therefrom, wrote his _Lives_ and those occasional papers known as his _Ethica_ or _Moral Essays_, and enjoyed the discussion of many a knotty question—often perhaps of little or no importance beyond the fact of its forming a problem—in the agreeable society of his relatives or his cultivated friends and guests. At such gatherings he was the leader, doubtless dominating the conversation—though in his more courteous way—somewhat as Johnson dominated the coterie described by Boswell. Often, we gather, he varied this quiet course of life by means of excursions to other Greek cities—Athens, Sparta, Aedepsus—where he most probably delivered an occasional lecture, and where, as we are certain, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in table-talk.[3] That he gave philosophical education, though apparently not of a systematic and pedagogic kind, to persons of both sexes is known from his own references to the practice. Whether he did so for money or not, we cannot tell. The later Platonists by no means felt bound to adopt the attitude of Socrates and Plato towards the taking of fees. The world had changed, and the _res angusta_ was often more powerful than a principle which had ceased to appear entirely rational. But there is every reason to suppose that Plutarch was a man of independent means; we know further that a genial frugality was the rule of his household, and that he entertained a becoming contempt for the obsequious or the advertiser. The day of the endowed professor, whether of philosophy or sophistic, was still to dawn for Greece under Marcus Aurelius, and it never dawned at all for so small a town as Chaeronea. We may take it therefore that, whether with or without fee or present, Plutarch was able to choose his own pupils—in all likelihood the sons and daughters of his friends—and that, in dealing with them or with a wider audience, he maintained the fullest dignity and independence, and practised all the amiable candour which he explicitly recommends. For any lack of originality, of speculative audacity, of profundity (or the obscurity which is so often mistaken for that virtue), Plutarch fully compensates. To his generation he served as a milch-cow of practical philosophy on its ethical side. He browsed on literature and thought, secreted the most valuable constituents, and yielded the cream to his hearers or readers. So far as he belonged to a philosophic school, it was that of the Old Academy. In other words, he would have labelled himself a Platonist. It is probable that he was as much attracted by the superb literary style of Plato, the nature of the man, and the nobility of his conceptions, as by anything capable of crystallization into a philosophy. These qualities attracted even the dilettante, while in the more specially philosophic world time had done much to refract the real Plato, to extract dogma from him, and to create a large _Aberglaube_ about his writings. Be that as it may, there is much in Plato that Plutarch does not accept, and there is much outside of Plato to which he gives a welcome. Towards Stoics and Epicureans—whose doctrines, like those of the Christians, would logically withhold men from public activity—he is distinctly, though never virulently, hostile, and when his pen ranges itself against particular schools, it is against these.[4] It is easier, in fact, to say to what sect Plutarch did not belong than to associate him definitively with any other. Nevertheless it is as a Platonist that he would have classed himself, and it is especially by the later Neo-Platonists that he was quoted as a divinely gifted writer who lent literary charm and potency to wisdom. So broad, however, was his teaching, and in many respects so adaptable even to Christianity, that early writers of the Church had no scruple in borrowing liberally from him.[5] Into whatever shape he may have systematized his views, and however popular his treatment of them, Plutarch ranked with the philosophers. If he was opposed to Stoicism and Epicureanism, he was, like other philosophers, no less opposed to sophistic. To him the representatives of that art were apt to seem shallow and showy.[6] He held, with the Socratics in general, that the basis of right action is knowledge, and he had no belief in empiricism. Not that he rejected either established moral views or established religion. He was no sceptic, still less an atheist. As Friedländer has well argued, there was no ancient cult of atheism. Plutarch, indeed, is remarkably receptive in the matter of deities. The Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris, which had made great progress throughout the Roman Empire, appeared to him equally tenable with the worship practised by his own ancestors. In the polytheism in which he acquiesced, such divinities were only other forms of those known in Hellas, and he found no difficulty in reconciling and combining the two sets of notions and cults. He was deeply tinged with Orientalism, though his culture and his natural good taste made him despise corybantic demonstrations and what Friedländer has called ‘dirty mortifications’. He held the Eranian belief in daemonic agencies, which acted upon mankind from the one side as the gods did from the other. If he appears to rise to the conception of ‘God’ in the singular, the word is rather to be taken as denoting the sum of divine wisdom and beneficent dispensation. Like all the best minds of his own and many a previous generation, he found moral difficulties in accepting the characters ascribed to the deities in the best literature of earlier Greece, and therefore, while approving of the established education in poetry, he necessarily felt some qualms as to the possible effects. Poetry served in the schools ‘as introduction to philosophy, history, geography, and astronomy’, and it had much to do with the formation of religious and ethical notions. Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, and Menander were ‘learned and wise’, and boys were brought to regard them as inspired. Hence Plutarch’s treatise on _Poets as Moral Teachers of the Young_. The point of view in that essay is not, indeed, entirely rational. It was not so easy for Plutarch as it is for us to realize that moral and religious ideas in Greek literature had passed through an evolution corresponding to the development of intellect and society. Instead of frankly recognizing the limitations of Homer or the inconsistencies of the dramatists in this respect, he puts a highly ingenious constraint upon the connexion between any dubious sentiment and its context. It is only when he fails in such a _tour de force_ that he consents to censure the poet. In this procedure he was by no means the first. The battle of the ‘takers of objection’ (προβληματικοί) and the ‘solvers of difficulties’ (λυτικοί) was centuries old. That Plutarch should range himself as far as possible with the solvers is a circumstance which would naturally follow both from his love of literature and from his constitutionally reverential temperament. As has been often observed, the purpose running through the _Parallel Lives_ and the _Moral Essays_ is one and the same. The philosophy of Plutarch was ethical. For logic and dialectic he shows no liking. His object was to relate philosophy to life, to bring home a philosophy which could be lived. By philosophy he meant the best conduct of life, based on an understanding of the nature of virtue—τὸ καλόν, the right, the honourable, the becoming. From philosophy we are to learn not only what is due to ourselves, but what is due to the gods, to the laws, to parents, children, friends, enemies, fellow-citizens, and strangers. The _Essays_, like those of Seneca or Bacon, deal with separable components or manifestations of right and wrong character, with duties and circumstances: the _Lives_ meanwhile afford us concrete examples or object lessons from history.[7] Yet life, even that of a philosopher, is not made up entirely of preaching and exhortation, least of all when the philosopher is at the same time a man of the world and a man of letters. Plutarch felt a lively interest in all such posers as were mooted in the talk of the table or of the loungers’ club. He therefore includes among his occasional papers—whether written by request or under the fashionable fiction of a request—a number of treatises on physical, antiquarian, literary, and artistic topics which can hardly be said to bear with any immediateness upon the ethical perfection of the reader. As a change, therefore, from the treatment of _Superstition_ or _Inquisitiveness_ or _The Restraint of Anger_, of _Rules for Married Couples_ and _Rules of Health_ and rules for _The Student at Lecture_, he may in a spare moment discuss such matters as _The Face in the Moon_ or questions in Roman custom. The majority of the pieces in the present selection speak for themselves. With the one exception to be mentioned immediately, they all bear the impress of the man. There is the same moral broadmindedness and sobriety, the same shrewd sense of _le bonhomme Plutarque_, the same faculty for popularizing[8] without descending to vapidity, the same knack of relieving the sermon by means of anecdote, quotation, or interesting item of information at the point where the discourse threatens to become tedious. It is true that the German critic, in his indefatigable search for the _unecht_, has impugned the authorship of the _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_[9] on grounds unintelligible to those who do not expect a dinner-table conversation to be a systematic treatise, and who are satisfied to believe that a mixture of serious talk, banter, and narrative, and a frequent transition of subject, are precisely the things for which one would look on such an occasion. Every feature of the style is Plutarchan, and, if Plutarch did not write the piece, we can only feel unmixed regret that he did not, and unmixed surprise that its real author should sacrifice the credit of his performance. With the article on _The Bringing-up of a Boy_ the case is different. Wyttenbach has sufficiently pointed out its frequent feebleness of argument, its turbid arrangement, the exceeding triteness of its ideas, and its unaccountable omissions. To us moderns it is of great interest for the light which it throws on the education of the period, and for its incidental revelations of the conditions of domestic life and the domestic affections. Otherwise it is a puerile performance and savours of nothing but the student essay. If it be argued that it is one of Plutarch’s juvenile works, the answer is that it is unlike him to be disingenuous; and disingenuous he must be, if in his early youth he pretends to have ‘often impressed upon parents’ this or that. Antiquity produced far too many amateur essays in imitation of great authors—imitations actually ascribed to those authors by a recognized fiction of the schools—for us to do an injustice to Plutarch when an easier solution lies so close to our hands. Perhaps, again, the piece on _Fawner and Friend_[10] suffers from an occasional _longueur_, but there are few writers who do not at some less felicitous moment perpetrate paragraphs less vivacious than their average. As a stylist Plutarch is apt to be underrated. He is, it is true, no laborious atticist, and makes no point of writing like a purist in the classic manner of a Plato or a Lysias. But this does not mean that he is in the least negligent in either word or sentence. On the contrary, his words are selected with extreme care, and his sentences—where the text is sound, as for the most part it is—are rounded off and interlinked as watchfully as any natural writing need require. It is true that his vocabulary is large and his expression full, but, when his words are properly weighed and their metaphorical and other differentiations duly perceived, no understanding reader will call him verbose.[11] He displays an immense command of language, but no word plays an idle part, and if (like Cicero, whom in many respects he resembles) he is fond of joining what are erroneously called synonyms, it needs but little appreciation of verbal values to realize that the added words invariably carry some amplification, some more precise definition, or some emphasis helpful to a full grasp upon the sense. It is true also that his sentences are apt to appear—like the sentences of Ruskin’s earlier days—somewhat lengthy; nevertheless they commonly atone by lucidity of construction for any demand they may make upon sustained attention.[12] In a modern English dress they must necessarily be broken up, but a practised reader of Plutarch finds no more difficulty with them in the original than he would find with a passage of Demosthenes or Plato. To one who becomes familiar with them they are at least as agreeable as the staccato brevities of Seneca. What chiefly exacts some effort from the reader of Plutarchan Greek is the fact that its words are extraordinarily charged with metaphor and allusion.[13] His choice of one word rather than another is always nicely calculated. This truth once recognized, a reader cannot fail to admire both the consistency with which the writer maintains his similitude while he is upon it, and also the copious resources of vocabulary upon which he draws for the purpose. Meanwhile, despite any length of sentence and fullness of praise, Plutarch neither irritates with tricks and mannerisms nor wearies with pedantry and ponderousness. A pedant he could not be. He is no writer of Johnsonese. To him the best words are those which best suit their context, and he has no objection whatever to a dash of the colloquial or a touch of the homely or naïve. It is one of his characteristic merits that he knows when to take the higher and when the lower road of diction. He also knows when he is in danger of stylistic monotony. Plutarch was a teacher, but, like all truly intelligent members of that profession, he recognized that the most uninspiring attitude to adopt is the severely and unremittingly pedagogic. ‘The knack of style,’ it has been said, ‘is to write like a human being,’ and Plutarch, a professor of humanity without a chair, is always and entirely human. That his pen must have moved with extraordinary facility is evident from the number of his publications. Apart from his _Lives_ (of which not all are extant), his _Moralia_ include over eighty pieces, long or short, and it is certain that many others had disappeared[14] before the present collection became available in its eleventh-century MS. It is not here implied that he is never culpable, never over-loaded. There are times, though rare ones, at which we feel that his memory or his notebook has been unduly exploited. We feel that he might have spared us an illustration which does not illustrate or a similitude which is deficient in similarity. To a certain extent he is a Euphuist, and though Guevara perhaps owed nothing directly to him (as he did to Seneca[15]), it is manifest that Plutarch sometimes strains a point in order to achieve an over-ingenious comparison. The contagion of the thing, like that of Euphuism in the Elizabethan age, was in the air, and Plutarch assuredly does not err more often or more heinously with one generation than Shakespeare did with another. Wide reading and natural fecundity easily slip into sins which narrow resources and slow invention are impotent to commit. * * * * * There are numerous signs that the pendulum of classical interest is swinging in the direction of the literature of the early Empire. The exclusive _toujours perdrix_ of the Attic and Ciceronian periods has apparently begun to jade the palate, and writers like Seneca and Plutarch are coming into their own once more. There was a time when these authors were perhaps better known than any others. That they were worthy of prime consideration is manifest from the immense influence which they exercised upon the ardent and inquiring spirits of the sixteenth and following centuries, in England no less than on the Continent. Authors who could make such an appeal to Montaigne, to the Elizabethan dramatists, to Bacon, or to Jeremy Taylor,[16] are surely not to be despised because they belong stylistically to a ‘silver’ age, or because their strength lies mostly in the fact that they are a mine of ideas, wise saws, and pointed moral instances. Seneca, as being a writer of Latin, was naturally the earlier and more widely read,[17] but from the publication of the _editio princeps_ of Plutarch by Aldus in 1509 our author sprang into peculiar estimation among the recovered spirits of antiquity. It was, however, due to Amyot that both his _Lives_ and his _Essays_ became accessible to those who had little or no Greek. The _Essays_ were rendered into idiomatic French by that admirable translator in the year 1572,[18] and Montaigne was by no means the only reader among _nous autres ignorans_ who made the Plutarch of Amyot his breviary, and who ‘drew his water incessantly’ from him. It was not the literary etiquette of the Elizabethan age to acknowledge all the obligations one might owe even to a contemporary, much less to the ancients, and the stores of Plutarch might be rifled without much fear of detection, and certainly with no fear of reproach. When Lyly, in _Euphues and his Ephoebus_,[19] takes it in hand to bring up a child in the way he should go, he is in a large measure simply translating, expanding, and emphasizing the pseudo-Plutarch on the _Bringing-up of a Boy_ and interspersing the discourse with pickings from other essays, particularly that on _Garrulousness_.[20] Montaigne, of course, with his bland unreserve, credits Plutarch via Amyot with a multitude of observations, while Bacon, when following the new vogue of the essay, sometimes refers us to ‘Plutarke’, and at least on one occasion informs us that ‘Mountaigny saith’ a thing which on reference to the said ‘Mountaigny’ we find to be Plutarchan. Though it is no part of the present Introduction to examine in detail the influence of the philosopher of Chaeronea upon modern writers, or to make an inventory of his contributions to English literature, it is at least worth asking whether an author whom genius once delighted to exploit, and from whom so many good things have filtered down to us through various channels, may not be well worth reading at first hand. To Professor Mahaffy[21] Plutarch ‘is a pure and elevating writer, full of precious information, and breathing a lofty moral tone’, and to Professor Gilbert Murray[22] he is ‘one of the most tactful and charming of writers, and one of the most lovable characters in antiquity’. Said Emerson[23]: ‘Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.’ Footnote 1: The reproof might ostensibly be general, but its particular application was readily felt. Musonius, we are told by Epictetus, made all his hearers feel ‘as if some one had been talking to him about them’. Footnote 2: See _Concerning Busybodies_, 522 E. Footnote 3: Over and above his resemblances to Macaulay as a writer of essays and biographical history, there is a distinct similarity between their conversational tastes. We can imagine a Plutarch fully at home with Macaulay at one of those astonishing early Victorian breakfast-parties where a man might be asked if he ‘knew his Popes’, and where he might be endured while he recited them. Plutarch’s _Table-Talk_, like his _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_, reveals for contemporary Greek society the same deliberate cult of intellectual conversation sharpened by challenge and debate. In such conversation he must himself have played a conspicuous part. Nevertheless, it may fairly be gathered that the Greek or Graeco-Roman interlocutors in the reign of Trajan were the more ingenuously athirst for reciprocal enlightenment, however dubiously we may regard the value of the information or misinformation actually gained. Nor is it easy to believe that Plutarch would have thought it etiquette to indulge in the protracted monologues to which the more modern society submitted with such grace as it best could. Footnote 4: e.g. in his _De repugnantiis Stoicorum_ and his _Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum_. Yet, as Mahaffy says, ‘it would be hard to say whether the number of Stoic dogmas which he rejects exceeds that which he quotes with approval’ (_The Greek World under Roman Sway_, pp. 300 sqq.). Footnote 5: Volkmann names in particular Clement of Alexandria and Basil. Footnote 6: This does not mean that he had no friends among the rhetorical teachers (the contrary is shown by his reference to ‘our Niger’ in _praec. san._, § 16), but only that he distrusted the type. He refused to approve of a fluent and polished style as an end in itself. Pliny describes how the amazingly voluble Isaeus would offer his audience a choice of subject and allow it to dictate the side which he should take. He would then rise and demonstrate his extemporizing powers with much show of rhetorical ornament. Footnote 7: Volkmann says of the _Lives_, ‘Das Werthvolle an ihnen sind nicht die historischen Details, die er giebt, sondern die eingestreuten Reflexionen, die ethischen Betrachtungen, das Eingehen auf individuelle Stimmungen und Leidenschaften der grossen Männer.’ Footnote 8: _Aulicis tantum scripsit, non doctis_, says Scaliger. Footnote 9: Volkmann guesses that it is _ein Produkt der späteren Sophistik_. If so, we may congratulate the Sophist on his perfect reproduction of Plutarch’s style and of his non-sophistic tone. Footnote 10: Bacon’s Essay _Of Followers and Friends_ owes almost nothing to Plutarch beyond the title. We do, however, find him borrowing the words ‘for there is no such Flatterer as a Man’s selfe’. Footnote 11: As Volkmann happily puts it, he writes ‘with comfortable breadth’. Footnote 12: The sentences would doubtless have been easier still if Plutarch had not felt bound to follow the fashion of the time and elaborately avoid hiatus. Footnote 13: Perhaps this is why Plutarch, as seen through Amyot, appeared to Montaigne ‘close and thorny,’ while his sense was nevertheless ‘closely-jointed and pithily-continued’. Footnote 14: Stobaeus (sixth century) had access to much of Plutarch that is now lost. Footnote 15: See an observation of Professor Summers, _Seneca Select Letters_, Introduction, p. lxxiv. Footnote 16: Plutarch ‘is the theme of more than 230 allusions or direct references on the part of Jeremy Taylor’ (Sandys, _A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300). Footnote 17: He was familiar reading of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and appears in the _Gesta Romanorum_. Later the _Adagia_ of Erasmus draw freely upon him. Footnote 18: ‘Il a en quelque sorte créé Plutarque,’ says Demogeot. Footnote 19: _Euphues_ appeared in 1579. Jusserand (_The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare_, p. 127) remarks that Euphues ‘addresses moral epistles to his fellow men to guide them through life’, but he appears to be unaware that Lyly borrowed this object, as well as so large a quantity of his matter, from Plutarch. Footnote 20: We meet, for example, with the story of Zeno, ‘the olde man in Athens that amiddest the pottes could hold his peace.’ Footnote 21: _History of Greek Classical Literature_, ii. 427. Footnote 22: _The Literature of Ancient Greece_, p. 396. Footnote 23: Quoted by Sandys (_A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300). CONTENTS Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages 27 On Old Men in Public Life 65 Advice to Married Couples 96 Concerning Busybodies 113 On Garrulousness 130 On the Student at Lectures 157 On Moral Ignorance in High Places 180 Fawner and Friend 187 On Bringing up a Boy 241 Notes on Persons and Places 267 Appendix: Notes on the Greek Text 295 _In the following imaginary ‘Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages’ the supposed narrator is a certain Diocles of Corinth, a professional diviner and expiator of omens connected with the court of Periander, who was despot of Corinth from 625_ B. C. _to 585_ B. C. _The dramatic date is towards the close of that period. It must not be assumed that Plutarch is pretending to be historical, and anachronisms must be disregarded._ _The Seven Sages are here Thales, Bias, Pittacus, Solon, Chilon, Cleobulus, Anacharsis (see Notes on Persons and Places). The list varies with different writers, but Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon are invariably, and Chilon is regularly, included in the canon. Periander is himself sometimes made one of the number, and a certain Myson also appears._ _The qualities which constituted a ‘sage’ in this connexion were those of keen practical sense and insight, and a power of crystallizing the results into pithy maxims. He was not a ‘philosopher’ in the later sense of that word._ DINNER-PARTY OF THE SEVEN SAGES We [Sidenote: 146 B] may be sure, Nicarchus, that in process of time facts will become so obscured as to be altogether beyond ascertainment, seeing that in the present instance, where they are so fresh and recent, the world accepts accounts of them which are pure concoctions. In the first place, the party at dinner did not consist—as you have been told—merely of seven, but of [Sidenote: C] more than twice that number. I was myself included, both as being professionally intimate with Periander and as the host of Thales, who had taken up his quarters with me by Periander’s directions. In the second place, whoever related the conversation to you, reported it incorrectly. Presumably he was not one of the company. Inasmuch, therefore, as I have plenty of spare time and my years do not warrant me in putting off the narrative with any confidence, I will—since you are all so eager—tell you the whole story from the beginning. Periander [Sidenote: D] had prepared his entertainment, not in the city, but in the banquet-hall at Lechaeum, close to the temple of Aphrodite, the festival being in her honour. For after having refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite since the love-affair which led to his mother’s suicide, he was now for the first time, thanks to certain dreams on the part of Melissa, induced to pay honour and court to that goddess. Inasmuch as it was summer-time and the road all the way to the sea was crowded with people and vehicles, and therefore full of dust and a confusion of traffic, each of the invited guests was supplied with a carriage and pair handsomely caparisoned. Thales, however, on seeing the carriage at the door, simply [Sidenote: E] smiled and sent it away. Accordingly we turned off the road and proceeded to walk quietly through the fields, a third member of our party being Niloxenus of Naucratis, a man of high character who had formed a close acquaintance with Solon and Thales in Egypt. His presence was due to his having been sent on another mission to Bias. Of its purpose he was himself unaware, although he suspected that the sealed document of which he was the bearer contained a second problem for solution. He had been instructed, in case Bias could do nothing, to show the missive to the wisest of the Greeks. ‘It is a godsend to me,’ [Sidenote: F] said Niloxenus, ‘to find you all here, and, as you perceive’—showing us the paper—‘I am bringing the letter to the dinner.’ At this Thales remarked with a laugh, ‘In case of trouble, once more to Priene![24] For Bias will solve the difficulty, as he did the first, without assistance.’ ‘What do you mean,’ said I, ‘by “the first”?’ ‘The king,’ replied Thales, ‘sent him an animal for sacrifice, and bade him pick out and send back the worst and best portion of the meat. Thereupon our friend, with excellent judgement, took out and sent the tongue; and he is manifestly held in high repute and admiration in consequence.’ [Sidenote: 147] ‘That is not the only reason,’ said Niloxenus, ‘Bias does not object—as you do—to be, and to be called, a friend of kings. In your own case the king not only admires you on general grounds, but he was hugely delighted with your method of measuring the pyramid. Without any fuss or the need of any instrument, you stood your stick at the end of the shadow thrown by the pyramid, and the fall of the sunlight making two triangles, you showed that the pyramid stood in the same ratio to the stick as the one shadow to the other.[25] But, as I observed, you were charged with being a king-hater, and [Sidenote: B] certain outrageous expressions of yours concerning despots were reported to him. For example, when asked by the Ionian Molpagoras what was the strangest sight you had seen, you answered, “An aged despot.” Again, at a drinking-party, when the talk fell upon animals, you stated that among wild animals the worst was the despot, and among tame animals the sycophant. However much a king may claim to differ from a despot, he does not welcome language of that kind.’ ‘Nay,’ said Thales, ‘the former remark belongs to Pittacus, who once made it in a playful attack on Myrsilus. My own observation [Sidenote: C] was that I should regard as a strange sight, not an aged despot, but an aged navigator. None the less, my feelings at the altered version are those of the young fellow who, after throwing at the dog and hitting his step-mother, remarked, “Not so bad, after all.” Yes, I regarded Solon as very wise in refusing to act the despot. Our Pittacus also, if he had kept clear of monarchy, would not have said that “_it is hard to be good_”. As for Periander, his despotism may be regarded as an inherited disease, from which he is making a creditable recovery, inasmuch as up to the present he keeps wholesome company, cultivates the society of sensible men, and will have nothing to say to that “cutting down of the tall poppies” suggested by my fellow-countryman [Sidenote: D] Thrasybulus. A despot who desires to rule over slaves rather than men is no better than a farmer who is ready to reap a harvest of darnel and cammock in preference to wheat and barley. Among the many undesirable features of despotic rule, the one desirable element is the honour and glory, in a case where the subjects are good but the ruler is better, and where they are great but he is regarded as greater. If he is satisfied with safety without honour, his right course would be to rule over a herd of sheep, horses, or oxen, not over human beings. However, [Sidenote: E] your visitor here has launched us upon an inopportune topic. We are walking to a dinner, and he should have remembered to moot questions suited to the occasion. For you will doubtless admit that there is a certain preparation necessary for the guest as well as for the host. The people of Sybaris, I understand, send their invitations to the women a year in advance, so that they may have plenty of time to prepare their dress and their jewelry before coming to dinner. In my own opinion one who is to play the diner in the proper way requires still more time for real and true preparation, inasmuch as it is harder to arrive at the appropriate adornment of character than at the useless and superfluous adornment of the person. When a man of sense comes to [Sidenote: F] dinner, he does not bring himself to be filled like a vessel, but to contribute something either serious or sportive. He is to listen or talk about such matters as the occasion asks of the company, if they are to find pleasure in each other’s society. An inferior dish may be put aside, and if a wine is poor, one may take refuge with the Nymphs.[26] But when your table-companion is an ill-bred bore who gives you a headache, he utterly ruins the enjoyment of any wine or dish or musical entertainment. [Sidenote: 148] Nor have you the resource of an emetic for that kind of annoyance, but in some cases the mutual antipathy lasts all your life, an insulting or angry incident at your wine having resulted in a kind of nausea. Chilon was therefore quite right when, on receiving his invitation yesterday, he only accepted after ascertaining the full list of the guests. As he remarked, when people cannot help going to sea or on a campaign, and a shipmate or tentmate proves disagreeable, they are obliged to put up with him; but no sensible man will form one of an indiscriminate wine-party. The mummy which the Egyptians regularly bring in and exhibit at their parties, bidding you [Sidenote: B] remember that you will very soon be like it, may be an unwelcome and unseasonable boon-companion; yet the custom is not without its point. Even if it may not incite you to drink and enjoy yourself, it does incite to mutual liking and regard. “Life,” it urges, “is short in duration; do not make it long by vexations.”’ After talk of this nature on the way we arrived at the house. As we had anointed ourselves, Thales decided not to take a bath, but proceeded to visit and inspect the race-tracks, the wrestling-grounds, and the handsomely decorated park along the shore. Not that he was greatly taken with anything of that kind, but he would not appear to despise or slight Periander’s display [Sidenote: C] of public spirit. The other guests, as soon as each had anointed himself or bathed, were being led by the servants through the cloister into the dining-room. Anacharsis, however, was seated in the cloister, and in front of him stood a girl, who was parting his hair with her hands. Upon her running to meet Thales in the frankest possible manner, he kissed her and said with a laugh, ‘That’s right: make our foreign visitor beautiful, so that he may not frighten us by looking like a savage, when he is really a most civilized person.’ Upon my asking him who the child was, he replied, ‘Don’t you know the wise and far-famed [Sidenote: D] Eumetis? That, by the way, is her father’s name for her, though most people call her Cleobuline, after him.’ ‘I presume,’ said Niloxenus, ‘your compliment refers to the girl’s cleverness in constructing riddles. Some of her puzzles have found their way as far as Egypt.’ ‘Not at all,’ rejoined Thales. ‘Those are merely the dice with which, on occasion, she plays a match for fun in conversation. There is more in her than that: an admirable spirit, a practical intellect, and an amiable character, by which she renders her father’s rule over his fellow country-men more gentle and popular.’ ‘Yes,’ remarked Niloxenus, ‘one [Sidenote: E] can see it by looking at her simplicity and unpretentiousness. But how is it she is attending to Anacharsis so affectionately?’ ‘Because,’ was the answer, ‘he is a man of virtue and learning, and has given her zealous and ungrudging instruction in the Scythian manner of dieting and purging the sick. I should say that at the present moment, while looking after the gentleman so amiably, she is getting some lesson and talking it over.’ As we were just approaching the dining-room, we were met by Alexidemus of Miletus, the natural son of the despot Thrasybulus. [Sidenote: F] He was coming out in a state of excitement and angrily muttering something which conveyed no meaning to us. When he saw Thales he collected himself a little, stopped, and said: ‘Look how we have been insulted by Periander! He would not allow me to take ship home when I was anxious to do so, but begged me to stay for the dinner; and, when I come to it, he assigns me a degrading place at table, and lets Aeolians, islanders, and goodness knows whom, take precedence of Thrasybulus. For since I was commissioned by Thrasybulus, it is evident that, in my person, he means to insult and humiliate [Sidenote: 149] him, by treating him as if he were nobody.’ ‘I see,’ said Thales, ‘what you are afraid of. In Egypt they say of the stars, according to their increase or decrease of altitude in the regions they traverse, that they become ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than themselves. You are afraid that in your own case your place at table may mean a similar loss of brightness and eminence, and you propose to show less spirit than the Lacedaemonian, who, upon being put by the director in the last place in a chorus, remarked, “A capital way of making even this place one of honour.” When we take our places,’ continued Thales, ‘we should not ask who have seats above us, but how we are to make ourselves agreeable to our immediate neighbours. As a means of immediately securing a beginning of friendly feeling on their part, we should cultivate, [Sidenote: B] or rather bring with us, instead of irritation, a tone of satisfaction at being placed in such good company. The man who is annoyed with his place at table is more annoyed with his next neighbour than with his host, and he earns the dislike of both.’ ‘That,’ retorted Alexidemus, ‘is mere talk. In practice I notice that even you sages are greedy for precedence’—and therewith he passed us and went off. Upon our expressing surprise at the man’s peculiar behaviour, Thales said, ‘A crazy person, constitutionally wrong-headed. When he was still a mere lad and a quantity of valuable perfume had been presented to Thrasybulus, he emptied it into a big wine-cooler, poured in some neat wine, and drank it off, thereby bringing ill-odour upon [Sidenote: C] Thrasybulus instead of the contrary.’ At this point an attendant came up and said, ‘Periander requests you to take Thales here along with you and examine an object which has just been brought to him, to see whether it is a mere matter of accident or signifies something portentous. He appears himself to be greatly agitated, regarding it as a pollution, and as a smirch upon the festival.’ Whereupon he proceeded to lead us to one of the apartments off the garden. Here a youth, apparently a herdsman, still beardless and with considerable handsomeness of person, opened a leather wrapper and displayed a baby thing which he told us was the offspring of a mare. The upper parts, as far as the neck and arms, were human, the lower parts equine; its voice when it cried was that [Sidenote: D] of a new-born child. Niloxenus, exclaiming ‘Heaven help us!’ turned away from the sight; but Thales took a prolonged look at the young fellow, and with a smile remarked—in accordance with his regular habit of twitting me in connexion with my profession—‘I suppose, Diocles, you are thinking of setting your purifications to work and giving trouble to the averting powers, in the belief that a great and terrible thing has happened?’ ‘Of course I am, Thales,’ said I, ‘for the token indicates strife and discord, and I am afraid it may affect no less a matter than marriage and its issue. As you see, before we have expiated the original offence, the goddess is giving warning of a second.’ [Sidenote: E] To this Thales made no answer, but began to move off—laughing. Upon Periander coming to the door to meet us, and putting questions as to what we had seen, Thales turned from me, took him by the hand, and said: ‘Anything Diocles bids you do, you will perform at your leisure. My own advice is to be more careful as to your herdsmen.’ On hearing this speech Periander appeared to be greatly delighted, for he burst out laughing and hugged and kissed Thales, who observed: ‘I should say, Diocles, that the sign has found its fulfilment already; for you see what a serious misfortune has befallen us in the [Sidenote: F] refusal of Alexidemus to be present at dinner.’ When we had actually entered the room, Thales, speaking in a louder tone, said: ‘And where was the seat to which the gentleman objected?’ Upon the place being pointed out, he went round and occupied it himself, taking me with him, and remarking: ‘Why, I would have paid something for the [Sidenote: 150] privilege of sharing the same table with Ardalus.’ The Ardalus in question was a Troezenian, a flute-player and priest of the Ardalian Muses, whose worship was established by the original Ardalus of Troezen. Thereupon Aesop—who happened to have arrived recently on a simultaneous mission from Croesus to Periander and to the god at Delphi, and was present on a low stool close to where Solon was reclining above—said, ‘A Lydian mule, having caught sight of his reflection in a river and conceived an admiration for the size and beauty of his body, gave a toss of his mane and set out to run like a horse; but after a while, reflecting that he was the son of an ass, he quickly [Sidenote: B] stopped his career and dropped his pride and conceit.’ At this Chilon, speaking in broad Laconian, observed: ‘Ye’re slow yersel, an’ ye’re running the mule’s gait.’ At this point Melissa came in and reclined beside Periander, whereas Eumetis sat at her dinner. Thales, addressing me—I was on the couch above Bias—said: ‘Diocles, why don’t you inform Bias that our visitor from Naucratis has come to him again with royal problems to solve, so that he may be sober and capable of looking after himself when he receives the communication?’ Bias replied: ‘Nay, our friend here has been trying for a long time to frighten me with that warning. But I am aware that, besides his other capacities, Dionysus is styled _Solver_[27] in right of wisdom. I feel [Sidenote: C] no fear, therefore, that my being “filled with the god” will cause me to make a less hopeful fight of it.’ While jokes of this kind were passing between these great men over their dinner, I was noticing that the meal was unusually frugal, and I was led to meditate on the fact that to invite and entertain wise and good men means no additional expense, but rather a curtailment of it, since it eliminates fancy dishes, out-of-the-way perfumes and sweetmeats, and lavish decantings of costly wines. Though Periander, being a despot and a person [Sidenote: D] of wealth and power, indulged in such things pretty nearly every day, on this occasion he was trying to impress the company with a show of simplicity and modest expenditure. He put aside and out of sight not only the display usually made in other things, but also that used by his wife, whom he made present herself in modest and inexpensive attire. The tables were removed; Melissa caused garlands to be distributed; and we poured libations. After the flute-girl had played a short piece to accompany them, and had then withdrawn, Ardalus, addressing Anacharsis, asked if there were any flute-girls among the Scythians. Instantly he replied, ‘No, nor [Sidenote: E] yet vines.’ When Ardalus rejoined: ‘Well, but the Scythians have gods;’ ‘Quite true,’ said he: ‘gods who understand human language. We are not like the Greeks, who imagine they speak better than the Scythians, and yet believe that the gods would rather listen to pieces of bone and wood.’ ‘Ah,’ said Aesop, ‘what if you knew, Sir Visitor, that the present-day flute-makers have given up using the bones of fawns and have taken to those of asses? They maintain that these sound better—a fact which explains Cleobuline’s riddle upon the Phrygian flute: [Sidenote: F] _With a shin that was horned Did an ass that was dead Deal a blow on my ear._ It is a wonderful thing that the ass, who is otherwise particularly crass and unmusical, should supply us with a bone particularly fine and melodious.’ ‘Now that,’ said Niloxenus, ‘is precisely the objection which the Busirites bring against us of Naucratis; for asses’ bones for flutes are already in use with us. With them, on the contrary, it is profanation even to listen to a trumpet, because it sounds like the bray of an ass. You know, I presume, that the ass is treated contemptuously by the Egyptians because of Typhon?’ A silence here occurred, and, as Periander perceived that Niloxenus, though eager to enter upon the subject, was shy [Sidenote: 151] of doing so, he said: ‘To my mind, gentlemen, it is a commendable practice, whether of community or ruler, to take the business of strangers first and of citizens afterwards. On the present occasion, therefore, I propose that for a short time we suspend any topics of our own, as being local and familiar, and that we treat ourselves as an Assembly and ‘grant an audience’ to those royal communications from Egypt, of which our excellent friend Niloxenus is the bearer to Bias, and which Bias desires that you should join him in considering.’ ‘Yes,’ said Bias: ‘for where, or with whom, could one more readily face the risk—if it must be faced—of answering in a case like this, especially when the king’s instructions are that, though [Sidenote: B] the matter is to begin with me, it is to go the round of you all?’ Niloxenus thereupon offered him the document, but Bias bade him open it himself and read every word to the whole company. The contents of the letter were to the following effect:

_The King of Ethiopia is engaged in matching his wits against mine. Hitherto he has had the worst of it, but has finally concocted a terrible poser in the shape of a command that I should ‘drink up the sea’. If I meet it with a solution, I am to have a number of his villages and towns. If not, I am to surrender the cities in the neighbourhood of Elephantine. Do you, therefore, take the matter [Sidenote: C] in hand and send Niloxenus back to me at once. Any return which friends or countrymen of yours require from me will be made without hesitation on my part._ This part of the letter having been read, Bias was not long in answering. After a few moments of meditation and a brief conversation with Cleobulus, who was close to him at table, he said: ‘Do you mean to say, my friend from Naucratis, that Amasis, though reigning over so many subjects and possessed of so large and excellent a country, will be ready to drink up the sea in order to win a few miserable insignificant villages?’ ‘Take it that he will, Bias,’ replied Niloxenus, ‘and consider how it can be done.’ ‘Very well then,’ said he: ‘let him tell [Sidenote: D] the Ethiopian _to stop the rivers that run into the ocean, while he is himself drinking up the sea at present existing_. The command applies to the sea as it is, not as it is to be later on.’ Bias no sooner made this speech than Niloxenus was so delighted that he rushed to embrace and kiss him. After the rest of the company had cheered and applauded, Chilon said with a laugh, ‘Sir Visitor from Naucratis, before the sea is all drunk up and lost, set sail and tell Amasis not to be asking how to make away with all that brine, but rather how to render his kingship sweet and drinkable for his subjects. Bias is a past master at teaching [Sidenote: E] such a lesson, and, if Amasis learns it, he will have no further occasion for his golden footpan[28] in dealing with the Egyptians. They will all be courting and making much of him for his goodness, even if he is declared to be of a thousand times lower birth than he actually is.’ ‘Yes, and by the way,’ said Periander, ‘it would be a good thing if all—“man after man”, as Homer has it—were to contribute a similar offering to His Majesty. A bonus of the kind thrown in would not only make the returns on his venture more valuable to him, but would also be the best thing in the world for us.’ Chilon thereupon asserted that Solon was the right man to [Sidenote: F] make a beginning on the subject, not only because he was senior to all the rest and was in the place of honour at the table, but because, having legislated for the Athenians, he held the greatest and completest position as a ruler. At this Niloxenus remarked quietly to me, ‘People believe a good deal that is false, Diocles; and they mostly take a delight in inventing for themselves, and in accepting with avidity from others, mischievous stories about wise men. For instance, it was reported [Sidenote: 152] to us in Egypt that Chilon had cancelled his friendship and his relations of hospitality with Solon, because Solon declared that laws were alterable.’ At this I answered, ‘The story is ridiculous; for in that case Chilon ought to begin by disclaiming Lycurgus and all his laws, as having altered the whole Lacedaemonian constitution.’ After a brief delay Solon said: ‘In my opinion a king or despot would win most renown _by furnishing his fellow-citizens with a popular, in place of a monarchical, government_.’ The second to speak was Bias, who said: ‘_By identifying his behaviour with the laws of his country._’ Thales came next with the statement that he considered a ruler happy ‘_if he died naturally of old age_‘. Fourth Anacharsis: ‘_If good sense never failed him._’ [Sidenote: *] Fifth Cleobulus: ‘_If he trusted none of those about him._’ Sixth Pittacus: ‘_If the ruler could get his subjects to fear, not him, but [Sidenote: B] for him._’ Next Chilon said that ‘_the ruler’s conceptions should never be mortal, but always immortal_‘. After hearing these dicta, we claimed that Periander himself should express an opinion. With anything but cheerfulness, and pulling a serious face, he replied: ‘Well, the opinion I have to add is that every one of the views stated practically disqualifies a man of sense from being a ruler.’ Whereupon Aesop, as if in a spirit of reproof, said, ‘You ought, of course, to have discussed this subject by yourselves, and not to have delivered an attack upon rulers under pretence of being their advisers and friends.’ [Sidenote: C] ‘Don’t you think,’ said Solon, taking him by the head and smiling, ‘that one can make a ruler more moderate and a despot more reasonable by persuading him that it is better to decline such a position than to hold it?’ ‘And pray who,’ he replied, ‘is likely to follow you in the matter rather than the God, whose opinion is given in the oracle delivered to yourself: _Blessèd the city that hearkens to one commander’s proclaiming._’ ‘True,’ said Solon, ‘but, as a matter of fact, the Athenians, though with a popular government, do listen to one proclaimer [Sidenote: D] and ruler in the shape of the law. You have a wonderful gift at understanding ravens and jackdaws, but your hearing of the [Sidenote: *] voice of modesty is indistinct. While you think that a state is best off when it listens, as the God says, to “one”, you believe that the best convivial party is that in which everybody talks on every subject.’ ‘Yes,’ said Aesop, ‘for you have not yet legislated to the effect that “_a slave shall not get tipsy_” is to stand on the same footing with those Athenian ordinances of yours which say “_a slave shall not indulge in love or in dry-rubbing with oil_”.’[29] At this Solon broke into a laugh, and Cleodorus the physician remarked: ‘But, in one respect, talking when the wine is taking effect does stand on the same footing with dry-rubbing—it is very pleasant.’ ‘Consequently,’ [Sidenote: E] broke in Chilon, ‘it is the more to be avoided.’ ‘Yes,’ said Aesop again,[30] ‘Thales did appear to recommend getting old as quickly as possible.’ Periander laughed, and said: ‘Aesop, we have been properly punished for dropping into other questions before bringing forward the whole of those from Amasis, as we proposed. Pray look at the rest of the letter, Niloxenus, and take advantage of the gentlemen being all here together.’ ‘As for that,’ replied Niloxenus, ‘whereas the command sent by the Ethiopian can only be called a “doleful [Sidenote: F] dispatch”—as Archilochus would say—your friend Amasis has shown a fine and more civilized taste in setting such problems. He bade him name the oldest thing, the most beautiful, the greatest, the wisest, the most universal, and—not stopping there—the most beneficent, the most harmful, the most powerful, and the easiest.’ ‘Well, and did his answers give the solution in each case?’ ‘His replies were these,’ said Niloxenus. ‘It is [Sidenote: 153] for you to listen and judge; for the king is very anxious neither to be guilty of pettifogging with the answers, nor to let any slip on the part of the answerer escape without refutation. I will read you the replies as given. _What is the oldest thing?_—_Time._ _What the greatest?_—_The universe._ _What the wisest?_—_Truth._ _What the most beautiful?_—_Light._ _What the most universal?_—_Death._ _What the most beneficent?_—_God._ _What the most harmful?_—_Evil genius._ _What the strongest?_—_Fortune._ _What the easiest?_—_That which is pleasant._’ Well, Nicarchus, after the reading of this second passage there was a silence. Then Thales asked Niloxenus if Amasis was satisfied with the solutions. Upon his replying that he had [Sidenote: B] accepted some, but was dissatisfied with others, Thales said, ‘And yet not one of them is unassailable. There are great blunders and signs of ignorance all through. For instance, how can Time be the oldest thing, seeing that, while some of it is past and some present, some of it is future? Time which is to come after us must be regarded as younger than the events and persons of the present. Again, to call Truth wisdom appears to me as bad as making out that the light is the eye. Next, if he considered Light beautiful—as indeed it is—how came he to ignore the sun? As for the rest, the answer concerning gods and evil spirits is bold and dangerous, while in that [Sidenote: C] concerning Fortune the logic is exceedingly bad. Fortune would not be so readily upset if it was the strongest and most powerful thing in existence. Nor yet again is Death the most universal thing, for in the case of the living it has no existence. However, to avoid seeming merely to criticize the work of others, let us express views of our own and compare them with his. I am ready to be the first to be questioned point by point, if Niloxenus so desires.’ In relating the questions and answers I will put them exactly as they occurred. _What is the oldest thing?_ ‘_God_,’ said Thales: ‘for He is without birth.’ _What is greatest?_ ‘_Space_: for [Sidenote: D] while the universe contains everything else, it is space that contains the universe.’ _What is most beautiful?_ ‘_The cosmos_: for everything duly ordered is part of it.’ _What is wisest?_ ‘_Time_: for it is Time that has either discovered things or will discover them.’ _What most universal?_ ‘_Expectation_: for those who have nothing else have that.’ _What most beneficent?_ ‘_Virtue_: for it makes other things beneficent by using them rightly.’ _What most harmful?_ ‘_Vice_: for most things suffer from its presence.’ _What most powerful?_ ‘_Necessity_: for it is invincible.’ _What most easy?_ ‘_The natural_; not pleasure, for people often fail to cope with that.’ The whole company being satisfied with Thales and his [Sidenote: E] acumen, Cleodorus observed: ‘It is questions and answers of this kind, Niloxenus, that are proper for kings. On the other hand, the barbarian who gave Amasis the sea to drink, required the short answer made by Pittacus to Alyattes, when he wrote the Lesbians a letter containing an arrogant command. The reply was merely a recommendation to eat onions and hot bread.’[31] Here Periander joined in; ‘I may remind you, Cleodorus, that even in old times the Greeks had a habit of posing each [Sidenote: F] other with similar difficulties. We are told, for instance, that there was a gathering at Chalcis of the most distinguished poets among the wise men of the day, in order to celebrate the funeral of Amphidamas—a great warrior who had given much trouble to the Eretrians and had fallen in the fighting for Lelantum. The verses composed by the poets were so well matched, that it became a difficult and troublesome matter to judge between them, and the reputation of the competitors—Homer and Hesiod—caused the jury much diffidence and [Sidenote: 154] embarrassment. Thereupon they had recourse to questions of the present kind, and Homer—as Lesches tells us—propounded the following: _Tell me, Muse, of such things as neither before have befallen, Nor shall hereafter befall?_ To which Hesiod instantly replied: _When in eager pursuit of the prize the chariots, one ’gainst the other Are dashed by the ringing-hoof’d steeds round the tomb where Zeus lieth buried._ This answer, it is said, won particular admiration and secured him the tripod.’ ‘But pray what is the difference,’ asked Cleodorus, ‘between such questions and Eumetis’s riddles? It is no doubt right [Sidenote: B] enough for her to set women such puzzles by way of amusement, constructing them as other women plait their bits of girdles or hair-nets. But for sensible men to treat them with any seriousness is absurd.’ Eumetis would apparently have liked to make some retort, but she was too shy, and checked herself, her face mantled with blushes. ‘Nay,’ said Aesop, by way of championing her, ‘it is surely more absurd to be unable to solve them. Take for example the one she set us just before dinner: _I saw a man glue bronze on a man; with fire did he glue it._ Can you tell me what that means?’ ‘No, and I don’t want [Sidenote: C] to be told either,’ answered Cleodorus. ‘And yet,’ said Aesop, ‘no one is so familiar with the thing, or does it so well, as you. If you deny it, cupping-glasses[32] will bear me out.’ At this Cleodorus laughed, for he made more use of cupping-glasses than any medical man of the day, and the estimation in which that remedy is held is especially due to him. ‘I beg to ask, Periander,’ said Mnesiphilus the Athenian, a close friend and admirer of Solon, ‘that the conversation, like the wine, shall not be limited to wealth or rank, but shall be put on a democratic footing and made to concern all alike. In what has just been [Sidenote: D] said about wealth and kingship there is nothing for us commoners. We think, therefore, that you should take a government with equal rights, and each of you again contribute some opinion, beginning once more with Solon.’ It was decided that this should be done. First came Solon. ‘Well, Mnesiphilus, you, like every other Athenian, have heard what opinion I hold about such a government. But if you desire to hear it again now, it seems to me that a community is in the soundest condition, and its popular government most securely maintained, _when the wrongdoer is accused and punished quite as much by those who [Sidenote: E] have not been wronged as by the man that has_.’ The second to speak was Bias, who said that the best popular government is ‘_that in which every one fears the law as he would a despot_.’ Next came Thales with ‘_that in which there are no citizens either too rich or too poor_.’ Anacharsis followed with ‘_that in which, while everything else is treated as equal, superiority is determined by virtue and inferiority by vice_.’ In the fifth place Cleobulus affirmed that a democracy is most soundly conducted ‘_when its public men are more afraid of blame than of the law_‘. Sixth, Pittacus: ‘_Where the bad are not permitted to hold office and the [Sidenote: F] good are not permitted to decline it._’ Last of all Chilon expressed the view that the best free government is ‘_that which pays least attention to the orators and most to the laws_.’ Periander once more summed up at the end by saying that they all appeared to him to be praising ‘that democratic government which most resembled an aristocratic.’ Upon the conclusion of this second discussion I begged that they would also tell us the proper way to deal with a household; ‘for while there are few who are at the helm of a kingdom or a commonwealth, we all play our parts in the hearth and home.’ [Sidenote: 155] At this Aesop said with a laugh: ‘No! not if in “all” you include Anacharsis. He has no home, but actually prides himself on being homeless, and on using a wagon—in the same way as they tell us the sun roams about in a chariot, occupying first one and then another region of the sky.’ ‘Yes,’ retorted Anacharsis, ‘and that is why, unlike any other—or more than any other—god, he is free and independent, ruling all and ruled by none, but always playing the king and holding the reins. You, however, fail to realize the surpassing beauty and marvellous [Sidenote: B] size of his car, otherwise you would not have tried to raise a laugh by jocosely comparing it with ours. It seems to me, Aesop, that to you a home means those coverings of yours made by clay and wood and tiles. You might as well regard a “snail” as meaning the shell instead of the animal. It is therefore natural that you should find cause to laugh at Solon, when he beheld all the costly splendour in the house of Croesus and yet refused to declare off-hand that its possessor was happy and blessed in his home; “for”—he argued—“I am more desirous of looking at the fine things in the man than at those in his house.” It appears, moreover, that you have forgotten your own fox. That animal, when she and the leopard were engaged in a dispute as to which was the more “cunningly marked”, begged the judge to examine her on the inside, inasmuch as she would be found to possess more “marks of cunning” from that point of view. But you go inspecting the productions of carpenters [Sidenote: C] and stone-masons, and regarding those as the “home”, instead of the inward and domestic constituents in the case—the children, wife, friends, and servants. If these have good sense and good morals, a man who shares his best means with them possesses a good and happy home, even if it be but an ant-hill or a bird’s-nest.’ ‘That,’ he continued, ‘is my answer to Aesop and my contribution to Diocles. But it is only fair that each of the others should express his own views.’ Thereupon Solon said that in his opinion the best household was ‘_that in which the resources are acquired without dishonesty, [Sidenote: D] watched over without distrust, and expended without repentance_‘. According to Bias it was ‘_that inside which the master behaves for his own sake as well as he does outside for the law’s sake_‘. According to Thales, ‘_that in which the master can find most time to himself_‘. According to Cleobulus, ‘_where the master has more who love than fear him_.’ Pittacus would have it that the best house is ‘_that which wants no luxury and lacks no necessity_‘. Chilon’s view was that the house should be ‘_as like as possible to a state ruled by a king_‘, and he went on to observe that when some one urged Lycurgus to establish a republic at Sparta, he [Sidenote: E] answered: ‘You begin by creating a republic at home.’ This topic also having been dealt with, Eumetis left the room in company with Melissa. Periander then pledged Chilon in a capacious goblet, and Chilon in turn pledged Bias. At this Ardalus got up, and, addressing Aesop, said: ‘Perhaps you will be good enough to pass yonder cup on to us, seeing that these gentlemen are passing theirs to each other, as if it were a Bathycles’s goblet,[33] and are giving no one else a turn.’ ‘Nay,’ [Sidenote: F] replied Aesop, ‘there is to be nothing democratic about this cup either, for Solon has been keeping it all to himself for quite an age.’ Thereupon Pittacus, addressing Mnesiphilus, asked why Solon, by not drinking, was testifying against the verses in which he had written _Now do I welcome the tasks of the Cyprus-born goddess and Bacchus, And tasks of the Muses that bring cheer to the heart of mankind._ ‘Because,’ said Anacharsis, before Mnesiphilus could speak, ‘he is frightened at that cruel law of your own, Pittacus, where the words run, _If any one commit any offence when drunk, the penalty to be double that paid by a man who was sober._’ ‘And you,’ retorted Pittacus, ‘showed such wanton contempt of the law that last year, when you had got intoxicated at that [Sidenote: 156] party at Delphi, you asked for a prize and a victor’s wreath.’ ‘And why not?’ asked Anacharsis. ‘A prize was offered to him who drank most, and, since I was the first to get tipsy, I, of course, claimed the reward of victory. Otherwise will you gentlemen tell me what is the end and aim of drinking a large quantity of unmixed wine, if it is not to get intoxicated?’ Pittacus laughed, while Aesop told the following story. ‘A wolf, having seen some shepherds eating a sheep in a tent, came close up to them, and said: “What a to-do you would have made if _I_ had been doing that!”’ At this Chilon remarked, ‘Aesop has properly taken his revenge. A moment ago we put the muzzle on him, and now he sees that others have taken the words out of Mnesiphilus’ mouth. It was Mnesiphilus who was requested to answer on behalf of Solon.’ ‘Well, in doing so,’ said Mnesiphilus, ‘I speak with knowledge. In Solon’s opinion [Sidenote: B] the concern of every art and faculty of man or God is with results rather than with agencies, the end rather than the means. A weaver, I take it, would consider his object to be a cloak or mantle rather than the arrangement of his shuttle-rods or the picking-up of his straightening-stones. To a blacksmith it is rather the welding of iron and putting an edge on an axe than any of the processes necessary thereto, such as the kindling of his charcoal or the preparation of lime. Still more would a master-builder object if, instead of a ship or a house, we declared his object to be the boring of wood or the mixing of mortar. The Muses would utterly scout the notion that their [Sidenote: C] concern is with a harp or flute, instead of with the cultivation of character and the soothing of the emotions of their votaries by means of melodies properly attuned. So—to come to the point—the object of Aphrodite is not sexual intercourse, nor that of Dionysus wine and tipsiness, but the friendly feeling, the longing, the companionship, and the close mutual understanding which they produce in us by those agencies. These are what Solon calls divine “tasks”, and he means that these are the objects which he appreciates and cultivates in his old age. Of reciprocal affection between men and women Aphrodite is the creator, using pleasure as the means of melting and commingling their souls at the same time with their bodies; while in ordinary cases, where persons are not very intimate or particularly acquainted, Dionysus uses wine as a kind of fire to soften and supple their dispositions, and so provides a starting-point towards a blending in mutual friendship. ‘But when such men meet together as Periander has invited in your persons, there is no need, I take it, of the goblet and the wine-ladle. The Muses set before you all, in the form of conversation, a mixing-bowl containing no intoxicant and yet abundance of pleasure, grave or gay. In this they stir friendly feeling, blend it, and pour it forth, while for the most part the [Sidenote: E] ladle is allowed to lie undisturbed “above the bowl”—a thing which Hesiod forbids where the company is better qualified for drinking than for conversation.’ ‘As for pledging one another,’ he continued, ‘I gather that with the ancients the ceremony consisted of one large goblet going the round, each man drinking a measured “allowance” (as Homer tells us), and then letting his neighbour take his share, as he would do with a sacrificial portion.’ When Mnesiphilus had finished, the poet Chersias—who had ceased to be under censure and had lately been reconciled to [Sidenote: F] Periander through Chilon’s intercession—remarked, ‘Are we also to understand that, when the gods were the guests of Zeus and were pledging each other, he poured in their drink by measure, as Agamemnon did for his chieftains?’ ‘And pray, Chersias,’ said Cleodorus, ‘if Zeus has his ambrosia brought—as you poets say he does—by doves which find the greatest difficulty in flying over the Clashing Rocks, don’t you think [Sidenote: 157] that his nectar is also scarce and hard to get, and that consequently he is sparing of it and doles it out economically?’ ‘Perhaps so,’ replied Chersias. ‘Since, however, the question of household economy has again been mooted, perhaps some one will deal with the remainder of the question. And that, I take it, is to discover what amount of property will be sufficient to meet all needs.’ ‘To the wise man,’ said Cleobulus, ‘the law has supplied the standard; but in reference to weak characters I will repeat a story which my daughter told her brother. The Moon, she said, asked her mother to weave a tunic to fit her; whereat the mother answered, “How can I possibly [Sidenote: B] weave one to fit? At one time I see you as a full moon, at another as a crescent, and at another gibbous.” Similarly, my dear Chersias, there is no way of determining the amount of means requisite for a weak and foolish person. His wants vary with his appetites and experiences, his case being that of Aesop’s dog, of whom our friend says that in winter he huddled and curled himself up with the cold, and contemplated making a house; but in summer it was different; he stretched himself out when he slept, thought himself a big fellow, and decided that it was both a laborious and an unnecessary task to build so large a house to cover him. Don’t you observe, Chersias’—he went on—‘that even insignificant people, though they will at one moment draw themselves into a very modest compass, with the idea of living a close and simple Spartan life, at another [Sidenote: C] time will fancy they are going to die of want unless they have all the money in the world—all the king’s and all the private people’s?’ Chersias having nothing to say, Cleodorus joined in. ‘Well, but,’ he said, ‘I perceive that there is no equal distribution in the properties which even you sages respectively possess.’ ‘Yes, my dear sir,’ said Cleobulus, ‘because the law, like a weaver, allots us the amount which properly and reasonably fits each case. In your own profession, substituting reason for law, you feed [Sidenote: D] and diet and physic the sick by prescribing, not the same quantity for everybody, but the proper quantity for each case.’ Here Ardalus interposed. ‘I suppose, then,’ he asked, ‘it is at the bidding of some law that Epimenides—the friend of you gentlemen and the guest of Solon—abstains from other kinds of food and passes the day without breakfast or dinner by merely putting in his mouth a little of that “anti-hunger essence” which he makes up for himself?’ This remark having arrested the attention of the party, Thales mockingly observed that Epimenides was a sensible man for refusing to be troubled—as [Sidenote: E] Pittacus was—with grinding and cooking his own food. ‘You must know,’ he said, ‘that when I was at Eresus, I heard my hostess singing to the mill: _Grind, mill, grind; For Pittacus is grinding, As he kings it over great Mytilene._’ Then Solon expressed his surprise that Ardalus had not read the law ordaining the diet in question, seeing that it was written in the verses of Hesiod. ‘For it is he who first supplied Epimenides with hints for that form of nourishment, by teaching him to make trial [Sidenote: F] _How great and sustaining the food that in mallow and asphodel lieth._ ‘Nay,’ said Periander, ‘do you imagine Hesiod conceived of anything of the kind? Don’t you suppose that, with his habitual praise of economy, he is merely urging us to try the most frugal dishes as being the most agreeable? The mallow makes good eating, and asphodel-stalk is sweet; but I am told that anti-hunger and anti-thirst drugs—for they are drugs rather than foods—include among their ingredients some sort of foreign honey and cheese, and a large number of seeds which are difficult to procure. Most certainly, therefore, Hesiod would find that the “_rudder_” hung “_above the smoke_” and _The works of the drudging mules and the oxen’s labour would perish_, [Sidenote: 158] if all that provision is to be made. I am surprised, Solon, if your guest, on recently making his great purification of Delos, failed to note how they present to the temple—as commemorative samples of the earliest form of food—mallow and asphodel-stalk along with other cheap and self-grown produce. The natural reason for which Hesiod also recommends them to us is that they are simple and frugal.’ ‘Not only so,’ remarked Anacharsis, ‘but both vegetables bear the highest possible character for wholesomeness.’ ‘You are quite right,’ said Cleodorus. ‘That Hesiod possessed medical knowledge is manifest from the careful and well-informed manner in which he speaks about diet, the mixing of wine, good quality in water, [Sidenote: B] bathing, women, and the way to seat infants. But it seems to me that there is more reason for Aesop to declare himself a pupil of Hesiod than there is for Epimenides. It is to the speech of the hawk to the nightingale that our friend owes the first promptings to his admirably subtle wisdom in many tongues. But for my part I should be glad to hear what Solon has to say. We may assume that, in his long association with Epimenides at Athens, he asked him what motive or subtle purpose he had in adopting such a diet.’ ‘What need was there to ask him that question?’ replied Solon. ‘It was self-evident that the next best thing to the [Sidenote: C] supreme and greatest good is to require the least possible food. You allow, I suppose, that the greatest good is to require no food at all?’ ‘Not I, by any means,’ answered Cleodorus, ‘if I am to say what I think, especially with a table in front of us. Take away food, and you take away the table—that is to say, the altar of the Gods of Friendship and Hospitality. As Thales tells us that, if you do away with the earth, the whole cosmos will fall into confusion, so the abolition of food means the dissolution of house and home. For with it you do away with the hearth-fire, the hearth, the wine-bowl, all entertainment and hospitality—the most humanizing and essential elements in our mutual relations. Or rather you do away with the whole of life, if life is “_a passing of the time on the part [Sidenote: D] of a human being involving a series of actions_”, most of those actions being evoked by the need, and in the acquirement, of food. Of immense importance, my good friend, is the question [Sidenote: *] of mere agriculture. Let agriculture perish, and the earth that it leaves us becomes unsightly and foul, a corrupt wilderness of barren forest and vagabond streams. The ruin of agriculture means the ruin of all arts and crafts as well; for she takes the lead of them, and provides them with their basis and their [Sidenote: E] material. Do away with her, and they count for nothing. There is an end also to our honouring the gods. Men will thank the Sun but little, and the Moon still less, for mere light and warmth. Where will you find altar or sacrifice to Zeus of the Rain, Demeter of the Plough, or Poseidon the Fosterer of Plants? How can Dionysus be Boon-Giver, if we need nothing that he gives? What sacrifice or libation shall we make? What offering of firstfruits? All this means the overthrow and confounding of our most important interests. Though to cling to every pleasure in every case is to be a madman, to avoid every pleasure in every case is to be a block. By all means let the soul have [Sidenote: F] other pleasures of a superior kind to enjoy; the body can find no pleasure more right and proper than that derived from taking food. All the world recognizes the fact, for this pleasure people take openly, sharing with each other in the table and the banquet, whereas their amorous pleasure is screened by night and all the darkness possible. To share that pleasure with others is considered as shameless and brutelike as it is not to share in the case of the table.’ Here, as Cleodorus paused for a moment, I joined in: ‘And is there not another point—that in discarding food we also [Sidenote: 159] discard sleep? If there is no sleep, there is no dreaming either, and we lose our most important means of divination. Moreover, life will be all alike, and there will be practically no purpose in wearing a body round our soul. Most of its parts, and the most important, are provided as instruments to feeding—the tongue, teeth, stomach, and liver. None of them is without its work, and none has other business to attend to. Consequently any one who has no need of food has no need of a body either. Which means that a person has no need of himself; for it is thanks to the body that each of us is a “self”.’ ‘Such,’ I added, ‘are our contributions on behalf of the belly. If Solon or any one else has objections to bring, we will listen.’ ‘Of course I have objections,’ replied Solon. ‘I have no [Sidenote: B] wish to be thought a poorer judge than the Egyptians. After cutting open a dead body, they take out the entrails and expose them to the sunlight. They then throw those parts into the river and proceed to attend to the rest of the body, which is now regarded as purified. Yes, therein in truth lies the pollution of our flesh. It is its Tartarus—like that in Hades—full of “dreadful streams”, a confused medley of wind and fire and of dead things. For while itself lives, nothing that feeds it can be alive. We commit the wrong of murdering animate things and of destroying plants, which can claim to have life through the fact that they feed and grow. I say destroying, because [Sidenote: C] anything that changes from what nature has made it into something else, is destroyed; it must perish utterly in order to become the other’s sustenance. To abstain from eating flesh, as we are told Orpheus did in ancient times, is more a quibble than an avoidance of crime in the matter of food. The only way of avoiding it, and the only way of attaining to justice by a complete purification, is to become self-sufficing and free of external needs. If God has made it impossible for a thing to secure its own preservation without injury to another, He has also endowed it with the principle of injustice in the shape of its own nature. Would it not, therefore, be a good thing, my dear friend, if, when cutting out injustice, we could cut out the belly, the gullet, and the liver, which impart to us no perception [Sidenote: D] of anything noble and no appetite for it, but partly resemble the utensils for cooking butcher’s meat—such as choppers and stew-pans—and partly the apparatus for a bakery—ovens, water-tanks, and kneading-troughs? Indeed, in the case of most [Sidenote: *] people you can see their soul shut up in their body as if in a baker’s mill, and perpetually going round and round at the business of getting food. Take ourselves, for example. Just now we were neither looking at nor listening to one another, but we all had our heads down, slaving at the business of feeding. But now that the tables have been removed, we have—as you perceive—become free, and with garlands on our heads we are [Sidenote: E] engaged in sociable and leisurely conversation together, because we have arrived at the state of not requiring food. Well then, if the state in which we now find ourselves remains as a permanence all our lives, shall we not be at perpetual leisure to enjoy each other’s society? We shall have no fear of poverty. Nor shall we know the meaning of wealth, since the quest for luxuries is but the immediate consequence and concomitant of the use of necessaries. ‘But, thinks Cleodorus, there must be food so that there may be tables and wine-bowls and sacrifices to Demeter and the Maid. Then let some one else demand that there shall be war and fighting, so that we may have fortifications and arsenals and [Sidenote: F] armouries, and also sacrifices in honour of slaying our hundreds, such as they say are the law in Messenia. Another, I suppose, is aggrieved at the prospect of the healthfulness which would follow. A terrible thing if, because there is no illness, there is no more use in soft bedclothes, and no more sacrificing to Asclepius or the Averting Powers, and if medical skill, with all its drugs and implements, must be put away into inglorious hiding! What is the difference between these arguments and the other? Food is, in fact, “taken” as a “remedy” for hunger, and all who use food are said to be “taking care” of [Sidenote: 160] themselves and using some “diet”; and this implies that the act is not a pleasant and agreeable performance, but one which Nature renders compulsory. Certainly one can enumerate more pains than pleasures arising from feeding. Further still; whereas the pleasure affects but a small region of the body, and lasts but a short time, it needs no telling how full we become of ugly and painful experiences through the worry and difficulty of digesting. Homer had these in view, I suppose, when he used as a proof that the gods do not die the fact that they do not feed: _For they eat not the bread of corn, nor drink they the wine that is ruddy, And therefore blood have they none in their veins, and are called the Immortals._ Food, he gives us to understand, is the necessary means not only [Sidenote: B] for living, but for dying. From it come our diseases, feeding themselves with the feeding of our bodies, which suffer quite as much from repletion as from want. Very often it is an easier business to get together our supply of victuals than to make away with them and get quit of them again when once they are in the body. Just suppose it were a question with the Danaids what sort of life they would live and what they would do if they could get rid of their menial labour at filling the cask. When we raise the question, “Supposing it possible to cease from heaping into this unconscionable flesh all these things from [Sidenote: C] land and sea, what are we going to do?” it is because in our ignorance of noble things we are content with the life which our necessities impose. Well, as those who have been in slavery, when they are emancipated, do for themselves and on their own account what they used formerly to do in the service of their masters, so is it with the soul. As things are, it feeds the body with continual toil and trouble; but let it get quit of its menial service, and it will presumably feed itself in the enjoyment of freedom, and will live with an eye to itself and the truth, with nothing to distract and deter it.’ This, Nicarchus, concluded the discussion as to food. While Solon was still speaking, Gorgos, Periander’s brother, entered the room. It happened that, in consequence of certain [Sidenote: D] oracles, he had been sent on a mission to Taenarum in charge of a sacrificial embassy. After we had welcomed him, and Periander had taken him to his arms and kissed him, he sat down by his brother on the couch and gave him a private account of some occurrence which appeared to cause Periander various emotions as he listened to it. At one part he was manifestly vexed, at another indignant; often he showed incredulity, and this was followed by amazement. Finally he laughed and said to us, ‘I should like to tell the company the news; but I have [Sidenote: E] scruples about it, because I heard Thales once say that when a thing is probable we should speak of it, but when it is impossible we should say nothing about it.’ At this Bias interposed, ‘Yes, but here is another wise saying of Thales, that “while we should disbelieve our enemies even in matters believable, we should believe our friends even when the thing is unbelievable”. By enemies I presume he meant the wicked and foolish, and by friends the good and wise.’ ‘Very well then,’ said Periander, ‘you must let every one hear it; or rather you must pit the story you have brought us against those new-fangled dithyrambs and overcrow them.’ Gorgos then told us his story. His sacrificial ceremony had occupied three days, and on the [Sidenote: F] last there was an all-night festival with dancing and frolic by the sea-shore. The sea was covered with the light of the moon, and, though there was no wind, but a dead calm, there appeared in the distance a ripple coming in past the promontory, accompanied by foam and a very appreciable noise of surge. At this they all ran in astonishment down to the place where it was [Sidenote: *] coming to land. This happened so quickly that, before they could guess what was approaching, dolphins were seen, some of them massed together and moving in a ring, some leading the way to the levellest part of the shore, and others as it were [Sidenote: 161] bringing up the rear. In the middle there stood out above the sea, dim and indistinct, the shape of a body being carried. So they came on, until, gathering together and coming to land at the same moment, they put ashore a human being, alive and moving; after which they themselves retired in the direction of the promontory, leaping out of the water more than ever and for some reason, apparently, frolicking and bounding for joy. ‘Many of our number,’ continued Gorgos, ‘fled from the sea in a panic, but a few found the courage to approach along with myself, and discovered that it was Arion, the harp-player. Not only did he utter his own name, but his dress spoke for itself, [Sidenote: B] for he was actually wearing the festal robes which he adopted when performing at the competitions. Well, we brought him to a tent, and, inasmuch as there was nothing the matter with him except that he was evidently tired and overstrained from the rushing motion, we heard him tell a story which no one would believe except us who actually saw the end of it. ‘What Arion told us was this. He had for some time made up his mind to leave Italy, and had been made the more eager to do so by a letter from Periander. Accordingly, when a Corinthian merchant-vessel appeared on the scene, he at once went on board and put to sea. They had a moderate wind for three days, when he perceived that the sailors were forming a plot to make away with him, and was afterwards secretly informed [Sidenote: C] by the pilot that they had resolved to do the deed that night. At this, being helpless and at a loss what to do, he acted upon a kind of heaven-sent impulse. He decided that he would adorn his person and—while still alive—put on his own shroud in the shape of his festal attire. Then, in meeting his death, he would sing a _finale_ to life, and in that respect show no less spirit than the swan does. Accordingly, having dressed himself and given notice that he felt moved to perform the Pythian hymn on behalf of the safety of himself and the ship and crew, [Sidenote: D] he took his stand on the poop by the bulwarks. After some prelude invoking the gods of the sea, he began to sing the piece. Just before he was half-way through, the sun began to set into the sea and the Peloponnese to come into sight. Thereupon the sailors no longer waited for night, but advanced to their murderous deed. Arion, seeing their knives unsheathed and the pilot beginning to cover his face from the sight, ran back and hurled himself as far as possible from the vessel. Before, however, his body had all sunk into the water, a number of dolphins ran under him and bore him up. At first he was filled with bewilderment, distress, and alarm; but when he found himself riding easily, and saw many of them gathering about [Sidenote: E] him in a friendly way, and taking turns at the work as if it were a necessary duty belonging to them all; and when the long distance at which the vessel was left behind showed how great was their speed; he said that what he felt was not so much fear of death or desire of life, as eagerness to be rescued, so that he might become recognized as the object of divine favour, and might have his reputation as a religious man assured. At the same time, observing that the sky was full of stars, and that the moon was rising bright and clear, while the sea [Sidenote: F] on all sides was waveless and a kind of path was being cut for his course, he was led to reflect that Justice has more eyes than one, and that God looks abroad with all those orbs upon whatever deeds are done by land or sea. By these reflections (he told us) he found relief from the weariness which was by this time beginning to weigh upon his body, and when at last, dexterously avoiding and rounding the lofty and precipitous headland which ran out to meet them, they swam close in by the shore and [Sidenote: 162] brought him safely to land like a ship into harbour, he realized beyond doubt that he had been steered on his voyage by the hand of God. ‘When Arion had told us this story,’ continued Gorgos, ‘I asked him where he thought the ship would put in. He answered that it would certainly be at Corinth, but that it was left far behind; for, after throwing himself off it in the evening, he believed he had been carried over sixty miles and a calm had fallen immediately.’ Gorgos added, however, that after ascertaining the names of the captain and pilot, and also the ship’s flag, he had sent out vessels and soldiers to the various landing-places to keep a watch. Moreover, he had Arion with [Sidenote: B] him in hiding, so that they might not hear of his rescue beforehand and make their escape. ‘The event,’ he said, ‘has proved truly miraculous; for no sooner did we arrive here than we learned that the ship had been seized by the soldiers, and the traders and sailors arrested.’ Thereupon Periander ordered Gorgos to get up and go out at once and place the men in custody where no one would approach them or tell them of Arion’s escape. ‘Well now,’ said Aesop, ‘you gentlemen make fun of my jackdaws and crows for talking. Do dolphins behave in this outrageous way?’ To which I replied, ‘A different matter, [Sidenote: C] Aesop! A story to the same effect as this has been believed and written among us for more than a thousand years, ever since the times of Ino and Athamas.’ Solon here interposed: ‘Well, Diodes; let us grant that these events are in the sphere of the divine and beyond us. But what happened to Hesiod is on our own human plane. You have probably heard the story.’ ‘For my part, no,’ I answered. ‘Well, it is worth hearing. Hesiod and a Milesian—I think it was—shared the same room as guests in a house at [Sidenote: D] Locri. The Milesian having been found out in a secret intrigue with the host’s daughter, Hesiod fell under suspicion of having all along known of the offence and helped in concealing it. Though in no way guilty, he fell a victim to cruel circumstance at a critical time of anger and misrepresentation. For the girl’s brothers lay in wait for him at the Nemeum in Locris and killed him, together with his servant, whose name was Troilus. Their bodies having been pushed into the sea, that of Troilus, which was carried out into the current of the river Daphnus, was caught by a low wave-washed rock projecting a little above the water. The rock still bears his name. Meanwhile the [Sidenote: E] dead body of Hesiod was picked up immediately off the shore by a shoal of dolphins, who proceeded to carry it to Rhium, close to Molycrea. It happened that the Locrians were engaged in the Rhian festival and fair, which is still a notable celebration in those parts. At sight of the body being borne towards them they were naturally amazed, and when, on running down to the shore, they recognized the corpse—for it was still fresh—they could think of nothing but tracking out the murder, so high was the renown of Hesiod. Their object was soon achieved. They discovered the murderers, threw them into the sea, and razed their house to the ground. Meanwhile Hesiod was buried near the Nemeum. Most strangers, however, are ignorant of his tomb, which has been concealed because the people of [Sidenote: F] Orchomenus are in quest of it, from a desire, it is said, to recover the remains and bury them in their own country in accordance with an oracle. ‘If, then, dolphins show such affectionate interest in the dead, it is still more natural for them to render help to the living, especially if they have been charmed by the flute or the singing of tunes. For, of course, we are all aware that music is a thing which these animals enjoy and court, swimming and gambolling beside a ship as its oarsmen row to the tune of song and flute in calm weather. They take a delight also in children when [Sidenote: 163] swimming, and they have diving matches with them. Hence there is an unwritten law that they shall not be harmed. No one hunts them or injures them; the only exception being that, when they get into the nets and do mischief to the catch, they are punished with a beating, like naughty children. I further remember hearing some Lesbians tell of a girl having been rescued from the sea by a dolphin. I am not, however, sure as to the exact details, and, since Pittacus knows them, he is the right person to tell us about them.’ Pittacus thereupon assured us that the story had good warrant and was mentioned by many authorities. ‘An oracle was given to the colonizers of Lesbos that, when on the voyage they came across the reef known as Mesogeum, they should then and [Sidenote: B] there throw a bull into the water as an offering to Poseidon, and a live virgin to Amphitrite and the Nereids. There were seven chiefs, all of whom were kings, Echelaus—whom the Pythian oracle had assigned as leader of the colony—making an eighth. Echelaus was still a bachelor. When as many of the seven as had unmarried girls cast lots, the lot fell upon the daughter of Smintheus. Upon getting near the place, they decked her in fine clothes and gold ornaments, and, after offering prayer, were on the point of lowering her into the water. Now it happened that one of the party on the ship—assuredly a gallant young man—was in love with her. His name has been preserved to us as Enalus. This youth, in the passion of the [Sidenote: C] moment, seized by an eager but utterly hopeless desire to succour the girl, darted forward at the right instant and, throwing his arms about her, cast himself along with her into the sea. Now from the first there was spread among the contingent a rumour, lacking certainty, but nevertheless widely believed, that they were safe and had been rescued; and at a later date, it is said, Enalus appeared in Lesbos and told how they had been carried by dolphins through the sea and cast ashore without harm upon the mainland. He had other still more miraculous experiences to tell, which held the crowd spellbound with amazement, but for all of which he gave actual evidence. For when an enormous wave was rushing sheer round [Sidenote: D] the island and people were terrified, he alone ventured to face it. [Sidenote: *] On its retiring, a number of polypi followed him to the temple of Poseidon. From the largest of these he took a stone which it was carrying, and offered it as a dedication. That stone we call Enalus. ‘Speaking generally, the man who knows the difference between impossible and unfamiliar, between unreasonable and unexpected, will be most a man after your own heart, Chilon; he will neither believe nor disbelieve without discrimination, but will carefully observe your own rule of “_nothing in excess_”.’ Anacharsis next made the remark that, as Thales believed [Sidenote: E] all the greatest and most important components of the universe to contain soul, there was no reason to wonder if the most splendid actions were brought to pass by the will of God. ‘For the body is the instrument of the soul, and soul is the instrument of God. And as, though many of the motions of the body proceed from itself, the most and the finest are produced by the soul, so again is it with the soul. While it performs many actions on its own motion, in other cases it is but lending itself, as the aptest of all instruments, to the use of God, for Him to direct and apply it as He chooses. It would,’ said he, ‘be [Sidenote: F] a very strange thing if, while fire, wind, water, clouds, and rain are God’s instruments, by which He often preserves and nourishes and often kills and destroys, He has never on any occasion at all used animals as His agents. On the contrary, it is natural that, in their dependence upon the divine power, they should lend themselves more responsively to motions from God than does the bow to the Scythian or the lyre and flute to the Greek.’ After this the poet Chersias mentioned, among other cases of persons rescued in hopeless situations, that of Cypselus, Periander’s father. When he was a newborn babe, the men who had been sent to make away with him were turned from their purpose because he smiled at them. When they changed their minds and came back to look for him, he was not to be found, his mother having hidden him in a chest. ‘It is for this reason [Sidenote: 164] that Cypselus built the house at Delphi, believing that the god had then stopped him from crying so that he might elude the search.’ At this Pittacus, addressing Periander, observed, ‘I have to thank Chersias, Periander, for mentioning that house; for I have often wanted to ask you the meaning of those frogs which are carved in such large size at the base of the palm-tree. What reference have they to the god or to the dedication?’ Periander having bidden him ask Chersias, who knew the reason and was present when Cypselus consecrated the house, Chersias said with [Sidenote: B] a smile, ‘No: I will give no information until these gentlemen have told me the meaning of their _Nothing in excess_ and _Know thyself_, and of those words which have kept many people from marrying, made many distrustful, and reduced some to positive dumbness—the words _Give a pledge, and Mischief is nigh._’ ‘Why do you need us to tell you that,’ said Pittacus, ‘seeing that you have so long admired the stories in which Aesop practically deals with each of those maxims?’ ‘Nay,’ replied Aesop, ‘he does need it, when he is joking at me. But when he is in earnest, he proves that Homer was their inventor. He says that Hector “knew himself”, inasmuch as, though [Sidenote: C] he attacked the rest, _Ajax, Telamon’s son, he would not fight, but he shunned him_, and that Odysseus recommends “nothing in excess” since he urges Diomede _Nay, prithee, Tydeus’ son; nor praise me much nor reprove me_. As for a pledge, not only is it the general opinion that he is reprobating it as a misguided and futile thing when he says _Sorry, I trow, to take are the pledges that sorry folk offer_, but our friend Chersias here tells us how “Mischief” was hurled from heaven by Zeus because she was present when he was tripped [Sidenote: D] up through pledging his word in connexion with the birth of Heracles.’ Here Solon interposed. ‘Well, Homer was a very wise man, and we should do well to take his advice: _Already the night is here; night bids, and ’tis good to obey her._ Let us therefore pour an offering to the Muses and to Poseidon and Amphitrite, and then—with your permission—break up the party.’ This, Nicarchus, terminated the party on that occasion. Footnote 24: The home of Bias. Footnote 25: According to another account he waited till the shadow was equal in length to the stick. The pyramid was then also equal in height to the length of its shadow. Footnote 26: The divinities of spring-water. Footnote 27: The title _Lusios_ or _Luaios_ was popularly interpreted Deliverer (from care or difficulty). Footnote 28: See note on _Amasis_. Footnote 29: i.e. anointing himself, not in connexion with bathing, but with exercise in the wrestling-schools. Footnote 30: The precise remark is uncertain, the text here being corrupt. Footnote 31: Equivalent to a command to ‘go weep’. Footnote 32: In antiquity these vessels were of bronze. Footnote 33: Which was bequeathed ‘to the wisest’. It was given to Thales, who passed it on to another, and the process was repeated till it came back to Thales, whereupon he dedicated it to Apollo.

It is well known, Euphanes, that as an admirer of Pindar you [Sidenote: 783 B] are fond of quoting his ‘fine and forcible words’: _When struggle is afoot, excuses Cast a deep cloud on valour._ In connexion with the struggles of public life timidity and weakness can find plenty of excuses, but as a last and most desperate plea they urge ‘advancing years’. This is their pretext _par excellence_ for blunting ambition and putting it out of countenance. They argue that there is a fitting close to a public, as much as to an athletic, career. For these reasons [Sidenote: C] I think it well to take my own ordinary reflections upon ‘old men in public life’ and lay them before yourself. They may prevent either of us from deserting that long companionship which has hitherto followed a common path, and from abandoning that public life which may be regarded as a familiar friend from youth up, in order to adopt another which is unfamiliar, and with which there is no time for us to become thoroughly intimate. I would have us abide by our original principle, and determine that life and the worthy life shall end together. It is not for us to convert the brief remainder into a confession that the bulk of our time has been wastefully applied to no good purpose. [Sidenote: D] It is not, indeed, true—as some one told Dionysius—that ‘despotism is a fine shroud’. In his case the combination of absolutism with injustice was only made all the more complete a calamity by the fact that it never ceased. It was therefore a shrewd remark of Diogenes, when at a later date he saw Dionysius’ son in a humble private station at Corinth. ‘Dionysius,’ said he, ‘you are far from receiving your deserts. Instead of living a free and fearless life here with us, you ought to have been there, housed in the despot’s palace and made to live in it, like your father, till old age.’ It is different with constitutional and democratic statesmanship. When a man has learned to show himself a profitable subject as well as a profitable ruler, he [Sidenote: E] does indeed obtain at death a ‘fine shroud’, in the shape of the good name earned by his life. For this—to quote Simonides— _Is the last thing to sink beneath the ground_, except in cases where high human interests and noble zeal are earlier to fail and die than natural desires. Are the active and divine elements of our being more evanescent than the passionate and corporeal? That were an unworthy view to hold; as unworthy as to accept the doctrine that the [Sidenote: F] only thing of which we never weary is making gain. On the contrary, we should improve upon Thucydides, and regard as ‘_the only thing that never ages_’ not ‘_the love of honour_‘, but that public spirit and activity which even ants and bees maintain till the end. No one has ever seen old age convert a bee into a drone. Yet there are some who claim that public men who have passed their prime should sit and be fed in seclusion at home, allowing their practical abilities to rust away in idleness. [Sidenote: 784] Cato used to say that, to the many plagues of its own from which old age suffers, there is no justification for deliberately adding the disgrace of vice. There are many vices, but none can do more than weak and cowardly inactivity to disgrace a man in years—a man who skulks away from the public offices to look after a houseful of women, or to supervise gleaners and reapers in the country. _Where now Is Oedipus? Where the famed riddles now?_ It is one thing to wait till old age before commencing public life, and to be like Epimenides, who—so they say—fell asleep a youth and fifty years afterwards awoke an old man. If, in [Sidenote: B] such a case, one were to divest himself of that quiet habit which has lasted all his life, and were to plunge into struggles and worries with which he was unfamiliar, and for which he was not trained by intercourse with public affairs or with mankind, there would be room for remonstrance. We might say, as the Pythian priestess said, ‘_You come too late_’ in your quest of office and leadership. You are past the time for knocking at the door of the Presidency. You are like some blundering reveller whose surprise visit is not made till night; or like some stranger who is in quest, not of a new district or country, but of a new life, about which you know nothing. If Simonides says _The State is a man’s teacher_, it is true only of those who have the time to change their teacher and learn a new lesson—a lesson slowly and laboriously acquired by means of many a struggle and experience, and only when it [Sidenote: C] can take its hold sufficiently early on a natural genius for bearing toils and troubles with equanimity. To resume. We find that, on the contrary, it is striplings and youths whom sensible men do their best to keep out of public business. Witness our laws, under which the crier in the Assembly, when inviting speech and advice, calls upon the platform in the first instance not an Alcibiades or a Pytheas, but persons over fifty. Foolish audacity and lack of experience [Sidenote: D] are nowhere so out of place as in a deliberator or a judge.[34] Cato, when past eighty and on his defence, said it was hard to have to defend himself before one set of people after having lived with another. It is agreed on all hands that the measures of Caesar—the conqueror of Antony—became considerably more regal and good for the public towards the end of his life. Once, when by stern application of custom and law he was correcting the rising generation, and they made an outcry, his own words were: ‘Young men, listen to an old man to whom old men listened [Sidenote: E] when he was young.’ It was in old age, too, that the statesmanship of Pericles reached its greatest influence. This was the time when he induced the Athenians to enter upon the war, and when he successfully opposed their ill-timed eagerness to fight a battle against sixty thousand men-at-arms, by all but sealing up the public armouries and the locks of the gates. As for what Xenophon writes of Agesilaus, it is best to quote verbatim. _‘Is there any youth with whom this old man did not compare to advantage? Who in the prime of life was so formidable to an enemy as Agesilaus was at the most advanced age? Of whom was the foe so glad to be rid as of Agesilaus, though he was old [Sidenote: F] when his end came? Who inspired such courage in his own side as Agesilaus, although close upon the end of life? What young man was more regretted by his friends than Agesilaus, though he died when full of years?_’ Well, if time was no hindrance to the great actions of men like these, what of us, who nowadays enjoy the luxury of a public life which admits of no despots, no fighting, no sieges, but only of warless contests and of ambitions which are for the most part settled by just means according to law and reason? Are we [Sidenote: 785] to play the coward? Must we confess that we are the inferiors, not merely of the commanders and popular leaders of those days, but of the poets, leaders of thought, and actors? Take Simonides. He won choric victories in old age, as is evident from the last lines of the epigram: _And withal to Simonides fell the glory and prize of the poet; Fell to Leoprepes’ son, come to his eightieth year._ Take Sophocles. It is said that, when his sons charged him with being in his dotage, he read in his defence the entrance ode of the _Oedipus at Colonus_, beginning: _To this land of the steed, O stranger, To the goodliest homes on earth, Thou hast come—to the white Colonus, Fond haunt of the nightingale, Where her clear voice trills its sorrow In the green of the leafy dell...._ a lyric which won such admiration that he left the court, as it [Sidenote: B] might have been the theatre, amid the applause and cheers of the audience. A little epigram, admitted to be by Sophocles, contains the words: _Five years and fifty Sophocles had seen, Ere for Herodotus he wrought a song._ Take Philemon, the comic poet, and Alexis. They were still putting plays upon the stage, still winning crowns, when death overtook them. Take Polus, the tragedian. Eratosthenes and Philochorus inform us that, shortly before his end, and when [Sidenote: C] he was seventy, he acted eight tragedies in four days. Is it, I say, creditable that old men of the platform should show a poorer spirit than old men of the stage? That they should retire from the sacred contests—for ‘sacred’ these veritably are—and give up the rôle of the public man in exchange for goodness knows what other part? From king, say, to farmer is a descent indeed. Demosthenes calls it cruel treatment of the _Paralus_, to make that sacred warship carry cargoes of timber, vine-stakes, and cattle for Meidias. But suppose a public man abandons the Presidentship of Games, his seat on the Federal Board, his high place in the Sacred League, and is found [Sidenote: D] measuring out barley-meal and olive-cake, or shearing sheep. It cannot but look as if he were needlessly courting the status of ‘old worn-out horse’. As for leaving a public career to engage in vulgar and petty trade, one might as well take some self-respecting lady, strip off her gown, give her an apron, and keep her in a tavern. Turn public ability to mere business and money-making, and its rank and character [Sidenote: E] are lost. Or if, as a last alternative, people choose to talk of ‘ease and enjoyment’, when they mean luxurious self-indulgence; if they recommend the public man to adopt that process of idle senile decay, I hardly know which of two ugly comparisons will best hit off such a life. Shall I say it is a case of sailors taking ‘Aphrodite-holiday’ and keeping it up for ever, without waiting till their ship is berthed, but deserting it while still on the voyage? Or is it a case of ‘Heracles-chez-Omphale’—as some sorry humourists depict him—wearing a saffron gown and quietly allowing Lydian handmaids to fan him and braid his hair? Are we to treat our public man in that way? To strip off his [Sidenote: F] lion’s-skin, lay him on a couch, and feast him, with lute and flute lulling him all the while? Or should we not take warning by the retort of Pompey the Great to Lucullus? The latter, after his campaigns and public services, had given himself up to baths, dinners, social entertainments in the daytime, profound indolence, and new-fangled notions in the way of house-building. Meanwhile he accused Pompey of a fondness for place and power unsuited to his years. Pompey replied that for an old man effeminacy was more unseasonable than office. When he was [Sidenote: 786] ill and the doctor ordered him fieldfares—the bird being then out of season and difficult to procure—and when some one told him that Lucullus had a large number in his preserves, he refused to send for or receive one, exclaiming, ‘What? Pompey could not live but for the luxury of Lucullus?’ It may be true that nature ordinarily seeks pleasure and delight. But, with an old man, the body has become incapable of all pleasures except a few which are essential. Not only is it the case that _The Queen of Love turns weary from the old_, [Sidenote: B] as Euripides has it. Though they may retain the appetite for eating and drinking—generally in a dulled or toothless form—they find a difficulty in whetting the edge or sharpening the teeth even of that. It is in the mind that one must lay up a stock of pleasures, though not of the mean and ignoble kind indicated by Simonides, when he told those who reproached him with avarice that, though age had robbed him of other joys, he had still one left to support his declining years—the joy of money-making. In public activity there are pleasures of the greatest and noblest sort, such as we may believe to be the only, or the chief, enjoyment of the gods themselves—I mean those which result from a beneficent deed or a fine achievement. Nicias the painter was so taken up with his artistic work that he was often obliged to ask his servants whether he had had his [Sidenote: C] bath or his breakfast. Archimedes stuck so closely to his drawing-board that, in order to anoint him, his attendants had to drag him away and strip him by force. He then went on drawing his diagrams in the ointment on his body. Carus the flutist (an acquaintance of your own) used to say that people did not know how much more pleasure he himself got from playing than he gave to others; otherwise an audience would be paid to listen instead of paying. Can we fail to perceive how great are the pleasures derived from fine actions and public-spirited achievements by those who put high qualities to use? Nor is it by means of those effeminate titillations which soft and agreeable movements exert upon the flesh. The ticklings of the flesh [Sidenote: D] are spasmodic, fickle, intermittent, whereas the pleasures of noble deeds—the creations of the true statesman’s art—will bear the soul aloft in grandeur and pride and joy, as if, I will not say upon the ‘_golden wings_’ of Euripides, but upon those ‘_celestial pinions_’ described by Plato. Remember the instances of which you have so often heard. Epaminondas, when asked what had been his most pleasurable experience, replied, ‘Having been victorious at Leuctra while [Sidenote: E] my father and mother were still alive.’ When Sulla first reached Rome after purging Italy of its civil wars, he could not sleep a wink that night. As he has written in his own _Notes and Recollections_, so elated was his mind with the greatness of his joy and happiness, that it seemed to walk on air. If we admit, with Xenophon, that ‘_no hearing is so agreeable as praise_‘, no sight, recollection, or reflection is so fraught with gratification as the contemplation of exploits of our own in the conspicuous public arena of office and statesmanship. Not but what, when [Sidenote: F] a grateful goodwill testifies to our achievements, and when there is a rivalry of commendation productive of well-earned popularity, our merit acquires a gloss and brilliance which adds to our sense of pleasure. Therefore, instead of permitting our reputation to wither in our old age like an athlete’s crown, we must be constantly adopting new devices and making fresh efforts to enliven the sense of past obligation, to enhance it, and to make it permanent. We must act like the craftsmen who were required to provide for the security of the Delian ship. They used to replace unsound timbers by others, and, by means of insertions and repairs, were regarded as keeping the vessel immortal and indestructible from [Sidenote: 787] the oldest times. Reputation is like flame. There is no difficulty in keeping it alive; it merely requires a little feeding with fuel. But let either of them become extinct and cold, and it will take some trouble to rekindle. Lampis, the shipowner, was once asked how he made his fortune. ‘Making the big one,’ he answered, ‘was easy enough; but it was a long and hard business to make the little one.’ So with political power and reputation. Though not easy to get in the first instance, anything will suffice to maintain and increase them when once they are great. It is as with a friend, when once he becomes such. He does not look for a large number of important services in order to retain his friendship; [Sidenote: B] small tokens, consistently shown, will keep his constant affection. Nor are the confidence and friendship of the people perpetually calling for you to open your purse, to play the champion, or to hold an office. They are retained by mere public spirit—by being in no haste to desert or shirk the burden of care and watchfulness. Campaigns are not matters of everlastingly facing the enemy, fighting, and besieging. They have also their times of sacrifice, their occasional social gatherings, their periods of ample leisure, when jest and nonsense are toward. And why should one look upon public life with dread, as being laborious, wearisome, and devoid of consolations, seeing that the theatre, processions, awards, ‘_dances of the Muses and Gladsomeness_,’ and honour [Sidenote: C] after honour to the gods relax the stern brow of the Bureau or the Chamber, and yield a manifold return of inviting entertainment? In the next place jealousy, the greatest bane of public life, is less severe upon old age. For, to quote Heracleitus, ‘_dogs bark at the man they do not know_.’ Though jealousy may fight with the beginner at the doors of the platform and refuse him access, no savageness or fierceness is shown to a man of familiar and established reputation, but he finds friendly admittance. For this reason some have compared jealousy to smoke. In the case of beginners, during the process of kindling, it pours forth in clouds; when they are in full blaze, it disappears. And while [Sidenote: D] people resist and dispute other forms of superiority—in merit, birth, or public spirit—through a belief that any acknowledgement to others means so much derogation to themselves, the primacy which is due to time—‘seniority’ in the proper sense—is conceded without a grudge. Respect paid to the aged has the unique quality of doing more honour to the giver than to the recipient. Moreover it is not every one who expects to attain to the power derived from wealth, eloquence, or wisdom; whereas no public man despairs of winning the esteem and distinction to which age gradually leads. Imagine a navigator, who has managed his ship safely in the face of contrary winds and waves, and then, when the weather [Sidenote: E] becomes fair and calm, wishes to lay her to. It is just as strange when a man has fought his ship in a long battle with jealousies, and then, after they are quietly laid, backs out of public life, and, in abandoning his activities, abandons his partners and associates. The more time there has been, the more friends and fellow-workers he has made; but he is neither in a position to lead them with him off the stage, as a poet does his chorus, [Sidenote: F] nor has he the right to leave them in the lurch. A long public life is like an old tree. To pull it up is no easy task, because of its many roots and its entanglement with many interests, which involve worse wrenching and disturbance when you leave them than when you stay. And if political conflict does leave you some remnant of jealousy or antagonism to face when you are old, it is better to quell it by means of your position than to turn your back and retire without armour or weapons of defence. People are not so ready to attack you out of jealousy when you are still in action as they are out of contempt when you give it up. [Sidenote: 788] We may also appeal to the great Epaminondas and his remark to the Thebans. It was winter at the time, and the Arcadians were inviting them to enter the city and live in the houses. This he refused to allow, observing: ‘At the present time they come to look at you and admire your wrestling and military exercises; but if they see you sitting by the fire and chewing your beans, they will regard you as no better than themselves.’ So with an aged man. When making a speech, transacting business, or receiving honours, he is a dignified spectacle; but when he lies all day on a couch or sits in the corner of a public [Sidenote: B] resort talking drivel and wiping his nose, he is an object of contempt. This is precisely what Homer teaches, if you read him rightly. Nestor, who was campaigning at Troy, received high respect and honour; whereas Peleus and Laertes, the stay-at-homes, were despised, and counted for nothing. Nay, even intellectual power begins to fail those who have let themselves relax. Idleness gradually renders it feeble and flaccid, in the absence of some necessary exercise of thought to keep the logical and practical faculty perpetually alive and in trim. _Like glossy bronze, ’tis use that makes it shine._ Bodily weakness may be a drawback to public activity in the [Sidenote: C] case of those who, in spite of their years, make the platform or the Cabinet their goal. But it is more than compensated by the advantage of their caution and prudence. They do not dash into public affairs with the expression of opinions prompted by error or vanity as the case may be, and carrying the mob with them in as excited a condition as a stormy sea; but they deal in a mild and reasonable fashion with such matters as arise. It is for this reason that, in times of disaster or alarm, communities feel the need of a Board of Government consisting of senior men. Often they have fetched back from the country [Sidenote: D] an old man who neither asked nor wished it, and have compelled him to put his hand to the helm and steer the ship of State into safety, while they thrust aside generals and popular leaders, despite all their ability to shout, to talk without taking breath, and also, no doubt, to make ‘_sturdy stand and doughty fight_’ against the enemy. When Chares, the son of Theochares—a man in the prime of bodily strength and condition—was brought into the ring in opposition to Timotheus and Iphicrates by the public speakers of Athens, with the claim that ‘this is the kind of general the Athenians should have’, Timotheus [Sidenote: E] replied: ‘By no manner of means. No doubt that is the sort needed to carry the general’s baggage; but the general should be one who “_sees before and after_”, and whose calculations as to policy no distractions can disturb.’ Sophocles said ‘he was glad that old age had enabled him to escape from sexual passion—a fierce and mad master.’ But in public life we have to escape, not from one master—the love of women—but from many madder still; from contentiousness, vanity, and the desire to be first and greatest—a malady most fertile in envy, jealousy, and [Sidenote: F] feud. Some of these feelings are abated or dulled, some are altogether chilled and quenched, by old age. And though old age may do something to diminish our zest for action, it does more to guard us from the intemperate heat of passion, so that we can bring a sober and steady reason to bear upon our thoughts. By all means, in dealing with one who begins to play the youth when his hair is grey, let it be—as it is considered—sound warning to say: _Misguided man, stay quiet in thy bed._ [Sidenote: 789] Let us remonstrate with an old man when he rises from a long privacy, as from a bed of sickness, and bestirs himself to obtain a command or an official post. But suppose a man has lived a life of public action and thoroughly played the part. To prevent him from going on till ‘finis and the torch’, to call him back and bid him change the road he has long followed, is utterly unfeeling, and bears no resemblance to the case just given. If an old man has his wreath on and is scenting himself in readiness to marry, there is nothing unreasonable in trying to dissuade him by quoting the lines addressed to Philoctetes: _But, pray, where is the bride, where the young maid, Would welcome thee? Rare bridegroom thou, poor soul!_ Nay, they are fond of making jests of the kind at their own [Sidenote: B] expense: _I’m marrying old, and for the neighbours’ good: I know it._ But when a man has been long married, and has lived with his wife for years without a fault to find, to tell him that he should divorce her because he is old, and that he should live by himself or get a wretched concubine in place of his lawful spouse, is the very extreme of absurdity. In the same way when an aged man seeks to enter politics—Chlidon the farmer, Lampon the ship’s captain, or some philosopher from the Garden[35]—there is some reason in admonishing him, and keeping him to the state of inactivity to which he has been used. But it is urging a public man to act [Sidenote: C] with injustice and ingratitude, when we take hold of a Phocion, a Cato, or a Pericles, and say, ‘Sir Athenian—or Sir Roman— _Thine age is wither’d and thy head o’erfrosted_; therefore sue for a divorce from statesmanship, have done with the worrying business of the platform and the Board of War, and make haste into the country, to live with farming “for a waiting-maid” or to occupy the rest of your days with thrift and the keeping of accounts.’ Well, but (it may be asked) what of the soldier in the comedy with his _Discharged! No pay! because of my white hair?_ Quite true, my friend. The War-God’s servants must be in the prime of manly vigour. Their business is with _War and war’s baleful work_, in which, though an old man’s grey hair may be hidden by his [Sidenote: D] helmet, _Yet in secret his thews are aweary_, and, though the spirit be willing, the strength can no longer respond. But the ministers of Zeus—the God of Council, of Assembly, of the State—are not asked for deeds of hand and foot, but for counsel and foresight. We ask them for advice, not such as to evoke roars of mere noise in the Assembly, but full of sense and shrewdness, and safe to follow. In their case the despised white hair and wrinkles become the visible tokens of experience. They suggest moral force, and are therefore a help to persuasion. [Sidenote: E] It is the part of youth to obey; of old age to guide; and that state is safest where _Best are the old men’s counsels, And best the young man’s spear._ Homer’s _And first he summon’d to council the old men mighty-hearted By the side of the ship of Nestor_, is a touch greatly admired. For the same reason the Select Board associated with the kings at Sparta was called by the Pythian oracle ‘elder-born’, but by Lycurgus ‘old men’ _sans phrase_, while the Roman Council is called _Senatus_ down to the present time. The law crowns a man with the circlet and the wreath, Nature crowns him with grey hair, and both are the venerable emblems of sovereign rank. Moreover, the words [Sidenote: F] _geras_, ‘prerogative,’ and _gerairein_, ‘honour with prerogative’—derived from _geron_, ‘old man’—retain a dignified sense, not because the old man’s bath is warmed and his bed a softer one, but because he amounts to a king in the state by virtue of his wisdom; and wisdom is like a late-fruiting plant, it is only in old age that nature brings out its special excellence and perfect quality. When the king of kings prayed to the gods _Would that among the Achaeans were ten such as he to advise me!_ [Sidenote: 790] —meaning Nestor—not one of the ‘_valorous_’ and ‘_prowess-breathing_’ Achaeans complained. They all admitted that not only in statesmanship, but in war also, age was of great moment, since _More worth is one sage thought than many a hand_, and one rational and cogent judgement achieves the finest and most important results in public affairs. Now kingship, the most complete and comprehensive form of public activity, is full of cares, labours, and preoccupations. Seleucus, it was said, used to declare that if ordinary people knew what a business it was merely to write and read so many letters, they would not pick up the crown if they found it [Sidenote: B] lying in the street. And the story goes that, when Philip was proposing to encamp in an excellent position, but was told that there was no fodder for the pack-animals, he exclaimed: ‘Good Heavens! what is our life worth, when we are obliged to suit it to the convenience of our asses?’ Ought we then to give the same advice to a king when he has grown old? Bid him lay aside the crown and the purple, take to a cloak and a crutched stick, and live in the country, for fear people should think it officious and unseasonable of him to be reigning when he is grey? But we have no right to talk in this way about an Agesilaus, or a Numa, or a Darius. Neither then should we compel a Solon [Sidenote: C] to leave the Council of the Areopagus, nor a Cato the Senate, nor yet urge a Pericles to leave popular government to look after itself. It is contrary to reason that in our youth we should bounce upon the platform, spend upon the public all the passionate licence of our ambition, and then, when age arrives and brings the wisdom of experience, desert and betray our public standing like a woman whom we have used at our pleasure. In Aesop, when the hedgehog wanted to pick off his ticks, the fox would not let him. ‘These are glutted,’ said he, ‘and [Sidenote: D] if you get rid of them, hungry ones will be at you in their place.’ So with public life. If it is perpetually shedding the old men, it will necessarily be plagued with young ones, who are thirsting for notoriety and power but devoid of political sense. How can they be otherwise, if they are to have no elderly statesman to watch and learn from? A ship’s captain is not made by treatises on navigation. He must often have stood upon the quarter-deck and watched the struggle with wave and wind and stormy nights, when _The sailor on the brine longs sore For Tyndareus’ twin sons._ And can the handling of a State and the persuading of Assembly [Sidenote: E] or Council be rightly left to a young man because he has read a book or taken down a lecture on statesmanship in the Lyceum? Though he has not taken his stand many a time beside rudder-rope and tiller, leaned first to this side and then to that, while generals and public leaders were pitting their knowledge and experience against each other, and so learned his lesson in the midst of dangers and difficulties? Beyond question, No! For the education and training of the young, if for no other reason, old men should play a public part. A teacher of letters or of music himself reads or plays a passage over first by way of example [Sidenote: F] to his pupils. So the authority on statesmanship must guide a young man, not simply by talking or suggesting from outside, but by the practical administration of public business. It is by deeds as well as by words that he will mould him to the true shape, filled with the breath of life. It is training of this kind—not in the schools where you practise safe forms of wrestling under mannerly professors, but in contests truly Olympian and Pythian—that makes one, as Simonides puts it, _Keep pace, as with the steed the wearied colt_; [Sidenote: 791] —Aristeides with Cleisthenes, Cimon with Aristeides, Phocion with Chabrias, Cato with Fabius Maximus, Pompeius with Sulla, Polybius with Philopoemen. It was by attaching themselves when young to older men, by using them as supports to their own growth, by being raised to their standard of statesmanlike achievement, that they acquired the political experience which brought them fame and power. When certain professors declared that the claim of Aeschines, the Academic philosopher, to have been a pupil of Carneades was contrary to fact, he replied, ‘O yes: I was a disciple of Carneades at the time when age had taken all the fuss and noise [Sidenote: B] out of his teaching and reduced it to practical and serviceable shape.’ With the statesmanship of an old man, however, it is not merely the talking, but the deeds, that lose all ostentation and itch for notoriety. They tell us that, when the iris has grown old and exhausted all crude exuberance of perfume, its fragrance gains in sweetness. So with the views and suggestions of the old. There is no crudeness in them, but always a quality of quiet solidity. For this reason, as I have said, we must have elderly men in public life. Plato speaks of mixing water with neat wine as the bringing of a ‘frenzied god’ to sanity by the [Sidenote: C] ‘chastening of another who is sober’. So when young spirits in the Assembly are a-boil with the intoxication of glory and ambition, we need the old men’s caution to qualify them and to eliminate their mad excess of fire. There is another consideration. It is an error to suppose that statesmanship is like a voyage or a campaign—carried on for an ulterior object and discontinued when that is attained. Statesmanship is not a public burden, to be borne only so long as needs must. It is the career of a civilized being with a gift for citizenship and society, and with a natural disposition to live a life of public influence, worthy aims, and social helpfulness for as long as occasion calls. The right course therefore is to _be_ a public man, not to _have_ been one; just as it is right to speak the truth, not to [Sidenote: D] _have_ spoken it; to act honestly, not to _have_ so acted; to love one’s country and fellow-citizens, not to _have_ loved them. Those are Nature’s objects, and where men are not utterly demoralized by idleness and effeminacy, her promptings are such as these: _Thy sire begat thee for rich use to men_, and _Ne’er let us cease from service to mankind._ To urge the plea of ill-health or disablement is to blame disease and injury, not old age. Young men are often sickly, old men often vigorous. It is therefore not the old whom we should discourage, but the incapable. It is the capable whom [Sidenote: E] we should encourage, not the young. Aridaeus was young, and Antigonus old; but while Antigonus annexed nearly the whole of Asia, Aridaeus was like the ‘super’ upon the stage—a king with nothing to say, and a butt for whoever happened to be in power. To demand of the sophist Prodicus or the poet Philetas—who, young though they might be, were thin, sickly, and constantly taking to their beds through ill-health—that they should take up public life, were folly. But it were folly also to hinder old men like Phocion, or Masinissa the African, or the Roman Cato, from holding office or military command. The [Sidenote: F] Athenians being set upon an ill-timed war, Phocion ordered that every man under sixty should take up arms and serve. When this made them angry, he said, ‘There is no hardship. I, who am to be with you in command, am over eighty.’ And of Masinissa Polybius relates that he died when he was ninety, leaving a child of four, of whom he was the father. Shortly before his death he beat the Carthaginians in a great battle, [Sidenote: 792] and the next day was seen in front of his tent eating a loaf of cheap coarse bread. To expressions of surprise he answered that he did so to keep himself in training. _For like to goodly bronze, it shines in use, While a house crumbles, if left idle long_, says Sophocles. We may say the same of that glossy brightness of the mind, to which we owe calculation, memory, and sound judgement. For the same reason it is said that wars and campaigns make better kings than inactivity. Attalus, the brother of Eumenes, was so thoroughly enervated by long peace and [Sidenote: B] idleness that Philopoemen, one of his intimates, had simply to shepherd him and keep him fat. In fact, the Romans used to inquire of arrivals from Asia, whether ‘the king had any influence with Philopoemen’. It would be hard to find a Roman general more able than Lucullus, so long as he kept his intellect braced with action. But he surrendered himself to a life of inactivity, stayed at home, thought of nothing, and became as lifeless and shrunken as a sponge in a calm. Afterwards, in his old age, he so tamely accepted a certain freedman, Callisthenes, for his keeper, that the man [Sidenote: C] was thought to be bewitching him with spells and drugs, till at last his brother Marcus drove the fellow away and himself took to managing and tutoring him for the short remainder of his life. On the other hand, Darius, the father of Xerxes, used to say that he became his wisest in times of danger; and Ateas the Scythian declared that, when he had nothing to do, he could see nothing to distinguish him from his grooms. When some one asked the elder Dionysius if he had time to spare, he replied: ‘Heaven forbid I ever should!’ Whereas a bow, they tell us, is broken by stringing it tight, a mind is broken by leaving it loose. If a musician gives up listening [Sidenote: D] for pitch, a geometrician the solving of problems, an arithmetician the constant habit of calculation, old age will enfeeble the ability along with the loss of its exercise, although the art in these cases is not a ‘practic’ one, but a ‘theoretic’. In the case of the special ability of the statesman—his caution, wisdom, and justice, together with an experienced knack of hitting the right language at the right time; that is to say, a faculty for creating persuasion—it is kept in good condition by constant speech, action, calculation, and judicial decision. It would be a dire mistake for it to abandon such activities [Sidenote: E] and permit all those important virtues to leak away from the mind. For it naturally means a decline of kindly interest in man and society—a thing which should be without limit or end. Suppose your father had been Tithonus. Suppose, though he was immortal, old age had made him require close and constant care. You would not, I imagine, have run away and repudiated the task of tending him, talking to him, and helping him, just because you had ‘borne the burden for a long time’. Well, your fatherland—or ‘motherland’ as it is called in Crete—has claims prior to those of parents, and greater. Your country’s life has been a long one, but she is not without old age. She is [Sidenote: F] not sufficient to herself, but is in perpetual need of watchful and considerate help. She therefore grasps at the statesman and holds him back: _Clutching his garment she stays him, though eager he be for departure._ You are aware that I have performed my public duty at many a Pythian festival. But you would not say ‘Plutarch, you have done enough in the way of sacrifices, processions, and choruses. You are now in years; it is time to put off your wreath; age entitles you to leave the shrine alone’. Well, look at your own duty in the same way. In the sacred service of the State you are coryphaeus and prophet, and it is not for you to abandon that worship of Zeus, God of State and Assembly, in which you have been so long initiated and are so thoroughly versed. [Sidenote: 793] Permit me now to leave the arguments for quitting public life, and to examine another point. We must beware of inflicting upon our old age an unbecoming or exacting task, when so many portions of public work are so well suited to that time of life. If it had been proper for us to go on singing all our days, there are at our disposal many keys and modes, or, as the musicians call them, ‘systems.’ Our right course in our old age would have been to cultivate, not a mode both high and sharp, but one combining ease with appropriate character. And since Nature prompts mankind to act and speak—even more [Sidenote: B] than it prompts the swan to sing—until the end, our duty is not to lay action aside, like a lyre of too high a pitch, but to lower the key and adapt it to such forms of public effort as are light, unexacting, and within an old man’s compass. We do not leave our bodies entirely without muscular exercise because we cannot use the spade and the jumping-weights, or hurl the discus, or practise fencing, as we used to do. We swing or walk, and in some cases the breathing is exercised and warmth stimulated by playing a gentle game of ball, or by conversation. On the one hand, then, do not let us allow ourselves to become [Sidenote: C] stiff and torpid from inactivity. On the other, let us not undertake any and every official position, clutch at any and every kind of public work, and bring such an exposure upon old age that it is driven to exclaim in despair: _Right hand, how fain art thou to grasp the spear! How vain thy longing, in thy strengthlessness!_ Even in the prime of strength a man wins no credit if he tries to take on his shoulders the whole pack of public business, and [Sidenote: D] refuses—like Zeus, according to the Stoics—to leave anything to others; if he insinuates himself everywhere and has his finger in everything, through an insatiable greed for notoriety or through jealousy of any one who contrives to get a share of honour and power in the community. But when a man is quite old, then, apart from the discredit, wretchedly hard work is entailed by that itch for office which is always courting every ballot-box, that meddlesomeness which lies in wait for every opportunity of acting on a jury or a committee, that ambition which snaps up every appointment as delegate or proctor. [Sidenote: E] Such work is a heavy tax on an old man, even when people are well-disposed. But the opposite may very well be the case. For young men hate him because he leaves them no opportunities and prevents them from coming to the front; while the rest of the community looks upon his itch for office and precedence with the same disapproval as upon the itch of other old men for money and pleasure. When Bucephalus was growing old, Alexander, being unwilling to overwork him, used to ride some other horse while reviewing the phalanx and getting it into position before the [Sidenote: F] battle. Then, after giving the word for the day, he changed his mount to Bucephalus, and at once led the charge and tried the fortunes of war. In the same way a sensible public man—in this case handling his own reins—will, when in years, hold aloof from unnecessary effort, leaving more vigorous persons to deal with the minor matters of state, but himself playing a zealous part in great ones. Athletes keep their bodies from all contact with necessary labours and in perfect trim for useless ones. We, on the contrary, will leave petty little details alone, and will keep ourselves in reserve for matters of moment. No doubt, as Homer says, _To the young all labours are seemly_, and the world gives consent and approval, calling them ‘public-spirited’ and ‘energetic’ when they do a large number of little things, and ‘noble’ and ‘lofty-minded’ when they do brilliant and distinguished things. At that time of life there are [Sidenote: 794] occasions when a venturesome aggressiveness is more or less in season and wears a grace of its own. But what when an elderly man consents to perform routine services to the public, such as letting out taxes, or superintending harbours and markets? What when he seizes opportunities of being sent on a mission to some governor or other powerful personage—a position for which there is no necessity, which contains no dignity, and which necessitates time-serving and complaisance? To my mind, my friend, his case is one for regret and commiseration; some may even think it distressingly vulgar. Not even positions of authority are any longer a suitable [Sidenote: B] sphere for him, unless they are of high rank and importance; such a position, for example, as you now hold in the Presidentship of the Areopagite Council, not to mention the distinguished rank of Amphictyon,[36] which your country has imposed upon you all your life, with its _Welcome toil and labour sweet to bear._ Even these honours we should not seek, but should make from holding them. We should ask, not for them, but to be excused from them. It should seem, not that we are taking office to ourselves, but that we are surrendering ourselves to office. The Emperor Tiberius used to say that a man over sixty should be ashamed of holding out his wrist to a physician. But he should [Sidenote: C] be more ashamed of holding out his hand to the public in solicitation of its ‘vote and influence’. That situation is as humiliating and ignoble as the contrary is honourable and dignified—I mean when your country chooses you, calls you, and waits for you, and when you come down amidst respect and welcome, a ‘reverend signior’ indeed, to meet your distinction with gracious acceptance. Similarly with speaking in the Assembly. A man of advanced age should not be perpetually springing upon the platform and crowing back to every cock that crows. Young men are like horses, and he should not, by constantly grappling with [Sidenote: D] them and irritating them, lose control of their respect, or encourage the practice and habit of resistance to the reins. He should sometimes leave them to make a restive plunge for distinction, keeping out of the way and not interfering, unless the matter at stake is vital to the public safety or to decency and honour. In that case he should not wait to be called, but should let some one take him by the hand, or carry him in his chair, and push his way at more than full speed, like Appius Claudius in Roman history. The Romans had been defeated by Pyrrhus in a great battle, and Appius heard that the Senate [Sidenote: E] was listening to proposals for a truce and a peace. This was more than he could bear, and, though blind of both eyes, along he came in his chair through the Forum to the Senate House. He went in, planted himself before them, and said: ‘Hitherto I have been distressed at the loss of my sight; now I could pray to be also unable to hear—that you are meditating so ignoble and disgraceful a transaction.’ Thereupon, partly by reproaches, partly by advice and encouragement, he persuaded them to have [Sidenote: F] immediate recourse to arms and to fight Pyrrhus to a finish for the prize of Italy. Again, when it became manifest that, in acting the demagogue, Peisistratus was aiming at absolutism, and yet no one ventured to resist or prevent it, Solon brought out his weapons with his own hands, piled them in front of his house, and called upon the citizens to help. And when Peisistratus sent and asked him what gave him the confidence to do so, he replied, ‘My age.’ Things so vital as these, it is true, are rousing enough to fire even the most worn-out of old men, so long as he possesses the breath of life at all. Otherwise he will sometimes, as I have said, be showing good taste if he declines to perform paltry and menial tasks which bring more worry to the doer than good [Sidenote: 793] to the persons for whom they are done. There are also occasions when he will wait for the citizens to call for him, feel the need of him, and come to his house to fetch him. He is wanted, and therefore his appearance on the scene will carry more weight. But for the most part, though present, he will be silent and will leave the younger generation to do the speaking, while he acts as umpire to the match of political ambition. And if it goes beyond bounds, he will offer a mild reproof and courteously put an end to outbreaks of self-assertion, recrimination, or ill-temper. When a motion is wrong, he will reason with and correct the mover, but without blaming him. When it is right, he will commend it without reserve and will cheerfully acquiesce, often surrendering an argumentative victory in order that [Sidenote: B] a young man may get on in the world and be in good heart. In some cases he will supply a deficiency while paying a compliment, like Nestor with his _No man, I trow, will find fault with thy words among all the Achaeans: None say thee nay. Yet not to an end hast thou brought all the matter. True ’tis, thou art yet but young, and myself might be thine own father._ There is a practice still more statesmanlike. One may not merely teach a lesson openly in public by means of a reproval unaccompanied by any sting of humiliation or injury to prestige. Still more may be done in private for persons with good political abilities. We may offer them kindly suggestions and assistance [Sidenote: C] towards the bringing forward of useful arguments and public measures, encourage them to high aims, help them to acquire a distinguished tone of mind, and—as riding-masters do with their horses—see that at first the people shall be gentle and docile for them to mount. And if so be a young man should make a failure, instead of leaving him to despond, we may rouse and comfort him. It was in this way that the spirits and courage of Cimon were revived by Aristeides, and those of Themistocles by Mnesiphilus, when they began by incurring ill-odour and a bad name for forwardness and recklessness. It is also said of Demosthenes that, when he was in great distress at his failure [Sidenote: D] in the Assembly, he was taken to task by a very old man who had heard Pericles, and who told him that he had no right to despair of himself, seeing that he possessed gifts so much like those of that eminent person. So when Timotheus was hissed for his innovations and treated as guilty of an outrage on music, Euripides bade him keep up his courage, since he would soon be dictating to his audience. At Rome the term of the Vestal Virgins is divided into three stages—one for learning, one for the performance of the ceremonies, and the third for teaching. So with the votaries of [Sidenote: E] Artemis at Ephesus; each is called first a novice, next a priestess, and then a past-priestess. In the same way the complete statesman is during the first part of his public career still engaged in learning the mysteries; during the last part he is engaged in teaching and initiating. Whereas to superintend the athletics of others is to take no part in them oneself, it is otherwise with those who train a youth in public business and the political arena, and who make sure that for the good of his country he shall _Be speaker of words and eke doer of deeds._ They perform good service, not in some petty inconsiderable [Sidenote: F] part of public life, but in one to which Lycurgus devoted his first and foremost attention—training the young to give to every old man the same unfailing obedience as to a lawgiver. What had Lysander in his mind, when he declared that the finest form of old age is to be found at Lacedaemon? Did he mean that at Lacedaemon elderly people had the best opportunities of doing nothing, of lending money, of sitting together and playing dice, or of meeting together at an early hour to drink? Surely not. He meant that all persons at that time of life hold, as it were, a magisterial position; that they are, in a sense, public fathers or guardians, who not only look after matters of state, but take active cognisance of everything a young [Sidenote: 796] man may do in connexion with his training-school, his pastimes, or his style of living. Such a position makes them an object of fear to wrong-doers, and of respect and affection to the well-behaved. For young men make a point of cultivating their society, because of the way in which they encourage steadiness and nobility of character by sympathy and approbation and without jealousy. The last-named feeling is not a becoming one at any time of life. But whereas in the case of a young man it finds plenty of respectable names—‘rivalry’, ‘emulation’, ‘ambition’—in an old man it is a coarse and vulgar sentiment altogether out of place. The aged statesman should therefore be entirely free from jealousy. He should be no malignant old tree, [Sidenote: B] unequivocally snubbing the shoots and checking the growth of plants which spring up beside or beneath it, but should give them a kindly welcome and every opportunity to cling to him and twine about him. He should hold young people upright, lead them by the hand, and foster them, not only by wise suggestion and advice, but by surrendering to them political tasks which bring honour and distinction, or which afford scope for services of an innocent nature and yet welcome and gratifying to the public. When a task is a stubborn and arduous one, or when it is like a medicine which stings and gives pain at the moment, while its beneficial effects are not produced till afterwards, he [Sidenote: C] should not prescribe it for young people. Instead of subjecting them in their inexperienced state to the uproars of an unreasonable mob, he should himself accept the unpopularity attaching to salutary measures. By this means he will render a youth both more well-disposed and also more zealous in other duties. Meanwhile it must be remembered that statesmanship does not consist solely in holding office, acting as envoy, shouting loudly in the Assembly, and indulging in a fine frenzy of speeches and motions on the platform. The generality of people may think that these make a statesman, just as they think that talking [Sidenote: D] from a chair and delivering lectures based on books make a philosopher. But they fail to discern the sustained statesmanship or philosophy which is revealed consistently day after day in actions and conduct. As Dicaearchus used to say, the word _peripatein_, ‘walk’, has now come to be used of persons taking a turn in the colonnades rather than of those who are walking into the country or to see a friend. It is the same with acting the statesman as it is with acting the philosopher. For Socrates to play the philosopher there was no arranging of forms, seating himself in a chair, or observing a fixed time—arranged with his associates—for a discussion or discourse. He played the philosopher while joking with you, perhaps, or drinking with you, [Sidenote: E] or possibly campaigning with you, or at market with you, and finally when he was in prison and drinking the poison. He was thus the first to show that life affords scope for philosophy at every moment, in every detail, in every feeling and circumstance whatsoever. Statesmanship should be regarded in the same light. Foolish persons, even if they are Ministers of War, or Secretaries, or platform-speakers, should not be considered as acting the statesman, but as courting the mob, or making a display, or creating dissension, or doing public service because they must. But when a man possesses public spirit and broad interests, and is a keen patriot and a ‘state’s man’ in the literal sense, even if he has never worn official garb, he is playing the statesman all the time. He does so by stimulating men of [Sidenote: F] ability, giving advice to those who need it, lending his help to deliberation, discouraging bunglers, and fortifying persons of sense. And this does not mean that he goes to the Assembly Theatre or Senate House out of pride of place when canvassed or pressed, and, when he gets there, merely puts in an appearance—if he does so—by way of pastime, as he might at a show or entertainment. It means that, even if not present in body, he [Sidenote: 797] is present in spirit; that he asks how the business goes, and is pleased or vexed as the case may be. Aristeides at Athens and Cato at Rome held few public offices; but they made their whole life a perpetual service to their country. Though Epaminondas won many a distinguished success as commander-in-chief, he is no less famous for what he did in Thessaly at a time when he held no command or office. The generals had plunged the phalanx into a difficult situation. The enemy was attacking them with his missiles, [Sidenote: B] and they were in confusion. Epaminondas was therefore summoned from the ranks, and, after allaying the panic of the army by words of encouragement, he proceeded to make an orderly disposition of the phalanx—which was in a state of turmoil—extricated it with ease, posted it so as to confront the enemy, and compelled him to change his tactics and retire. Once when King Agis was in Arcadia, and was in the act of leading his army into action in full order of battle, one of the elder Spartans shouted out that he was proposing to ‘mend one error by another’, meaning (as Thucydides says) that ‘his [Sidenote: C] present unseasonable ardour was intended to repair the discredit of his retreat’ from Argos. Agis listened, took the advice, and retired. Menecrates actually had a seat placed for him every day at the doors of the Government Office, and the Ephors frequently rose and consulted him upon questions of the first importance; so great was his reputation for wisdom and shrewdness. The story goes that, when he had completely lost all physical strength and was for the most part confined all day to his bed, upon the Ephors sending for him to the Agora, he got up and set out to walk. As he was toiling slowly along, he met [Sidenote: D] some children on the way, and asked them: ‘Do you know anything more binding than to obey a master?’ Upon their replying, ‘Lack of the power,’ his reason told him that this brought his service to an end, and he turned back home. For though zeal should not fail so long as ability lasts, we must not put pressure upon it when left helpless. Once more, Scipio, whether in the field or in politics, constantly sought the advice of Gaius Laelius to such an extent as to make some people say of his achievements that Scipio was the actor, but the author was Gaius. And Cicero himself acknowledges that the greatest and finest of the successful measures of his consulship were devised with the help of the philosopher Publius Nigidius. [Sidenote: E] There is, then, nothing to prevent an aged man from advancing the public good in many a department of statesmanship. He has the best of means thereto: reason, judgement, plain-speaking, and ‘_thought discreet_‘, as the poets say. It is not merely our hands and feet or the strength of our bodies that are part and parcel of the possessions of the State. Most important are the mind and the beauties of the mind—temperance, justice, and wisdom. It is monstrous that, as these come late and [Sidenote: F] slowly to their own, our house and farm and other goods and chattels should get the benefit of them, while, in a public way, to our country and our fellow-citizens, we make ourselves of no further use because of ‘time’. For what time takes away from our powers of active effort is less than what it adds to those of guidance and statesmanship. It is for this reason that, when Hermes is represented in an elderly form, though he has no hands or feet, his virile parts are tense—an indirect way of saying that there is little need for old men’s bodies to be hard at work, so long as their power of reasoned speech is—as it ought to be—vigorous and generative. Footnote 34: The text here is corrupt. Footnote 35: i.e. Epicurean. Footnote 36: Member of a religious council which met at Delphi and represented the chief states of all Greece.

[Sidenote: 138 B] TO POLLIANUS AND EURYDICE WITH PLUTARCH’S BEST WISHES. When they were shutting you in your bridal chamber, the ancestral ritual was duly applied to you by the priestess of Demeter. I believe that now, if reason also were to take you in hand and join in the nuptial song, it would prove of some service, and would support the tune as prescribed. In the musical world they used to call one of the modes for the flute ‘the Horse-and-Mare’, because, apparently, the strains in that key were provocative of union between those animals. Well, philosophy has many excellent sermons to give, but none [Sidenote: C] more worthy of serious attention than that upon marriage. By it she exerts a spell upon those who come together as partners in life, and renders them gentle and tractable to each other. I have, therefore, taken the main points of the lessons which you have repeatedly heard, brought up as you have been in the company of Philosophy. I have arranged them in a series of brief comparisons to make them easier to remember, and am sending them as a present to you both. In doing so I pray that the Muses may graciously lend aid to Aphrodite, since, if it is their province to see that a lyre or a harp shall be in tune, it is no less so to provide that the music of the married home shall be harmonized by reason and philosophy. When people in olden times assigned a seat with Aphrodite to Hermes, it was because [Sidenote: D] the pleasure of marriage stands in special need of reason; when to Persuasion and the Graces, it was in order that the married pair might obtain their wishes from each other by means of persuasion, and not by contention and strife.

1. Solon bade the bride eat a piece of quince before coming to the bridegroom’s arms—apparently an enigmatical suggestion that, as a first requirement, a pleasant and inviting impression should be gathered from an agreeable mouth and speech. 2. In Boeotia, after veiling the bride, they crown her with a wreath of thorny asparagus. As that plant yields the sweetest eating from among the roughest prickles, so a bride, if the groom does not run away in disgust because he finds her difficult and vexatious at first, will afford him a sweet and gentle companionship. One who shows no patience with the girl’s first [Sidenote: E] bickerings is as bad as those who let the ripe grapes go because once they were sour. Many a young bride is affected in the same way. First experiences disgust her with the bridegroom, and she makes as great a mistake as if, after enduring the sting of the bee, she were to abandon the honeycomb. 3. It is especially at the beginning that married people should beware of quarrel and friction. Let them note how vessels which have been mended will at first easily pull to pieces on the slightest occasion, but as time goes on and they become solid at the seams, it is as much as fire and iron can do to separate [Sidenote: F] the parts. 4. Fire is readily kindled in chaff, dry rushes, or hare’s fur, but quickly goes out unless it gets a further hold upon something capable both of keeping it in and feeding it. So with that fierce blaze of passion which is produced in the newly-married by physical enjoyment. You must not rely upon it nor expect it to last, unless it is built round the moral character, gets a hold upon your rational part, and so obtains a permanent vitality. 5. Doctoring the water is no doubt a quick and easy way of [Sidenote: 139] catching fish, but it renders them bad and uneatable. So when women work artificially upon their husbands with philtres and spells, and control them by the agency of pleasure, they have but crazy simpletons and dotards for their partners. While Circe derived no good from the men she had bewitched, and made no use of them when turned into swine and asses, she found the greatest pleasure in the rational companionship of the wise Odysseus. 6. A woman who is more desirous of ruling a foolish husband than of obeying a wise one, is like a traveller who would rather lead a blind man than follow one who possesses sight and knowledge. [Sidenote: B] 7. Why should people disbelieve that Pasiphae, though consort to a king, fell in love with an ox, when they see that some women find a strict and continent husband wearisome, and prefer to live with one who is as much a mass of ungoverned sensuality as a dog or a goat? 8. When a rider is too weak or effeminate to vault upon a horse, he teaches the animal itself to bend its legs and crouch. In the same way some men who marry high-born or wealthy women, instead of improving themselves, put indignities upon their wives, in the belief that they will be more easily ruled when humbled. The proper course is, while using the rein, to maintain the dignity of the wife, as one would the full height of the horse. [Sidenote: C] 9. When the moon is at a distance from the sun, we see it bright and luminous. When it comes near him, it fades and is lost to view. With a properly conducted woman it is the contrary. She should be most visible when with her husband; in his absence she should keep at home and out of sight. 10. Herodotus was wrong in saying that when a woman lays aside her tunic she lays aside her modesty. On the contrary, a chaste wife puts on modesty in its place. Between married persons the token of greatest regard is greatest modesty. 11. If two notes are taken in accord, the lower of the two is [Sidenote: D] the dominant. So, though every action in a well-conducted house is performed by both parties in tune, it will reveal the husband’s leadership and priority of choice. 12. The Sun vanquished the North Wind. When the wind endeavoured to take off the man’s cloak by violence and blowing a gale, he only tightened his mantle the more and held it the closer. But when, after the wind, the sun became hot, the man began to grow warm. When at last he sweltered, he took off not only his cloak but his tunic. The parable applies to the generality of women. When their husbands take violent measures to do away with extravagant indulgence, they show [Sidenote: E] fight and temper; but if you reason with them, they give it up peaceably and practise moderation. 13. Cato expelled from the Senate a man who had kissed his own wife in the presence of his daughter. This, perhaps, was too severe a step. But if—as is the case—it is unseemly to be fondling and kissing and embracing each other in company, it is surely more unseemly to be scolding and quarrelling in company, and, while treating your love-passages as a sacred secret between you and your wife, to make an open display of fault-finding [Sidenote: F] and reproach. 14. A mirror,[37] though decorated with gold and precious stones, is of no use unless it shows you your form true to life. Similarly there is no advantage in a rich wife, if her conduct does not represent that of her husband and harmonize with it in character. If the reflection which it offers is glum when you are joyful, but wears a merry grin when you are gloomy and distressed, the mirror is faulty and bad. A wife is a poor thing and out of place if she is in the dumps when her husband is disposed for frolic or love-making, but is all fun and laughter when he is serious. In the former case she is disagreeable; in [Sidenote: 140] the latter, she slights you. Geometers tell us that lines and surfaces make no movement by themselves, but only in conjunction with the bodies to which they belong. In the same way a woman should be free from peculiar states of mind of her own, but should act as the husband’s partner in his earnestness and his jest, in his preoccupation and his laughter. 15. A man who dislikes to see his wife eating with him, teaches her to satisfy her appetite when she gets by herself. Similarly one who is never a merry companion to her, nor shares in her sport and laughter, teaches her to look for private pleasures apart from him. [Sidenote: B] 16. When the Persian kings are dining or feasting, their legitimate wives sit at their side. But when they wish to amuse themselves or get tipsy, they send those wives away and summon their minstrel-women and concubines. The practice is a right one, at least to the extent that they do not permit their wives to take part in wanton and licentious scenes. So, if a private man, who lacks self-control or good-breeding in his pleasures, is guilty of a lapse with a common woman or a menial, the wife should not be indignant and resentful, but should reflect that, out of respect for her, he finds some other woman to share his riot and lasciviousness. [Sidenote: C] 17. When kings are fond of music, they make many musicians; when of learning, learned men; when of athletics, gymnasts. So when the love of a husband is for the person, his wife will be all for dress; when for pleasure, she becomes lewd and wanton; when for goodness and virtue, she shows herself discreet and chaste. 18. When a Lacedaemonian girl was once asked whether she had already embraced a man, she answered, ‘No, indeed; but _he_ has embraced _me_.’ Such, I believe, is the right attitude for a lady—not to shun or dislike caresses, when the husband begins them, nor yet to begin them of her own accord. The one course is bold and immodest, the other disdainful and [Sidenote: D] unaffectionate. 19. The woman ought not to possess private friends, but to share those of the man. But first and greatest are the gods, and it is therefore right for the wife to reverence or acknowledge only those gods who are recognized by the husband. Her street-door should be kept shut to out-of-the-way forms of worship and alien superstitions. No deity finds gratification in ceremonies which a woman performs in secret and by stealth. 20. Plato holds that a community is in a state of blissful well-being when the expressions ‘_mine_’ and ‘_not mine_’ are scarcely ever heard, inasmuch as the citizens enjoy, as far as [Sidenote: E] possible, the common use of everything worth considering. Much more ought such language to be abolished from the married state. In the same way, however, in which medical men tell us that a blow on the left side produces an answering sensation in the right, it is proper for a wife to sympathize with her husband’s concerns and the husband with the wife’s. In this way, just as ropes, when interwoven, lend each other strength, so, through each party reciprocating the other’s goodwill, the partnership will be maintained by both combined. Nature blends us through the body in such a way as to take [Sidenote: F] a portion from each, and by commingling produce an offspring common to both, so that neither can define or distinguish an ‘own’ part from ‘another’s’. The same sort of partnership between married persons should assuredly exist in respect of money also. They should pour it all into a single fund, and blend it in such a way that they never think of one part as ‘own’ and one as ‘another’s’, but treat it all as ‘own’ and none of it as ‘another’s’. And as we call a mixture ‘wine’, though it may contain a greater proportion of water, so the property of the house should be said to belong to the man, even though the wife may contribute the larger share. 21. Helen loved wealth, and Paris loved pleasure: Odysseus was wise, and Penelope discreet. Hence the union of the latter [Sidenote: 141] pair was happy and enviable, while that of the former brought upon Greeks and Asiatics an ‘Iliad of Woes’. 22. When the Roman was admonished by his friends for having divorced a wife who was chaste, rich, and beautiful, he stretched out his shoe and remarked: ‘Yes, and this looks fine and new, but no one knows where it chafes me.’ The wife must not rely upon her dowry, her birth, or her beauty. The matters in which she touches her husband most closely are conversation, character, and companionship. Instead of making these harsh and vexatious day after day, she must render them [Sidenote: B] compatible, soothing, and grateful. Physicians are more afraid of fevers which spring from vague causes gradually accumulating, than of those for which there is a great and manifest reason. So it is these little, continual, daily frictions between man and wife, which the world knows nothing of, that do most to create the rifts which ruin married life. 23. King Philip was once enamoured of a Thessalian woman who was charged with bewitching him. Olympias thereupon became eager to get this person into her power. When, upon presenting herself, she not only turned out to be a handsome woman, but spoke with considerable nobility and good sense, [Sidenote: C] Olympias said: ‘Those calumnies are all nonsense! Your witchcraft lies in yourself.’ How irresistible a thing is a married and lawful wife, if, by treating everything—dowry, birth, philtres, the very girdle[38] of Aphrodite—as lying in herself, she conquers affection by means of character and virtue! 24. On another occasion, when a youthful courtier had married a handsome woman of bad repute, Olympias remarked, ‘The fellow has no judgement; otherwise he would not have married with his eyes.’ Marriage should not be made with the eyes; neither should it with the fingers, as it is in the case of some, who reckon up the amount of the dower, instead of calculating the companionable quality, of the wife they are [Sidenote: D] marrying. 25. To young men who are fond of looking at themselves in the mirror Socrates recommended that the ugly should correct their defects by virtue, while the handsome should avoid spoiling their beauty by vice. It is a good thing for the married woman also, while she is holding the mirror, to talk to herself, and, if she is plain, to ask, ‘And what if I show myself indiscreet?’ if beautiful, ‘And what if I show myself discreet as well?’ The plain woman may pride herself on being loved for her character, and the handsome woman on being loved more for her character than her beauty. 26. When the Sicilian despot sent Lysander’s daughters a set of costly mantles and chains, he refused to accept them. ‘These bits of ornaments,’ said he, ‘will rather take from my [Sidenote: E] daughters’ beauty than set it off.’ Lysander, however, was anticipated by Sophocles in the lines: _Nay, ’twould not seem, poor fool, to beautify, But to unbeautify, and prove thee wanton._ As Crates used to say, ‘Adornment is that which adorns,’ and that which adorns is that which adds to a woman’s seemliness. This is not done by gold or jewels or scarlet, but by whatever invests her with the badges of dignity, decorum, and modesty. 27. In sacrificing to Hera as goddess of marriage, the gall is not burned with the other portions of the sacrifice, but is [Sidenote: F] taken out and thrown down at the side of the altar—an indirect injunction of the legislator that gall and anger should have no place in the married state. The austerity of the lady of the house, like the dryness of wine, should be wholesome and palatable, not bitter like aloes or unpleasant like a drug. 28. Xenocrates being somewhat harsh in character, though otherwise a high type of man, Plato recommended him to _sacrifice to the Graces_. Now I take it that a woman of strict morals stands in special need of the graces in dealing with her [Sidenote: 142] husband, so that—as Metrodorus used to say—she may live with him on pleasant terms and not ‘in a temper because she is chaste’. A woman should no more forget to be amiable because she is faithful, than to be neat because she is thrifty. Decorum in a woman is rendered as disagreeable by harshness as frugality is by sluttishness. 29. A wife who is afraid to laugh and joke with her husband for fear of seeming bold and wanton, is as bad as the woman who, from fear of being thought to use ointments on her head, does not even oil it,[39] and, to avoid seeming to rouge her face, does not even wash it. We find that when poets and orators avoid appealing to the vulgar by bad taste and affectation in [Sidenote: B] respect of their diction, they practise every art to attract and stir the hearer with their matter, their treatment, and their moral quality. So the lady of the house, because she avoids and deprecates—as she is quite right to do—extravagant or meretricious demonstration, ought all the more to bring the graces of character and conduct into play in dealing with her husband, thus habituating him to proper ways, but in a pleasurable manner. If, however, a wife shows herself strait-laced and rigidly austere, her husband must put the best face upon it. When Antipater required Phocion to perform an improper and [Sidenote: C] degrading action, he answered, ‘I cannot serve you both as your friend and your toady.’ In the same way, when a woman is staid and strait-laced, our reflection should be, ‘The same woman cannot behave to me as both a wife and a mistress.’ 30. By a national custom the Egyptian women wore no shoes, so that they might keep at home all day. In the case of most women, to deprive them of gold-worked shoes, bangles, anklets, purple, and pearls, is to make them stay indoors. 31. Theano, in putting on her mantle, once showed a glimpse of her arm. Upon some one saying, ‘A beautiful forearm!’ she retorted, ‘But not for the public!’ A well-conducted woman will keep, not only her forearm, but her speech, from [Sidenote: D] publicity. She will be as shy and cautious about her utterances to the outside world as if they were an exposure of her person, inasmuch as, when she talks, they are a revelation of feelings, character, and disposition. 32. Pheidias, in representing the Elean Aphrodite with her foot upon a tortoise, meant women to take it as a symbol of home-keeping and silence. A woman should talk either to, or through the medium of, her husband; nor should she resent it if, like a player on the clarinet, she finds a more impressive utterance through another tongue than through her own. 33. When rich or royal persons pay respect to a philosopher, they do honour both to themselves and to him. But when a philosopher pays court to rich people, he is not conferring [Sidenote: E] distinction upon them, but lowering his own. The same is the case with women. By submission to their husbands they win regard; by seeking to govern them they demean themselves worse than the men so governed. Meanwhile it is only right that the husband, in controlling the wife, should not be like an owner dealing with a chattel, but like the mind dealing with the body—sympathetic with the sympathy of organic union. It is possible to care for the body without being a slave to its pleasures and desires, and it is possible to rule a wife and yet do things to please and gratify her. 34. Compound objects are classified by philosophers as follows. In some the parts are distinct, as in a fleet or army. [Sidenote: F] In some they are conjoined, as in a house or ship. In others they form an organic unity, as in all living creatures. We may say much the same of marriage. The marriage of love is the ‘organic unity’; the marriage for a dowry or for children is that of persons ‘conjoined’; marriage without sharing the same couch is that of persons ‘distinct’, who may be said to [Sidenote: 143] dwell together, but not to live together. With persons marrying, there should be a mutual blending of bodies, means, friends, and relations, in the same way as, according to the scientists, when liquids are mixed, the mixture runs through the whole. When the Roman legislator forbade married couples to exchange presents, he did not mean that they should not impart to each other, but that they should look upon everything as joint property. 35. At Leptis in Africa it is a traditional custom for the bride, on the day after marriage, to send to the bridegroom’s mother to borrow a pot. The latter refuses, saying she has none. The intention is that the bride may realize from the first the ‘step-mother’ attitude of her mother-in-law, so that, if anything more disagreeable happens afterwards, she may not be vexed or irritated. The wife should understand this fact and apply [Sidenote: B] treatment to its cause, which is, that the mother is jealous of her son’s affections. There is but one treatment for this state of mind. While winning the special affection of her husband for herself, she must avoid detaching or lessening his affection for his mother. 36. Mothers appear to be more fond of their sons, because those sons are able to help them, and fathers of their daughters, because daughters need their help. Maybe also it is out of compliment to each other that both parties desire to be seen making much of that which is more akin to the other. This, perhaps, is a trait of no importance, but there is another which is charming. I mean, when the wife’s respect is seen to incline rather to the husband’s parents than to her own, and when, [Sidenote: C] in case of anything troubling her, she refers it to them and conceals it from her own people. If you are thought to trust, you are trusted; if you are thought to love, you are loved. 37. The Greeks who accompanied Cyrus received the following order from their commanders: ‘If the enemy come shouting to the attack, await them in silence; if they come in silence, charge to meet them with a shout.’ When a husband has his fits of anger, if he raises his voice, a sensible wife keeps quiet; if he is silent, she soothes him by talking to him in a coaxing way. 38. Euripides is right in blaming those who have the lyre [Sidenote: D] played to them at their wine. Music is more properly called in to cure anger and grief than to encourage further abandonment on the part of those who are taking their pleasure. So I would have you believe that it is a wrong principle to share the same bed for the sake of pleasure, and yet, when you are angry or fall out, to sleep apart. That is exactly the time to call in the Goddess of Love, who is the best physician for such cases. This is practically the teaching of the poet, when he makes Hera say: _And their tangled strife will I loosen, When to their couch I bring them, to meet in love and in union._ [Sidenote: E] 39. At all times and everywhere a wife should avoid offending the husband, and a husband the wife; but especially should they beware of doing so when together at night. In the story, the wife, in the vexation of her throes, used to say to those who were putting her to bed: ‘How can this couch cure a trouble which befell me upon it?’ So quarrels, recriminations, and tempers which are begotten in the chamber are not easily got over in another place or at another time. 40. There appears to be a truth in Hermione’s plea: [Sidenote: F] ‘_Tis wicked women’s visits have undone me._ This occurs in more than one way, but especially when connubial quarrels and jealousies offer to such women not only an open door, but an open ear. At such a time, therefore, should a sensible woman shut her ears, keep out of the way of slanderous whispers which add fuel to the fire, and be ready to apply the well-known saying of Philip. We are told that when his friends were trying to exasperate that monarch against the Greeks—on the ground that, though he treated them well, they abused him—he remarked, ‘Well, and what, pray, if we treat them badly?’ So, when the scandalizers say, ‘Your husband grieves you, in spite of all your affection and chastity,’ you [Sidenote: 144] should retort, ‘And what, pray, if I begin to hate and wrong him?’ 41. A man caught sight of a slave who had run away some time before, and gave chase. When the slave was too quick, and took refuge in a mill, he observed, ‘And in what better place could I have wished to find you than where you are?‘[40] So let a woman who is declaring for a divorce through jealousy say to herself, ‘And where would my rival be more glad to see me? And what would she be more pleased to see me doing, than harbouring a grievance, at feud with my husband, and actually abandoning the house and the marriage-chamber?’ [Sidenote: B] 42. The Athenians observe three sacred ploughings; the first at Sciron, in memory of the oldest sowing of crops; the second in the Rharian district; and the third—known as the Buzygian festival—close to the Acropolis. More sacred than all of these is the connubial ploughing and sowing for the procreation of children. It is a happy expression of Sophocles, when he calls Aphrodite ‘_fair-fruited Cytherea_‘. Man and wife should therefore be especially scrupulous in this connexion, keeping pure from unholy and unlawful intercourse with others, and forbearing to sow where they desire no crop to grow, or, if it does, are ashamed of it and seek to conceal it. 43. When Gorgias the rhetorician once read to the Greeks at Olympia a discourse upon peace and harmony, Melanthius exclaimed, ‘Here is a man giving us advice about peace and [Sidenote: C] harmony, when in private life he has failed to harmonize three people—himself, his wife, and his maidservant.’ For Gorgias, it appears, was enamoured, and his wife jealous, of the domestic. A man’s house ought to be in tune before he offers to set in tune a state, a public meeting, or friends. The public is more likely to hear of offences against a wife than of offences committed by her. 44. They say that the cat is driven frantic by the smell of unguents. If it had been the case that women were provoked [Sidenote: D] out of their senses by the same means, it would have been a monstrous thing for men not to abstain from unguents, and to let their wives suffer so cruelly for the sake of a trifling gratification of their own. Now since, though the husband’s use of unguents does not so afflict them, his dealings with other women do, it is unjust to cause such vexation and distress to a wife for the sake of a little pleasure. On the contrary, husbands should come to their wives pure and untainted by other intercourse, just as they would approach bees, who are said to show disgust and hostility towards any one who has been so engaged. 45. People never dress in bright clothes when approaching [Sidenote: E] an elephant, nor in red when approaching a bull, since the animals in question are particularly infuriated by those colours. Of tigers it is said that, if you beat drums all round them, they go mad and tear themselves to pieces. Surely, then, inasmuch as some men cannot bear to see scarlet or purple clothes, and some are irritated at cymbals and tambourines, it is not asking too much for women to leave such things alone, and not harass or exasperate their husbands, but practise quietude and consideration in their society. [Sidenote: F] 46. When Philip was once seizing upon a woman against her will, she said, ‘Let me go. All women are the same when you take away the light.’ While this applies well enough to adulterers and sensualists, it is particularly when the light is taken away that a wife should _not_ be the same as any ordinary female. Her person may not be visible, but her modesty, chastity, decorum, and natural affection should make themselves palpable. 47. Plato used to recommend that respect should rather be paid by elderly men to the young, so that the latter might behave modestly to them in return. For, said he, ‘where old men are shameless,’ the young acquire no modesty or scruple. A husband should bear this in mind, and show more respect [Sidenote: 145] to his wife than to any one else, since the nuptial chamber will prove to be her school of propriety or its opposite. The husband who indulges himself in certain pleasures, while warning her against the same, is as bad as the man who bids his wife fight on against an enemy to whom he has himself surrendered. 48. As to love of display, do you, Eurydice, read and endeavour to remember what Timoxena wrote to Aristylla. And you, Pollianus, must not expect your wife to refrain from showy extravagance, if she sees that you do not despise it in other [Sidenote: B] matters, but that you take a pleasure in cups with gilding, rooms with painted walls, mules with decorated harness, and horses with neck-trappings. You cannot banish extravagance from the women’s quarters when it has the free run of the men’s. You are at the right age to cultivate philosophy. Adorn your character, therefore, by listening to careful reasoning and demonstration in improving company and conversation. Be like the bees. Gather valuable matter from every source. Carry it home in yourself, and share it with your wife by discussing it and making all the best principles agreeable and familiar to her. While [Sidenote: C] _Thou unto her art father, and honoured mother, and brother_, it is no less a matter of pride to hear a wife say, ‘Husband, thou unto me art guide, philosopher, and teacher of the noblest and divinest lessons.’ It is studies of this kind that tend to keep a woman from foolish practices. She will be ashamed to be dancing, when she is learning geometry. She will lend no ear to the incantations of sorcery, when she is listening to those of Plato and Xenophon. When any one promises to fetch down the moon,[41] she will laugh at the ignorance and silliness of women who believe such things; for she will possess a knowledge of astronomy, and will have heard how Aglaonice, the daughter of Hegetor of Thessaly, thoroughly understood [Sidenote: D] eclipses of the full moon, how she knew beforehand the date at which it must be caught in the shadow, and how she thereby cheated the women into believing that she was fetching it down herself. We are told that no woman produces a child without the participation of the man, though there are shapeless and fleshlike growths—called ‘millstones’—which form themselves spontaneously from corrupted matter. We must beware of this occurring in women’s minds. If they are not impregnated with sound doctrines by sharing in the culture of their husbands, [Sidenote: E] they will of their own accord conceive many an ill-advised intention or irrational state of feeling. As for you, Eurydice, above all things do your best to keep touch with the sayings of wise and good men, and to have continually in your mouth those utterances which you learned by heart in my school when a girl. By so doing, you will not only be a joy to your husband, but the admiration of other women, when they see how, at no expense, you can adorn yourself with so much distinction and dignity. This rich woman’s pearls, that foreign lady’s silks, are not to be worn without paying a large price for them. But the ornaments [Sidenote: F] of Theano, of Cleobuline, of Gorgo the wife of Leonidas, of Timoclea the sister of Theagenes, of the Claudia of ancient history, and of Cornelia the daughter of Scipio, you may wear for nothing; and with this adornment your life may be as happy as it is distinguished. [Sidenote: 146] Sappho thought so much of her skill as a lyrist that she wrote—addressing a wealthy woman— _When thou art dead, thou shalt lie with none to remember thy name: For no portion hast thou in the roses Pierian...._ You will assuredly have more occasion to think highly and proudly of yourself, if you have a portion, not only in the roses, but also in the fruits, which the Muses bring as free gifts to those who prize culture and philosophy. Footnote 37: Made of polished bronze. Footnote 38: Which contained ‘every charm: love, desire, and sweet converse’ (Homer, _Il._ xiv. 214). Footnote 39: The use of oil to soften the hair was practically universal. Footnote 40: A common punishment for a slave was to put him to hard labour in turning the mill, in place of a horse or ass. Footnote 41: A frequent pretence of ancient witches.

If a house is stuffy, dark, chilly, or unhealthy, it is perhaps [Sidenote: 515 B] best to get out of it. But if long association makes you fond of the place, you may alter the lights, shift the stairs, open a door here and close one there, and so make it brighter, fresher, and more wholesome. Even cities have sometimes been improved [Sidenote: C] by such rearrangement. For instance, it is said that my own native town, which used to face the west and receive the full force of the afternoon sun from Parnassus, was turned by Chairon so as to front the east. Empedocles, the natural philosopher, once blocked up a mountain gorge, which sent a destructive and pestilential south wind blowing down upon the plains. By this means, it was thought, he shut the plague out of the district. Well, since there are certain injurious and unhealthy states of mind which chill and darken the soul, it would be best to get rid of them—to make a clean sweep to the foundations, and give ourselves the benefit of a clear sky, light, and pure air [Sidenote: D] to breathe. If not, we should reform and readjust them by turning them some other way about. We may take the vice of the busybody as an instance in point. It is a love of prying into other people’s troubles, a disease tainted—we may believe—with both envy and malice. _Why so sharp-eyed, my most malignant Sir, For others’ faults, yet overlook your own?_ Pray turn your pryingness the other way about, and make it face inwards. If you are so fond of the business of inquiring into defects, you will find plenty to occupy you at home. [Sidenote: *] _Abundant as leaves on the oak or the water that rolls from Alizon_ will you find the errors in your conduct, the disorders in your heart and mind, and the lapses in your duty. [Sidenote: E] According to Xenophon, a good householder has a special place for the utensils of sacrifice, and a special place for those of the table; agricultural implements are stored in one room, weapons of war in another. In your own case you have one stock of faults arising from envy, another from jealousy, another from cowardice, another from meanness. These are the faults for you to inspect and examine. Block up the windows [Sidenote: F] and alleys of your inquisitiveness on the side towards your neighbours, and open others which look into your own house—the male quarters, the female quarters, the living-rooms of the servants. Our busy curiosity will find occupation of a profitable and salutary, instead of a useless and malicious, kind, if each one will say to himself: _How have I err’d? What deed have I done? What duty neglected?_ As it is, we are all of us like the Lamia in the fable, of whom [Sidenote: 516] we are told that at home she is asleep and blind, with her eyes stowed away in a jar, but that when she comes abroad she puts them in and can see. Outside, and in dealing with others, we furnish our malice with an eye in the shape of our meddlesomeness, but we are continually being tripped up by our own misdeeds and vices, of which we are unaware, because we provide ourselves with no light or vision to perceive them. It follows that the busybody is a better friend to his enemies than to himself. While censoriously reproving their shortcomings and showing them what they ought to avoid or amend, he is so taken up with faults outside that he overlooks most of those at home. [Sidenote: B] Odysseus refused even to talk to his mother, until he had got his answer from the seer concerning the business which had brought him to Hades. When he had received the information, he turned to her, and also began to put questions to the other women, asking who Tyro was, and the beautiful Chloris, and why Epicaste met her death by _Tying a sheer-hung noose from the height of the lofty roof-tree_. Not so we. While treating our own concerns with the greatest indifference, ignorance, and neglect, we begin discussing other people’s pedigrees—how our neighbour’s grandfather was a Syrian and his grandmother a Thracian. ‘So-and-So owes more than seven hundred pounds, and cannot pay the interest.’ We also make it our business to inquire about such matters as where So-and-So got his wife from, and what private talk was that between A and B in the corner. Socrates, on the other [Sidenote: C] hand, went about inquiring, ‘By what arguments did Pythagoras carry conviction?’ So Aristippus, when he met Ischomachus at Olympia, proceeded to ask by what kind of conversation Socrates affected the Athenians as he did. When he had gleaned a few seeds or samples of his talk, he was so moved that he suffered a physical collapse, and became quite pale and thin. In the end he set sail for Athens, and slaked his thirst with draughts from the fountain-head, studying the man, his discourses and his philosophy, of which the aim was to recognize one’s own vices and get rid of them. But there are some to whom their own life is a most distressing [Sidenote: D] spectacle, and who therefore cannot bear to look at it nor to reflect the light of reason upon themselves. Their soul is so fraught with all manner of vices, that, shuddering with horror at what lies within, it darts away from home, and goes prowling round other men’s concerns, where it lets its malice batten and grow fat. It often happens that a domestic fowl, though there is plenty of food lying at its disposal, will slink into a corner and scratch _Where so appeareth, mayhap, one barley-grain in a dunghill._ It is much the same with the busybody. Ignoring the topics and questions which are open to all, and which no one prevents him from asking about or is annoyed with him if he does ask, [Sidenote: E] he goes picking out of every house the troubles which it is endeavouring to bury out of sight. But surely it was a neat answer which the Egyptian made to the man who asked him what he was carrying in that wrapper. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is why it _is_ in a wrapper.’ And why, pray, are you so inquisitive about a thing which is being concealed? If it had not been something undesirable, there would have been no concealment. It is not usual to walk into another man’s house without knocking at the door. Nowadays there are doorkeepers—formerly knockers were beaten upon the doors in order to give warning—the intention being that the stranger shall not surprise the lady of the [Sidenote: F] house or her daughter in the open, or come upon a slave receiving punishment, or the handmaids screaming. But these are exactly the things which the busybody steals in to see. At a staid and quiet household he would have no pleasure in looking, even if he were invited. His object is to uncover and make public those things to which keys, bolts, and the street-door owe their existence. ‘The winds which vex us most,’ says Ariston, ‘are those which pull up our cloaks.’ But the busybody strips off not only our mantles and tunics, but our walls; he spreads our doors wide open, and makes his way like a piercing wind through the ‘_maiden of tender skin_‘, prying and sneaking into [Sidenote: 517] her bacchic revels, her dances, and her all-night festivals. As Cleon in the comedy had _His hands in Askthorpe and his thoughts in Thefton_, so the busybody’s thoughts are at one and the same time in the houses of the rich and the hovels of the poor, in the courts of kings and the chambers of the newly-wed. He searches into everybody’s business—business of strangers, and business of potentates. Nor is his search without danger. If one were to take a taste of aconite because he was inquisitive as to its properties, he would find that he had killed the learner before he got his lesson. So those who pry into the troubles of the [Sidenote: B] great destroy themselves before discovering what they seek. If any one is not satisfied with the beams which the sun lavishes so abundantly upon all, but audaciously insists upon gazing unabashed at the orb itself and probing the light to its heart, the result is blindness. It was therefore wise of Philippides, the comic poet, when King Lysimachus once asked him, ‘What can I give you of mine?’ to reply, ‘Anything, Sire, but your secrets.’ The finest and most pleasant aspects of royalty are those displayed outwardly—its banquets, wealth, pomps and shows, graces and favours. But if a king has any secret, keep away from it and leave it alone. A king does not conceal his [Sidenote: C] joy when prosperous, nor his laughter when jocose, nor his intention to do a kindness or confer a boon. When he hides a thing, when he is glum, unsmiling, unapproachable, it is time for alarm. It means that he has been storing up anger, and that it is festering; or that he is sullenly meditating a severe punishment; or that he is jealous of his wife, or suspicious of his son, or distrustful of a friend. Run, run from that cloud which is gathering so black! You cannot possibly miss the thunder and lightning, when the matter which is now a secret bursts out in storm. How, then, are we to escape this vice? By turning our inquisitiveness—as we have said—the other way round, and, as far as possible, directing our minds to better and more interesting objects. If you are to pry, pry into questions [Sidenote: D] connected with sky, earth, air, or sea. You are by nature fond of looking either at little things or at big things. If at big things, apply your curiosity to the sun; ask where he sets and whence he rises. Inquire into the changes of the moon, as if she were a human being. Ask where she loses so much of her light, and whence she gets it back; how _Once dim, she first comes forth and makes Her young face beauteous, gathering to the full, And, when her greatest splendours she hath shown, Fades out, and passes into naught again._ These, too, are secrets—the secrets of Nature; but Nature has [Sidenote: E] no grievance against those who find them out. Are the big things beyond you? Then pry into the smaller ones. Ask how it is that some plants are always flourishing and green, proudly displaying their wealth at every season, while others are at one moment as good as these, but at another have squandered their abundance all at once, like some human spendthrift, and are left bare and beggared. Why, again, do some plants produce elongated fruits, some angular, some round and globelike? But perhaps you will have no curiosity for such concerns, [Sidenote: F] because there is nothing wrong about them. Well, if inquisitiveness absolutely must be always browsing and passing its time among things sordid, like a maggot among dead matter, let us introduce it to history and story, and supply it with bad things in abundance and without stint. For there it will find _Fallings of men and spurnings-off of life_, seductions of women, assaults by slaves, slanderings of friends, concoctions of poisons, envies, jealousies, shipwrecks of homes, overthrows of rulers. Take your fill, enjoy yourself, and cause no annoyance or pain to any of those with whom you come in contact. Apparently, however, inquisitiveness finds no pleasure in scandals which are stale; it wants them hot and fresh. And [Sidenote: 518] while it enjoys the spectacle of a novel tragedy, it takes no sort of interest in the comedy or more cheerful side of life. Consequently the busybody lends but a careless and indifferent ear to the account of a wedding, a sacrifice, or a complimentary ‘farewell’. He says he has already heard most of the details, and urges the narrator to cut them short or omit them. But if any one will sit by him and tell him the news about the corruption of a girl or the unfaithfulness of a wife or an impending action at law or a quarrel between brothers, there is no sleepiness or hurry about him, but _More words still doth he ask, and proffers his ears to receive them._ As applied to the busybody, the words _How much more apt to reach the ear of man An ill thing than a happy!_ are a true saying. As a cupping-glass sucks from the flesh what [Sidenote: B] is worst in it, so the inquisitive ear draws to itself the most undesirable topics. To vary the figure: cities have certain ‘Accursed’ or ‘Dismal’ gates, through which they take out criminals on their way to death and throw the refuse and offscourings of purification, while nothing sacred or undefiled goes in or out through them. So with the ears of the busybody. They give passage to nothing fine or useful, but serve only as the pathway of gruesome communications, with their load of foul and polluted gossip. _No chance brings other minstrel to my roof, But always Lamentation._ [Sidenote: C] That is the one Muse and Siren of the busybody, the most pleasant of all music to his ear. For his vice is a love of finding out whatever is secret and concealed, and no one conceals a good thing when he has one; on the contrary, he will pretend to one which has no existence. Since therefore it is troubles that the busybody is eager to discover, the disease from which he suffers is malignant gloating—own brother to envy and spite. For envy is pain at another’s good; malignity is pleasure at another’s harm; and the parent of both is ill-nature—the [Sidenote: D] feeling of a savage or a brute beast. So painful do we all find it to have our troubles revealed, that there are many who would rather die than tell a physician of a secret disease. Imagine Herophilus or Erasistratus, or Asclepius himself—when he was a mortal man—calling from house to house with his drugs and his instruments, and asking whether a man had a fistula or a woman a cancer in the womb! Inquisitiveness in their profession may, it is true, save a life. None the less, I presume, every one would have scouted such a person, [Sidenote: E] for coming to investigate other people’s ailments without waiting till he was required and sent for. Yet our busybody searches out precisely these, or even worse, ailments; and, since he does so not by way of curing them, but merely of disclosing them, he deserves the hatred he gets. We are annoyed and indignant with the collector of customs,[42] not when he picks out and levies on those articles which we import openly, but when, in the search for hidden goods, he ransacks among baggage and merchandise which are not in [Sidenote: F] question. Yet the law permits him to do so, and he is the loser if he does not. On the other hand, the busybody lets his own concerns go to ruin, while he is occupying himself with those of other people. He rarely takes a walk to the farm; it is too lonely, and he cannot bear the quiet and silence. And if, after a time, he does chance along, he has a keener eye for his neighbour’s vines than for his own. He proceeds to ask how many of his neighbour’s cattle have died, or how much of his wine turned sour. After a good meal of such news he is quickly off and away. Your true and genuine type of farmer has no desire to hear even the news which finds its own way from the city. Says he: _Then, while he digs, he’ll tell The terms o’the treaty. He must now, confound him, Go round and poke his nose in things like that!_ [Sidenote: 519] But to your busybody country life is a stale and uninteresting thing with nothing to fuss about. He therefore flees from it, and pushes into the Exchange, the Market, or the Harbour. ‘Is there any news?’ ‘Why, weren’t you at market early this morning? Do you imagine there has been a revolution in three hours?’ If, however, any one has a piece of news to tell, down he gets from his horse, grasps the man’s hand, kisses him, and stands there listening. But if some one meets him and says there is nothing fresh, he exclaims, as if he were annoyed: ‘What? Haven’t you been at market? Haven’t you been near the Board-Room? And haven’t you met the new arrivals from [Sidenote: B] Italy?’ The Locrian magistrates therefore did right in fining any one who, after being out of town, came up and asked, ‘Is there any news?’ As the butchers pray for a good supply of animals, and fishermen for a good supply of fish, so busybodies pray for a good supply of calamities, for plenty of troubles, for novelties and changes. They must always have their fish to catch or carcass to cut up. Another good rule was that of the legislator of Thurii, who forbade the lampooning of citizens on the stage, with the exception of adulterers and busybodies. The one class bears a resemblance to the other, adultery being a sort of inquisitiveness into [Sidenote: C] another’s pleasure, and a prying search into matters protected from the general eye, while inquisitiveness is the illicit denuding and corrupting of a secret. While a natural consequence of much learning is having much to say, and therefore Pythagoras enjoined upon the young a five years’ silence, which he called ‘Truce to Speech’, the necessary concomitant of curiosity is speaking evil. What the curious delight to hear, they delight to talk about; what they take pains to gather from others, they joy in giving out to new hearers. It follows that, besides its [Sidenote: D] other drawbacks, their disease actually stands in the way of its own desires. For every one is on his guard to hide things from them, and is reluctant to do anything when the busybody is looking, or to say anything when he is listening. People put off a consultation and postpone the consideration of business until such persons are out of the way. If, when a secret matter is towards, or an important action is in the doing, a busybody appears upon the scene, they take it away and hide it, as they [Sidenote: E] would a piece of victuals when the cat comes past. Often, therefore, he is the only person not permitted to hear or see what others may see and hear. For the same reason the busybody can find no one to trust him. We would rather trust our letters, papers, or seals to a slave or a stranger than to an inquisitive relation or friend. Bellerophon, though the writing which he carried was about himself, would not broach it, but showed the same continence in keeping his hands off the king’s letter as in keeping them off his wife. Yes, inquisitiveness is as incontinent as adultery, and not only incontinent, but terribly silly and foolish. To pass by so many women who are public property, and to struggle to get at one [Sidenote: F] who is kept under lock and key, who is expensive, and perhaps ugly to boot, is the very height of insanity. The busybody is just as bad. He passes by much that is admirable to see and hear, many an excellent discourse or discussion, to dig into another man’s poor little letter or clap his ear to his neighbour’s wall, listening to slaves and womenfolk whispering together, and incurring danger often, and discredit always. [Sidenote: 520] Well, if he wishes to get rid of his vice, the busybody will find nothing so helpful as to think over the discoveries he has hitherto made. Simonides used to say that, in opening his boxes after a lapse of time, he found the fee-box always full and the thanks-box always empty. So, if one were to open the store-room of inquisitiveness after an interval, and to contemplate all the useless, futile, and uninviting things with which it is filled, he would probably become sick of the business, so nauseating and senseless would it appear. Suppose a person to run over the works of our old writers and pick out their faultiest passages, compiling and keeping a book full of such things as ‘headless’ lines of Homer, solecisms [Sidenote: B] in the tragedians, the indecent and licentious language to women by which Archilochus makes a sorry show of himself. Does he not deserve the execration in the tragedy: _Perish, thou picker-up of miseries!_ Execration apart, his treasury, filled with other men’s faults, possesses neither beauty nor use. It is like the town which Philip founded with the rudest riff-raff, and which he called Knaveborough. With the busybody, however, it is not from lines of poetry, but from lives, that he goes gleaning and gathering blunders and slips and solecisms, till the memory which he carries about is the dullest and dreariest record-box, crammed with ugly things. [Sidenote: C] At Rome there are those who set no store by the paintings, the statues, or—failing these—the handsome children or women on sale, but who haunt the monster-market, examining specimens with no calves to their legs, or with weasel-elbows, three eyes, or ostrich-heads, and looking out for the appearance of any _Commingled shape and misformed prodigy._ Yet if you keep on showing them such sights, they will soon become surfeited and sick of it all. In the same way those who make it their business to pry into other people’s failures in their affairs, blots on their pedigree, disturbances and delinquencies in their homes, will do well to remind themselves how thankless [Sidenote: D] and unprofitable their previous discoveries have proved. The most effective way, however, of preventing this weakness is to form a habit—to begin at an early stage and train ourselves systematically to acquire the necessary self-control. It is by habit that the vice increases, the advance of the disease being gradual. How this is, we shall see, in discussing the proper method of practice. Let us make a beginning with comparatively trifling and insignificant matters. On the roads it can be no difficult matter to abstain from reading [Sidenote: E] the inscriptions on the tombs. Nor in the promenades can there be any hardship in refusing to let the eye linger upon the writings on the walls. You have only to tell yourself that they contain nothing useful or entertaining. There is A expressing his ‘kind sentiments’ towards B; So-and-So described as ‘the best of friends’; and much mere twaddle of the same kind. No doubt it seems as if the reading of them does you no harm; but harm you it does, without your knowing it, by inducing a habit of inquiring into things which do not concern you. Hunters do not permit young hounds to turn aside and [Sidenote: F] follow up every scent, but pull them sharply back with the leash, so as to keep their power of smell in perfectly clean condition for their proper work, and make it stick more keenly to the tracks: _With nostril a-search for the trail that the beast gives forth from its body_. The same watchfulness must be shown in suppressing, or in diverting to useful ends, the tendency of an inquisitive person to run off the track and wander after everything that he can see or hear. An eagle or a lion gathers its talons in when it [Sidenote: 521] walks, so as not to wear the sharp edge from their tips. Similarly let us treat the inquiring spirit as the keen edge to our love of learning, and refrain from wasting or blunting it upon objects of no value. In the next place let us train ourselves, when passing another’s door, to refrain from looking in, or from letting our inquisitive gaze clutch at what is passing inside. Xenocrates said—and we shall do well to keep the remark in mind—that whether we set foot or set eyes in another man’s house makes no difference. Not only is such prying unfair and improper; we get no pleasure from the spectacle. _Unsightly, stranger, are the sights within_, is a saying which is generally true of what we see inside—a litter of pots and pans, or servant-girls sitting about, but nothing of [Sidenote: B] any importance or interest. This furtive throwing of sidelong glances, which at the same time gives a kind of squint to the mind, is ugly, and the habit is demoralizing. When the Olympian victor Dioxippus was making a triumphal entry in a chariot, and could not drag his eyes from a beautiful woman among the spectators, but kept turning half round and throwing side glances in her direction, Diogenes—who saw it all—remarked, ‘See how a bit of a girl gets the neck-grip on our great athlete!’ Inquisitive people, however, are to be seen gripped by the neck and twisted about by any kind of sight, when they once develop a habit of squandering their glances in all directions. This is assuredly no right use of the faculty of vision. It should [Sidenote: C] not go gadding about like some ill-trained maidservant; but when the mind sends it upon an errand, it should make haste to reach its destination, deliver its message, and then come quietly home again to wait upon the commands of the reason. Instead of this, the case is as in Sophocles: _Thereon the Aenean driver’s hard-mouthed colts Break from control._ When the faculty of vision has not been tutored and trained in the proper manner as above described, it runs away, drags [Sidenote: D] the mind with it, and often brings it into disastrous collisions. There is a story that Democritus deliberately destroyed his sight by fixing his eyes upon a red-hot mirror and allowing its heat to be focussed upon them. His object, it is said, was to block up the windows toward the street, and thus prevent the disturbance of his intellect by repeated calls from outside, enabling it to stay at home and devote itself to pure thinking. Though the story is a fiction, nothing is more true than that those who make most use of their mind make few calls upon the senses. Note how our halls of learning are built far out from the towns, and how night has been styled the ‘_well-minded_‘, from a belief [Sidenote: E] that quiet and the absence of distraction are a powerful aid to intellectual discovery and research. Suppose, again, that people are quarrelling and abusing each other in the market-place. It requires no great effort of self-denial to keep at a distance. When a crowd is running towards a certain spot, it is easy for you to remain seated, or else, if you lack the necessary strength of mind, to get up and go away. There is no advantage to be got from mixing yourself with busybodies, whereas you will derive great benefit from putting a forcible check upon your curiosity and training it to obey the commands of the reason. [Sidenote: F] We may now go a step further, and tax ourselves more severely. It is good practice, when a successful entertainment is going on in a public hall, to pass it by; when our friends invite us to a performance by a dancer or comedian, to decline; when there is a roar in the race-ground or the circus, to take no notice. Socrates used to urge the avoidance of all foods and drinks which tempt one to eat when he is not hungry or to drink when he is not thirsty. In the same way we shall do well to shun carefully all appeals to eye or ear, when, though they are no business of ours, their attractions prove too much for us. Cyrus refused to see Panthea, and when Araspes talked of her [Sidenote: 522] remarkable beauty, his answer was: ‘All the more reason for keeping away from her. If I took your advice and went to see her, she might perhaps tempt me to be visiting her again when I could not spare the time, and to be sitting and looking at her to the neglect of much important business.’ In the same way Alexander refused to set eyes on Darius’ wife, who was said to be strikingly handsome. Though he visited the mother—an elderly woman—he would not bring himself to see her young and beautiful daughter. But what we do is to peep into women’s litters and hang about their windows, finding nothing improper in encouraging our curiosity and allowing it such dangerous [Sidenote: B] and unchecked play. Note how you may train yourself for other virtues. To learn justice you should sometimes forgo an honest gain, and so accustom yourself to keep aloof from dishonest ones. Similarly, to learn continence, you should sometimes hold aloof from your own wife, and so secure yourself against temptation from another’s. Apply this habit to inquisitiveness. Endeavour occasionally to miss hearing or seeing things which concern yourself. When something happens at home, and a person wishes to tell you of it, put the matter off; and when things have been said which appear to affect yourself, refuse to hear them. Remember how Oedipus was brought into the direst disasters by over-curiosity. Finding he was no Corinthian, but an alien, he set to work [Sidenote: C] to discover who he was, and so he met with Laius. He killed him, married his own mother, with the throne for dowry, and then, while apparently blessed by fortune, began his search once more. The endeavours of his wife to prevent him only made him question still more closely, and in the most peremptory way, the old man who was in the secret. And at last, when circumstances are already bringing him to suspect, and the old man cries: _Alas! I stand on the dread brink of speech!_ he is nevertheless in such a blaze or spasm of passion that he replies: _And I of hearing; and yet hear I must._ [Sidenote: D] So bitter-sweet, so uncontrollable, is the excitement of curiosity—like the tickling of a wound, at which one tears till he makes it bleed. Meanwhile if we are free from that malady, and mild by nature, we shall ignore a disagreeable thing and say: _Sovran Oblivion, how wise art thou!_ We must therefore train ourselves to this end. If a letter is brought to us, we must not show all that hurry and eagerness to open it which most people display, when they bite the fastenings through with their teeth, if their hands are too slow. When a messenger arrives from somewhere or other, we must not run to meet him, nor get up from our seats. If a friend [Sidenote: E] says, ‘I have something new to tell you,’ let us reply: ‘Better, if you have something useful or profitable.’ When I was once lecturing at Rome, the famous Rusticus—who was afterwards put to death by Domitian out of jealousy at his reputation—was among my hearers. A soldier came through the audience and handed him a note from the emperor. There was a hush, and I made a pause, to allow of his reading the letter. This, however, he refused to do, nor would he open it, until I had finished my discourse and the audience broke up. The incident caused universal admiration at his dignified behaviour. But when one feeds his inquisitiveness upon permissible material until he makes it robust and headstrong, he no longer [Sidenote: F] finds it easy to master, when force of habit urges it towards forbidden ground. Such persons will stealthily open their friends’ missives, will push their way into a confidential meeting, will get a view of rites which it is an impiety to see, will tread in hallowed places, and will pry into the doings and sayings of a king. Now with a despot—who is compelled to know everything—there is nothing that makes him so detested as the crew known as his ‘ears’ and ‘jackals’. ‘Listeners’ were first instituted by Darius the Younger, who had no confidence in himself and looked upon every one with fear and suspicion. ‘Jackals’ were [Sidenote: 523] the creation of the Dionysii, who distributed them among the people of Syracuse. Naturally, when the revolution came, these were the first to be seized and cudgelled to death by the Syracusans. Blackmailers and informers are a breed belonging to the Busybody clan; they are members of the family. But, whereas the informer looks to see if his neighbours have done or plotted any mischief, the busybody brings to book and drags into public even the misfortunes for which they are not responsible. It is said that the outcast derived his name of _aliterios_ in the first instance from being a busybody. It appears that when a severe famine once occurred at Athens, and when those who were in possession of wheat, instead of bringing it in to the public [Sidenote: B] stock, used to grind it (_alein_) secretly by night in their houses, certain persons, who went round watching for the noise of the mills, were in consequence called _aliterioi_. It was in the same way, we are told, that the informer won his name of _sukophantes_. The export of figs (_suka_) being prohibited, those who gave information (_phainein_) and impeached the offenders were called _sukophantai_. Busybodies would do well to reflect upon this fact. It may make them ashamed of the family likeness between their own practices and those of a class which is a special object of loathing and anger. Footnote 42: These were farmed.

[Sidenote: 502 B] When philosophy undertakes to cure garrulity it has a difficult and intractable case in hand. The remedy is reason, which requires that the patient should listen. But the garrulous person [Sidenote: C] does not listen, for he is always talking. Herein lies the first trouble with an inability to keep silent; it means an inability to listen. It is the deliberate deafness of a person who appears to find fault with nature for giving him two ears and only one tongue. Euripides is, of course, right when he says of the unintelligent hearer: _I cannot fill a man who cannot hold My wise words, poured and poured in unwise ears._ But there is more reason to say of the babbler: _I cannot fill a man who takes not in My wise words, poured and poured in unwise ears_, —or rather poured over them, since he talks though you do [Sidenote: D] not listen, and refuses to listen when you talk. For even if, thanks to some ebb in his loquacity, he does listen for a moment, he immediately makes up for it several times over. There is a colonnade at Olympia which reverberates a single utterance time after time, and is therefore known as the ‘Seven-Voiced’. Say but the least thing to set garrulity sounding, and it immediately dins you with its echoes: _Stirring the strings o’ the mind that none should stir._ The passage through the babbler’s ears leads, apparently, not to his mind, but to his tongue. Consequently, while others [Sidenote: E] retain what is said, the loquacious person lets it all leak away, and goes about like a vessel full of noise but void of sense. Nevertheless, if we are resolved to leave no stone unturned, let us say to the babbler: _Hush, boy: in silence many a virtue lies_, and, first and foremost, the two virtues of hearing and being heard. The garrulous person can get the benefit of neither, and makes a miserable failure of the very thing he is aiming at. In other mental maladies—love of money, love of glory, love of pleasure—there is at least a chance of gaining the object pursued. But with the babbler that result can hardly happen. [Sidenote: F] What he desires is listeners, and listeners he cannot get, for they all run headlong away. If, when they are sitting in a lounge or taking a walk together, they catch sight of him approaching, they promptly pass each other the word to shift camp. When a silence occurs at some meeting, it is said that _Hermes has appeared upon the scene_. Similarly, when a chatterer comes in to a wine-party or a social circle, everybody grows mum, for [Sidenote: 503] fear of giving him an opportunity. And if he begins of his own accord to open his lips, then _As ere the storm, when the North wind blows By the headland that juts to the deep_, the prospect of being tossed and seasick is so distressing that up they get and out they go. For the same reason he finds no welcome from neighbours at a dinner or from messmates on a journey or a voyage. They merely tolerate him because they must. For he sticks to you anywhere and everywhere, seizing you by the clothes or the beard, and slapping you in the ribs. _Then are your feet most precious_, as Archilochus would say—and not only Archilochus, but that wise man Aristotle. When the latter was himself once worried [Sidenote: B] by a chatterer, who bored him with a number of silly stories and kept repeating, ‘Isn’t it wonderful, Aristotle?’ he retorted, ‘The wonder is not at that, but at any one tolerating you, when he owns a pair of legs.’ To another person of the kind, who, after a great deal of talk, remarked, ‘Master, I have wearied you with my chatter,’ he replied, ‘Not at all; I was not listening.’ Precisely so. If a chatterer insists on talking, the mind surrenders the ears to him and lets the stream pour over them on the outside, while inwardly it goes its own way, opening [Sidenote: C] and reading to itself a book of quite different thoughts. It follows that he can get no hearer either to attend to him or to believe him. A babbler’s talk is as barren of effect as the seed of a person over-prone to sexualities is said to be. And yet there is no part of us which Nature has fenced with so excellent a barricade as the tongue. In front of that organ it has planted a guard in the shape of the teeth, so that, if it will not obey orders and pull itself together inside when reason tightens the ‘_silence-working reins_‘,[43] we may check its rashness by biting it till it bleeds. The phrase of Euripides is that ‘_disaster is the end_’ not of an ‘unchained’ treasury or storeroom, but of an ‘_unchained mouth_‘. To recognize that a storeroom without a door, or a purse without a fastening, is of no use to the owner, and yet to possess a mouth without lock or door, but with as perpetual an outflow as the mouth of the [Sidenote: D] Black Sea, is to set the lowest possible value on speech. The result is that such a person meets with no belief, though all speech has that object, its final cause being to create precisely such credence in the hearer. A chatterer is disbelieved even when he tells the truth. For as wheat, when shut in a bin, is found to increase in bulk but to deteriorate in quality, so, when a story finds its way into a chatterer, it generates a large addition of falsehood and its credibility is thereby corrupted. Again, any self-respecting and well-behaved person will beware of drunkenness. For while—as some put it—anger lives next door to madness, drunkenness lives in the same house. [Sidenote: E] Or rather it _is_ madness, of shorter duration, it is true, but more culpable, as being in a measure voluntary. But the charge most seriously urged against drunkenness is its intemperate and irresponsible language: _For though right shrewd be a man, wine eggs him on till he singeth; It loosens him that he laughs with a feeble laughter, and danceth._ Yet if this were the worst—singing, laughing, and dancing—there would be, so far, nothing very terrible. _And he letteth slip some speech, the which were better unspoken_:— [Sidenote: F] that is where the mischief and danger begin. We may, indeed, believe that these lines of the poet give the solution of the question discussed in the philosophic schools as to the distinction between mellowness and intoxication: mellowness produces unbending, but drunkenness foolish twaddling. As the proverb-makers put it, ‘_What is in the sober man’s heart is on the drunken man’s tongue._’ Hence when Bias once kept silent at a carousal, and a chatterer taunted him with stupidity, he retorted: ‘And, pray, who could keep silent over his wine, if he were a fool?’ A certain person at Athens was [Sidenote: 504] once entertaining envoys from a king, and, as they were eager for him to get together the philosophic teachers, he made every effort to gratify them. While the rest took part in general discussion, to which each contributed his quota, Zeno said nothing. At this the visitors, pledging him in friendly and courteous terms, asked him, ‘And what are we to say to the king about you, Zeno?’ ‘Merely,’ replied he, ‘that there is one old man at Athens who is capable of holding his tongue [Sidenote: *] when drinking.’ Silence, then, goes with depth, the capacity to keep a secret, [Sidenote: B] and sobriety. Drunkenness, on the other hand, will be talking, for it means folly and witlessness, and therefore loquacity. In fact, the philosophic definition of intoxication calls it ‘_silly talk in one’s cups_‘. The blame, therefore, is not for drinking, if one can drink and yet at the same time hold his tongue. It is the foolish talk that converts mellowness into drunkenness. Well, while the drunken man talks nonsense at his wine, the babbler talks it everywhere—in the market-place, in the theatre, when walking, when tipsy, by day and by night. As your doctor, he is a greater infliction than the disease; as your shipmate, more disagreeable than the sea-sickness; his praises are more annoying than another person’s blame. A tactful rogue is more pleasant company than an honest chatterer. In Sophocles, when [Sidenote: C] Ajax is beginning to use rough language, Nestor, in endeavouring to soothe him, says politely: _I blame thee not; for though thy words are wrong, Thine acts are right._ But those are not our feelings towards the twaddler. On the contrary, the tactlessness of his talk spoils and nullifies anything acceptable in what he may do. Lysias once gave a litigant a speech which he had composed for him. After reading it several times the man came back. In a despondent tone he told Lysias that, when he first went through the speech, it appeared wonderfully good, but on taking it up a second and third time, he found it extremely weak and ineffective. ‘Well,’ said Lysias laughing, ‘isn’t it only once [Sidenote: D] that you have to speak it before the jury?’ And consider how persuasive and charming Lysias is! For he is another who _Hath goodly portion, I trow, Of the Muses violet-tress’d._ Of all things that are said about the great bard the truest is this—that Homer alone manages never to cloy the appetite, since he is always new, and his charm always at its height. Nevertheless, exclaiming on his own account in the words of Odysseus: [Sidenote: *] _But to me it is hateful To tell o’er a story again, when once right plainly ’tis told you_, he is continually avoiding that tendency to surfeit which threatens talk of every kind, carrying his hearers from one story to another, and relieving their satiety by his constant freshness. Our babblers, on the contrary, bore us to death with their repetitions, as if our ears were palimpsests for them to scrawl rubbish upon. Let this, then, be the first thing of which we remind them. [Sidenote: E] It is with talking as it is with wine. The purpose of wine is to create pleasure and friendly feeling; but to insist upon our drinking it in great quantities and without qualifying it, is to lead us into offensive and wanton behaviour. So, while talk plays the most pleasant and human part in our intercourse, those who make a wrong and rash use of it render it inhuman and insufferable. The means by which they imagine they are ingratiating themselves and gaining admiration and friendship, only makes them a nuisance and wins them ridicule and dislike. How destitute of charm would be a person who alienated his company and drove them away with the very ‘girdle of charm’! And how destitute of culture and tact is the man [Sidenote: F] who arouses annoyance and hostility by means of speech! Other infirmities and disorders may be dangerous or detestable or ridiculous. Garrulity is all three at once. It is derided for relating what everybody knows; it is hated for bearing bad news; it is endangered through blabbing secrets. This is the [Sidenote: 505] reason why, when Anacharsis went to sleep after being entertained at dinner at Solon’s house, he was seen to be holding his right hand over his mouth. He believed—quite rightly—that the tongue requires a firmer control than any other member. It would be difficult, for instance, to count up as many persons who have been ruined by sensuality, as cities and dominions which have been brought to destruction by the divulgence of a secret. When Sulla was besieging Athens, he could not afford to spend much time upon it, _Since other labour was urging_, Mithridates having seized upon Asia, and the Marian party [Sidenote: B] being again masters of Rome. It happened, however, that a number of old men were talking at a barber’s, to the effect that no watch was kept upon the Heptachalcon and that the town was in danger of capture at that point. They were overheard by spies, who gave information to Sulla; and he promptly brought up his forces at midnight, led in his army, and almost razed the city to the ground, filling it with carnage till the Cerameicus flowed with blood. His anger with the Athenians was, however, due more to their words than to their deeds. They would leap on to the walls, and abuse him and Metella, and by jeering at him with [Sidenote: C] _A mulberry is Sulla, sprinkled o’er with barley-meal_, and a number of similar scurrilities, they brought upon themselves—to use a phrase of Plato—‘_a very heavy penalty_’ for that ‘_very light_’ thing, their words. It was, again, the talkativeness of one man that prevented Rome from obtaining its freedom by the removal of Nero. All preparations had been made, and only a single night was left before the despot was to perish. It happened, however, that the man who was to perform the assassination, when on his way to the theatre, saw a prisoner at the palace doors on the point of being brought before Nero. As he was bewailing his fate, our friend came up close and whispered to him, ‘My good [Sidenote: D] man, only pray that to-day may pass, and to-morrow you will be offering me thanks.’ The prisoner grasped the meaning of the hint, and reflecting, I suppose, that _’Tis a fool who forgoes what he holds, to pursue what is out of his keeping_, chose the surer rather than the more righteous way of saving himself. That is to say, he informed Nero of the expression used. The man was thereupon promptly seized, and underwent rack, fire, and lash while denying, in the face of constraint, what he had betrayed without any constraint. The philosopher Zeno, for fear that bodily suffering might force him to reveal some secret in spite of himself, bit through his tongue and spat it out at the despot. Leaena, again, has been gloriously rewarded for her self-command. She was the [Sidenote: E] mistress of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and she shared in their plot against the despots—to the best of her hopes, which was all a woman could do. For she also was inspired with the bacchic frenzy of that glorious ‘_bowl of love_‘, and the God had caused her also to be initiated into the secret. Well, after they had failed and met their death, she was put to the question and ordered to inform against those who still escaped detection. She refused, and the firmness with which she bore her sufferings [Sidenote: F] proved that, in the love of those heroes for such a woman, there was nothing unworthy of themselves. The Athenians therefore had a bronze lioness made without a tongue, and set it up in the gates of the Acropolis, that courageous animal representing her indomitable firmness, and the absence of a tongue her power of silence in keeping a solemn secret. No uttered word has ever done such service as many which have been unuttered. You may some day utter what you have kept silent, but you cannot unsay what has been said; it has been poured out, and has run abroad. Hence, I take it, we have mankind to teach us how to speak, but gods to teach us how to keep silent, our lesson in that art being received at initiatory [Sidenote: 506] rites and mysteries. Odysseus, who possessed most eloquence, the poet has made most reticent; he has done the same with his son, his wife, and his nurse. You hear how she says: _Like stubborn oak or like iron will I hold your secret and keep it._ In the case of Odysseus himself, as he sat beside Penelope, _Though in his heart he pitied his wife, and was sore at her weeping, Steady within their lids stood his eyes as horn or as iron._ [Sidenote: B] So full of self-command was his body in every part, under such perfect discipline and control did reason hold it, that it forbade the eyes to shed a tear, the tongue to utter a sound, the heart to tremble or cry out with rage; _And his heart once more did obey, and endure with a patient enduring_, inasmuch as reason had extended even to his irrational movements and made his very breath and blood amenable to its authority. Most of his comrades also were of the same character. Self-command and loyalty could no further go than in their case. Though harried and dashed upon the ground by the Cyclops, they would not denounce Odysseus to him. They would not betray the plot against his eye and the implement which had [Sidenote: C] been sharpened in the fire for that purpose; but they chose to be eaten raw rather than tell a word of the secret. Pittacus, therefore, was not far out, when, upon the King of Egypt sending him a sacrificial victim and bidding him pick out the ‘fairest and foulest’ part of the meat, he took out and sent him the tongue, as being the instrument of both the greatest good and the greatest evil. Euripides’ Ino, making bold to speak for herself, says that she knows how to be _Silent in season, speak where speech is safe._ Those, indeed, who are blessed with a noble and a truly royal education, know first how to be silent and then how to talk. The famous king Antigonus, when his son asked him at what [Sidenote: D] hour they were to break camp, replied, ‘What are you afraid of? That you may be the only one to miss hearing the trumpet?’ Was it that he did not trust with a secret the man to whom he intended to bequeath his throne? Rather he meant to teach him self-mastery and caution in dealing with such matters. The aged Metellus, on being asked a similar question during a campaign, answered, ‘If I thought my shirt knew that secret, I would take it off and put it on the fire.’ When Eumenes heard that Craterus was advancing, he told the fact to none of his friends, but pretended that it was Neoptolemus, whom his [Sidenote: E] soldiers despised, whereas they entertained a great respect for the reputation of Craterus and a high esteem of his ability. As, however, no one else found out the truth, they joined battle, won the victory, killed Craterus without knowing him, and only discovered who he was from his corpse. So good a general was the silence of Eumenes in the battle, and so formidable the opponent whose presence it disguised, that his friends admired instead of blaming him for not forewarning them. Even if some one does find fault, it is better to be accused when mistrust has saved you than to be the accuser when trust proves your undoing. What excuse can one possibly find for himself when blaming another for not holding his tongue? If the matter ought not to [Sidenote: F] have been known, it was wrong to tell it to any one else. If you let the secret slip from yourself, and yet ask another person to keep it, you take refuge in the loyalty of some one else while abandoning loyalty to yourself. And if he turns out as bad as you, you are deservedly undone; if better, you are saved by a miracle, through finding another person more faithful to you than yourself. ‘But So-and-So is my friend.’ So is a second person _his_ friend, whom _he_ again will trust as _I_ trust _him_. So with that person and a third, and thus the talk will go on [Sidenote: 507] increasing and extending in link after link of weak betrayal. The Unit never goes beyond its own limit, but is, once and for all, ‘oneness’—whence its name. But the number ‘two’ is the indefinite beginning of difference, for by the duplication it at once shifts in the direction of multitude. In the same way, so long as a piece of information is confined to the first possessor, it is really and truly a ‘secret’. But if it passes by him to a second, it must be classed as a ‘report’. ‘_Winged words_,’ says the poet. If you let go from your hand a thing with wings, it is not easy to get it back into your grasp; and if you let an observation slip from your lips, it is impossible to seize and secure it, but away it flies _on nimbly-whirling wing_, and circulates in all directions from one set of people to another. When a ship is caught by a wind, they put a check upon it [Sidenote: B] and deaden its speed with cables and anchors; but let a speech run—so to speak—out of port, and it finds no place to cast and ride at anchor. It is carried away with a roar, till he who has uttered it is dashed and sunk upon some great and terrible danger. _From but a little torch-light Ida’s heights May all be set ablaze; so, tell but one, And all the town will know it._ The Roman Senate had been engaged for a number of days [Sidenote: C] in debating a secret matter of policy. As it gave rise to much mystification and conjecture, a woman—otherwise irreproachable, but still a woman—kept pestering her husband and imploring him to tell her the secret. On her oath, she would be silent: if not, might a curse fall upon her. She wept and wailed because she was ‘not trusted’. From a desire to bring home her folly by a proof, the Roman said, ‘Have your way, wife. But the news is terribly ominous. We have been informed by the priests that a lark has been seen flying about with a gold helmet and a spear. We are therefore discussing the portent, and are inquiring, with the help of the augurs, whether it is good or bad. But mind you tell nobody.’ With these words he went off to the Forum. The wife at once seized hold of [Sidenote: D] the first maid-servant to enter the room, and, beating her own breast and tearing her hair, exclaimed, ‘O my poor husband and country! What will become of us?‘, her wish being to give the maid the opportunity of asking ‘Why, what has happened?’ At any rate she took the question as put, and told the tale, adding the invariable refrain of every babbler, ‘Tell no one about it, but hold your tongue.’ The girl no sooner left her than she looked for the fellow-servant who had least to do, and [Sidenote: E] imparted it to her. She in turn told it to her lover, who was paying her a visit. The story went rolling on so rapidly that it reached the Forum before the man who had invented it, and he was met by an acquaintance, who said, ‘Have you just come down from home?’ ‘This minute,’ he replied. ‘Then you haven’t heard anything?’ ‘No. Why? Is there any news?’ ‘A lark has been seen flying about with a gold helmet and a spear, and the magistrates are about to hold a Senate meeting on the matter.’ At this the man exclaimed with a laugh, ‘O wife, wife! What a speed! To think the story has got to the Forum ahead of me!’ First he interviewed the magistrates and relieved their anxiety; then, on going home, [Sidenote: F] he proceeded to punish his wife by saying, ‘Wife, you have been the ruin of me. The secret is public property, and the fault has been traced to my house. And so I am to be exiled, all because of your loose tongue.’ Upon her attempting to deny it by arguing ‘But there were three hundred who heard it as well as you’, he retorted ‘Pooh for your three hundred! I invented it to try you, all because of your persistence’. In this case the man took safe precautions in putting his wife [Sidenote: 508] to the test, by pouring into the leaky vessel not wine or oil, but water. It was otherwise with Fulvius, the close friend of Augustus. The emperor in his old age was lamenting to him over his desolate home and grieving because, two of his daughter’s children being dead, and Postumius, the only one left, being in exile on some calumnious charge, he was being driven to adopt his wife’s son as his successor, although he felt compassion [Sidenote: B] for his grandson and was considering the question of recalling him from abroad. Fulvius divulged what he had heard to his wife, and she to Livia; whereupon Livia took Caesar bitterly to task, asking why, if he had been so long of this mind, he did not send for his grandson, instead of putting her in a position of enmity and strife with the successor to the throne. Accordingly, when Fulvius came to him—as he regularly did—in the morning and said ‘Good morning, Caesar’, he replied ‘Good-bye, Fulvius’. Fulvius took the hint, went away home at once, sent for his wife, and said, ‘Caesar knows that I have betrayed his secret, and I propose therefore to put myself to death.’ ‘Rightly too,’ answered his wife, ‘seeing that, after living with [Sidenote: C] me so long, you failed to discover the looseness of my tongue and to guard against it. But after me, if you please’—and seizing the sword she despatched herself first. The comic poet Philippides therefore acted rightly when, in answer to the friendly civilities of King Lysimachus and his question ‘What is there of mine that I can share with you?‘, he replied ‘What you choose, Sire, except your secrets.’ On the other hand garrulity goes with the equally objectionable vice of inquisitiveness. The babbler must find much to hear, so that he may have much to tell. Especially must he go round tracking and hunting out hidden secrets, so as to provide himself with a miscellaneous stock-in-trade for his foolish [Sidenote: D] talk. Then, like a child with a piece of ice, he neither likes to keep hold nor wants to let go. Or rather, the secrets are reptiles, which he grasps and puts in his bosom, but which he cannot hold tight, and so is devoured by them. Garfish and vipers—so we are told—burst in giving birth to their young. So the escape of a secret is ruin and destruction to him who lets it out. Seleucus the Victorious, having lost all his army and resources in his fight with the Gauls, tore off his royal circlet with his own hands, and fled away on horseback with three or four attendants. After a long and circuitous ride away from the highroads, he was at last so overcome by want that he approached a homestead, and being fortunate enough to find the owner in [Sidenote: E] person, asked him for bread and water. The man not only gave him these, but supplied him liberally and in the most friendly way with whatever else he had upon his farm. In doing so he recognized the king’s face. So overjoyed was he at his fortunate opportunity of rendering him service, that, instead of restraining himself and playing up to the king’s desire to be unknown, he accompanied him as far as the road, and, on taking his leave, said, ‘Good-bye, King Seleucus.’ At this the king, holding out his right hand and drawing the man towards him as if to kiss him, gave a sign to one of the attendants to cut off his head with a sword; _And so, with the word on his lips, his head in the dust lay mingled_,— whereas, if he had then had the patience to hold his tongue [Sidenote: F] for a little while, he would in all probability, when the king subsequently won success and power, have earned a larger return for his silence than for his hospitality. In this case, it is true, the man’s hopes and kindly feeling formed some excuse for his lack of self-command. Most babblers, however, have no excuse at all for their own undoing. For example, people were once talking in a barber’s shop about the despotism of Dionysius, and saying how firmly established it was against all assault. At this the barber remarked laughingly, ‘How can you say that, when every few days I have my [Sidenote: 509] razor at his throat?’ No sooner did Dionysius hear of this speech than he impaled the barber. Barbers, by the way, are generally a garrulous crew. Their chairs being the resort of the greatest chatterers, they catch the bad habit themselves. It was a neat quip that Archelaus once gave to a loquacious barber. After putting the towel round him, the man asked, ‘How shall I cut your hair, Sire?’ ‘In silence,’ he replied. It was a barber also who reported the great disaster of the Athenians in Sicily, he having been the first to hear it at the Peiraeus from a slave, who had run away [Sidenote: B] from the spot. Abandoning his shop, he hurried at full speed to town, _Lest another the glory might win_ by imparting the news to the capital, _while he might come but the second_. A panic naturally ensued, and the people were gathered to an assembly, where they set to work to trace the rumour to its source. When, however, the barber was brought forward and questioned, he did not even know the name of his informant, but could only give as his authority a person unnamed and unknown. Thereupon the audience shouted in anger: ‘To the rack and the wheel with the wretch! The thing is a pure concoction! Who else has heard it? Who believes it?’ The wheel [Sidenote: C] had been brought, and the man had been stretched upon it, when there appeared upon the scene the bearers of the disastrous news, who had escaped from the very midst of the action. At this they all dispersed, to occupy themselves with their private griefs, leaving the poor wretch bound upon the wheel. When at a late hour towards evening he was set free, he proceeded to ask the executioner ‘whether they had also heard in what manner Nicias, the commander, had met his death’. Such a hopeless and incorrigible failing does garrulity become through force of habit. After drinking a bitter and evil-smelling medicine, we are disgusted with the cup as well. In the same way, if you are the bearer of bad news, you are regarded with disgust and hatred by those who hear it. Hence a pretty discussion in Sophocles: [Sidenote: D] A. _Is it in ear or heart that thou art stung?_ B. _Why seek thus to define where lies my pain?_ A. _’Tis the doer grieves thine heart, I but thine ears._ Be that as it may, a speaker causes pain as well as a doer. Nevertheless there is no stopping or chastening a loose, glib tongue. On one occasion it was discovered that the temple of Athena ‘Of the Bronze House’ at Sparta had been pillaged, and an empty flask was found lying inside. The crowd which had run together could make nothing of it, when one of their number said, ‘If you like, I will tell you my notion as to the flask. I fancy the robbers, realizing all the danger they were to run, first drank hemlock, and then brought wine with them. If they managed to escape detection, they were to neutralize [Sidenote: E] the effects of the poison by drinking the unmixed wine, and so get away in safety. If they were caught, they were to die an easy and painless death from the poison, before they could be put to torture.’ The theory was so ingenious and acute that it appeared to come of knowledge rather than conjecture. He was therefore surrounded and questioned on every side—‘Who are [Sidenote: F] you? Who knows you? How do you get to know all that?‘—till finally, under this searching examination, he confessed that he was one of the thieves. Were not the murderers of Ibycus found out in the same way? As they were sitting in the theatre, a number of cranes happened to come in sight, and they whispered laughingly to one another, ‘Here are the avengers of Ibycus!’ They were overheard by persons sitting near them, and as a search was being made for Ibycus, who had been missing for a considerable time, the words were seized upon and reported to the magistrates. By this means the matter was brought home, and the assassins carried off to prison, where their punishment was due, not to the cranes, but to their own garrulity, which played the part [Sidenote: 510] of an Erinys or Spirit of Vengeance in compelling them to divulge the murder. For as in the body, when a part is diseased or in pain, the neighbouring matter gathers towards it by attraction; so is it with the babbler’s tongue. Perpetually throbbing and inflamed, it must keep drawing towards itself some secret or other which ought to be concealed. We must therefore make ourselves secure. Let Reason lie like a barrier in the way of the tongue, to restrain its flow or prevent its slipping. And let us show that we possess no less [Sidenote: B] sense than certain geese of which we are told. It is said that, when they cross from Cilicia over the Taurus Range—which is full of eagles—they clap a bolt or bit upon their utterance. That is to say, they take in their mouths a good-sized stone, and so fly over at night without being discovered. Now if it were asked _Who it is that is the vilest, who most unredeemed of men_, it is the traitor who would always be named before any one else. Well, Euthycrates (as Demosthenes puts it) ‘_roofed his house with the timber got from Macedon_‘. Philocrates received a large sum of gold and proceeded to buy ‘_strumpets and fish_‘. Euphorbus and Philagrus, who betrayed Eretria, received lands [Sidenote: C] from the Persian king. But the babbler is a traitor who volunteers his services without pay, not in the way of betraying horses or fortresses, but of divulging secrets connected with lawsuits, party feuds, or political manœuvres. Instead of any one thanking him, he actually has to thank people for listening to him. The line addressed to a man who was recklessly squandering his money by giving indiscriminate presents— _Not generous, you: ’tis your disease; you love to be a-giving_— fits the prater also. ‘You do not give this information out of friendliness and goodwill. ’Tis your disease; you love to be a-talking and a-babbling.’ These remarks are not to be regarded as simply an indictment of garrulity. They are an attempt to cure it. An ailment is [Sidenote: D] overcome by diagnosis and treatment, but diagnosis comes first. No one can be trained to avoid or to rid his mental constitution of a thing which causes him no distress. That distress we learn to feel at our disorders, when reason leads us to perceive the injury and shame which result from them. Thus in the present instance we perceive that the babbler is hated where he desires to be liked, annoys where he wishes to ingratiate himself, is derided where he thinks he is admired, and spends without gaining anything by it. He wrongs his friends, assists his [Sidenote: E] enemies, and ruins himself. The first step, therefore, in physicing this disorder, is to reflect upon the disgrace and pain which it causes. The second is to consider the advantages of the contrary behaviour, constantly hearing, remembering, and keeping at our call the praises of reticence, the solemn and sacramental associations of silence, and the fact that it is not by your unbridled talker at large that admiration, regard, and reputation for wisdom are won, but by the man of short and pithy speech, who can pack much sense into few words. We find Plato commending such persons, and saying that, in [Sidenote: F] their deliverance of crisp, terse, and compact utterances, they resemble a skilful javelineer. Lycurgus, again, forced his fellow-citizens to acquire this gift of compression and solidity by applying the pressure of silence from their earliest childhood. The Celtiberians produce steel from iron by first burying it in the ground and then clearing away the earthy surplusage. So is it with Lacedaemonian speech. It has no surplusage, but is steadily hardened down to absolute effectiveness by the removal of everything unessential. And this knack of theirs of saying a pithy thing, or making a keen and nimble retort, is the result of a great habit of silence. [Sidenote: 511] We must not omit to give our chatterer examples of such brevities, in order to show how pretty and effective they are. For instance: _The Lacedaemonians to Philip_: _Dionysius at Corinth_; and, again, when Philip wrote to them ‘_If I enter Laconia, I will turn you out_‘, they wrote back, ‘_If._’ When King Demetrius shouted in his indignation, ‘Have the Lacedaemonians sent only one envoy to _me_?‘, the envoy replied undismayed, ‘One to one.’ Among our ancient worthies also we admire [Sidenote: B] the men of few words. It was not the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ or the paeans of Pindar that the Amphictyons inscribed upon the temple of the Pythian Apollo, but the maxims _Know Thyself_: _Nothing in Excess_: _Give pledge, and Mischief is nigh_, which they admired for their simple and compact expression, with its closely-hammered thought in small compass. And does not the god himself show a love of conciseness and brevity in his oracles, deriving his name of ‘Loxias’ from the fact that he would rather be obscure than garrulous? Do we not also particularly praise and admire those who can say, by means of a symbol and without speaking a word, all that [Sidenote: C] is necessary? For instance, when his fellow-citizens insisted upon Heracleitus proposing some measure for the promotion of concord, he mounted the platform, took a cup of cold water, sprinkled it with barley-meal, stirred it with a slip of pennyroyal, drank it off, and went home. This was his way of intimating that to be satisfied with the commonest things, and to have no expensive wants, is the way to maintain a community in peace and concord. Another case is that of Scilurus, the Scythian king, who left behind him eighty sons. When he was dying, he called for a bundle of small spears, and bade them take and break it in pieces, tied together as it was, and in the mass. When they gave up the task, he himself drew the spears out one by one and snapped them all with ease, thereby demonstrating [Sidenote: D] how invincible was their strength if harmoniously united, how weak and short-lived if they did not hold together. Any one, I believe, who constantly recalls these and the like examples, will cease to take a pleasure in chattering. But—speaking for myself—there is a story of a certain slave which greatly discourages me, when I reflect how hard it is to be so careful of our words as to make sure of our purpose. The orator Pupius Piso, not wishing to be troubled, ordered his slaves to talk only in answer to questions, and not a word more. Subsequently, being anxious to welcome Clodius in his official position, he gave orders for him to be invited to dinner, and prepared what was, of course, a splendid banquet. When the hour arrived, the other guests were all present and waiting for [Sidenote: E] Clodius. The slave who regularly carried the invitations was repeatedly sent out to see whether he was on his way. When evening came and he was given up in despair, Piso said to the slave, ‘Of course you took him the invitation?’ ‘I did,’ he answered. ‘Then why has he not appeared?’ ‘Because he refused.’ ‘Then why did you not tell me so at once?’ ‘Because you did not ask me that question.’ So much for the slave at Rome, whereas at Athens he will tell his master while digging _What terms are named i’ the treaty_, so great in all things is the force of habituation. To habituation let us now turn. [Sidenote: F] We cannot check the babbler by taking, as it were, a grip on the reins. The malady can only be overcome by habit. In the first place, therefore, when questions are asked of your neighbours, train yourself to keep silent until they have all failed to answer. _Counsel hath other ends than running hath_, says Sophocles, and so has speech or answer. In running, the victor is the man who comes in first, but here the case is different. If another makes a satisfactory reply, the proper course is to lend approval and a word of support, and so win credit for good [Sidenote: 512] feeling. If he fails, there is nothing invidious or inopportune in giving the information which he does not possess, or in supplementing his deficiencies. But above all things let us be on our guard, when a question is put to another person, that we do not anticipate him and take the answer out of his mouth. In any case in which a request is made of another it is, of course, improper for us to push him aside and offer our own services. By doing so we shall appear to be casting a slur on both parties; as if the one were incapable of performing what is asked, and as if the other did not know the right quarter from which to get what he asks for. But it is especially in connexion with answers to questions that such impudent forwardness is an outrage on [Sidenote: B] manners. To give the answer before the person questioned has time, implies the remark, ‘What do you want _him_ for?‘, or ‘What does _he_ know?‘, or, ‘When _I_ am present, nobody else should be asked that question.’ Yet we often put a question to a person, not because we need the information, but by way of eliciting from him a few words of a friendly nature, or from a wish to lead him on to converse, as Socrates did with Theaetetus and Charmides. To take the answer out of another’s mouth, to divert attention to yourself and wrest it from another, is as bad as if, when a person desired to be kissed by some one else, you ran forward and kissed him yourself, or as if, when he was looking at another, you twisted him round in your own direction. The right and proper [Sidenote: C] course, even if the person who is asked for information cannot give it, is to wait, to take your cue to answer from the wish of the questioner—his invitation not having been addressed to you—and then to meet the situation in a modest and mannerly way. If a person of whom a question is asked makes a mistake in answering it, he meets with a due measure of indulgence; but one who pushes himself forward and insists on answering first, receives no welcome if he is right, while, if he is wrong, he becomes an object of positive exultation and derision. The second item of our regimen concerns the answering of questions put to ourselves. Our garrulous friend must be particularly careful with these. In the first place he must not be deceived into giving serious replies to those who merely provoke him into a discussion in order to make a laughing-stock of him. [Sidenote: D] Sometimes persons who require no information simply concoct a question for the amusement and fun of the thing, and submit it to a character of this kind in order to set his foolish tongue wagging. Against this trick he must be on his guard. Instead of promptly jumping at the subject as if he were grateful, he should consider both the character of the questioner and the necessity for the question. And when it is clear that information is really desired, he must make a habit of waiting and leaving some interval between question and answer. There will then be time for the inquirer to add anything he wishes, and for himself to reflect upon his reply, instead of overrunning and muddling the question, hurriedly giving [Sidenote: E] first one answer and then another while the question is still going on. The Pythian priestess, of course, is accustomed to deliver oracles on the instant, even before the question is asked, inasmuch as the God whom she serves _Understandeth the dumb, and heareth a man though he speak not._ But if you wish your answer to be to the purpose, you must wait for the questioner’s thought to be expressed, and discover [Sidenote: F] precisely what he is aiming at. Otherwise it will be a case of the old saying: _Asked for a bucket, they refused a tub._ In any case that ravenous greed to be talking must be checked. Otherwise it will seem as if a stream, which has long been banked up at the tongue, is taking joyful advantage of the question to disgorge itself. Socrates used to control his thirst on the same principle. He would not permit himself to drink after exercise without pouring away the first jugful drawn from the well, thereby training his irrational part to wait until reason named the time. [Sidenote: 513] There are three possible kinds of answer to a question—the barely necessary, the polite, and the superfluous. For instance, to the inquiry, ‘Is Socrates at home?‘, one person may reply, in an offhand and apparently grudging way, ‘Not at home;’ or, if he is disposed to adopt the Laconian style, he will omit the ‘at home’ and merely utter the negative. Thus the Lacedaemonians, when Philip had written to ask, ‘Do you [Sidenote: *] receive me into your city?‘, wrote a large _No_ on a piece of paper and sent it back. Another, with more politeness, answers, ‘No, but you will find him at the bankers’ tables’—going so far, perhaps, as to add, ‘waiting for some strangers.’ But, [Sidenote: B] third, our inordinate chatterbox—at any rate, if he happens also to have read Antimachus of Colophon—will say, ‘No; but you will find him at the bankers’ tables, waiting for some strangers from Ionia, concerning whom he has had a letter from Alcibiades, who is near Miletus, staying with Tissaphernes, the Great King’s Satrap, the same who used formerly to help the Lacedaemonians, but who is now attaching himself to the Athenians, thanks to Alcibiades; for Alcibiades is anxious to be recalled from exile, and is therefore working upon Tissaphernes to change sides.’ In fact he will talk the whole eighth book of Thucydides and will deluge the questioner with it, until, before he has done, there is war with Miletus and Alcibiades has been exiled for [Sidenote: C] the second time. Here especially should loquacity be repressed. It should be forced to follow in the footsteps of the question, and to confine the answer within the circle of which the questioner’s requirement gives the centre and radius. When Carneades, before he became famous, was once discoursing in the gymnasium, the superintendent sent and requested him to lower his voice, which was a very loud one. Upon his replying ‘Give me my limit for reach of voice’, the officer aptly rejoined ‘The person who is speaking with you’. So, in making an answer, let the limit [Sidenote: D] be the wishes of the questioner. In the next place remember how Socrates used to urge the avoidance of those foods and drinks which induce you to eat when you are not hungry and to drink when you are not thirsty. So those subjects in which he most delights, and in which he indulges most immoderately, are the subjects which the babbler should shun, and whose advances he should resist. For example, military men are given to prosing about wars. Homer introduces Nestor in that character, making him relate his own deeds of prowess time after time. Take, again, those who have scored a victory in the law-courts, or who have met with surprising success at the courts of governors or kings. Generally [Sidenote: E] speaking, they are chronic sufferers from an itch to talk about it, and to describe over and over again how they came in, how they were introduced, how they played their parts, how they talked, how they confuted some opponent or accuser, and what eulogies they won. Their delight is more loquacious than that ‘sleepless night’ in the comedy, and is perpetually fanning itself into new flame and keeping itself fresh by telling over the tale. They are therefore prone to slip into such subjects at every pretext. For not only _Where the pain is, there also goes the hand_; [Sidenote: F] no less does the part which feels pleasure draw the voice and twist the tongue in its own direction, from a desire to dwell perpetually on the theme. It is the same also with amorous persons, who chiefly occupy themselves with such conversation as brings up some mention of the object of their passion. If they cannot talk to human beings about it, they do so to inanimate things: _O bed most dear!_ or _Bacchis thought thee a god, thou blessed lamp; And greatest god thou art, methinks, through her._ No doubt it makes not a pin’s difference to the chatterer [Sidenote: 514] what subject of conversation may arise. Nevertheless, if he has a greater predilection for one class of subjects than for another, he ought to be on his guard against that class and force himself to hold aloof from it, since those are the subjects which can always tempt him furthest into prolixity for the pleasure of the thing. It is the same with those matters in which the talker thinks that his experience or ability gives him a superiority over other people. Through egotism and vanity such a person _Giveth the most part of the day to that Wherein he showeth to the most advantage._ With the much-read man it is general information; with the [Sidenote: B] expert in letters, the rules of literary art; with the much-travelled man, accounts of foreign parts. These subjects also must therefore be shunned. They are an enticement to loquacity, which is led on to them like an animal towards its wonted fodder. One admirable feature in the conduct of Cyrus was that, in his matches with his mates, he challenged them to compete at something in which he was not more, but less, expert than they. Thus, while he caused no pain by eclipsing them, he also derived advantage from a lesson. With the chatterer it is the other way about. If any subject is mooted which gives him the opportunity of asking and learning something he does not know, he cannot even pay so small a fee [Sidenote: C] for it as merely holding his tongue, but he blocks the topic and elbows it aside, working steadily round till he drives the conversation into the well-worn track of stale old twaddle. We have had an example of this among ourselves, where a person who happened to have read two or three books of Ephorus used to weary every one to death, and put any convivial party to rout, by everlastingly describing the battle of Leuctra and its sequel, until he earned the nickname of ‘Epaminondas’. If, however, we are to choose between evils, this is the least, and we must divert loquacity into this channel. Talkativeness will be [Sidenote: D] less disagreeable when its excess is in an expert connexion. In the next place such persons should habituate themselves to putting things in a written or conversational form when alone. The case is not as with Antipater the Stoic. He gained his sobriquet of ‘Pen-Valiant’ because, being—as it would appear—unable and unwilling to come out and meet the vehement attacks made by Carneades upon the Porch, he kept filling his books with written disputations against him. But if the babbler turns to writing and valiantly fights shadows with his pen, the occupation will keep him from attacking people at large and will render him daily more bearable to his company. It will be as with dogs. Let them vent their anger on sticks and stones, and they are less ferocious to human beings. [Sidenote: E] Another extremely beneficial course for talkers to adopt is to associate continually with their superiors and elders, out of respect for whose standing they will develop a habit of holding their tongues. As part and parcel of this training we should always vigilantly apply the following reflection, when we are on the point of talking and the words begin running to our mouths: ‘What _is_ this remark that is so pressing and importunate? With what object is my tongue so impatient? What honour do I get by speaking, or what harm by keeping quiet?’ If the thought were an oppressive weight to be got rid of, the matter would be [Sidenote: F] different; but it remains with you just as much, even if it is spoken. When men talk, it is either for their own sake, because they want something, or it is to help the hearer; or else they seek to ingratiate themselves with each other by seasoning with the salt of rational conversation the pastime or business in which they happen to be engaged. But if a remark is neither of advantage to the speaker nor of importance to the hearer, if it contains nothing pleasant or interesting, why is it made? The [Sidenote: *] meaningless and futile is as much to be avoided in words as it is in deeds. Over and above all this, we should keep in lively recollection [Sidenote: 515] the saying of Simonides that he ‘had often repented of talking, but never of holding his tongue’. We should remember also that practice is a potent thing and overcomes all difficulties. People get rid even of the hiccoughs or a cough by resolutely resisting them. Yet this involves trouble and pain, whereas silence not only, as Hippocrates says, ‘prevents thirst;’ it also prevents pain and suffering. Footnote 43: The Homeric σιγαλόεντα (‘glossy’) is brought, either in error or by a deliberate pun, into relation with σιγή (‘silence’).

MY DEAR NICANDER, [Sidenote: 37 C] This is an article upon ‘The Attitude of the Student’, which I have written and am sending to you. Its purpose is to teach you the right attitude towards your philosophic teacher, now that you are a grown-up man and are no longer obliged merely to obey orders. Some young men are so ill-informed as to suppose that absence of restraint is the same thing as freedom, whereas, by unchaining [Sidenote: D] the passions, it makes them slaves to a set of masters more tyrannical than all the teachers and mentors of childhood. Herodotus says that when women take off the tunic they also take off shame. It is the same with some young men. In laying aside the garb of childhood they also lay aside shame and fear. No sooner do they unloose the cloak which controlled their conduct than they indulge in the utmost misbehaviour. With you it should be otherwise. You have been told over and over again that to ‘follow God’ and to ‘obey reason’ are the same thing. Understand, therefore, that with right-minded persons a coming of age does not mean rejection of rule, but change of ruler. For the hired or purchased[44] director of conduct they [Sidenote: E] substitute one that is divine—namely, reason. Only those who follow reason deserve to be considered free; for they alone live as they choose, because they alone have learned to make the right choice, whereas ignorant and irrational desires and actions give small and paltry scope to the will, but great scope to repentance. Note what happens in the case of naturalized citizens. Entire [Sidenote: F] foreigners from another country will often grumble irritably at their experiences, whereas those who have previously been denizens of the state, and have therefore lived in intimate touch with the laws, will accept their obligations with cheerful readiness. So with yourself. For a long time you have been growing up in the company of philosophy. From the first you have been accustomed to a taste of philosophic reason in everything that you have been taught or told as a child. It should therefore be in a well-disposed and congenial spirit that you come to Philosophy, who alone can adorn a youth with that finish of manhood which genuinely and rationally deserves the name. You will not, I believe, object to a prefatory remark upon [Sidenote: 38] the sense of hearing. Theophrastus asserts that it is the most susceptible of all the senses, inasmuch as nothing that can be seen, tasted, or touched, is the cause of such strong emotional disturbance and excitement as takes hold upon the mind when certain sounds of beating, clashing, or ringing fall upon the ear. It is, however, more rational, rather than more emotional, than the other senses. Vice can find many places and parts of the body open for it to enter and seize upon the soul. But the only hold that virtue can take is upon pure young ears [Sidenote: B] which have at all times been protected from the corruptions of flattery or the touch of low communications. Hence the advice of Xenocrates, that ear-guards should be worn by boys more than by athletes, inasmuch as the latter merely have their ears disfigured by blows, while the former have their characters disfigured by words. Not that he would wed us to inattention or deafness. It is but a warning to beware of wrong communications, and to see that others of the right nature have first been fostered in our character by philosophy and have mounted guard in that quarter which is most open to influence and persuasion. Bias, the ancient sage, was once bidden by Amasis to send him that piece of meat from a sacrificial victim which was at the same time the best and the worst. He replied by taking out and sending the tongue, on the ground that speech can do both the greatest harm and the greatest good. It is a general practice in fondling little children to take them by the ears, and to bid [Sidenote: C] them do the same to us—an indirect and playful way of suggesting that we should be especially fond of those who make our ears the instruments to our advantage. It is, of course, obvious that a youth cannot be debarred from any or every kind of hearing, or from tasting any discourse at all. Otherwise not only will he remain entirely without fruit or growth in the way of virtue; he will actually be perverted in the direction of vice, his mind being an idle and uncultivated patch producing a plentiful crop of weeds. Propensity to pleasure and dislike of labour—the springs of innumerable forms of trouble and disease—are not of external origin, nor imported [Sidenote: D] from teaching, but they well up naturally from the soil. If therefore they are left free to take their natural course; if they are not done away with, or turned aside, by sound instruction; if nature is not thus brought under control, man will prove more unreclaimed than any brute beast. The hearing of lectures, then, may be of great profit, but at the same time of great danger, to a young man. This being so, I believe it a good thing to make the matter one of constant discussion, both with oneself and with others. In most cases [Sidenote: E] we may notice a false procedure—that of cultivating the art of speaking before being trained to the art of listening. It is thought that, while speaking requires instruction and practice, any kind of listening is attended with profit. But not so. Whereas in ball-play one learns simultaneously how to throw and how to catch, in the business of speech the right taking in is prior to the giving out, just as conception is prior to parturition. We are told that in the case of a hen laying a wind-egg her labour and travail end in nothing but an abortive and lifeless piece of refuse. So when a young man lacks the ability to listen, [Sidenote: F] or the training to gather profit through the ear, the speech which he lets fall is wind-begotten indeed: _Sans all regard and sans note it is lost in the clouds and dispersèd._ He will take a vessel and tilt it in the right direction for receiving anything to be poured into it, and so ensure a real ‘in-pouring’ instead of a pouring to waste. But he does not learn to lend his own attention to a speaker and meet the lecture half-way, so as to miss no valuable point. On the contrary, his behaviour is in the last degree ridiculous. If he happens upon a person [Sidenote: 39] describing a dinner, a procession, a dream, or a brawling-match in which he has been engaged, he listens in silence and is eager for more. But if a teacher to whom he has attached himself tries to impart something useful, or to urge him to some duty, to admonish him when wrong, or to soothe him when angry, he is out of all patience. If possible, he shows fight, and is ambitious to get the best of the argument. Otherwise he is off and away to discourses of a different and a rubbishy kind, filling his ears—the poor leaky vessels—with anything rather than the thing they need. [Sidenote: B] From the right kind of breeder a horse obtains a good mouth for the bit, and a lad a good ear for reason. He is taught to do much listening, but to avoid much speaking. We may quote the remark of Spintharus in praise of Epaminondas, that he had scarcely ever met with any man either of greater judgement or of fewer words. Moreover, we are told, the reason why nature gave each of us two ears, but only one tongue, was that we should do less speaking than hearing. A youth is at all times sure to find silence a credit to him; but in one case it is especially so—when he can listen to another without becoming excited and continually yelping; when, even [Sidenote: C] if what is being said is little to his liking, he waits patiently for the speaker to finish; when, at the close, he does not immediately come to the attack with his contradiction, but (to quote Aeschines) waits a while, in case the speaker might wish to supplement his remarks, or perhaps to adjust or qualify his position. To take instant objection, neither party listening to the other but both talking at once, is an unseemly performance. On the other hand, those who have been trained to listen with modest self-control will accept a valuable argument and make it their own, while they will be in a better position to see through a worthless or false one and to expose it, thereby [Sidenote: D] showing that they are lovers of truth, and not merely contentious, headstrong, or quarrelsome persons. It is therefore not a bad remark of some, that there is more need to expel the wind of vanity and self-conceit from the young, than to expel the air from a skin, when you wish to pour in anything of value: otherwise they are too swollen and flatulent to receive it. The presence of envious and malicious jealousy is, of course, never to good purpose, but always an impediment to proper action. In the case of a student at lectures it is the most perverse of prompters. Words which ought to do him good are rendered vexing, distasteful, and unwelcome by the fact that there is nothing which an envious man likes so little as an [Sidenote: E] excellent piece of reasoning. And note that, when a man is piqued by fame or beauty belonging to others, he is envious and nothing more; what annoys him is another’s good fortune. But when he is irritated by admirable argument, his vexation is at his own good, since reason—if he has a mind to accept it—is as much to the good of one who hears as light is to the good of one who sees. Envy in other matters is the result of various coarse or low attitudes of mind; envy of a speaker is born of inordinate love of glory and unfair ambition. A person so disposed is prevented [Sidenote: F] from listening to reason. His mind is perturbed and distracted. At one and the same time it is looking at its own endowments, to see if they are inferior to those of the speaker, and at the rest of the company, to see if they are wondering and admiring. It is disgusted at their applause, and exasperated at their approval. The previous portions of the speech it forgets and ignores, because the recollection is irksome. The parts yet to come it awaits with trembling anxiety, for fear they may prove better still. When the speaker is at his best, it is most [Sidenote: 40] eager for him to stop. When the lecture is over, it thinks of nothing that was said, but takes count of the expressions and attitudes of the audience. From those who give praise it dances away in a frenzy; and to those who carp and distort it runs to form one of the herd. If there is nothing to distort, it makes comparisons with others who have spoken ‘better and more eloquently to the same purpose’. In the end our friend has so cruelly mishandled the lecture that he has made it of no use or profit to himself. [Sidenote: B] Let the love of glory, then, be brought to terms with the love of learning. Let us listen to a speaker with friendly courtesy, regarding ourselves as guests at a sacred banquet or sacrificial offering. Let us praise his ability when he makes a hit, or be satisfied with the mere goodwill of a man who is making the public a present of his views and endeavouring to convince others by means of the arguments which have convinced himself. When he goes right, let us consider that his rightness is due not to chance or accident, but to painstaking effort and learning. Let us take a pattern by it, and not only admire it, but emulate it. When he is at fault, let us stop and think for what reasons he is so, and at what point he began to go astray. [Sidenote: C] Xenophon observes that good managers derive profit from their enemies as well as from their friends. In the same way those who are attentive and alert derive benefit from a speaker not only when he is in the right, but also when he is in the wrong. Paltry thought, empty phrase, affected bearing, vulgar delight and excitement at applause, and the like, are more palpable to a listener in another’s case than to a speaker in his own. It is well, therefore, to take the criticism which we apply to him, and apply it to ourselves, asking whether we commit any mistake of the kind without being aware of it. It is the easiest thing in [Sidenote: D] the world to find fault with our neighbour, but it is a futile and meaningless proceeding, unless made to bear in some way upon the correction or prevention of similar faults. When lapses are committed, let us always be prompt to exclaim to ourselves in the phrase of Plato, ‘Am I, perhaps, as bad?’ As in the eyes of our neighbour we see the reflection of our own, so we should find a picture of our own speech in that of another. In that way we shall avoid treating others with over-confident contempt, and shall also look more carefully to our own deliverances. There is another way in which comparison serves this useful [Sidenote: E] purpose. I mean if, when we get by ourselves after the lecture, we take some point which appears to have been wrongly or unsatisfactorily treated, and attack the same theme, doing our best to fill in, to correct, to re-word, or to attempt an entirely original contribution to the subject, as the case may be—doing, in fact, as Plato did[45] with the speech of Lysias. While to argue against a certain deliverance is not difficult, but, on the contrary, very easy, to set up a better in its stead is an extremely hard matter. As the Lacedaemonian said on hearing that Philip had razed Olynthus to the ground: ‘Yes, but to create a city as good is beyond the man’s power’. Accordingly, [Sidenote: F] when we find that in dealing with the same subject we can do but little better than the speaker in the case, we make a large reduction in our contempt and speedily prune down that self-satisfied conceit which has been exposed during such process of comparison. Nevertheless, though admiration, as opposed to contempt, certainly betokens a fairer and gentler nature, it is a thing which, in its own turn, requires no little—perhaps greater—caution. [Sidenote: 41] For while a contemptuous and over-confident person derives too little benefit from a speaker, an enthusiastic and guileless admirer derives too much injury. He forms no exception to the rule of Heracleitus that ‘_Any dictum will flutter a fool_‘. One should be frank in yielding praise to the speaker, but cautious in yielding belief to the assertion; a kindly and candid observer of the diction and delivery of the arguer, but a sharp and exacting critic of the truth and value of his argument. [Sidenote: B] While we thus escape dislike from the speaker, we escape harm from the speech. How many false and pernicious doctrines we unawares accept through esteeming and trusting their exponent! The Lacedaemonian authorities, after examining a measure suggested by a man of evil life, instructed another person, famous for his conduct and character, to move it—a very proper and statesmanlike encouragement to the people to be led more by the character of an adviser than by his speech. But in philosophy we must put aside the reputation of the speaker and examine the speech in and by itself. In lecturing, as in war, there is much that is mere show. The speaker’s grey hairs, his vocal [Sidenote: C] affectations, his supercilious airs, his self-glorification; above all, the shouting, applauding, and dancing of the audience overwhelm the young and inexperienced student and sweep him along with the current. There is deception in the language also, when it streams upon the question in a delightful flood, and when it contains a measure of studied art and the grandiose. As, in singing to the accompaniment of the flageolet, mistakes are generally undetected by an audience, so an elaborate and pretentious diction dazzles the hearer and blinds him to the sense. I believe it was Melanthius who, when asked about [Sidenote: D] Diogenes’ tragedy, replied: ‘I could not get a sight of it; it was hidden behind the words.’ But with the discourses and declamations of the majority of our professors it is not merely a case of using the words to screen the thoughts. They also dulcify the voice—modulating, smoothing, and intoning—till the hearer is carried away with a perfect intoxication. They give an empty pleasure, and are paid with an emptier fame. Their case, in fact, is one for the quip given by Dionysius. It was he, I think, who, during the performance of a distinguished harp-player, promised him a liberal reward, but subsequently gave [Sidenote: E] him nothing, on the ground that he had made a sufficient return. ‘For as long a time as I was enjoying your singing’, said he, ‘you were enjoying your expectations.’ The deliverer of the lectures in question finds that they represent a joint contribution of the same kind. He receives admiration as long as his entertainment lasts. As soon as no more pleasure is forthcoming for the ear, there is no more glory left for him. The one party has wasted his time, the other his professional life. Let us, then, strip aside all this empty show of language, and make for the actual fruit. It is better to imitate the bee than [Sidenote: F] the garland-maker. The latter looks for the bright-coloured fragrant petals, and, by twining and plaiting them together, produces an object which is pleasant enough, but short-lived and fruitless. Bees, on the contrary, frequently skim through meadows of violets, roses, or hyacinths, to settle upon the coarsest and bitterest thyme. To this they devote themselves _Contriving yellow honey_, and then fly home to their proper business with something worth the getting. So a student who takes his work in real earnest will pay no regard to dainty flowery words nor to showy [Sidenote: 42] theatrical matter. These he will consider as fodder for drones who play the sophist. For his own part he will probe with keen attention into the sense of a speech and the quality of the speaker. Therefrom he will suck such part as will be of service and profit. He will remember that he has not come to a theatre or concert-hall, but to a classroom in the schools, and that his object is to get his life corrected by means of reason. Hence he should form a critical judgement of the lecture from his own case, that is to say, from a calculation of its effect upon himself. Has it been the chastening of a passion, the lightening [Sidenote: B] of a grief? Has it been courage, firmness of spirit, enthusiasm for excellence and virtue? Upon rising from the barber’s chair he will stand at the glass and put his hands to his head, inspecting the trim and arrangement of the hair. No less should he, immediately on leaving a lecture in the philosophic school, look at himself and examine his own mind, to see if it has got rid of any useless and uncomfortable growth and become lighter and more at ease. ‘There is no use’, says Aristo, ‘in either a bath or a speech, unless it cleanses.’ [Sidenote: C] By all means let a young man, while profiting from a discourse, find pleasure in the process. But he must not treat the pleasure of the lecture as its end, nor expect to come out of the philosopher’s school with a beaming face and humming a tune. He must not ask for scented unguents when what he needs is a lotion or a poultice. On the contrary, he should be grateful if a pungent argument acts upon his mind like smoke upon a hive, and clears out all the darkness and mistiness that fill it. Though it is quite right for a speaker not to be altogether without concern for an attractive and persuasive style of language, that should be a matter least regarded by the young student, at any rate in the first instance. Later, no doubt, the case may be [Sidenote: D] different. It is when they are no longer thirsty that persons engaged in drinking will turn a cup about and inspect the chasing upon it. Similarly during a breathing-time, after taking our fill of the lesson, we may be permitted to examine any uncommon elegance in the language. But if from the very first, instead of taking a grip upon the substance, you insist upon ‘good pure Attic’ expression, you are like a person who refuses to take an antidote unless the vessel is made of the best Attic earthenware; or who declines to put on a thick cloak in winter unless the wool is from Attic sheep, preferring to sit, stubborn and impracticable, in the thin napless mantle of the ‘style of Lysias’. Perversities of this kind are responsible for a plentiful [Sidenote: E] lack of good sense and an abundance of loquacious claptrap in the schools. Young fellows keep no watch upon the life, the practical action, or the public services of a philosopher, but make a great merit of diction, phrase, and fine method of statement, while they possess neither the ability nor the desire to find out whether the statement is valuable or worthless, whether it is vital or a mere futility. The next rule concerns the propounding of difficulties. A guest at a dinner is bound to accept what is put upon the [Sidenote: F] table, and neither to ask for anything else nor to find fault. When the feast consists of a discourse, any one who comes to it should listen and say nothing, if there is an understanding to that effect. Persons who cannot listen in a pleasant and sociable manner, but keep drawing the speaker off to other topics, interposing questions and mooting side-issues, get no benefit themselves and confuse both the speaker and the speech. When, however, he invites the audience to ask questions and advance difficulties, any that are proposed should prove to be useful and important. Odysseus, when in the suitors’ company, incurs ridicule through _Begging for morsels and scraps, and not for a sword or a cauldron._ [Sidenote: 43] regard it as a sign of lofty-mindedness not only to give, but to ask for, something of value. It is, however, more a case for ridicule when a hearer poses a speaker with petty little problems of the kind often propounded by young men, when they are talking claptrap in order to make a show of attainments in logic or mathematics—for example, concerning ‘division of the indeterminate’ and the nature of ‘lateral’ or ‘diagonal’ [Sidenote: B] motion. The proper answer to such persons is the remark of Philotimus to a man who was suffering with abscesses and consumption, but who had been talking to him for some time about requiring ‘some little thing to cure a whitlow’. Perceiving the man’s condition from his complexion and breathing, Philotimus observed: ‘My good sir, a whitlow is not the question with you.’ Nor in your case, young sir, is it worth while to be discussing such questions as yours, but how you are to get rid of conceit, swaggering about love-affairs, and such-like nonsense, and how you are to plant your feet on the way to a healthy and sober-minded life. Especially are you bound, in putting your questions, to accommodate yourself to a speaker’s range of knowledge or natural [Sidenote: C] ability—to his special _forte_. A philosopher who is more concerned with ethics should not be attacked with difficulties in natural science or mathematics, nor should one who prides himself upon his scientific knowledge be dragged into determining hypothetical syllogisms or solving fallacies. If you attempted to chop your wood with the key and to open your door with the axe, it would not be thought that you were making sport of these implements, but that you were depriving yourself of their respective powers and uses. In the same way, if you ask of a speaker a thing for which he has no gift or training, while you make no harvest of what he possesses and offers, [Sidenote: D] you not only do yourself harm to that extent, but you incur condemnation for malicious ill-nature. Be careful also not to propound difficulties yourself in too great numbers or too frequently. This is, in a sense, another way of showing off. Meanwhile, to listen equably when some one else is mooting them, shows that you are a clubbable person and a student. This is assuming you have no harassing and urgent trouble of your own, no mental disturbance to be controlled or malady to be comforted. It may not, after all, be (as Heracleitus says) ‘better to conceal ignorance’, but to bring it into the open and cure it. If your mind is upset by a fit of anger, an attack of superstition, a violent quarrel with your friends, or a mad amorous passion which _Stirreth the heart-strings that should rest unstirred_, [Sidenote: E] you must not run away from a discourse which searches it home, and fly to others of a different nature. On the contrary, these are the very topics to which you should listen, both at lectures and also by privately approaching the lecturer afterwards and asking for further light. The opposite course is the one too generally followed. So long as the philosopher is dealing with other persons, his hearers are all delight and admiration. But when he leaves those others alone and frankly administers some important reminder to themselves personally, they are disgusted with him for not minding his own business. Generally speaking, they think [Sidenote: F] a philosopher is entitled to a hearing inside his school, as the tragedian is in the theatre; but in matters beyond it they do not consider him in any way superior to themselves. Towards a sophist their attitude is natural enough; for when he rises from his chair, lays aside his books and his introductory manuals, and makes his appearance in the practical departments of life, he ranks in the popular mind as an unimportant and inferior person. But towards a philosopher in the real sense their attitude is wrong. They do not recognize that a tone of earnestness or jest, a sign of approval or disapproval, a smile or a frown, [Sidenote: 44] on his part—and, above all, his direct handling of their individual cases—are fruitful in good to those who have learned the art of listening with submission. Applause, again, has its duties, which call for a certain caution and moderation. A gentleman bestows neither too little nor too much of it. A hearer shows churlishly bad taste when nothing whatever in a lecture will make him thaw or unbend; when he is diseased with festering conceit and chronic self-complacency, and is all the time thinking he could improve upon the deliverance; when he neither makes any appropriate movement of the brow nor utters any sound to prove that he is [Sidenote: B] a considerate and willing listener; when he is seeking a reputation for solidity and depth by means of silence, an affected gravity, and attitudes of pose, under the notion that applause is like money, and that whatever amount you give to another you take from yourself. The fact is that there are many who take up the well-known saying of Pythagoras and sing it to a false tune. His own gain from philosophy, he said, was to ‘_wonder at [Sidenote: *] nothing_‘; whereas theirs is to ‘praise nothing’ or to ‘honour nothing’. With them wisdom lies in contempt, and the way to be dignified is to be disdainful. While, by means of knowledge [Sidenote: C] and the ascertainment of the cause in a given case, philosophic reason does away with the wonder and awe due to unenlightenment and ignorance, it does not destroy a generous appreciation. Those whose excellence is genuine and firmly seated find it the highest honour to bestow honour, the highest distinction to bestow distinction, where honour and distinction are due. Such conduct implies that they have fame enough and to spare, and are free from jealousy, whereas those who are niggards of praise to others are in all probability pinched and hungry for praise of their own. On the other hand, the opposite type of hearer is the fluttering feather-head who uses no discrimination, but punctuates with loud cheers at every word and syllable. While he is frequently obnoxious to the disputant himself, he is invariably a nuisance [Sidenote: D] to the hearers. He worries them on to their feet against their judgement, and drags them willy-nilly to join in the chorus because they are ashamed to refuse. Thanks to his applause deranging the lecture and making an imbroglio of it, he gets no good from it, but goes home with one of three descriptions to his credit—fleerer, sycophant, or ignoramus. It is true that, when hearing a case in court, we must lean [Sidenote: E] neither towards hostility nor towards favour, but towards justice as we best understand it. But at a lecture on a subject of learning there is neither law nor oath to debar us from granting the speaker an indulgent reception. The reason why the ancients placed the statue of Hermes in the company of the Graces was that speaking has a special claim to a gracious friendliness. It is impossible for any one to be so complete a failure or so utterly astray as to offer us nothing deserving of a cheer, in the shape of a thought, a reference to others, the mere choice of theme or purpose, or, possibly, in the wording or arrangement of the matter, _As among urchin-foot or mid coarse broom The tender snowflake springeth into bloom._ [Sidenote: F] There are persons who, for exhibition purposes, can lend a fair measure of plausibility to a panegyric upon vomiting or fever, or even a pot; and surely a deliverance by a man who has some sort of claim to be thought, or to call himself, a philosopher cannot absolutely fail to afford a well-disposed or courteous audience some opportunity of finding relief in applause. According to Plato young persons in the bloom of life can always manage somehow to excite a lover’s passion. If they are white he calls them ‘saint-like’; if swarthy, ‘virile’. [Sidenote: 45] A hook-nose is ‘regal’, a snub nose ‘piquant’; a sallow skin is a ‘complexion of honey’. He uses these pretty names, and is pleased and satisfied. Love has, indeed, an ivy-like gift for clinging to any pretext. Much less will an eager and earnest student of letters ever fail in inventiveness. In every speaker he will discover some grounds for reasonable applause. In the speech of Lysias, though Plato objects to its want of arrangement, and though he has no praise for its inventiveness, he nevertheless commends him for his manner of statement, and because there is ‘a clear round finish in the chiselling of every word’. [Sidenote: B] We might find fault with Archilochus for his subject-matter, Parmenides for his versification, Phocylides for his commonplaceness, Euripides for his garrulity, Sophocles for his inequality. Similarly one of the orators has no characterization, another exerts no passion, a third is lacking in grace and charm. Nevertheless each wins praise for a power to move and sway us in his own peculiar way. The hearer, then, has ample scope for showing good feeling to a speaker. In some instances it is sufficient if, without further declaration by word of mouth, we contribute a kindly eye, a genial expression, a friendly and agreeable mood. There are certain things for which even the man who is a total failure may [Sidenote: C] look, and which are but ordinary items of common etiquette for any and every audience. I mean an upright posture in our chairs, with no lolling or lounging; eyes kept directly upon the speaker; an air of businesslike attention; composure of countenance, with no sign, I need not say of insolence or peevishness, but of being taken up with other thoughts. If in every exacting task beauty is made up of a number of factors happily combined in a due proportion and harmony, ugliness is the prompt and immediate outcome of the faulty [Sidenote: D] omission or addition of this or that one element. And in this particular matter of listening, not only is there impropriety in a scowling brow, a disagreeable expression, a roving glance, a twisting of the body, and a crossing of the legs; but nodding or whispering to a neighbour, smiling, yawning sleepily, looking at the ground, and actions of a similar nature, are censurable and should be studiously avoided. There are some who think that, though the speaker has a duty, the hearer has none. They expect the former to present himself with his thoughts studiously prepared; yet, without a thought or care for their own obligations, they drop casually in and take their seats, for all the world as if they had come to a dinner to enjoy themselves while others are doing the work. Yet even a polite table-companion has his part to play, much [Sidenote: E] more a polite hearer. He is a partner in the speech and a coadjutor of the speaker; and he has no right to be sharply criticizing the mistakes, and taking every phrase and fact to task, while himself free from responsibility for the impropriety and the frequent solecisms which he commits as a hearer. In ball-play the catcher has to regulate his movements according to those of the thrower. So, in the case of a speech, there is a certain consonance of action in which both speaker and listener are concerned, if each is to sustain his proper part. [Sidenote: F] Our expressions in applauding must not, however, be used without discrimination. It is an unpleasing phrase of Epicurus when, in speaking of the little epistles from his friends, he says, ‘We give them a rattling clapping.’ But what of those who nowadays introduce such _outré_ expressions into our lecture-rooms? The _Capital!_ _Well said!_ and _Very true!_ which were the terms of commendation used by the hearers of Plato, Socrates, and Hypereides, are not enough for these persons. With their exclamations _Divine!_ _An inspiration!_ or _Unapproachable!_ they commit a gross impropriety, libellously making out that the speaker requires far-fetched eulogies of an [Sidenote: 46] outrageous kind. Highly obnoxious also are those who accompany their attestations with an oath, as if they were in a court of law. And equally so those who blunder in their descriptive terms; for instance, when the lecturer is a philosopher and they call out, _A shrewd hit!_, or an old man and they exclaim _Cleverly put!_ or _Brilliant!_, thus misapplying to a philosopher the expressions used at academic exercises, where the speaking is not serious but merely an exhibition of adroitness. To offer [Sidenote: B] to a sober discourse such meretricious praise is like crowning an athlete with a wreath of lilies or roses instead of laurel or wild olive. Once when the poet Euripides was going over a song [Sidenote: *] with an original setting for the benefit of the members of his chorus, and one of them happened to laugh, he observed: ‘If you had not been an ignorant dolt, you could not have laughed while I was teaching you a mixolydian[46] piece.’ So, I take it, a serious and practical philosopher might very well make short work of the airs and affectations of a hearer by saying, ‘I presume your case is one of foolishness or ill breeding; otherwise you would not have been piping out and jigging about at my remarks, when I was teaching, or admonishing, or arguing concerning religion, statesmanship, or the duties of [Sidenote: C] office.’ Just frankly consider what it means, when a philosopher is speaking, and the shouting and hurrahing inside the building make people outside wonder whether it is a flute-player, a harpist, or a dancer who is being applauded. Meanwhile, in listening to admonition and reproof, the pupil must be neither insensible nor unmanly. There are some who bear the philosopher’s reproaches with an easy-going indifference, laughing under the correction and applauding the corrector, just as parasites applaud in sheer impudence and recklessness when they are abused by those who keep them. The shamelessness which such persons display is no proper or genuine proof of courage. When a jibe containing no insult, and uttered in [Sidenote: D] a playful and tactful way, is borne cheerfully and without annoyance, it shows neither a want of spirit nor a want of breeding. On the contrary, it is exactly what a gentleman of the true Spartan style would do. But it is different when admonition takes in hand the correction of character by means of a stinging remedy in the shape of rational reproof. If a young man does not cower under the lesson and feel his soul burning with shame, till he breaks into a sweat and is ready to faint; if, on the contrary, he is unperturbed, gives a broad grin of self-depreciation, and refuses to take the matter seriously, then he is an extremely vulgar creature beyond all sense of shame, a constant habituation to misconduct having made his soul no more capable of a bruise than a thick callus in the flesh. These form the one class. Youths of the opposite disposition, [Sidenote: E] if a single hard word is said to them, turn deserters from philosophy and run away without a glance behind them. While nature has given them, in the shape of modesty, an excellent start towards moral salvation, they are so squeamish and timid that they throw their chance away. Unable to put up with reproof or to accept correction with spirit, they turn away to listen to the soft and agreeable utterances of some time-server or sophist, who charms them with melodious phrases as useless and futile as they are pleasing. If a man runs away from the surgeon after the operation and objects to be bandaged, he is submitting to the pain of the treatment but refusing to put up with its benefit. So when a lesson has lanced and probed his [Sidenote: F] folly, if he will not permit it to close and dress the wound, he is abandoning philosophy after feeling the sting and the pain but before deriving any advantage therefrom. Euripides says that the wound of Telephus was _Soothed by the filings ground from the same spear._ It is no less true that the sting implanted by philosophy in [Sidenote: 47] a youth of parts is cured by the same reasoning that caused the wound. While, therefore, it is right that the subject of reproof should feel some pain from the sting, he must not be crushed or dispirited, but, after undergoing the first discomposing rites of purification, he should look for some sweet and splendid revelation to follow the distress and confusion of the moment. For though the reproof may appear to be unjust, the proper course is to endure it with all patience until the speaker concludes. Then he may be met by a plea in self-defence, and by [Sidenote: B] a request to reserve for some real fault all the vigorous candour which he has shown in the present instance. To proceed to the next consideration. In reading and writing, playing the lyre, or wrestling, the first lessons are very harassing, laborious, and unsure; but, as we advance step by step, it is much as in dealing with mankind. By dint of frequent and familiar acquaintance we find that it all becomes pleasant and manageable, and every word or action easy. It is the same with philosophy. No doubt the language and matter, as first met with, contain something both hard and strange. But we must not take fright at the rudiments and prove so timid and spiritless [Sidenote: C] as to abandon the study. On the contrary, our duty is to grapple with every question, to persevere, to be resolved on making progress, and then to wait for that familiarity which converts all right action into a pleasure. It will not be long before it arrives, casting upon the study a flood of light, and inspiring an ardent passion for excellence. To be without such passion and to put up with the ordinary type of life because one is driven from philosophy by a lack of mettle, is to be a miserable or cowardly creature. We may also expect that at first the argumentation will prove somewhat difficult for young and inexperienced students to understand. For the most part, however, the obscurity and want of comprehension are due to themselves. Opposite dispositions [Sidenote: D] lead to the same mistake. Thus one class, through bashfulness and a desire to spare the teacher, will shrink from putting questions and making sure of the argument, and will ostensibly assent as if they quite understood. The others, led by misplaced ambition and meaningless rivalry to make a show of cleverness and quickness, pretend to have mastered a thing before they take it in, and so will not take it in at all. The consequence is that when the former—the modest and silent kind—go home, they will worry themselves with their perplexities, and in the end they will be driven perforce to trouble the speaker by harking back with their questions at a later date, when they will feel still more ashamed. Meanwhile the bold and ambitious kind will be perpetually cloaking their ignorance and hiding the fact that it haunts them. Let us then thrust aside all this pretentious silliness, and march [Sidenote: E] on towards learning. Let our business be to get an intelligent grasp upon valuable instruction. And let us put up with the laughter of those who are thought to be clever. Remember how Cleanthes and Xenocrates, though to all appearance slower than their fellow-pupils, refused to give up or run away from their studies. On the contrary, they were the first to joke at their own expense, comparing themselves to a narrow-necked bottle or a brass tablet, inasmuch as, though slow at taking their instruction in, they were safe and sure at retaining it. Not only must we, as Phocylides puts it, _Oft-times be baulked of our hope while seeking to come unto goodness_; we must also ‘oft-times’ be laughed at, and bear with scoffing [Sidenote: F] and jeering, meanwhile putting all our heart and energy into winning the struggle against our ignorance. We must, however, be quite as careful not to err in the opposite direction. Some do so from sloth, which makes them a wearisome infliction. Unwilling to trouble themselves when [Sidenote: 48] alone, they keep troubling the teacher by repeatedly asking for information on the same questions. Like unfledged birds in the nest, they are perpetually agape to be fed from another’s mouth, and expect to receive everything ready masticated by someone else. Another kind, in the misplaced quest of a reputation for alertness and acumen, worry the lecturer with their fussy garrulity, perpetually mooting some unimportant difficulty or demanding some unnecessary demonstration, _Till a short journey so becometh long_ [Sidenote: B] —as Sophocles says—not only to themselves but to every one else. By continually arresting the teacher with superfluous and futile questions, as if they were merely chatting with a companion, they interfere with the continuity of the lesson by a series of checks and delays. Persons of this class are (to quote Hieronymus) like wretched cowardly puppies, who bite the skins and tear the odds and ends of wild animals at home, but who never touch the animals themselves. As for the former and lazy class, let us give them this advice. When they have managed to comprehend the main points, let them piece the rest together for themselves, using their [Sidenote: C] memory as a guide to independent thought. And let them take the reasoning they hear from another as a beginning—a seed which they are to make grow and thrive. The mind is not a vessel which calls for filling. It is a pile, which simply requires kindling-wood to start the flame of eagerness for original thought and ardour for truth. Suppose someone goes to borrow from his neighbour’s fire, and then, on finding a large bright blaze, persists in staying and basking on the spot. It is the same when a man comes to another to borrow reason, and does not realize that he must kindle a light of his own in the shape of thinking for himself, but sits enchanted with enjoyment of the lecture. He derives from the lesson [Sidenote: D] a ruddy glow or outward brilliance, but he fails to drive out the mould and darkness from within by the warming power of philosophy. If therefore any advice is needed for the hearing of lectures, it is to remember the rule just given—to practise independent thought along with learning. We shall thus attain, not to the ability of a sophist or the ‘well-informed’ man, but to a deep-seated philosophic power. Right listening will be for us the introduction to right living. Footnote 44: The _paedagogus_, an attendant slave, who accompanied the boy and watched over his conduct. Footnote 45: In his _Phaedrus_. Footnote 46: i. e. in the mixolydian mode, which was of a sad and dirgelike character.

[Sidenote: 779 D] When Plato was invited by the Cyrenaeans to draw up a code of laws for their use and to organize their constitution, he begged to be excused, on the ground that it was difficult to legislate for so prosperous a people: _For nought so arrogant_— nor so impracticable and headstrong— _as human kind_, when prosperity—or what is so considered—lies within its grasp. [Sidenote: E] No less difficult is the task of advising a ruler how to rule. To admit reason, he fears, is to admit a ruler, whose law of duty will make a slave of him and curtail the advantage he derives from power. He has yet to learn a lesson from Theopompus, the Spartan king, who was the first to modify the powers of the throne by means of that of the Ephors. When his wife reproached him for proposing to leave to his children less authority than he had inherited, he replied: ‘Nay, greater, because more assured.’ By relaxing its excessive absolutism he escaped the [Sidenote: F] consequent ill-feeling, and therewith its dangers. But note. Theopompus, in diverting into other channels a portion of the full stream of power, deprived himself of just so much as he gave away. But when philosophic reason becomes the established colleague and protector of a ruler, it merely removes the perilous element and leaves the healthy—a process as necessary to power as to sound health. In most cases, however, monarchs or rulers show as little wisdom as a tasteless sculptor, who fancies that to represent a figure with a huge stride, strained muscles, and gaping mouth, is to make it appear massive and imposing. They imagine that [Sidenote: 780] an arrogant tone, harsh looks, short temper, and exclusiveness give them the true regal air of awe and majesty. In reality they are not a bit better than a colossal statue with the outward shape and form of a god or demigod, while the inside is a mass of earth, stone, or lead. Indeed, in the case of the statue, these heavy materials serve to keep it erect and prevent it from warping; whereas, with an unschooled governor or chief, the unreason within is often the cause of instability and collapse. [Sidenote: B] His foundation being out of plumb, the lofty power which he builds upon it is correspondingly unstable. Now it is only when the builder’s square is itself faultless in line and angle, that it can make other things true to line by adjustment to, and comparison with, itself. So a ruler must begin by acquiring rule within himself. Let him set his own soul straight, and make his own character firm, and then begin adjusting his subjects thereto. You cannot set upright, when you are falling; teach, when you are ignorant; discipline, when unruly; command, when disobedient; govern, when ungoverned. And yet it is a common error to suppose that the chief blessing of authority [Sidenote: C] is to be above authority. To the King of Persia every one was a slave except his own wife, the very person whose master he ought to have been. By whom, then, is the ruler to be ruled? By the _Law, Sovereign of mortals and immortals all_, as Pindar says; not a law written outwardly in books or on wooden tables, but a living law of reason in himself, abiding with him, watching him, and never leaving his soul destitute of guidance. The King of Persia kept one chamberlain whose special function was to enter in the morning and say to him: ‘Rise, Sire, and attend to matters which Great Oromazdes [Sidenote: D] meant for your concern.’ The ruler who has learned wisdom and self-control hears the same voice of exhortation from within. It was a saying of Polemo that love is ‘_serving the Gods in the care and protection of the young_‘. With more truth it might be said that a ruler serves God in the care and protection of men, by dispensing, or safeguarding, the blessings which God gives to mankind. _See’st thou yon boundless sky and air aloft, How in soft arms it clasps the world about?_ From it descend the first principles of seeds in due kind; earth brings them forth; their growth is fostered by rains or winds or the warmth of moon and stars; while the sun brings everything [Sidenote: E] to beauty and tinctures all creation with that peculiar love-spell which is his. But though the Gods may lavish these great boons and blessings, who can enjoy or use them rightly, if there be no law, justice, or ruler? Justice is the end of law; law is the work of the ruler; and a ruler is an image of the God who orders all things. He needs no Pheidias or Polycleitus or Myro to fashion him, but brings himself into likeness with deity [Sidenote: F] by means of virtue, and so creates the fairest and most divine of effigies. In the heavens the sun and moon were set by God as His own beauteous image; and, in a state, the same shining embodiment is to be found in the ruler _Godfearing, who justice upholdeth_, —that is to say, when he holds, not a sceptre, but a mind which is the reason of God; not when he holds the thunderbolt or trident with which some represent themselves in statue or picture, rendering their folly odious to Heaven by such impossible assertion. For God visits with righteous wrath him who makes pretence of thunder or thunderbolt or darting sun-ray; but when a man studies to emulate His goodness, and to take [Sidenote: 781] a pattern by His virtue and benevolence, He delights in furthering him and bestowing a portion of His own righteousness, justice, truth, and mercy. Not fire or light, not the course of the sun, the risings and settings of the stars, everlastingness and immortality, are more divine that these attributes. For it is not by reason of length of life that God is happy, but by reason of the virtue which rules. This is ‘divine’. ‘Noble’, however, is the virtue whose part it is only to obey. When Alexander was in sore distress at killing Cleitus, Anaxarchus told him, by way of comfort, that Right and Justice were [Sidenote: B] but the ‘assessors’ of Zeus—making out that any act was right and lawful for a king. A false and pernicious salve for his repentance at his sin, this encouragement to repeat it! If we are to use such figures of speech, Right is no ‘assessor’ of Zeus, but He himself is Right and Justice, the oldest and most consummate Law. What the ancients tell and write and teach is that, without Justice, not even Zeus can properly rule. According to Hesiod _A virgin is she_, the incorruptible partner of feeling, self-control, and beneficence. [Sidenote: C] Hence are kings called ‘merciful’, for mercy best becomes those who are least afraid. A ruler’s fear should be of doing harm rather than of suffering it; for the former action is the cause of the latter, and this kind of fear on the part of a ruler is creditable to humanity. There is nothing ignoble in a fear for his subjects and of possible injury to them. Such rulers are like _Dogs that keep ward o’er the sheep in the farmstead, anxiously watching At sound of a fierce wild beast_— their anxiety being not for themselves, but for their charges. Once when the Thebans had recklessly abandoned themselves [Sidenote: D] to feasting and carousal, Epaminondas went the round of the walls and the military posts all by himself, remarking that he was keeping sober and wakeful so that the rest might be drunk and asleep. When Cato, after the defeat at Utica, gave orders that every one else should be sent to sea, saw them on board, prayed that they might have a prosperous voyage, and then went back home and stabbed himself, it was a lesson on the text, ‘For whose sake should a ruler feel fear, and for what should he feel contempt?’ On the other hand, Clearchus, despot of Pontus, used at bedtime to crawl like a snake into a chest. [Sidenote: E] Similarly, Aristodemus of Argos crept into an upper room entered by a trap-door. Over this he would put the couch upon which he passed the night with his mistress. Meanwhile her mother dragged away the ladder from below, bringing it back and putting it in place in the morning. How, think you, must he have shuddered at the theatre, at the Government offices, at the Senate-House, at the banquet, when he turned his own bedchamber into a prison? Yes, kings are afraid _for_ their subjects, despots are afraid _of_ them. It follows that, as they add to their power, they add to their alarms; the more people they rule, the more people they fear. [Sidenote: F] It is an improbable and unworthy view to hold of God—as some philosophers do—that He exists as an element in matter to which all sorts of things may happen, and in entities which are subject to innumerable accidents, chances and changes. In reality He is stablished somewhere aloft ‘_on holy pedestal_’ (as Plato puts it) in the realm of nature uniform and constant, and there ‘_moves according to Nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end_‘. And as in heaven the sun, His beauteous counterfeit, shows itself as His reflection in a mirror to those who have the power to see Him through it, so, in the justice and reason which shine in a state, He sets up a likeness of that which is in Himself, and, by copying that likeness, men [Sidenote: 782] whom philosophy has gifted and chastened model themselves after the highest pattern. This condition of mind nothing can implant except reason acquired from philosophy. Otherwise we are in the position of Alexander, when he went to see Diogenes at Corinth. In delight at his talent, and in admiration of his proud and lofty spirit, he exclaimed: ‘If I had not been Alexander, I would have been Diogenes.’ And what did this virtually mean? That he was vexed at his own high fortune, splendour, and [Sidenote: B] power, because they were an obstacle to the virtue for which he could find no time, and that he envied the cloak and the wallet, which made Diogenes as invincible and unassailable as he himself was made by armour and horses and spears. And yet by the practice of philosophy he might have secured the moral character of a Diogenes while retaining the position of an Alexander. Nay, he should have become all the more a Diogenes for being an Alexander, since his high fortune, so liable to be tossed by stormy winds, required ample ballast and a master hand at the helm. In the case of private men without strength or standing, folly is so qualified by impotence that in the end no mischief is done. It is as with a bad dream, in which, though the mind is excited with passion, no harm results, inasmuch as it is unable to rise and act in accordance with the desires. When, on the other [Sidenote: C] hand, vice is adopted by power, the passions acquire sinew and strength. Dionysius spoke truly when he said that the highest advantage of power was to give speedy effect to a wish. A most parlous thing, if you can give effect to a wish, and yet wish what is wrong! _No sooner the word had been utter’d, than straightway the deed was accomplish’d._ Vice, when enabled by power to run rapid course, forces every passion into action, converting anger into murder, love into adultery, greed into confiscation. _No sooner the word hath been utter’d_, than your opponent has met his doom. No sooner a suspicion, than the victim of slander is a dead man. [Sidenote: D] Scientists tell us that, whereas lightning really follows and issues from thunder like blood from a wound, it is perceived first because, while the hearing waits for the sound, the vision goes out to meet the light. So with rulers. The punishment outstrips the charge; the condemnation does not wait for the proof. _For forthwith anger slips and loses hold, Like anchor’s tooth in sand when seas swell high_, unless reason with all its weight puts a heavy drag on power; unless, that is, the ruler acts like the sun, whose motion is least [Sidenote: E] when its height is greatest, namely, at the time of its northern altitude, its course being steadied by the diminished speed. Vice in high places cannot be hid. When an epileptic is placed upon a height and made to turn round, he is seized with giddiness and begins to totter, his malady being betrayed thereby. So with an unschooled and ignorant person. After a brief uplifting by wealth or fame or place, the same fortune which raised him up immediately reveals how ready he is to fall. To put it another way; when a vessel is empty, you cannot detect the crack or flaw, but when you begin to fill it, the leak appears. [Sidenote: F] So with a mind which is too unsound to hold power and authority; its leaks are to be seen in its exhibitions of lust, anger, pretentiousness, and ignorance. Yet why speak of this, when holes are picked in eminent and distinguished men for the merest peccadilloes? Cimon was reproached for his addiction to wine, Scipio for his addiction to sleep, and Lucullus for his extravagance at table[47].... Footnote 47: The rest of the essay is missing. FAWNER AND FRIEND (WITH AN EXCURSUS ON CANDOUR) MY DEAR ANTIOCHUS PHILOPAPPUS, [Sidenote: 48 E] ‘Every one,’ says Plato, ‘will pardon a man for admitting that he has a strong affection for himself,’ but—not to mention [Sidenote: F] numerous other defects to which he is subject—there is one chief weakness which precludes him from giving a just and incorruptible verdict in his own case. ‘The lover is blind where the beloved object is concerned,’ unless he has learned the habit of prizing things, not because they are his own or related to himself, but because they are beautiful. Hence, there is ample opportunity for the flatterer to obtain a place among our friends. He delivers his attack from an excellent point of vantage in the shape of that self-love which makes every man his own [Sidenote: 49] first and greatest flatterer, ready and willing to welcome such external testimony as will endorse his own conceits and desires. For the man who is reprobated as a lover of toadies is an ardent lover of himself. Out of fondness for himself he not only entertains the wish to possess, but also the conceit that he possesses, all manner of qualities; and though the desire may be natural enough, the conceit is fallacious and calls for the greatest watchfulness. And if truth is divine, and—as Plato asserts—the first principle [Sidenote: B] of ‘all good things both with Gods and men’, the toady must be an enemy of the Gods, and especially of the Pythian. For, in perpetual antagonism to the doctrine of _Know Thyself_, he produces self-deception in a man, self-ignorance, and error as to his virtues and vices. The virtues he renders defective and abortive; the vices he renders incorrigible. Now if the flatterer had been like most other mischievous things, and had solely or chiefly attacked mean and petty victims, the harm would have been neither so great nor so difficult to prevent. But it is into soft and sweet kinds of wood that worms prefer to bore, and it is estimable and capable characters—characters with a love of approbation—that give access and supply nourishment to the flatterer who fastens upon [Sidenote: C] them. ‘_The breeding of the steed_,’ says Simonides, ‘_sorts not with Zacynthus,[48] but with wheat-bearing plains_.’ Similarly we do not find toadyism in attendance upon the poor, the insignificant, or the uninfluential, but sapping and debilitating great houses and great fortunes, and frequently subverting rulers and thrones. Consequently no slight effort or common precaution is required in considering how it can be most readily detected and so prevented from doing injury and discredit to friendship. [Sidenote: D] Vermin quit a dying man and desert the body when the blood which feeds them becomes exhausted. So with the time-server. You will never find him approaching a person whose fortune is destitute of sap and warmth. It is the famous and influential whom he attacks; it is out of them that he makes capital; and when their circumstances change he promptly beats a retreat. We should not, however, wait for that test; it is then not merely useless but fraught with injury and danger. It is a grievous thing to find out who is not your friend only at the moment when a friend is needed, since the discovery does not enable you to exchange the uncertain and counterfeit for the genuine and certain. You should possess friends as you possess coin—tested [Sidenote: E] before the occasion, not waiting to be proved by the occasion. Discovery should not come through injury, but injury should be prevented by our acquiring a scientific insight into the nature of the toady. Otherwise we shall be in the position of those who distinguish a deadly poison by tasting it; we shall meet our death in the effort of judging. One can neither approve of such a course, nor yet of those who, because they regard a ‘friend’ as implying a high and wholesome influence, imagine that an agreeable associate is immediately and manifestly proved to be a time-server. For there is nothing disagreeable or uncompromisingly severe about a friend, nor does the high respect we pay to friendship depend upon harshness or austerity. Nay, its high influence and claim to respect are actually an agreeable and desirable thing in themselves, [Sidenote: F] _And close at its side do the Graces and Longing Desire set their dwellings._ Not only may the unfortunate man say, with Euripides, _’Tis sweet to look into a friend’s fond eyes_, but friendship is a comrade who adds as much pleasure and gratification to our blessings as it brings relief to the pains and perplexities of our mishaps. According to Euenus ‘_the best of [Sidenote: 50] seasonings is fire_‘. So, by making friendship an ingredient of life, God has rendered all things bright and sweet and enjoyable through its presence and participation. How, indeed, could the fawner have wormed himself into our pleasures, if he had seen that friendship refuses all admittance to what is pleasant? The thing is absurd. No; the toady is like the mock-gilt and tinsel which merely mimic the sheen and lustre of gold. It is in order to imitate the attractiveness and charm of a friend that he makes a constant show of agreeableness and amiability, and never opposes or contradicts you. It is therefore wrong, [Sidenote: B] when a person praises you, to suspect at once that he is simply a flatterer. Friendship is quite as much called upon to praise in season as it is to blame. In fact, perpetual peevishness and fault-finding is the negation of friendship and sociability; whereas, when affection bestows zealous and ungrudging praise upon our good deeds, we also submit readily and cheerfully to its candid remonstrances, being satisfied with the belief that the man who is glad to praise will only blame because he must. [Sidenote: C] ‘It is a hard matter then,’ we may be told, ‘to distinguish between flatterer and friend, if they are equally pleasant and equally laudatory, especially when we find that toadyism is often more than a match for friendship in the tendering of services.’ Naturally so, we reply, if the object of our search is the genuine toady, with a past-master’s skill at the business; if, that is, we do not adopt the common view and mean by ‘toady’ your poverty-stricken trencherman, who ‘begins’—as some one has said—‘to declare himself with the first course,’ and whose lickspittle character betrays itself by gross and vulgar [Sidenote: D] buffoonery at the first dish and the first glass. It needed no test to expose Melanthius, the parasite of Pherae. It was enough that, when asked ‘how Alexander was stabbed,’ he replied, ‘Through the ribs, into my belly.’ Nor is there any such need with those who besiege ‘an opulent table’, and whom _Not fire, nor steel, nor bronze can keep_ from making their way to a dinner. Nor yet with those female toadies of Cyprus, who, after their transference to Syria, were [Sidenote: E] called ‘pair o’ steps’ from the fact that they used to allow the king’s wife to mount her carriage over their bent backs. Against whom, then, are we to be on our guard? Against the man who is not confessedly or apparently a toady; one who is not to be found hanging about the kitchen, nor to be caught watching the dial with a dinner in prospect; one who is not to be made tipsy and then pitched into any corner; but one who for the most part keeps sober and bustling, thinking it his business to take part in all your doings, and to be privy to your confidential talk—the man, in short, who acts the rôle of friend, not in the satyric[49] or comic style, but in the high tragic. According to Plato, ‘the extreme of dishonesty is to appear honest when you are not.’ So with time-serving. It is [Sidenote: F] to be regarded as dangerous, not when confessed, but when undetected; when it wears a serious, not an amusing, air. In this form, unless we are careful, it casts a slur of discredit even upon genuine friendship, the points of coincidence being numerous. When the Mage was trying to escape and Gobryes had plunged with him into a dark room and was grappling with him, Darius stood at a loss what to do. ‘Stab,’ said Gobryes, ‘though you stab both.’ With us it is not so easy, inasmuch as we can by no means give any sanction to the maxim: ‘_Perish friend, if so perish foe._’ There are so many points of similarity to complicate the fawner with the friend that we must find it a most parlous business to tear the one from the other. We may either be casting out the good thing along with the bad, [Sidenote: 51] or, in trying to spare the right thing, we may let the wrong one bring us to grief. There are wild plants of which the seeds are similar in shape and size to those of wheat. When the two are mixed it is difficult to sift these out; they will not fall through smaller holes, and, if the holes are wider, one falls through as much as the other. No less difficult is it to separate time-serving from friendship, when it blends itself with every feeling, every movement, need, and habit. Friendship being the most pleasant and delightful thing in the world, it follows that the toady also uses pleasure for his [Sidenote: B] bait. To give pleasure is his main concern. And since agreeableness and usefulness are concomitants of friendship—whence the saying that ‘_a friend is more indispensable than fire and water_‘—it follows that the toady insists on rendering services, and is all eagerness to show unfaltering promptitude and zeal. But the surest foundation of friendship is similarity of pursuits and character. The foremost agent in mutual attraction is similarity of temperament—the liking and disliking of the same things. This the time-server perceives, and therefore he adapts himself [Sidenote: C] like wax to the proper shape and form, endeavouring by imitation to mould himself so as exactly to fit his victim. His supple versatility, his genius for mimicry, is so great that it is a case of _Thou art Achilles’ self, and not Achilles’ son._ And note his craftiest device. He observes that candour is called (what it appears to be) ‘the characteristic note of friendship’, while lack of candour is the negation of friendship and spirit. He does not fail, therefore, to imitate this quality also. As a skilful _chef_ will use some bitter or piquant juice for a sauce in order to prevent sweets from cloying, so with the candour [Sidenote: D] of the toady. It is not genuine, nor is it useful; it is given, as it were, with a wink, and serves simply as an excitant. The result is that he is as hard to detect as one of those creatures which possess the natural power of altering their colour so as to match the spot on which they happen to lie. Since, therefore, it is under cover of resemblances that he deceives us, our proper course is to find in the non-resemblances a means of stripping off his disguise and showing that—as Plato puts it—he is ‘beautifying himself with borrowed forms and colours through lack of any of his own’. Let us begin at the very beginning. In most instances, we remarked, friendship commences with similarity of temperament [Sidenote: E] and disposition, a taste for very much the same habits and principles, and a delight in the same pursuits, occupations, and pastimes. Such a similarity is implied in the lines: _Most welcome to the old is old men’s speech; Child pleaseth child, and woman pleaseth woman, Sick men the sick, and one who meets disaste Brings solace to another suffering it._ The toady knows that it is natural to find pleasure in one’s like and to be fond of his society. This, therefore, is his first device [Sidenote: F] for approaching you and getting neighbours with you. He acts like herdsmen on a pasture. He works gently up to you and rubs shoulders with you in the same pursuits, amusements, tastes, and way of life, until you give him his chance and let yourself grow tame and accustomed to his touch. He condemns such circumstances, such conduct, and such persons as he notices you dislike; while of those that please you he cannot say too much in praise, exhibiting boundless delight and admiration [Sidenote: 52] for them. He thus confirms you in your loves and hatreds, as being the results, not of feelings, but of judgement. How, then, is he to be exposed? By what points of difference are we to prove that he is not, nor is on the way to be, our like, but only a pretender thereto? In the first place we must look for consistency and permanence in his principles. We must see whether he takes pleasure in, and gives praise to, the same things at all times; whether he directs and establishes his own life after one pattern, as a frank and free lover of single-minded friendship and fellowship ought to do. A friend does act in this manner. On the other hand, the time-server possesses no one fixed hearthstone to his character. He does not live a life [Sidenote: B] chosen for himself, but a life chosen for another. Moulding and adapting himself to suit others, he possesses no singleness or unity, but adopts all manner of varying shapes. Like water poured from one vessel into another, he is perpetually flowing hither and thither and accommodating himself to the form of the receptacle. The ape, we are told, is captured through endeavouring to imitate man by copying his motions in dancing. The time-server, on the contrary, is one who allures and decoys others. Nor does his mimicry take the same form in all cases. One person he will help to dance and sing: with another he will share a taste for wrestling and athletics. If he gets hold of a sportsman devoted to hunting, he follows his lead, and all but shouts, in the words of Phaedra, [Sidenote: C] _I long, ye Gods, to cheer the hounds Close-pressing on the dappled deer_, whereas he feels no interest whatever in the animal, but is setting his toils to catch the huntsman himself. If his next quarry is a young man with a taste for study and intellectual improvement, he is all for books, and grows a beard down to his feet; it is a case of wearing the philosopher’s cloak and his air of ‘indifference’,[50] and of prating about Plato’s ‘numbers’ and ‘right-angled triangles’. If, next, there happens along some easy-going bibulous person with plenty of money, _Then forthwith are his rags cast off by the wily Odysseus._ [Sidenote: D] Away goes the cloak; shorn off is the beard—’tis a crop that bears no corn: to the fore are wine-coolers and wine-cups, laughter in the streets and mockery of the philosophic student. We are told, for instance, that at Syracuse, when Plato visited the place and Dionysius was seized with a mania for philosophy, the host of geometricians turned the palace into a perfect whirl of dust.[51] But when Dionysius came to logger-heads with Plato, had had enough of philosophy, and abandoned himself to drink and women and to silly talk and wanton [Sidenote: E] behaviour, in a moment it was as if Circe had transformed them every one, and there came a reign of vulgarity, oblivion, and folly. Examples are also to be found in the conduct of time-servers on a large scale, such as demagogues. Greatest was Alcibiades. At Athens he joked, kept horses, and lived like a wit and a man of the world. At Lacedaemon he cropped his hair close, wore a short cloak, and bathed in cold water. In Thrace he fought and drank. But when he attached himself to Tissaphernes, he indulged in luxury, effeminacy, and ostentation, and sought to win the good graces of his company by adapting himself in all cases to their likeness and becoming one of them. Not so Epaminondas or Agesilaus. Despite [Sidenote: F] all their intercourse with so many persons, communities, and standards of conduct, they everywhere maintained—in dress, way of life, speech, and behaviour—their own proper character. So with Plato. He was the same at Syracuse as at Athens, the same to Dionysius as to Dion. Our easiest method of exposing the polypus-like changes of the time-server is to make a show of frequent changes on our own part, finding fault with conduct of which we formerly approved, and all of a sudden countenancing actions, conduct, [Sidenote: 53] or talk which used to fill us with disgust. We shall then perceive that he has no sort of settled and specific character; that his loves, hatreds, pleasures, and pains are not matters of his own feeling; that he is merely a mirror reflecting extraneous moods, principles, and emotions. For observe the man’s ways. Should you speak disparagingly to him of one of your friends, he will remark: ‘You have been slow in finding the fellow out; _I_ never did like him.’ If, on the contrary, you change your tone and speak in his praise, he will declare that he is ‘right glad and thankful on the man’s behalf’, because he ‘believes in him’. If you propose to adopt a different mode of life—if, for example, [Sidenote: B] you are converted from a political career to a life of quiet inactivity—he will say, ‘We ought to have got quit of brawlings and jealousies long before this.’ If, on the other hand, you appear eager for office and the platform, he seconds you with, ‘A very proper spirit! A quiet life is pleasant, no doubt, but it lacks honour and distinction.’ We ought immediately to answer that kind of man with the words: ‘_Different, sir, dost thou show thyself now from the man thou wert erstwhile._ I do not want a friend who shifts his ground when I do and who nods when I nod—my shadow can do that better—but one who helps me to truth and sound judgement.’ [Sidenote: C] Such is one way of applying a test. There is a second point of difference to be watched, as against the points of resemblance. It is not in all matters that a genuine friend is prompt to copy or commend us, but only in the best. _Not his to share our hates, but share our loves_, as Sophocles has it. Yes, and to share our right conduct and high principles, not our wrong and wanton deeds, unless perhaps—as a result of familiar association—some contaminating effluence, like that of ophthalmia, affects him to some extent with a blemish or a fault against his will. For instance, it is said that [Sidenote: D] Plato’s stoop, Aristotle’s lisp, King Alexander’s crook of the neck and harshness of voice in conversation, were tricks borrowed by their respective intimates. There are persons who, without knowing it, pick up from both the temperament and conduct of their friends most of what is characteristic of them. The time-server, however, is exactly like the chameleon. As the latter assimilates himself to every colour but white, so the time-server, though utterly unable to arrive at a likeness to your valuable qualities, leaves no discreditable one uncopied. He is like a bad painter, who, because beauty lies beyond the reach of his weak capacity, makes the strikingness of his portraiture [Sidenote: E] a matter of wrinkles, moles, and scars. So the toady becomes an imitator of dissoluteness, superstition, irascibility, harshness to servants, and distrust of friends and relatives. Not only is he by nature and of his own accord prone to the lower course; it is by imitating a baseness that he appears to be farthest from blaming it. A man who takes the higher line, and shows distress and vexation at his friends’ misdeeds, is dubiously regarded—a fact which accounts for the ruin of Dion with Dionysius, of Samius with Philip, and of Cleomenes with Ptolemy. But when a man desires to be, and to be thought, agreeable and to be depended upon, the worse the thing is, the more display he makes of liking it, as if the strength of his affection will not permit him to dislike even your vices, but makes him your [Sidenote: F] natural sympathizer in all circumstances. Such persons therefore insist upon sharing even involuntary and accidental shortcomings. When toadying an invalid, they pretend to suffer with the same complaint. In company with a person who is somewhat blind or deaf, they pretend to be dim-sighted and hard of hearing, like the flatterers of Dionysius, whose sight was so dull that they stumbled against each other and knocked over the dishes at dinner. Sometimes they work themselves into closer and more intimate touch with a trouble or a malady, till they come to participate in afflictions of the most secret kind. If they see [Sidenote: 54] that the patron is unhappy in his marriage or on bad terms with his sons or his relatives, they do not spare themselves, but make lamentations about their own children, or wife, or relatives, or friends, on certain alleged grounds which they divulge as a miserable secret. Such similarity creates a closer understanding with their patron. He has received a sort of hostage, thereupon betrays to them some secret or other, and, because of that betrayal, keeps friends with them and is afraid to leave his confidence to its fate. I know of one time-server who, when the patron divorced his wife, turned his own wife also out of doors. It was, however, found out—through a discovery [Sidenote: B] of the patron’s wife—that he was visiting and sending messages to her in secret. The toady must have been but little known to the man who thought that the lines: _Body all belly, and an eye that looks All round; a thing that crawls upon its teeth_, were as apt a description for a crab as they are for the flatterer. The picture is that of the parasite: _The friend of saucepan-time and dinner-hour_, as Eupolis expresses it. This point, however, we will reserve till its proper place. Meanwhile we must not omit to mention another shrewd trick played by the time-server when he imitates you. If he goes so far as to copy some good quality in the person whom he [Sidenote: C] toadies, he is careful to leave the advantage with him. Friends in the true sense are neither jealous nor envious of each other, and, whether they reach or fail to reach the same degree of excellence, they accept the situation fairly and without a grudge. But the toady—who never forgets to play second rôle—lets his resemblance fall short of equality, and owns to being distanced at everything but vices. In vices, however, he insists on first prize. If the patron is irritable, he says, ‘_I_ am all bile;’ if superstitious, ‘_I_ am a mass of fears;’ if love-sick, ‘_I_ am frantic.’ [Sidenote: D] ‘It was wrong of you to laugh,’ he will say, ‘but _I_ was absolutely dying with laughter.’ But where virtues are concerned it is the other way about. ‘I am a fast runner, but _you_ positively fly.’ ‘I am a tolerable horseman, but nothing to a centaur like our friend here.’ ‘I have a neat turn for poetry, and can write a line better than some, but _Thunder is not for me, ’tis work for Zeus._’ He thus appears to do two things at once—to give an air of merit to his patron’s tastes by imitating them, and of unapproachableness to his ability by failing to match it. So much for the differences between fawner and friend in the midst of their resemblances. Since, as we have observed, pleasure is another point in common—a good type of man taking as much delight in his friends as a weak man does in his flatterers—we may proceed to make a distinction here also. The distinction lies in the relation between the pleasure and its end. Thus, not only unguents [Sidenote: E] have an agreeable smell; a medicine may have it also. But there is the difference that the object of the former is pleasure and nothing else, while in the other case the purgative, warming, or flesh-making quality happens to be combined with fragrance. Again, a painter mixes engaging colours and dyes, and there are also certain medical preparations with a taking appearance and an attractive colour. Where is the difference? Clearly our distinction will lie in the end for which they are used. Just so with the case before us. In the agreeable relations of [Sidenote: F] friend with friend the pleasant-giving element is a kind of gloss upon a substance of high value and utility. Sometimes sportiveness, the table, wine, and even mockery and nonsense are used by them as a seasoning to high and serious purposes. Hence such expressions as: _Then had they joyance in talk and in speaking the one to the other_; or: _Nor should aught else have parted us twain in our love and our joyance._ But, with the time-server, it is his function and end to be [Sidenote: 55] perpetually dishing up in a spicy form something amusing, something done or something said which pleases and is meant to please. To put it briefly, the toady thinks the purpose of his every action should be to make himself agreeable, whereas the friend will only do what is right, and therefore, though often agreeable, he is often the contrary, not because he wishes it, but because, when it is the proper course, he does not avoid it. It is as with the physician. When it helps matters he will throw in a pinch of saffron or spikenard, and will frequently order a pleasant bath and an inviting diet. But there are times when he will have none of these, but will shake in a dash of castor _Or polium foul of odor, that men e’en shudder to smell it._ [Sidenote: B] Or he will pound a dose of hellebore and make you drink it off. Neither the unpleasantness in the one case nor the pleasantness in the other is the end in his mind, but in both cases he has only one object in view for the patient, and that object is his good. In the same way there are times when a friend will lead you in the path of duty by inspiriting you with praise or gratifying you with courtesies, as the speaker does in _Teucer, Telamon’s son, dear prince of a warrior people, Shoot as now thou dost_, or in: _How then should I, if ’tis so, be forgetful of godlike Odysseus?_ But when, on the contrary, you need calling to attention, he will upbraid you in biting terms and with the plain-speaking of a guardian: [Sidenote: C] _Foolish art thou, Menelaus Zeus-foster’d: no time is this present For folly like thine._ There are also times when he makes the deed accompany the word, like Menedemus, when he taught the prodigal and dissolute son of his friend Asclepiades a wholesome lesson by shutting the door in his face and refusing to speak to him. Similarly Arcesilaus forbade Bato the lecture-room for having attacked Cleanthes in a verse of a comedy. He was reconciled to him, however, when he repented and made his peace with Cleanthes. For though one must give a friend pain when it does him good, one must not, while giving the pain, make an end of the friendship. The sting should be used only as a medicine, for the care and salvation of the patient. A friend is therefore [Sidenote: D] like a musician. In converting us to right and salutary courses he will sometimes loosen and sometimes tighten the strings. Pleasure you will get from him often, profit always. On the other hand, the time-server, who harps in a single key and is accustomed to strike no note but that of your pleasure and gratification, has no notion of any action to check you or word to pain you. He merely plays the accompaniment to your wishes, with which both his time and his words are invariably in accord. Xenophon says of Agesilaus that he welcomed praise from those who were no less ready to blame. So we should regard that which gives pleasure and gratification as in the category of ‘friend’, if it can also on occasion oppose us and give us pain. But a companionship which is uniformly pleasurable and maintains [Sidenote: E] a perpetual graciousness unqualified by any sting, calls for suspicion. We ought, in fact, to be ready to ask, like the Laconian on hearing praise of King Charillus, ‘How can a man be honest, when he cannot be angry even with a rascal?’ It is close to the ear, we are told, that the gadfly gets into a bull and the tick into a dog. In the case of a man of ambition, the time-server with his flatteries takes hold of his ears and sticks so fast that it is hard to rub him off. Particularly, therefore, in such circumstances must we keep our judgement vigilant. It must be on the alert to see whether the praise is given to the [Sidenote: F] thing or to the man. It is given to the thing when men praise us in our absence more than in our presence; when they wish and strive for the same objects themselves, and praise not only us but every one else who does the like; when we do not find them doing and saying first one thing and then the opposite; and—most important of all—when our sense does not tell us that we are repenting or ashamed of the things for which we are praised, or wishing that we had rather done and said the [Sidenote: 56] contrary. This inward judgement, which testifies against a flattery and refuses to accept it, is immune from contamination, and proof against the time-server. It is a strange thing that most men, when they meet with a misfortune, cannot bear to be consoled, but are better pleased with those who will join in the lamentations; but when they are guilty of a blunder or a fault, if you make them feel the sting of repentance by means of a reproof or a reprimand, they think you an enemy and an accuser; whereas, if you eulogize their conduct, they regard you as a loyal friend and receive you with open arms. Now when people give you praise and applause for something [Sidenote: B] you do or say, whether in sober earnest or in careless jest, the harm they do is only for the moment, and only affects the matter in hand. But when their praises go so far as to influence your moral being, and their flatteries to affect your character, they are as bad as servants who pilfer ‘_not from the stack, but from the seed_‘. For the moral disposition and the moral character—first principle and fountain-head of conduct—are the seed of actions, and these they corrupt by clothing vice in the titles of virtue. Thucydides tells us that in the midst of war and faction ‘_the customary acceptation of words was arbitrarily changed to suit an end. Reckless daring came to be thought devoted courage; [Sidenote: C] cautious hesitation, an excuse for cowardice; moderation, weakness in disguise; complete insight, complete inertia_‘. So, when flattery is at work, we should warily note how prodigality is called ‘generosity’; cowardice, ‘caution’; light-headed caprice, ‘life and vigour’; meanness, ‘moderation’; the amorous man, ‘amiable and affectionate’; the arrogant and irascible person, ‘a man of spirit’; a poor meek creature, ‘civil and obliging’. [Sidenote: D] Remember, how Plato tells us that the lover—the flatterer of the beloved—calls a snub nose ‘piquant’, a hook-nose ‘regal’, a swarthy face ‘virile’, a white face ‘saint-like’, while ‘honey-colour’ is simply the coinage of a lover who indulgently invents a pretty name for pallor. Yet when an ugly man is persuaded that he is beautiful, or a little man that he is tall, his deception is short-lived, and the harm which he sustains is slight and easily repaired. But flattery may teach him to treat vices as if they [Sidenote: E] were virtues, and to rejoice in them instead of sorrowing. It may remove all sense of shame at misconduct. Such flattery spelled destruction to the Siceliots, when it called the cruelty of Dionysius and Phalaris a ‘hatred of wickedness’. It spelled ruin to Egypt, when it gave to Ptolemy’s effeminacy, to his hysterical superstition, to his shriekings and bangings of tambourines, the name of piety and worship. It came once within an ace of utterly subverting Roman morals, when it glossed over Antony’s dissolute and ostentatious self-indulgence with pretty terms as a ‘festive and genial appreciation of the boons of unstinted [Sidenote: F] power and fortune’. What made Ptolemy tie on the mouth-strap and its pair of flutes? What made Nero cultivate the tragic stage and don the mask and buskin? What else but praise from flatterers? Is not a king regularly called an Apollo if he warbles, a Dionysius if he gets drunk, a Hercules if he wrestles? And is he not so pleased with it, that there is no way of disgracing himself to which flattery will not lead him? It is therefore in the matter of praise that we should chiefly beware of the time-server. He is himself alive to the fact, and [Sidenote: 57] is deft at avoiding suspicion. If therefore he gets hold of some dull-witted and thick-skinned grandee, he fools him to the top of his bent. Remember how Strouthias makes a hobby-horse of Bias and dances his fling upon the man’s stupidity by praising him with: _You have drunk more than royal Alexander_, or: _I laugh to think o’ the quip you gave the Cyprian._ But with persons of more discernment he perceives that in this direction they are particularly on the alert, that in this quarter they keep a special watch. He does not therefore adopt a direct line of attack with his flattery, but fetches a circuitous course from a distance, and _Advances noiselessly, as when a beast_ [Sidenote: B] is tentatively approached and fingered. At one moment he will describe how you have been praised by some one else, using the public speaker’s device of putting the words in another person’s mouth. He will say, for instance, that he had the great pleasure of being present in the market-place when some ‘visitors’—or some ‘elderly people’—were relating a good many admiring and complimentary stories about you. At another time he will concoct a number of trivial and fictitious charges against you, which he purports to have heard from others, and he will say that he has hastened to find you and desires to know where you said such-and-such a thing or did so-and-so. If you deny them—as you naturally will—he at [Sidenote: C] once has you in the trap for his compliments: ‘It did surprise me that you should speak ill of a friend, seeing that it is not your nature to do so even of an enemy;’ or ‘that you should have designs on other people’s property, when you are so liberal with your own’. Others, again, are like a painter who brings the light and bright parts into relief by the juxtaposition of dark and shaded portions. By blaming, abusing, belittling, and ridiculing the opposite qualities, they give a concealed praise and encouragement to the defects of the person flattered. To a spendthrift they disparage economy and call it stinginess. To a grasping knave [Sidenote: D] who makes money by mean and shabby practices they depreciate honest self-support and call it want of enterprise and business capacity. When they associate with some careless idler who shuns the busy centres of affairs, they are not ashamed to style public life a ‘meddling with other people’s business’, and public spirit a ‘sterile vanity’. Sometimes, in order to flatter a public speaker, a philosopher is belittled, or the favour of profligate women is won by miscalling faithful and loving wives ‘provincial and unattractive’. Most pitiful in its baseness is the fact that the toady does not even spare himself. As a wrestler crouches his body in order to throw another, so he insidiously contrives to compliment his neighbour by disparaging himself. [Sidenote: E] ‘I am a nervous wretch at sea,’ says he. ‘I cannot face trouble. Hard words make me frantically angry. But our friend here has no nerves; nothing troubles him. He is a peculiar person, always good-tempered, never ruffled.’ But if a man thinks himself particularly sensible, and is so desirous of being severely matter-of-fact that—out of what he calls straightforwardness—he is always on the defensive with _Tydeus’ son, bepraise me not much, nor, prithee, upbraid me_, the artist in flattery will not adopt this manner of approaching [Sidenote: F] him. Such cases are met by another device. He will come and consult him, as a person of superior wisdom, about affairs of his own. ‘Though,’ he will say, ‘there are others with whom I am more intimate, I am compelled to trouble you. For where are we to take refuge when we need advice? In whom are we to put confidence?’ Then, after listening to what he has to say, he will take his leave with the remark that what he has received is ‘not an opinion; it is an oracle’. And if he sees that you make pretensions to being a judge of literature, he gives you something he has [Sidenote: 58] written himself, and asks you to read and correct it. When King Mithridates had a fancy for doctoring, some of his courtiers actually put themselves in his hands to be lanced and cauterized. This was flattery by deeds in place of words, since he accepted their confidence as a sufficient voucher for his skill. _Of many shapes are means divine_, and this negative class of praise requires to be countered with some craftiness. The way to confute it is by deliberately offering counsel and suggestion which are nonsensical, and making corrections [Sidenote: B] which are absurd. If your man objects to nothing, says ‘Yes’ to everything, and exclaims ‘Good!’ ‘Capital!’ at every item, he exposes himself as one who _The watchword asks, while other are his aims_, —those aims being to encourage your self-conceit with his laudations. Take another case. Painting has been styled ‘silent poetry’. So there is a way of praising by silent flattery. The sportsman’s purpose is better concealed from the game when he pretends to be upon other business—walking, tending cattle, or tilling the soil. In the same way a toady drives home his eulogies most effectively when the eulogy is disguised under some different form of action. It may be by giving up his seat, or his place [Sidenote: C] at table, when you appear upon the scene. Or if he is addressing the Assembly or Council, and notices that some wealthy man desires to speak, he may stop his speech and yield him the platform. His silence indicates more clearly than the loudest acclamation that he regards the person in question as a better man and his intellectual superior. Such persons may therefore be seen taking possession of the front seats at an entertainment or in the meeting-hall, not because they claim any right to them, but in order that they may play the toady by giving up their places to rich people. Or you may see them begin the discussion at a congress or a board-meeting, and subsequently give way to ‘superior argument’ and shift round with the [Sidenote: D] greatest readiness to the opposite view, if their opponent is a person of influence, wealth, or note. The clearest exposure of such complaisances and concessions is to be sought in the fact that it is not to knowledge or high abilities or age that the deference is paid, but to riches and reputations. When Megabyzus took a seat at Apelles’ side and wanted to prate to him about ‘line’ and ‘shading’, the painter remarked, ‘Do you see those boys yonder grinding my mixing-earth? When you were silent, they were all eyes of admiration for your purple and your jewels. But now that you have begun to talk about things [Sidenote: E] you do not understand, they are laughing at you.’ Similarly Solon, when Croesus questioned him about ‘happiness’, declared that Tellus, an Athenian of humble rank, as well as Cleobis and Biton, were more favoured by fortune. A flatterer, on the contrary, not only avers that a king, a rich man, or a man in power, is prosperous and fortunate; he also declares that he is pre-eminent in wisdom, art, and every form of excellence. Hence while there are persons who have no patience to listen when the Stoics describe the sage as at the same time ‘rich, beautiful, noble, and king’, a toady will make out that the rich man is at the same time an orator, a poet, and—if he so wishes—a painter and a musician. He makes him out swift of foot and [Sidenote: F] strong of thew by letting himself be thrown in wrestling and outstripped in running, as Criso of Himera did in a race against Alexander—much to Alexander’s disgust when he detected it. Carneades used to say that the only thing that kings’ and rich men’s sons understand is how to ride; they receive no proper instruction in anything else. For their teacher flatters them in school with his praises, and their antagonists in the wrestling-ring by courting defeat; whereas a horse, who neither knows nor cares whether you are in or out of office, poor or rich, pitches you head first if you cannot keep your seat. It was therefore a silly and stupid thing for Bion to say: ‘If by [Sidenote: 59] eulogizing a field we could make it bear a prolific crop, would it not be a mistake for a man to go digging and moiling instead? Neither, then, is it irrational for you to praise a human being, if your praise is productive of good fruit.’ A field suffers no injury from being praised, whereas insincere and undeserved compliment puffs a man up and ruins him. On this point we have said enough. The next consideration is that of candour. [Sidenote: B] When Patroclus, on going out to fight, dressed himself in Achilles’ armour and drove his team, the one thing he let alone and did not venture to touch was the Pelian spear. So it might have been expected of the flatterer that, when dressing himself up carefully for the part of ‘friend’, with its proper tokens and badges, the one thing he would leave untouched and uncopied would be plain-speaking—a special attribute, _Heavy and huge and stubborn_, to be wielded only by friendship. But in his fear that laughter, strong drink, jest, and fun may mean his betrayal, we find him [Sidenote: C] putting a solemn face on the business, flattering with a frown and administering dashes of blame and admonition. Here again, therefore, we must apply our tests. In a comedy of Menander, the Mock-Hercules comes in carrying a club which has no strength or solidity, but is merely a hollow sham. So, I take it, with the flatterer’s plain-speaking. On trial you will find that it is soft and without weight or vigour; that it behaves like a woman’s cushion, which, while seeming to offer a firm support to the head, actually yields it more of its own way. [Sidenote: D] This spurious candour, with its hollow fullness, its false and superficial puffiness, is merely meant to shrink and collapse, so as to induce the person who leans upon it to make himself more comfortable. The genuine candour of a friend attacks only our misdeeds; it hurts only out of care and protection; like honey, it merely stings our sores in cleansing them, its general uses being grateful and sweet. This, however, is a theme for special discussion. With the flatterer it is different. In the first place, when he displays sharpness or heat or inflexibility, it is in dealing with others than yourself. He is severe upon his own servants; he is terribly hard upon the misdeeds of his own relations; he shows no admiration or respect for a stranger, but treats [Sidenote: E] him with contempt; his scandalizing is merciless when exacerbating other people. His object is to make it appear that he detests low practices, and that he would not consent to abate a jot of his candour in your behalf, or to do or say anything to curry favour. In the next place, when there is something really and seriously wrong, he pretends to be completely ignorant and unconscious of it, while he will pounce upon some little immaterial shortcoming and take it rigorously and vehemently to task—if, for instance, he sees an implement carelessly placed, or a fault of domestic management, or negligence in the cut of your hair or the wearing of your clothes, or lack of [Sidenote: F] proper attention to a dog or a horse. But should you slight your parents, neglect your children, humiliate your wife, despise your relatives, and waste your money, it becomes no business of his. In such circumstances not a word does he venture to utter, but he is like a trainer who permits an athlete to get drunk and dissipated, while he is severe upon him in the matter of an oil-flask or a scraping-iron; or like a grammar-master who scolds a boy for the state of his slate and pencil, but pretends not to hear his slips of grammar and expression. The toady is the kind of man who, in dealing with a ridiculously incompetent public speaker, has nothing to say about his matter, but finds fault with his voice-production, and blames him severely for spoiling [Sidenote: 60] his larynx by drinking cold drinks; or who, when requested to peruse some miserable composition, finds fault with the roughness of the paper and calls the copyist a slovenly wretch. It was so in the case of Ptolemy, when he made pretence to literary tastes. They would fight with him about some out-of-the-way word or bit of a verse or point of information, and would keep it up till midnight. But to his indulgence in cruelty and outrage, to his tambourine-playing and initiating, not one of [Sidenote: B] all their number offered any opposition. Imagine a man suffering with tumours and abscesses, and some one taking a surgeon’s knife and cutting—his hair or his nails! That is what the flatterer does. He employs his candour upon those parts which feel no pain or soreness. There is a still craftier species, who make their plain-speaking and fault-finding an actual means of pleasing. When Alexander was once making large gifts to a jester, envy and vexation drove Agis, the Argive, to bawl out, ‘How utterly absurd!’ The king turned upon him angrily and asked, ‘_What_ is that you say?’ ‘I confess,’ was the reply, ‘to being annoyed and [Sidenote: C] indignant when I see how much alike all you sons of Zeus are in your fondness for flatterers and ridiculous persons. Heracles found pleasure in his Cercopes, Dionysus in Sileni, and we can see what a high regard you have yourself for people of the kind.’ One day when the emperor Tiberius entered the Senate, one of his flatterers got up and said that, as free men, they were bound to speak frankly and to treat important interests without reticence or reservation. When he had thus aroused every one’s interest and had secured silence and the attention of Tiberius, he said, ‘Listen, Caesar, to the charge which we all make against you, but which no one dares to utter openly. You are neglecting yourself, sacrificing your health and wearing it out by perpetually working and thinking for us, and giving yourself [Sidenote: D] no rest day or night.’ As he continued with a good deal more in the same strain, the orator Cassius Severus is said to have exclaimed, ‘Such plain-speaking will be the man’s death!’ These devices, however, are of minor moment. The matter becomes grave—as meaning ruin to foolish people—when a man is accused of the opposite disorders to those with which he is afflicted; as when the parasite Himerius used to scold the meanest and most avaricious plutocrat in Athens by calling him a reckless prodigal, bent on bringing himself and his children to starvation; or when, on the contrary, a toady reproaches [Sidenote: E] a prodigal spendthrift with sordid parsimony, as Titus Petronius did Nero; or when he urges a ruler who behaves with savage cruelty towards his subjects to divests himself of ‘all that gentleness and ill-timed and mistaken clemency’. To the same class belongs the man who pretends to look upon some silly nincompoop as a clever rogue of whom he is afraid and wary. Or if an ill-conditioned person who delights in perpetual fault-finding and scandalizing does happen to be led into praising some distinguished man, he may take him to task and raise objections, for ‘it is a weakness of yours, this praising [Sidenote: F] of even quite insignificant people. What remarkable thing has he ever said or done?’ Love-affairs are favourite ground for the flatterer to play upon his victim by further inflaming his passion. If he sees you at variance with your brothers, or neglecting your parents, or contemptuous towards your wife, he offers neither remonstrance nor reproach, but actually intensifies the bad feeling. ‘No: you don’t appreciate yourself,’ or, ‘It is you that are to blame, for always playing the humble servant.’ But if anger [Sidenote: 61] and jealousy provoke a tiff with a mistress of whom you are enamoured, in comes flattery at once with a fine blaze of frankness, and adds fuel to the fire by pleading cause and accusing the lover of all sorts of unloverlike, unfeeling, and unforgivable conduct: _O ingrate! after all that rain of kisses!_ Thus, when Antony was becoming passionately enamoured of the Egyptian queen, his friends did their best to persuade him that the love was on her side, and they upbraided him with being ‘cold and supercilious’. ‘The lady has forsaken all that royal state and that life of delightful enjoyments to go wandering [Sidenote: B] about on the march with you, like any concubine. _But, for thee, the heart in thy breast is past all moving or charming_, and you leave her to suffer as she will.’ It gratified Antony to be thus put in the wrong; no praise could please him like these accusations; and unconsciously he became perverted to the standard of the man who pretended to be reproving him. For candour of this kind is like the bite of a lascivious woman; while pretending to give pain, it arouses a provoking sensation of pleasure. Though unmixed wine is, generally speaking, a corrective of hemlock, yet, if you add it to that drug in the form of a mixture, [Sidenote: C] you make it impossible to counteract the power of the poison, the heat driving it rapidly to the heart. So, while aware that candour is a potent corrective of flattery, your rogue actually uses ‘candour’ as his instrument for flattering you. Bias was therefore wrong in his answer to the question: ‘What animal is the most dangerous?’ when he replied, ‘Among wild animals, the despot, among tame animals, the toady.’ It would have been truer to say that, among toadies, those who merely frequent your bath and your table are tame, while those who thrust the [Sidenote: D] tentacles of their slanderous and malicious meddling into bedchamber and boudoir are savage and unmanageable beasts. The one method of protecting ourselves appears to lie in recognizing and never forgetting that our mental being is made up of two parts—one high-principled and rational, the other irrational, mendacious and passionate—and that a friend is the unfailing supporter and champion of the better part—a physician who promotes and watches over good health—while a flatterer acts as prompter to the passionate and irrational part, exciting, titillating, coaxing, and divorcing it from reason by inventing [Sidenote: E] low forms of self-indulgence on its behalf. There are some kinds of food which yield no benefit to blood or breath, and put no vigour into muscle or marrow, but simply excite the sensual appetites and make the flesh flabby and unsound. So with the advice of a fawner. If does nothing to help sane thought and judgement; but watch it, and you will find it cosseting an amorous pleasure, aggravating a foolish fit of anger or provoking an attack of envy, puffing you up with vulgar and empty pride, encouraging your doleful dumps, or, where there is a tendency to be ill-natured or mean-spirited or mistrustful, making the [Sidenote: F] feeling more bitter or shy or suspicious by constantly suggesting and anticipating evil. For he is perpetually in wait for some passion or other, which he proceeds to feed up; and whenever there is a festering or inflammation of your mental state, you will always find him a kind of bubo, bringing it to a head. Are you angry? ‘Then punish.’ Do you crave a thing? ‘Then buy it.’ Are you afraid? ‘Then let us run away.’ Are you suspicious? ‘Then trust the feeling.’ If it is hard to catch him in connexion with such affections as these—their strength being so overpowering as to baffle the reason—he will give you a better opening in smaller matters; for he will be just the same with them. If you are apprehensive [Sidenote: 62] of a headache or a surfeit, and are doubtful as to bathing or taking food, a friend will try to check you and will urge you to be cautious, whereas the toady will drag you to the bath, or ask them to put some novel dish on the table, begging you not ‘to keep so tight a hand upon your body as to be cruel to it’. If he sees you inclined to shirk a journey, a voyage, or a piece of work, he will say that there is no immediate hurry, and that it will do just as well if you postpone the matter or send someone else. If, after promising a friend to make him a loan or a present of a sum of money, you repent, but have your scruples, the toady [Sidenote: B] throws his weight into the less honourable scale; he corroborates ‘the argument of the purse’, and makes short work of your sense of shame by urging you to be economical, ‘seeing that you have so many expenses and so many persons to support.’ If, therefore, we are able to perceive our own covetousness, shamelessness, or cowardice, we shall also be able to see when a man is a toady. Such he is when he is always playing the advocate to those passions and ‘speaking his mind’ when we deviate from them. Enough having been said upon this topic, we may next proceed to the question of the practical services rendered. In this [Sidenote: C] respect the flatterer makes his distinction from the friend a very obscure and perplexing matter; he always appears so prompt and indefatigable in his zeal. While a friend’s way, like the ‘speech of truth’ as described by Euripides, is ‘single’, open, and unaffected, that of the flatterer _Sick in itself, needs antidotes full shrewd_ —uncommonly so, indeed, and plenty of them. When you meet a friend, he sometimes passes on without uttering or receiving a word, and with no more than a glance or a smile; he simply manifests by his expression, and gathers from yours, the kindly [Sidenote: D] understanding within. But the toady is on the run to overtake you, greets you from a long way off, and, if you catch sight of him and speak to him first, he excuses himself over and over again, calling his witnesses and taking his oath. So in the matter of actions. A friend will neglect many a trifle; he is no precisian and makes no fuss; he does not insist upon serving you at every turn. But the other is persistent, unremitting, unwearied; he leaves no opportunity or room for any one else to serve you; he is eager to receive your orders, and, if he does not get them, he is piqued, nay, absolutely heart-broken with disappointment. A sensible man, then, may take these as some indications that a friendship is not sincere and single-minded, [Sidenote: E] but is like a harlot who forces her embraces upon you before they are asked for. The first place, however, in which to look for the difference is in promises. It has already been well said by previous writers that a friend will put his promise in the form familiar in _If I have power to achieve it, and if ’tis a thing for achievement_, while a time-server will put it in this: _Voice me the thought in thy mind._ The comedians present us with such characters: _Nicomachus, pit me against the soldier. I’ll make ripe pulp of him; I’ll make his face Softer than sponge: if not, then flog me soundly._ In the next place no friend will be a party to your actions [Sidenote: F] unless he has first been a party to planning them. He must first have looked into the business and helped to put it on a right and proper footing. Not so the flatterer. Even if you do grant him a share in weighing the matter and expressing an opinion about it, he is not only so anxious to gratify you with his complaisance, but is in such dread of leading you to suspect him of unreadiness to face the action, that he leaves you to take your course, or only lends spurs to your desire. It is not easy to find a rich man or a grandee who is ready to say: [Sidenote: 63] _Give me a man, a beggar—nay, no matter, Lower than beggar, if he means me well— To put fear by, and speak his heart to me._ Like the tragedian, he must have the support of a chorus of friends who keep his tune, or of an audience who give applause. Merope in the tragedy advises: _Get thee for friends such men as, when they speak, Yield not; but when a man will for thy pleasure Make himself knave, lock thou thy door against him._ [Sidenote: B] But such persons do the opposite. If, ‘when you speak’ you ‘yield not’, but oppose them for their good, they abominate you; but if ‘for their pleasure’ you are a ‘knave’ and a servile charlatan, they receive you not merely inside their locked doors but inside their most secret passions and concerns. The simple kind of flatterer, it is true, does not aim at so much. What he asks in such important matters is not to be your adviser, but your minister and servant. But the more crafty person will stand still—puzzling over the question with puckered brow and appropriate changes of countenance—but will say nothing. And if you give your own idea, he will exclaim, ‘How strange! You just managed to anticipate me. I was about to make exactly your suggestion.’ [Sidenote: C] Mathematicians tell us that lines and surfaces, being mental perceptions and incorporeal, have in themselves no such thing as bending, stretching, or motion, but that they are bent, stretched, and changed in position along with the bodies of which they are the boundaries. So you will discover that, with the time-server, his assent, his opinion, even his pleasure and anger, are always dependent. Here, therefore, it is perfectly easy to detect the difference. It is still more apparent in the manner in which a service is rendered. With the good feeling of a friend, as with a living creature, its most vital functions lie [Sidenote: D] deep. It is marked by no ostentatious display; but very often, like a physician who conceals the fact that he is doctoring you, a friend does you a good turn by a word of intercession or by bringing about an understanding, and so consults your interests without your knowing it. Arcesilaus was a man of this type. Not to mention other instances, when Apelles the Chian was ill and Arcesilaus had discovered how poor he was, he came back later with twenty drachmae. Taking a seat close to him, he exclaimed, ‘There is nothing here beyond Empedocles’ four elements: _Fire and water and earth and the gentle air of the heavens._ Why, even your bed is made all askew.’ With that he moved his pillow and meanwhile slipped the coins under it. When the [Sidenote: E] old woman in attendance found them and told Apelles in amazement, he laughed and said, ‘It is that thief Arcesilaus.’[52] And here we may note how philosophy produces ‘_children like unto their sires_‘. Cephisocrates, who had been impeached, was on his trial, and beside him, with the rest of his friends, stood Lacudes, one of the coterie of Arcesilaus. The accuser having asked for his ring, Cephisocrates quietly dropped it at his side, and Lacudes, who noticed the action, put his foot upon it and hid it. On that ring depended the proof of the charge. When Cephisocrates, after his acquittal, went shaking hands with members of the jury, one of them, who had apparently [Sidenote: F] seen what occurred, bade him thank Lacudes, and gave an account of the affair, which Lacudes had mentioned to no one. We may believe that it is the same with the Gods, and that for the most part they confer their benefits unperceived, it being their nature to find pleasure in the mere act of bestowing favours and doing good. But in a deed done by a flatterer there is nothing honest, sincere, single-minded, or generous. It is a case of sweating, bawling, bustling, and of a tense look upon the face, intended to convey the impression of arduous and urgent business. The thing resembles, in fact, an overdone painting, [Sidenote: 64] which strives to secure realistic effect by the use of blatant colours and affected folds, wrinkles, and angles. He is also offensive enough to relate how the business has meant running about and anxiety, and he goes on to describe how he has got into trouble with other people and had no end of worry and some terrible experiences, until you declare that the thing was not worth it all. Any obligation thrown in your teeth will cause an unbearable and distressing sense of annoyance, but with an obligation from a time-server your sense of reproach and shame is felt at once, from the very moment that the service [Sidenote: B] is being rendered. A friend, on the other hand, if he has occasion to speak of the matter, qualifies his account of it, and about himself he says nothing. For example, the Lacedaemonians once sent the people of Smyrna some corn at a time of need, and, to their expressions of admiration of the kindness, they replied, ‘Not at all! To scrape this together we had only to vote the forgoing of one day’s dinner for ourselves and our beasts.’ A favour so rendered is not only a generous one; it is made the more welcome to the recipients by the thought that no great harm is done to the benefactor. It is not, however, by the flatterer’s offensive way of rendering his services nor by the recklessness of his promises that one [Sidenote: C] can best recognize the breed; an easier criterion consists in the creditable or discreditable nature of the service, and in the different character of the pleasure or benefit. A friend will not, as Gorgias asserted, expect his friend to render him honest services and yet himself oblige that friend in many ways which are not honest: _’Tis his to share the wisdom, not the folly._ Rather, therefore, he will dissuade him also from improper courses. And, if he fails, there is virtue in Phocion’s answer to Antipater, ‘You cannot use me both as friend and toady’—that is to say, both as friend and not friend. We must help a friend in his need, not in his knavery; in his planning, not in his plotting; with testimony, not conspiracy. Yes, and we must share in his misfortunes, though not in his misdeeds. We [Sidenote: D] should not choose even to be privy to the baseness of our friends; how then to be a party to their misbehaviour? When the Lacedaemonians, after their defeat by Antipater, were making terms, they stipulated that, though he might impose any penalty he liked, he should impose no disgrace. It is the same with a friend. Should occasion call for expense or danger or hard work, he is foremost in his claim to be summoned and take a prompt and zealous part; but when disgrace attaches to it, he will as promptly beg to be spared and left alone. But with the fawner it is the reverse. In services of difficulty and danger he cries off, and, if you give him a tap to sound him, his excuse—whatever [Sidenote: E] it may be—rings false and mean. But in vile and degrading little jobs, do as you like with him; trample on him; nothing shocks or insults him. Look at the ape. He cannot watch the house like a dog, nor carry like a horse, nor plough the ground like an ox. He is therefore the bearer of scurrilous insult and buffoonery and the butt of sport, his function being to serve as a tool for laughter. Precisely so with the toady. He is unequal to any form of labour and serious effort, and incapable of helping you by a speech, with a contribution, or in a fight; but in business which shuns the light he is promptitude itself—a most competent [Sidenote: F] agent in an amour, an adept at ransoming a strumpet, alert at checking the bill for a drinking-bout, no sloven in the ordering of your dinner, deft at attentions to your mistress, and, if you bid him show insolence to your wife’s relations or bundle her out of doors, he is beyond all pity or shame. This, therefore, is another easy means of finding him out. Order him to do any disreputable and discreditable thing you [Sidenote: 65] choose, and he is ready to spare no pains in gratifying you accordingly. A very good indication of the wide difference between our fawner and a friend may be found in his attitude towards your other friends. The one is delighted to have many others giving and receiving affection with him, and his constant aim is to make his friend widely loved and honoured. He holds that ‘_friends have all things in common_‘, and their friends, he thinks, [Sidenote: B] should be more ‘in common’ than anything else. But the other—the false, bastard, and spurious article—realizes, better than any one, how he is himself sinning against friendship by—so to speak—debasing its coinage. While, therefore, he is jealous by nature, it is only against his like that he gives his jealousy play, by striving to surpass them in grovelling and lickspittle tricks. Of his betters he stands in fear and dread, we cannot say because he is _Plodding on foot against a Lydian car_, but because, as Simonides has it, he _Hath not e’en lead To match the pure refinèd gold._ If, therefore, light in weight, surface-gilt and counterfeit, he finds himself put in close comparison with genuine friendship, [Sidenote: C] full-carat and mint-made, he cannot bear the test, and must be detected. Consequently he acts like the painter whose cocks in a picture were wretchedly done, and who therefore ordered his slave to drive any real cocks as far from his canvas as possible. In the same way the flatterer drives away real friends and prevents them coming near. If he fails, while openly he will fawn upon them and pay them court and deference as being his betters, in secret he will throw out calumnious hints and suggestions. And if the word in secret has given a scratch without at once absolutely producing a wound, he never forgets Medius’s maxim. This Medius was what may be called the [Sidenote: D] fugleman or expert conductor of the chorus of toadies who surrounded Alexander, and was at daggers drawn with the highest characters. His maxim was, ‘Be bold in laying on and biting with your slanders, for even if the man who is bitten salves the wound, the slander will leave its scar.’ It was through these scars, or rather because he was eaten up with gangrenes and ulcers, that Alexander put Callisthenes, Parmenio, and Philotas to death. Meanwhile he surrendered himself unreservedly to a Hagnon, a Bagoas, an Agesias, or a Demetrius, and allowed them to give him a fall by salaaming to him and dressing him up after the fashion of an oriental idol. So powerful an effect [Sidenote: E] has complaisance, and apparently most of all with those who think most of themselves. Their wish for the finest qualities goes with the belief that they possess them, and so the flatterer acquires both credit and confidence. For while lofty places are difficult of approach or assault for all who have designs upon them, the lofty conceit produced in a foolish mind by the gifts of fortune or talent offers the readiest footing to those who are small and petty. As therefore we urged at the beginning of this treatise, so we urge again here; ‘Let us make a clearance of self-love and self-conceit.’ These, by flattering us in advance, render us more [Sidenote: F] amenable to flattery from outside: we come prepared. But if, in obedience to the God, we recognize how all-important the maxim _Know Thyself_ is to each of us; if we therefore examine our own nature, training, and education, and observe how all alike fall short of excellence in countless ways, and how they all contain a large admixture of weakness in the things we do or say or feel, we shall be very slow in allowing the flatterer to abuse us at his pleasure. Alexander remarked that what made him give least credence to those who called him a God was his sleep and his sexualities, his excesses in those things falling below his own standard. On our own part we shall [Sidenote: 66] always discover that at many a point and in many a way our qualities are ugly or a source of pain, defective or misdirected. We shall see ourselves in our true light, and find that what we need is not a friend who will pay us compliments and eulogies, but one who will bring us to book when we are really doing wrong. But only then. There are in any case very few with the courage to treat a friend with candour rather than complaisance; yet among these few it will be hard to find such as understand their business. It will be easier to find persons who imagine that they are using candour because they abuse and scold. Yet it is with plain-speaking as with any other medicine. [Sidenote: B] When it is given at the wrong time the effect is to upset and pain you to no purpose. In a certain sense it does painfully what flattery does pleasantly, inasmuch as unseasonable blame works as much harm as unseasonable praise. More than anything else it is a thing which drives a man headlong into the arms of the flatterer. Like water, he turns from the steep unyielding surface and glides away into the receptive shallows. Candour, therefore, must be tempered by rational courtesy, which will divest it of excess and over-severity. The light must not be so strong that in our pain and distress at the invariable reproving and fault-finding we turn away to escape discomfort and fly to find shade with the flatterer. [Sidenote: C] In shunning a vice, Philopappus, our object should always be virtue, not the contrary vice. Some people think they escape being shamefaced by being shameless; that they escape being rustic by being ribald; that their behaviour becomes furthest from timidity and cowardice when they appear nearest to impudence and insolence. Some plead to themselves that they would rather be irreligious than superstitious, rather [Sidenote: D] knaves than simpletons. Their character may be likened to a piece of wood, which, through lack of the skill to straighten it, they crook to the opposite side. The ugliest way of refusing to flatter is to give useless pain. Our social intercourse must be boorishly ignorant of all the rules of good feeling when it is by being harsh and disagreeable that we avoid any creeping humbleness in our friendship, just as if we were the freedman in the comedy, who thinks that, to be properly enjoyed, ‘speech on equal terms’ means abusive speech. Since, therefore, it as an ugly thing when our striving to be agreeable lands us in flattery, and an ugly thing when, in the avoidance of flattery, all the spirit of friendly sympathy is ruined by immoderate plain-speaking; and since we ought to commit neither mistake, but—in candour as in other things—draw ‘success from moderation’, mere logical sequence seems to [Sidenote: E] dictate the conclusion to our treatise. Plain-speaking, we find, is liable to be, as it were, tainted in various ways. The first thing is to divest it of its selfish aspect, by taking the greatest care not to let it appear as if your reproaches were due to a kind of injury or grievance of your own. When the speaker is concerned about himself, we regard his words as the outcome of anger, not of goodwill; as grumbling, not as reproof. For whereas candour is a mark of friendliness which compels respect, grumbling is petty and selfish. We therefore respect and admire the person who is frank, while a fault-finder provokes recrimination and contempt. Though Achilles [Sidenote: F] imagined he was speaking with but reasonable frankness, Agamemnon lost his temper; but when Odysseus attacked him bitterly in the words _Madman, thou shouldst have commanded some other, some pitiful army_, he patiently gave way, the friendly purpose and good sense of the speech causing him to draw in his horns. The reason was that, while the plain-speaking of Odysseus, who had no private [Sidenote: 67] grounds for anger, was only for the sake of Greece, the vexation of Achilles was thought to be chiefly on his own account. Nay, Achilles himself, though possessed of no sweet or gentle temper, but _A terrible man, who must blame, e’en though it be blaming the blameless_, silently permitted Patroclus to give him many such hard blows: _Man of no pity, no father of thine was Peleus the horseman, Thetis no mother of thine; from the green-grey sea wert thou gotten By beetling crags; so comes it thy heart is void of all mercy._ [Sidenote: B] The orator Hypereides used to urge the Athenians to consider not merely whether he was angry, but whether his anger was gratuitous. So with the admonition of a friend. When pure from any private feeling, it is a thing of awe, which we cannot face unabashed. And if, when a man is speaking his mind, it is manifest that he is casting aside any wrongs his friend may have done to himself; that it is other misdemeanours on his part which he is bringing home—other reasons for which he does not shrink from giving him pain—such candour produces an irresistible effect, the sharpness and severity of the admonition being intensified by the kindliness of the admonisher. Doubtless, [Sidenote: C] as has been well said, ‘it is most of all when we are angry or at variance with our friends that we should do or devise something to their advantage or credit’; but we show no less true a friendliness if, when we think ourselves slighted or neglected, it is on behalf of other victims of neglect that we give them a plain-spoken reminder. Plato, at a time when his relations with Dionysius were strained and dubious, asked for an interview. Dionysius granted it, in the belief that Plato was coming with a tale of grievance of his own. The conversation, however, took the following shape. ‘Suppose, Dionysius, you discovered [Sidenote: D] that some ill-disposed person had made a voyage to Sicily with the intention of doing you an injury, but that he could find no opportunity. Would you allow him to leave the country and get away scot-free?’ ‘Certainly not, Plato,’ said Dionysius: ‘enemies must be hated and punished not only for what they do, but for what they propose to do.’ ‘Then suppose,’ said Plato, ‘some one comes here in a friendly spirit, with the intention of rendering you a service, but that you afford him no chance. Is it a proper thing to cast him aside with ingratitude and contempt?’ Upon Dionysius asking who it was, he answered, ‘Aeschines, a man who, in rightness of character, will compare with any of Socrates’ associates, and whose teaching cannot fail to set any hearer firmly on his feet. Though he has [Sidenote: E] made a long voyage for the sake of philosophic intercourse with you, he has been left in neglect.’ These words stirred Dionysius so deeply that, in admiration of his kindliness and magnanimity, he promptly embraced Plato with effusion and proceeded to pay to Aeschines the most distinguished attentions. In the second place, our candour must be cleared of all excrescences, so to speak. We must allow it no coarse flavourings in the shape of insulting ridicule or buffoonish mockery. When a surgeon is performing an operation, a certain ease and neatness [Sidenote: F] should be incidentally apparent in his work, but there should be no supple juggleries of the hand in the way of fantastic and risky _fioriture_. In the same way candour admits of a dexterous touch of wit, so long as it is so prettily put as to maintain our respect; but impertinent and insolent buffoonery utterly destroys that feeling. Hence the harpist chose a polite as well as a forcible way of stopping Philip’s mouth, when that monarch attempted to argue with him on a question of musical note. ‘Sire,’ said he, ‘Heaven forbid you should ever become so badly off as to know more about these things than I do!’ [Sidenote: 68] Epicharmus, on the other hand, chose the wrong way, when Hiero, a few days after putting some of his familiars to death, invited him to dinner. ‘Nay, but,’ said he, ‘the other day there was no invitation to your sacrifice of your friends.’[53] It was also a mistake for Antiphon, when the question: ‘What sort of bronze is the best?’ was under discussion in the presence of Dionysius, to say, ‘That kind out of which they made the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton at Athens.’ No good is done by the stinging bitterness of such speeches, nor is any pleasure given by their scurrilous pleasantry. Language of the [Sidenote: B] kind comes only from a want of self-command—which is partly insolent ill-nature—combined with enmity. Those who use it are courting their own destruction as well; they are veritably dancing a ‘dance at the well’s edge’. Antiphon was put to death by Dionysius; Timagenes was banished from Caesar’s friendship, not because of any free word he ever uttered, but because, at dinner-parties or when walking, he would perpetually and with no serious purpose whatever, but _For whatsoever him thought might move the Argives to laughter_, advance some charge against his conduct as a friend, merely by way of pretext for upbraiding him. It is the same with the comic poets. Their work contained many serious and statesmanlike appeals to the audience; but [Sidenote: C] these were so much mixed up with farce and ribaldry—like good food in a hotch-potch of greenstuff—that their plain-speaking lost all nutritive power and use, with the result that the speaker was looked upon as an ill-natured buffoon, and the hearer derived no benefit from the speech. In other cases by all means have your fun and laugh with your friends, but when you give them a piece of your mind, let it be done with earnestness and with courtesy. And if the matter is one of importance, impart a cogent and moving effect to your words by your emotions, gestures, and tone of voice. There is also the question of the right moment. To disregard it is in all cases a serious mistake, but is particularly ruinous to good results when you are ‘speaking your mind’. That we should beware of doing anything of the kind when wine and inebriation are to the fore, is obvious. It is to bring a cloud [Sidenote: D] over the bright sky, if, in the midst of fun and gaiety, you moot a topic which puckers the brow and stiffens the face, as if to defeat the ‘Relaxing God’, who—to quote Pindar— _Unbends the harassed brow of care._ Nay, there is actually great danger in such unseasonableness. Wine renders the mind perilously testy, and tipsiness often takes command of candour and converts it into enmity. Moreover, instead of showing spirit and courage, it shows a want of manliness for a person who dare not speak his mind when sober to become bold at table, like a cowardly dog. There is, however, no need to dwell further upon this theme. Let us proceed. There are many who, when affairs are going well with their [Sidenote: E] friends, neither make any claim nor possess the courage to put restraint upon them. Prosperity, they think, lies quite beyond the reach of admonition. But should one stumble and come to grief, they set upon him. He is tame and humbled, and they trample upon him. The stream of their candour has been unnaturally dammed up, and now they let the whole flood loose upon him. He was once so disdainful, and they so feeble, that they thoroughly enjoy his change of fortune and make the most of it. It is as well, therefore, to discuss this class also. If Euripides asks: _When fortune blesses, what the need of friends?_ the answer must be that it is the prosperous man who has most [Sidenote: F] need of friends to speak their minds and take down any excess of pride. There are few who can be both prosperous and wise at the same time. Most men require to import wisdom from abroad; they require that reasoning from outside should put compression upon them when fortune puffs them up and sets them swaying in the wind. But when fortune reduces their inflated bulk, the situation itself carries its own lesson and brings repentance home. There is consequently no occasion for friendly candour or for language which bites and distresses. When such reverses happen, verily [Sidenote: 69] _’Tis sweet to look into a friend’s fond eyes_, while he gives us solace and encouragement. Xenophon says of Clearchus that in battle and danger there appeared upon his face a look of geniality which put greater heart into those who were in peril. But to employ your mordant candour upon a man who is in trouble, is like administering ‘sharp-sight drops’ to an eye suffering with inflammation. It does nothing to cure or relieve the pain, but only adds anger to it by exasperating [Sidenote: B] the sufferer. For instance, when a man is in health he is not in the least angry or furious with a friend for blaming his looseness with the other sex, his drinking, his shirking of work and exercise, his continual bathings and ill-timed gorgings. But when he is sick, the thing is intolerable. It is more sickening than the disease to be told, ‘This is the result of your reckless self-indulgence, your laziness, your rich dishes, and your women.’ ‘What an unseasonable man you are! I am writing my will; the doctors are getting castor and scammony ready for me; and you come preaching and philosophizing!’ So, when a man is in trouble, the situation is not one for speaking your mind and moralizing. What it requires is sweet reasonableness [Sidenote: C] and help. When a little child has a fall, the nurse does not rush up in order to scold it. She picks it up, washes off the dirt, and straightens its dress. It is afterwards that she proceeds to reprimand and punish. An apposite story is told of Demetrius Phalereus, when he was in banishment and was living at Thebes in mean and obscure circumstances. It was with no pleasure that he saw Crates coming towards him, inasmuch as he expected to hear some plain-spoken cynic abuse. Crates, however, accosted him gently, and then spoke upon the subject of exile—how there was no calamity in it, and how little need there was to be distressed, [Sidenote: D] since it meant getting rid of cares, with their dangers and uncertainties. At the same time he urged him to have confidence in himself and his inner man. Cheered and heartened by such language, Demetrius exclaimed to his friends: ‘Alas, for all that engrossing business which prevented me from getting to know a man like this!’ _To one in grief a friend should speak kind words, But to great folly words of admonition._ Such is the way of a noble friend. But the mean and ignoble flatterer of the prosperous man is like those ‘ruptures and [Sidenote: E] sprains’ of which Demosthenes tells us that ‘when the body meets with an injury, then you begin to feel them’. He seizes upon your change of fortune with every appearance of delight and enjoyment. If you do require any reminder when your own ill-advised conduct has brought you to the ground, it should suffice to say: _’Twas not with approval of mine: full oft did I seek to dissuade thee._ In what cases, then, ought a friend to be uncompromising? When should he exert his candour to the full? It is when the proper moment calls for him to stem the vehement course of pleasure, anger, or insolence; to put the curb on avarice; to [Sidenote: F] restrain a reckless folly. It was in this way that, when the precarious favours of fortune had corrupted Croesus with the pride of luxury, Solon spoke his mind to him, bidding him wait and see the end. It was in this way that Socrates was wont to put control on Alcibiades, to wrench his heart and draw genuine tears from him by bringing his errors home. Such was the method of Cyrus with Cyaxares. Such too, when Dion’s splendour was at its height and he was drawing all men’s eyes upon him by the brilliance and greatness of his exploits, was [Sidenote: 70] the method of Plato, who bade him keep anxious watch against _Self-will, house-mate of Solitude._ Speusippus also urged Dion in his letters not to be proud because he had a great name among children and women-folk, but to take care and ‘make glorious’ the Academy by adorning Sicily with piety and justice and the best of laws. But not so Euctus and Eulaeus, the associates of Perseus. In his prosperity they followed him like the rest, always assenting, always complaisant. But when he met the Romans at Pydna, was defeated, and fled, they attacked him with bitter censure, reminding him of his errors and oversights and throwing them one after the other in his teeth, until the man became so utterly sore and [Sidenote: B] angry that he made an end of both by stabbing them with his dagger. This, then, may serve for the general rule as to place and time. But opportunities are often offered by a man himself, and no one who cares for his friend should let these occasions slip or omit to use them. Sometimes a question asked, a story told, blame or praise of a similar action in the case of other people, gives you the cue for a piece of plain-speaking. For instance, the story goes that Demaratus visited Macedonia at a time when [Sidenote: C] Philip was at variance with his wife and son. Upon Philip welcoming him and inquiring how far the Greeks were in harmony with each other, Demaratus—who was his well-wisher and intimate friend—remarked, ‘It becomes you excellently, Philip, to be asking about the harmonious relations of Athens and the Peloponnese, while you allow your own house to be so full of feud and discord.’ A good hit was also made by Diogenes. Philip was on his way to fight the Greeks, and Diogenes, who had entered the camp, was brought before him. Philip, being unacquainted with him, asked him if he was a spy. ‘Certainly I am,’ he replied. ‘I am a spy upon the short-sighted foolishness which induces you to come, without any compulsion, and risk [Sidenote: D] your throne and person upon the cast of a single hour.’ This, however, was perhaps somewhat too forcible. Another good opportunity for admonition occurs when a man has been abused for his mistakes by some one else and is feeling small and humbled. A person of discretion will make a happy use of the occasion by sending the abusive parties to the right about and himself taking his friend in hand, reminding him that, if there is no other reason for being careful, he should at least give his enemies no encouragement. ‘How can they open their mouths or say another word, if you cast aside once for [Sidenote: E] all these faults for which they abuse you?’ By this means the abuser gets the credit of the pain, and the admonisher that of the benefit. Some are more subtle. They convert their familiar friends by blaming some one else, accusing others of the things they know that those friends do. Once at a lecture in the afternoon our professor, Ammonius, aware that some of his class had not lunched as simply as they might, ordered his freedman to give his own boy a whipping, on the charge that ‘he must have vinegar with his lunch’. Meanwhile the glance he threw at us brought the reproach home to the guilty parties. In the next place, we should be cautious of speaking plainly to a friend before company. Remember the case of Plato. [Sidenote: F] Socrates having handled one of his associates somewhat vigorously in conversation at table, Plato remarked, ‘Would it not have been better if this had been said in private?’ ‘And,’ retorted Socrates, ‘would you not have done better if you had said that to _me_ in private?’ The story goes that, when Pythagoras once dealt rather roughly with a pupil before a number of persons, the youth hanged himself, and from that time Pythagoras never again reproved anyone in another’s presence. A fault should be treated like a humiliating complaint. The uncovering and [Sidenote: 71] prescribing should be secret, not an ostentatious display to a gathering of witnesses or spectators. It is not the act of a friend, but of a sophist, to use another’s slips to glorify oneself, showing off before the company like those medical men who perform surgical operations in the theatre in order to advertise themselves. And apart from the insult—which has no right to accompany any curative treatment—we have to consider the contentiousness and obstinacy of a man in the wrong. Not merely is it the case that—as Euripides has it— _Love, when reproved, Is but more tyrannous_, [Sidenote: B] but if you make no scruple about offering reproof in public, you drive any moral disease or passion into becoming shameless. Plato insists that, if old men are to inculcate reverence in the young, they must themselves first show reverence towards the young. In the same way the friendly candour which most abashes is that which itself feels abashed. Let it be gently and considerately that you approach and handle the offender; then you undermine and destroy his vice, since regard is contagiously felt where regard is shown. Excellent, therefore, is the notion: _Putting his head close down, to the end that the rest should not hear it._ [Sidenote: C] Least propriety of all is there in exposing a husband in the hearing of the wife, a father before the eyes of his children, a lover in the presence of the beloved, or a teacher in that of his pupils. He becomes frantic; so sore and angry is he at being set right before persons in whose eyes he is all anxiety to shine. When Cleitus enraged Alexander, it was, I imagine, not so much the fault of the wine as that he appeared to be humbling him before a large company. Another case is that of Aristomenes, the tutor[54] of Ptolemy. Once, when an embassy was in the room, Ptolemy fell asleep and Aristomenes gave him a hit to wake him up. The flatterers seized the opportunity, and affected to be indignant on the king’s behalf. ‘If,’ said [Sidenote: D] they, ‘you did drop off, thanks to hard work and want of sleep, we ought to set you right privately, not lay hands on you before so many people.’ As the result, he sent Aristomenes a cup of poison and ordered him to drink it off. Aristophanes also tells us how Cleon tried to exasperate the Athenians against him by making it a charge that he _Abused the country before foreigners._ This, then, is another of the mistakes to be avoided, if your desire is not so much to make a self-advertising display as to make your candour produce helpful and healing results. In the next place, your plain-speaker ought to bear in mind [Sidenote: E] the principle which Thucydides makes the Corinthians so properly express, in saying that they ‘had a right to find fault’ with others. It was Lysander, I believe, who said to the man from Megara, when he was delivering himself at the Federal Council concerning the interests of Greece, ‘You need a country to back your talk.’ In any case, doubtless, you need character for plain-speaking, but in no case is this so true as when you are admonishing and lecturing other people. Plato used to say that it was by his life he admonished Speusippus, and the mere sight of Xenocrates at lecture, and a glance from him, [Sidenote: F] sufficed to convert Polemon to better ways. When we lack weight and strength of character the result of any attempt at plain-speaking on our part is to draw upon ourselves the words: _Why physic us, thyself one mass of sores?_ Nevertheless it often happens that, though a man’s own character is as weak as that of his neighbour, circumstances drive him to administer reproof. In that case the civillest behaviour is to contrive somehow to imply that the speaker is included in the reproach. In this tone are the words: _Tydeus’ son, what ails us, forgetting our prowess and valour?_ [Sidenote: 72] and: _But no match are we now for Hector alone...._ Socrates’ way of quietly setting young men right was of the same kind. He would not be taken as being himself free from ignorance, but as feeling it a duty to share with them in the cultivation of virtue and the quest of truth. We inspire affection and confidence when it is thought that, being equally to blame, we are applying to our friends the same correction as to ourselves. But if, when rebuking your neighbour, you put on the superior air of a flawless and passionless being, unless you are much the senior or possess an acknowledged eminence of character and reputation, you do no good and only make yourself [Sidenote: B] offensive and a nuisance. For this reason, when Phoenix introduced the story of his own misfortunes—how in anger he set to work to kill his father, but speedily repented: _Lest the Achaeans should name me ‘the man who murdered his father’_— it was of set purpose, that it might not seem as if, in reproving Achilles, he claimed to be an impeccable person whom anger had no power to corrupt. In such cases the moral effect sinks in, since we yield more readily to a show of fellow-feeling than to one of contempt. Another point. Since a mind diseased can no more bear unqualified candour and reproof than an inflamed eye can [Sidenote: C] be submitted to a brilliant light, one most useful resource among our remedies is to add a slight tincture of praise. For example: _Ugly is this that ye do, to cease from your valour and prowess, All ye best of the host! I would not move me to quarrel, If ’twere some other who thus might hold his hand from the fighting, Some craven man; but with you is my heart exceedingly anger’d_: or: _Pandarus, where is thy bow, and where thy feathery arrows? Where thy glory, the which no man among us doth challenge?_ If a man is giving way, there is also a vigorous rallying power in such language as _Where now Is Oedipus and all his far-famed rede?_ or: _Is ‘t Heracles, He who hath borne so many a brunt, speaks thus?_ Not only does it temper the harshness of the punishment [Sidenote: D] inflicted by the reproach; it sets a man at rivalry with himself. When reminded of the things which stand to his credit, he is ashamed of those which degrade him, and he finds an elevating example in his own person. But when we make comparisons with others—with mates, fellow citizens, or kinsmen—the contentiousness which belongs to his failings is piqued and exacerbated. It has a habit of retorting angrily, ‘Then why don’t you go to my betters, instead of harassing _me_?’ We must therefore beware of belauding one person while we are speaking our minds to another—always, of course, with the exception of his parents. Thus Agamemnon can say: _Truly, a son little like to himself hath Tydeus begotten_; [Sidenote: E] or Odysseus, when in Scyrus: _But thou o’ersham’st the brilliance of thy race, Wool-spinner! thou, whose sire was Greece’s hero!_ By no means should we use reproof to answer reproof, or plain-speaking in counter-attack to plain-speaking. Otherwise we quickly produce heat and create a quarrel. Moreover, such disputatiousness is naturally regarded, not as a return of candour, [Sidenote: F] but as intolerance of it. It is better, therefore, to listen with a good grace when a friend believes he is reproving you. For this, if at a later time some offence of his own calls for reprobation, is the very thing which gives your plain-speaking its right—as it were—to speak. When, without bearing any grudge, you remind him that it has not been his own habit to let his friends go wrong, but to teach them better and set them right, he will be the more ready to give in and accept the proffered correction; for he will believe that it is good feeling and good intention, not anger and fault-finding, which prompt this payment in return. [Sidenote: 73] In the next place, remember the saying of Thucydides: ‘Well advised is he who accepts unpopularity in a great cause.’ It is the duty of a friend to accept the odium of reproof when questions of great moment are at stake. But if he is everywhere and always being displeased; if he behaves to his intimates as if he were their tutor and not their friend, his reproofs will possess no edge and produce no effect when it comes to matters of importance. He will have frittered away his candour, after the manner of a physician who takes a pungent or bitter drug [Sidenote: B] of a sovereign and costly character, and parcels it out in a large number of petty doses for which there is no necessity. No! while a friend will, for his own part, carefully avoid such unremitting censoriousness, the incessant niggling and pettifogging of some other person will afford him an opening to attack those faults which are more serious. Once when a man with an ulcerated liver showed the physician Philotimus a sore on his finger, the doctor observed, ‘My good sir, your case is not a matter of a whitlow!’ So when some one is finding fault with a number of insignificant peccadilloes, the real friend will be offered the opportunity of saying to him, ‘What have his tippling and foolery to do with us? My good sir, let our friend here dismiss his mistress or stop dicing, and he is otherwise an admirable fellow.’ If a man finds that allowance is made [Sidenote: C] for his trifling errors, he will take it in good part when a friend speaks his mind against those which are of more moment. But to be everlastingly girding, to be bitter and harsh on all occasions, to be continually meddling and taking cognisance of every action, is intolerable even to a child or a brother, nay, unendurable even to a slave. Again, it is no more true of the folly of our friends than it is—despite Euripides—of old age, that _All things are wrong with it._ Our friends have their right actions, and we should keep an eye upon these no less than upon their errors. We should, in fact, begin by zealously praising them. In dealing with iron we have first to soften it with heat before the chilling process [Sidenote: D] can impart to it the consistency and hardness of steel. So with our friends. First we warm and fuse them with praise; then a quiet application of candour serves as a tempering douche. We have, for instance, the opportunity of saying, ‘Is there any comparison between the other conduct and this? Do you see what good fruit comes of doing the right thing? This is what your friends expect of you; it is like you, and what nature meant you for. The other conduct is abominable; away with it _To the mountain or to the wave of the surging tumultuous ocean!_‘ A sensible physician will always rather cure a sick man with sleep and feeding than with castor and scammony; and a right-minded friend, or a kind father or teacher, prefers to use praise [Sidenote: E] rather than blame as his means of moral correction. For a candid friend to cause least pain and work most benefit, there is nothing like showing the least possible anger and treating the offender with polite good feeling. We must not, therefore, sharply confute him if he denies a thing, nor try to stop him if he defends himself. On the contrary, we must help him to contrive some kind of plausible excuse; and, when he refuses to own to the more discreditable motive, we must ourselves concede him a less heinous one. Thus Hector says to his brother: _Not well is this wrath, foolish man, that thus thou hast stored in thy bosom_, [Sidenote: F] as if his retirement from the battle, instead of being a dastardly running away, was an exhibition of temper. So Nestor to Agamemnon: _Thou didst yield to the pride of thy spirit._ It is manifestly more courteous to say, ‘You did not stop to think,’ or, ‘You failed to perceive,’ than ‘You behaved badly’, or ‘You behaved unfairly’; to say, ‘Do not be hard upon [Sidenote: 74] your brother,’ than ‘Do not be jealous of your brother’; to say, ‘Flee from the woman’s seductions,’ than ‘Stop trying to seduce the woman’. This is the manner cultivated by curative [Sidenote: *] candour; the other belongs to vexatious candour. Suppose a person is about to do wrong and that we are called upon to check him—to stem the current of some vehement impulse. Or suppose that he is inclined to be unready in the performance of duty, and we wish to brace him up and stimulate him. We should do so by making charges which put the matter in an outrageously unbecoming light. For instance, in Sophocles, when Odysseus is working upon Achilles, he makes out, not that Achilles is angry at the affair of the banquet, but [Sidenote: B] _Now that thou hast the Trojan burghs in sight, Thou art afraid._ And when, in answer to this, Achilles is so enraged that he declares he is off home: _I know what ’tis thou flyest—not reproach: Hector is nigh, and ’tis not well to stay._ In inciting to high courses and dissuading from low ones, we may frighten a man with the reputation he will win: a man of courage and spirit with that of coward; a man of temperance and self-control with that of profligate; a man of magnificent generosity with that of miser and cheeseparer. Where a thing is past cure, we must show ourselves reasonable; our candour [Sidenote: C] must display more sorrow and sympathy than blame. But when we are preventing a misdeed or fighting against a passion, we must be vigorous, inflexible, and insistent. Then is the right moment for incorruptible affection and genuine frankness. To blame an action when it is done is no more than we find enemies doing to each other. Diogenes used to say that, if you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you. But it is better to avoid errors by taking advice than to repent of an error because of abuse. For this reason [Sidenote: D] we must study tact even in the matter of candour. As it is the most effective drug that can be employed in friendship, so it stands in most need of unfailing discretion as to time and moderation as to strength. And, finally, since, as I have said, it is in the nature of plain-speaking that it should often cause pain to the person under treatment, we must take a pattern by the medical man. He does not use his lancet and then leave the part to suffer; he eases it with gentle lotions and fomentations. Similarly, if our admonitions are to be tactful, we do not administer a sharp sting and then run away. We adopt a different strain, and soothe [Sidenote: E] and calm the patient with courteous language, much as sculptors put smoothness and gloss upon a statue where they have chipped it with hammer and chisel. If we strike and gash a man with plain-speaking and then leave him in the rough—lumpy and uneven with anger—it is a hard matter afterwards to call him back and smooth him over. This, therefore, is a result against which the admonisher must be especially on his guard. He must not leave the patient too soon, nor allow the last words of his conversation to be such as pain and exasperate his intimate friend. Footnote 48: i.e. a rough and mountainous island. Footnote 49: A ‘satyric’ drama was a half-comic interlude or sequel to tragedies. Footnote 50: In the Stoic sense of _adiaphoria_. Footnote 51: Since diagrams were often drawn with sticks in the dust. Footnote 52: The Greek jest does not admit of translation. The same word may mean both ‘theft’ and a ‘stealthy act’. Footnote 53: The point lies in an ambiguity which is possible only in the Greek. The words may equally mean: ‘You issued no invitation when sacrificing your friends,’ and ‘when sacrificing, you did not invite your friends’. Footnote 54: Or what French would call the _gouverneur_. ON BRINGING UP A BOY[55] I propose to offer some remarks upon the bringing-up of [Sidenote: 1] free-born children, as a means of securing soundness of character. Perhaps the best starting-point is that at which they are brought into existence. Upon one who desires to become the father of reputable [Sidenote: B] children I would urge that he should be careful as to his consort. She must be no mistress or concubine. Base birth, whether on mother’s or father’s side, is an indelible reproach. It sticks to a man all the days of his life; it offers a handle to those who are minded to discredit or vilify him; and it is a wise saying of the poet that _When the foundation of a stock is laid Amiss, needs must the issue be unhappy_. A sure fund of confidence for facing the world lies therefore in honourable birth, and this must be a first consideration with all who are anxious for a right and proper procreation of children. It is quite natural that those whose birth is of base metal which will not bear scrutiny should tend to be weak-spirited and abject. The poet is quite right in saying: [Sidenote: C] _It slaves a man, stout-hearted though he be, To know his mother or his father base._ It is no doubt equally the case that persons of distinguished parentage become full of pride and self-assertion. Thus Themistocles’ son, Diophantus, is reported to have said on many occasions and to many persons that he had only to wish for a thing and the Athenian people voted for it. ‘What he liked, [Sidenote: D] his mother liked; what his mother liked, Themistocles liked; and what Themistocles liked, all Athens liked.’ A most praiseworthy pride was that exhibited by the Lacedaemonians, when they mulcted their own king Archidamus for condescending to marry a woman of small stature, their plea being that he intended to provide them with kinglets instead of kings. In this connexion there is one observation which my predecessors also have duly made. It is that those who approach their wives with a view to offspring should do so either while wholly abstaining from wine or at least after tasting it in moderation. [Sidenote: 2] This explains the remark of Diogenes on seeing a youth in a state of mad excitement: ‘Young fellow, your father begat you when he was drunk.’ So much for the question of birth. We will now turn to that of upbringing. Speaking generally, we must say of virtue what it is customary to say of the arts and sciences—that for right action three things must go together, namely, nature, reason, and habit. By reason I mean instruction; by habit I mean exercise. The [Sidenote: B] first elements come from nature; progress, from instruction; the actual use, from practice; the consummation, from all combined. In so far as any of these is defective, character must necessarily be maimed. Nature without instruction is blind; instruction without nature is futile; practice without both is abortive. In farming, the soil must first be good; next, the farmer must know his business; third, the seeds must be sound. Similarly with education. Nature is the soil, the teacher is the farmer, [Sidenote: C] the lessons and precepts are the seed. It may be confidently asserted that all three were harmoniously blended in the souls of those men whose renown is universal—Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and others who have won imperishable glory. Blest indeed, and divinely favoured, is the man on whom Heaven has bestowed each and all. Yet it would be a great, or rather a total, mistake to suppose that, when natural gift is defective, no right moral instruction and practice will lead one to improve his faulty nature in some attainable degree. For while neglect will ruin an excellent natural gift, teaching will correct an inferior one. Be careless, and you miss a thing, however easy: take pains, and you secure it, however difficult. You have only to glance at a number of everyday facts in order [Sidenote: D] to perceive how complete is the success of persistent effort. Drops of water will hollow a rock; iron and bronze are worn away by the touch of the hands; wood bent by pressure into a carriage-wheel can never recover its original straightness. To straighten the curved sticks used by actors is impossible, the unnatural form having become, by dint of straining, stronger than the natural. Nor are these the only examples to prove the efficacy of painstaking. Instances are countless. Soil may be naturally [Sidenote: E] good; but neglect it, and it becomes a waste. Indeed, the better it is by nature, the more hopeless a wilderness will your neglect make of it. On the other hand, it may be too hard and rugged; yet cultivation will speedily cause it to produce excellent crops. Is there any tree which will not grow crooked and cease to bear fruit if left untended, whereas, when properly trained, it bears well and brings its fruit to perfection? Does not bodily strength invariably become effete when you take your ease and neglect to keep in good condition, whereas a feeble physique gains immensely in strength through gymnastic and athletic exercise? Is there any horse which a rider cannot render obedient by [Sidenote: F] a thorough breaking-in, whereas, if left unbroken, it will prove stiff-necked and full of temper? But why dwell longer on such cases, when there are so many examples of the most savage creatures being tamed and made amenable to hard work? When a Thessalian was asked which of his countrymen were the gentlest in manner, his answer was a good one: _Those who are giving up war._ But it is useless to multiply instances. Character is long-standing habit, and it would scarcely be beside [Sidenote: 3] the mark to speak of the virtues of the mind as the virtues ‘of minding’.[56] One more illustration, and we will dispense with further elaboration of the subject. The Spartan legislator Lycurgus once took two puppies belonging to the same parents and brought them up in entirely different ways. The one he turned into a gluttonous good-for-nothing, the other into a keen and capable hunting-dog. Subsequently he got the Lacedaemonians together and said to them: ‘A great factor [Sidenote: B] in engendering virtue consists of habit and education—of instruction in the conduct of life—as I am about to prove to you here and now.’ He then brought forward the two young dogs, put down directly in front of them a plate of food and a hare, and let the dogs loose; whereupon the one darted after the hare, while the other made for the plate. The Lacedaemonians, who were not yet in the secret, failed to perceive the meaning of his demonstration, until he told them: ‘Both these dogs come from the same parents, but the difference in their education has turned the one into a glutton and the other into a hunter.’ No more need be said of habit and conduct of life. We may [Sidenote: C] proceed to the question of nurture. In my opinion mothers should nurse their own children and offer them the breast; for their nursing will be of a more sympathetic and painstaking kind, since their love is from the heart, or, as the saying goes, ‘down to the finger-tips,’ whereas the affection of professional nurses and foster-mothers—who are paid for it—can only be spurious and factitious. That it is the duty of the mother herself to suckle and nurse her offspring is evident from the arrangement of nature, which has supplied every animal after parturition with the necessary provision of milk. Here Providence further shows its wisdom, inasmuch as it has furnished a woman with a pair of breasts, [Sidenote: D] so that, even if she bears twins, there may be a double source for them to draw upon. Moreover she will by so acting become more tender and affectionate to her child. It can, indeed, scarcely be otherwise; the connexion of nurse and nursling is the means of raising affection to its highest pitch. One can see how even a brute beast will yearn for its nursling, if you tear them apart. If possible, then, the mother should endeavour to nurse the child herself. But if—as may sometimes happen—she is prevented by physical weakness, or if other children are speedily on the way, it is at least desirable not to accept as foster-mother or nurse the first that offers, but to choose the best possible. [Sidenote: E] To begin with, her character should be Greek. It is as with the treatment of the body. As soon as children are born, we have to mould their limbs in order that they may grow straight and shapely. Similarly their characters ought to be regulated from the first. For youth is supple and plastic, and it is while the mind is still soft and yielding that it acts as a mould for instruction, whereas it is always difficult to knead into shape [Sidenote: F] anything hard. As it is in soft wax that we make the impression of a seal, so it is in the minds of those who are still little children that we imprint a lesson. That great thinker Plato is right, it seems to me, in exhorting a nurse to use discretion in the tales she tells to young children; otherwise their minds may become infected from the first with folly and corruption. It is also sound advice which the poet Phocylides gives in the words: _While yet but a child, it behoveth To learn such deeds as are good._ Another point which we cannot afford to omit concerns the slave children who are to serve the young master and to be brought up with him. Pains must be taken, first, of course, that [Sidenote: 4] they shall be well-behaved, but also that they shall talk Greek, and talk it with good articulation. Otherwise, through rubbing against barbarians and bad characters, he will pick up something of their vices. The proverb-makers have good reason for saying: _If you have a lame man for a neighbour, you will learn to limp._ When children reach the age to be put under a mentor, it becomes especially necessary to take pains in the appointment of such a person. Otherwise we shall have them entrusted to some uncivilized or rascally fellow. What actually happens [Sidenote: B] is often in the highest degree absurd. Respectable slaves are made into farmers, skippers, traders, stewards, or money-lenders, while any low specimen who is found to be a glutton and a tippler and of no use in any kind of business is taken and put in charge of the sons. A fit and proper attendant should possess the same qualities of mind as Phoenix, the attendant of Achilles. We now reach a topic more important and vital than any yet treated—that of the right teachers for our children. The kind to be sought for are those whose lives are irreproachable, whose characters are unimpugned, and whose skill and experience [Sidenote: C] are of the best. The root or fountain-head of character as a man and a gentleman lies in receiving the proper education. As farmers put stakes beside their plants, so the right kind of teacher provides firm support for the young in the shape of lessons and admonitions, carefully chosen so as to produce an upright growth of character. As things are, the behaviour of some fathers is contemptible. Before making inquiry as to the proposed teachers, they put their children into the hands of frauds and charlatans, without knowing what they are about, or, maybe, because they are not competent to judge. In the latter case their behaviour is not so ridiculous, but there is another case in which it is in the last degree absurd. I mean, when they know, either from their own [Sidenote: D] observation or from the accounts of others, how ignorant and [Sidenote: *] bad certain educators are, and yet entrust their children to them. Sometimes this is because they cannot resist the fawning of some obsequious flatterer; sometimes it is done to gratify the whim of a friend. It would be just as reasonable for a sick man to gratify a friend by rejecting the doctor whose science could save him, and preferring the ignoramus who will kill him; or for a man to dismiss the best ship’s-captain and appoint the worst, because a friend asked for it. In the name of all that is sacred, can any one called a ‘father’ set the pleasing of [Sidenote: E] somebody who asks a favour above the education of his children? There was good sense in a frequent saying of famous old Socrates, ‘If it could be done, one ought to mount the loftiest part of the city and shout: _Good people, what are you after? Why in such deadly earnest about making money, while troubling so little about the sons to whom you are to leave it?_’ We may add that the conduct of such fathers is like that of a man who is anxious as to his shoe, while his foot may look after itself. Many fathers go to such lengths in the way of fondness for their money and [Sidenote: F] want of fondness for their children, that, to avoid paying a larger fee, they choose utterly worthless persons to educate their sons, their object being an inexpensive ignorance. This reminds one of Aristippus and his neat and witty repartee to a foolish father. Questioned as to what fee he asked for educating the child, he replied, ‘Forty pounds.’ ‘Good heavens!’ said the father: ‘What an extravagant demand! For forty pounds I can buy a slave.’ ‘Very well,’ was the answer: ‘then you [Sidenote: 5] will have two slaves—your son, and the one you buy.’ To put it shortly, it is surely absurd to train little children to receive their food with the right hand, and to scold them if they put out the left, and yet to take no precautions that they shall be taught moral lessons of a sound and proper kind. What the consequence is to these admirable fathers, when they bring up their sons badly and educate them badly, is soon told. On coming of age and taking rank as men, the sons show an utter disregard of a wholesome and orderly life, and throw themselves headlong into low and irregular pleasures. Then [Sidenote: B] at last, when it is of no use, and when their wrongdoing has brought him to his wits’ end, the father repents of having sacrificed his children’s education. Some of them take up with toadies and parasites, wretched nondescripts who are the ruin and bane of youth; others with haughty and expensive mistresses and strumpets, whom they ransom from their employers. Some spend recklessly on gormandizing; some are wrecked upon dice and carousals; some go so far as to venture on the more daring vices—they commit adultery, and think death not too much [Sidenote: C] to pay for a single pleasure. Had these last studied philosophy, they would in all probability not have succumbed to temptation of this kind. They would have been told of the advice of Diogenes—who, however coarse in his language, is right in his facts—‘Go to a brothel, my boy, and you will find that the [Sidenote: *] expensive article is not a bit better than the cheap one.’ In brief, then, I assert—and it would be fairer to regard me as repeating an oracle than as giving advice—that in these matters the one and essential thing, the first, middle, and last, is a sound upbringing and right education. It is this, I say, which leads to virtue and happiness. [Sidenote: D] Other blessings are on the human plane; they are slight and not worth serious pursuit. Good birth is a distinction, but the boon depends on one’s ancestors. Wealth is a prize, but its possession depends on fortune, which often carries it off from those who have it and bestows it on those who never hoped for it. Moreover, great wealth is a target exposed to any rogue of a servant or blackmailer who is minded to ‘aim a purse’ at it. And, worst of all, even the basest of men have their share of it. Fame, again, is imposing, but uncertain. Beauty, though greatly courted, is short-lived; health, though highly prized, is unstable; strength is a thing to be envied, but it falls an easy prey to disease and age. Let us tell any one who prides himself [Sidenote: E] on his bodily strength that he is manifestly under a delusion. How small a fraction is human strength of the might of other animals, such as the elephant, the bull, and the lion! Meanwhile culture is the only thing in us that is immortal and divine. In the nature of man there are two sovereign elements—understanding and reason. It is the place of the understanding to direct the reason and of the reason to serve the understanding. Fortune cannot overcome them, calumny cannot rob us of them, disease cannot corrupt them, old age cannot impair them. The understanding is the only thing that renews its youth as it grows old, and, while time carries off everything else, it brings old age one gift—that of knowledge. When, again, war comes like a torrent, tearing and sweeping everything away, it is of our mental culture alone that it cannot rob us. Stilpo, the Megarian philosopher, made what seems a memorable answer when Demetrius, after enslaving the city and razing it to the ground, asked him if he had lost anything. ‘O no!’ said he, ‘for virtue is not made spoil of war.’ The reply of Socrates is evidently to the same tune and purpose. [Sidenote: 6] It was Gorgias, I believe, who asked him his opinion of the Great King, and whether he considered him happy. ‘I have no knowledge,’ said Socrates, ‘as to the state of his character and culture.’ He assumed that happiness depended upon these, and not upon the gifts of fortune. Not only should the education of our children be treated as of the very first importance, but I once more urge that we should insist upon its being of the sound and genuine kind. From pretentious nonsense our sons should be kept as far aloof [Sidenote: B] as possible. To please the many is to displease the wise, an assertion in which I have the support of Euripides: _I am not deft of words before the crowd, More skilled when with my compeers and the few. ’Tis compensation: they who ‘mid the wise Are naught, surpass in gift of speech to mobs._ My own observation tells me that persons who make a business of speaking in a way to please and curry favour with the rabble, generally prove correspondingly dissolute and pleasure-loving in their lives. Nor, indeed, should we expect anything else; for if they have no regard to propriety when catering for the [Sidenote: C] gratification of other people, it is not likely that they will permit right and sound principles to have the upper hand of their own voluptuous self-indulgence, nor that they will cultivate self-control rather than enjoyment. [Sidenote: *] And how can children learn from them anything admirable? Among admirable things is the practice of neither saying nor doing anything at random; and, as the proverb goes, ‘admirable things are difficult.’ Meanwhile, speeches made offhand are a mass of reckless slovenliness, without a notion where to begin or where to end. Apart from other faults, extempore speakers drop into a terrible prolixity and verbiage, whereas premeditation keeps [Sidenote: D] a speech safe within the lines of due proportion. When Pericles, ‘as tradition informs us,’ was called upon by the assembly, he frequently refused the call, on the ground that his thoughts were ‘not arranged’. Demosthenes, who took him for his own political model, acted in the same way. If the Athenians called upon him to address them, he would resist, with the words, ‘I have not arranged my thoughts.’ This, it is true, may be unauthentic and a fabrication; but in the speech against Meidias we have an explicit statement as to the advantage of preparation. His words are: ‘_I admit, gentlemen, that I come prepared; and I have no wish to deny it. I have even conned over my speech to the best of my poor ability. It would have been insane conduct, if, after and amid such harsh treatment, I had paid no regard to what I meant to say to you on the subject._’ That impromptu speaking should be rejected altogether, or, [Sidenote: E] failing this, that it should be practised only on unimportant subjects, I do not say. I am recommending a tonic regimen. Before manhood, I claim that there should be no speaking on the spur of the moment. But when the ability has taken firm root, it is only right for speech to enjoy free play as occasion invites. Though persons who have been in prison for a long time may subsequently be liberated, they are unsteady on their feet, [Sidenote: F] a protracted habit of wearing chains making them unable to step out. Similarly if those who have for a long time kept their speaking under close constraint some day find it necessary to speak offhand, they nevertheless retain the same style of expression. But to let mere children make extempore speeches is to become responsible for the worst of twaddle and futility. There is a story of a wretched painter who showed Apelles a picture, with the remark, ‘I have just painted this at one [Sidenote: 7] sitting.’ ‘I can see,’ said Apelles, ‘without your telling me, that it has been quick work. But my wonder is that you haven’t painted more than one as good.’ While (to return to the original matter in hand) we must be careful to avoid a style which is theatrical and bombastic, we must be equally on our guard against one which is low and trivial. If the turgid style is unbusinesslike, too thin a style is ineffective. Just as the body should be not only healthy but also in good condition, so language must be full of strength [Sidenote: B] and not simply free from disease. Keep on the safe side, and you are merely commended: face some risk, and you are admired. I take the same view of the mental disposition also. One should neither be over-bold, and so become brazen, nor yet timid and bashful, and so become mean-spirited. The rule of art and taste is _The middle course in all things_. [Sidenote: *] While I am still upon the subject of this part of education there is an opinion which I desire to express. A style consisting of single clauses I regard in the first instance as no slight evidence of poor taste, and, in the next, as too finical a thing ever to [Sidenote: C] be maintained in practice. Here, as in everything else that caters for ear or eye, monotony is as cloying and irksome as variety is delightful. There is no subject in the ‘regular curriculum’ of which the eye or ear of a freeborn boy should be permitted to remain uninformed. But while he receives a cursory education in those subjects in order to taste their quality, the most important place—complete all-round proficiency being impossible—must belong to philosophy. We may explain by a comparison with [Sidenote: D] travel, in which it is an excellent thing to visit a large number of cities, but good policy to settle in the best. As the philosopher Bion wittily remarked, when the suitors could obtain no access to Penelope they satisfied themselves with her handmaids, and when a man is unable to get hold of philosophy he makes dry bones of himself upon the remaining subjects, which are of no account. Philosophy, then, should be put at the head of all mental culture. The services which have been invented for the care of the body are two—medicine and gymnastics—the one imparting health, the other good condition. But for the weaknesses and ailments of the soul philosophy is the only thing to be prescribed. It is from and with philosophy that we can tell what is becoming or disgraceful, what is just or unjust, [Sidenote: E] what course, in short, is to be chosen or shunned. It teaches us how to behave towards the Gods, our parents, our elders, the laws, our rulers, friends, wives, children, and servants: that we should worship the Gods, honour our parents, respect our elders, obey the laws, give way to our rulers, love our friends, be continent towards our wives, show affection to our children, and abstain from cruelty to our slaves. Above all, it warns us against excess of joy when prosperous and excess of grief when unfortunate; against dissoluteness in our pleasures, or fury and brutality in our anger. These I judge to be chief among [Sidenote: F] the blessings conferred by philosophy. To bear adversity nobly is to act the brave man,[57] to bear prosperity unassumingly, the [Sidenote: *] modest mortal. To get the better of pleasures by reason needs wisdom; to master anger requires no ordinary character. Perfect men I take to be those who can blend practical ability [Sidenote: 8] with philosophy, and who can achieve both of two best and greatest ends—the life of public utility as men of affairs, and the calm and tranquil life as students of philosophy. For there are three kinds of life: the life of action, the life of thought, and the life of enjoyment. When life is dissolute and enslaved to pleasure, it is mean and animal; when it is all thought and fails to act, it is futile; when it is all action and destitute of philosophy, it is crude and blundering. We should therefore do our best to engage both in public business and in the pursuit [Sidenote: B] of philosophy, as occasion offers. Of this kind was the public career of Pericles, of Archytas of Tarentum, of Dion of Syracuse, and of Epaminondas of Thebes. Of these Dion actually attached himself to Plato as his pupil. There is no need, I think, to deal at any greater length with mental cultivation. It is, however, further desirable—or rather it is essential—that we should not neglect to possess the standard treatises, but should collect a stock of them, with the result of keeping our knowledge from starvation.[58] Farmers stock [Sidenote: *] [their fertilizers], and the employment of books is instrumental to culture in the same way. [Sidenote: C] Meanwhile we must not omit to exercise the body also. Our boys must be sent to the teacher of gymnastics and receive a sufficient amount of physical training, both to secure a good carriage and also to develop strength. Good condition is the foundation laid in childhood for a hale old age, and, just as our preparations for wintry weather should be made while it is fine, so we should store up provision for age in the shape of regular and temperate behaviour in youth. Physical exertion should, however, be so regulated that a boy does not become too exhausted to devote himself sufficiently to mental culture. [Sidenote: D] As Plato observes, sleep and weariness are the enemies of study. Upon this topic I need not dwell, but will pass on at once to the most important consideration of all—the necessity of training a boy for service as a fighting-man. For this he must go through hard drill in hurling the javelin, in shooting with the bow, and in hunting. ‘The goods of the vanquished,’ it has been said, ‘are prizes offered to the victor.’ There is no place in war for the physical condition of the cloister, and a lean soldier accustomed to warlike exercises will break through [Sidenote: *] a phalanx of fleshy prize-fighters. [Sidenote: E] ‘Well but,’ some one may urge, ‘while you promised us a set of rules for the upbringing of free men, it turns out that you have nothing to say concerning that of poor and common people, but are satisfied to confine your suggestions to the rich.’ There is a ready reply to the objection. If possible, I should desire the proposed education to be applicable to all alike. But if there are cases in which limited private circumstances make it impossible to carry my rules into practice, the blame should be laid upon fortune, not upon him who offers the advice. Though a man is poor, he should make every possible effort to bring up his children in the ideal way. Failing this, he must come as near to it as he can. After thus encumbering our discussion with this side-issue, [Sidenote: F] I will now proceed with the connected account of such other [Sidenote: *] matters as contribute to the right upbringing of the young. And first, children should be led into right practices of persuasion and reasoning: flogging and bodily injury should be out of the question. Such treatment is surely more fit for slaves than for the free, whom the smart, or even the humiliation, of a beating deprives of all life and spirit, making their tasks a horror to them. The freeborn find praise a more effective [Sidenote: 9] stimulus to the right conduct, and blame a more effective deterrent from the wrong, than any kind of bodily assault. In the use of such praise and reprimand there should be a subtle alternation. When a child is too bold, it should first be shamed by reproof and then encouraged by a word of praise. We may take a pattern by nurses, who may have to make an infant cry, but who afterwards comfort it by offering it the breast. We must, however, avoid puffing children up with eulogies, the consequence of excessive praise being vanity and conceit. I have noticed more than one instance in which the over-fondness [Sidenote: B] of a father has proved to be a lack of fondness. To make my meaning clear, I will use an illustration. Being in too great haste for their children to take first place in everything, they impose extravagant tasks, which prove too great for their strength and end in failure, besides causing them such weariness and distress that they refuse to submit patiently to instruction. Water in moderation will make a plant grow, while a flood of water will choke it. In the same way the mind will thrive under [Sidenote: C] reasonably hard work, but will drown if the work is excessive. We must therefore allow children breathing-time from perpetual tasks, and remember that all our life there is a division of relaxation and effort. Hence the existence of sleep as well as waking, of peace as well as war, of fine weather as well as bad, of holidays as well as business. In a word, it is rest that seasons toil. The fact is obvious, not merely in the case of living things, but in that of the inanimate world. We loosen a bow or a lyre, so that we may be able to tighten it. In fine, the body is kept sound by want and its satisfaction, the mind by relaxation and labour. [Sidenote: D] There are some fathers who have a culpable way of entrusting their sons to attendants and teachers, and then entirely omitting to keep the instruction of such persons under their own eye or ear. This is a most serious failure in their duty. Every few days they should personally examine their children, instead of confiding in the character of a hireling, whose attention to his pupils will be more conscientious if he is to be brought continually to book. In this connexion there is aptness in the groom’s dictum that _nothing is so fattening to a horse as the eye of the king_. [Sidenote: E] Above all things one should train and exercise a child’s memory. Memory serves as the storehouse of culture, and hence the fable that Recollection is the mother of the Muses—an indirect way of saying that memory is the best thing in the world to beget and foster wisdom. Whether children are naturally gifted with a good memory, or, on the contrary, are naturally forgetful, the memory should be trained in either case. The natural advantage will be strengthened, or the natural shortcoming made up. The former class will excel others, the latter will excel themselves. As Hesiod well puts it: [Sidenote: F] _If to the thing that is little you further add but a little, And do the same oft and again, full soon it becometh a great thing._ This, then, is another fact for fathers to recognize—that the mnemonic element in education plays a most important part, not only in culture, but also in the business of life, inasmuch as the recollection of past experience serves as a guide to wise policy for the future. Our sons must also be kept from the use of foul language. ‘The word,’ says Democritus, ‘is the shadow of the deed.’ More than that, we must render them polite and courteous, [Sidenote: 10] for there is nothing so detestable as a boorish character. One way in which children may avoid becoming disagreeable to their company is by refraining from absolute stubbornness in discussion. Credit is to be gained not merely by victory, but also by knowing how to accept defeat where victory is harmful. There is unquestionably such a thing as a ‘Cadmean victory’. _À propos_ I may quote the testimony of that wise poet Euripides: [Sidenote: B] _When two men speak, and one is full of anger, Wiser the one who strives not to reply._ This is the time to remember certain other habits quite as necessary—and more so—for the young to cultivate as any yet mentioned. These are modesty of behaviour, restraint of the tongue, mastery of the temper, and control of the hands. Let us see how important each of them is. We may take an illustration to bring home the notion more clearly. And we will begin with the last. There have been those who, by lowering their hands to ill-gotten gains, have thrown away all the reputation won by their previous career. This was the case with the Lacedaemonian, Gylippus, who was driven into exile from Sparta [Sidenote: C] for secretly broaching the money-bags. Absence of anger, again, is a quality of wisdom. Socrates once received a kick from a very impudent and gross young buffoon, but on seeing that his own friends were in such a violent state of indignation that they wanted to prosecute him, he remarked: ‘If a donkey had kicked me, would you have condescended to kick him back?’ The fellow did not, however, get off scot-free, but finding himself universally reproached and nicknamed ‘Kicker’, he hanged himself. When Aristophanes brought out the _Clouds_, and poured all manner of abuse upon Socrates, one of those present asked: ‘Pray, are you not indignant at his ridiculing you in this manner?’ [Sidenote: D] ‘Not I, indeed,’ replied Socrates; ‘this banter in the theatre is only in a big convivial party.’ A close counterpart of this attitude will be found in the behaviour of Plato and of Archytas of Tarentum. When the latter, on his return from the war in which he had held command, found that his land had gone out of cultivation, he summoned his manager and remarked: ‘You would have suffered for this, if I had not been too angry.’ When Plato, again, was once worked into a passion with a greedy and impudent slave, he called his sister’s son Speusippus and said, ‘Go and give this fellow a thrashing: I am myself in a great passion.’ But, it may be argued, it is difficult to reach so high a standard [Sidenote: E] as this. I am well aware of it. We can therefore only do our best to take a pattern by such conduct, and minimize any tendency to ungovernable rage. As in other matters, we are no match for either the moral mastery or the finished character of those great models. Nevertheless we may act towards them as we might towards the Gods, serving as hierophants and torch-bearers of their wisdom and endeavouring to imitate in our nibbling way as much as lies in our power. As for the control of the tongue—the remaining point to be considered according to our promise—any one who regards it as of trivial moment is very much in the wrong. In a timely [Sidenote: F] silence there is a wisdom superior to any speech. It is apparently for this reason that men in old times invented our mystic rites and ceremonies. The notion was that, through being trained to silence in connexion with these, we should secure the keeping of human secrets by carrying into them the same religious fear. Moreover, though multitudes have repented of talking, no man has repented of silence, and while it is easy to utter what has been kept back, it is impossible to recall what has been uttered. My own reading affords countless instances of the greatest disasters resulting from an ungoverned tongue. I will content [Sidenote: 11] myself with mentioning one or two typical examples. When, upon the marriage of Philadelphus with his sister, Sotades composed a scurrilous verse, he paid ample atonement for talking out of season by rotting for a long time in prison. He thus purchased a laugh in others by long weeping of his own. The [Sidenote: *] story is closely matched by that of the sophist Theocritus, who endured similar, but much more terrible, consequences for a similar remark. Alexander had ordered the Greeks to provide a stock of purple garments, with a view to the thanksgiving [Sidenote: B] sacrifice on his return from his Persian victories, and the various peoples were contributing at so much per head. Hereupon Theocritus observed: ‘I have now become clear upon a point which used to puzzle me. This is what is meant by Homer’s “purple death”‘—words which earned him the enmity of Alexander. Antigonus, the Macedonian king, had but one eye, and Theocritus made him excessively angry by a taunt at this disfigurement. Eutropion, the chief cook, who had become a person of importance, was sent to him by the king with a request that he would come to court and engage him in argument. On receiving repeated visits from Eutropion with this message, he [Sidenote: C] remarked, ‘I am well aware that you want to dish me up raw to the Cyclops,’ thus twitting the one with being disfigured, the other with being a cook. ‘Then,’ replied Eutropion, ‘it will be without your head, for you shall be punished for such mad and reckless language.’ Thereupon he reported the words to the king, who sent and put Theocritus to death. The last and most sacred requirement is that children should be trained to speak the truth. Lying is a servile habit; it deserves universal detestation and is unpardonable even in a decent slave. [Sidenote: D] So far I have had no doubt or hesitation in what I have said of the modesty and good behaviour of children. But upon the matter which now calls for mention I am dubious and undecided, my judgement swaying in the balance first one way and then the other, without finding it possible to turn the scale in either direction. It concerns a practice which I can neither recommend nor discountenance without great reluctance. Nevertheless one must venture a word upon it. The question is whether a man who is enamoured of a boy is to be allowed to keep intimate [Sidenote: E] company with him, or whether, on the contrary, association with such a person is to be tabooed. When I look at fathers whose disposition is uncompromisingly harsh and austere, and who regard such association as an intolerable insult to their children, I have many scruples in recommending it or speaking in its favour. When, on the other hand, I think of Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Aeschines, Cebes, and all those great men who have with one accord approved of love between males, while they have led youths on to culture, to public leadership, and to [Sidenote: F] a virtuous character, I change my mind and am inclined to copy those great exemplars. Euripides is on their side, when he says: _Nay, men may feel passion of other sort, Love of a just, chaste, virtuous mind and soul._ Nor must we omit the saying of Plato, partly serious and partly humorous, that those who have shown special excellence should have the right to kiss any beautiful person they choose. The proper course is to drive away those who are enamoured of the person, but, generally speaking, give a sanction to those who are in love with the mind and soul. While we must have nothing to say to the connexions in vogue at Thebes or in Elis, or to the so-called ‘abduction’ of Crete, we may well imitate that kind [Sidenote: 12] which is usual at Athens or in Lacedaemon. On this matter it is for every man to hold such convictions as he has formed for himself. I will now leave it, and, having spoken of the discipline and good behaviour of the boy, will pass on to deal with the age of adolescence. I shall do so in very few words, for I have often expressed my disapproval of those who encourage vicious habits by proposing to put a boy under the charge of tutors and teachers, whereas, with a stripling, they would permit his inclinations to range at will. As a matter of [Sidenote: B] fact, there is need of more anxious precautions in the case of the stripling than in that of the boy. Every one is aware that the faults committed by a boy are small matters, which can be cured without difficulty—such as paying no heed to his tutor, or trickery and inattention in school. But the sins of adolescence often reach a flagrant and shocking pitch—stealing the father’s money, gormandizing, dicing, roistering, drinking, loose passion for young girls, or corruption of married women. The propensities of young manhood ought therefore to be carefully watched and kept closely under the chain. When capacity for [Sidenote: C] pleasure is at its prime, it rejects control, kicks over the traces, and requires the curb. If therefore we do not take a firm hold upon this time of life, we are giving folly a licence to sin. This is the moment when wise fathers should be most watchful and alert; when they should bring their lads within bounds by warnings, threats, or entreaties, and by pointing out instances of disaster caused by devotion to pleasure, and of praise and good repute won by continence. These two things form what may be called first principles of virtue, namely, hope of honour and fear of punishment, the one producing a greater eagerness [Sidenote: D] for the noblest pursuits, the other a shrinking from bad actions. One general rule of duty is to keep boys from associating with vicious persons; otherwise they will pick up something of their vice. This has been urged by Pythagoras among a number of dark sayings. Since these also possess great value as aids to the attainment of virtue, I will proceed to quote them, adding their explanation. _Do not taste black-tails_[59]—keep no company with persons who are malignant and therefore ‘black’. _Do not [Sidenote: E] step over a beam_—justice must be scrupulously respected and not ‘overstepped’. _Do not sit on a quart-measure_—beware of idleness, and see to the providing of daily bread. _Do not clasp hands with every man_—we should form no sudden connexions. _Do not wear a tight ring_—one should carry out the practice of [Sidenote: *] life, and not fasten it to any chain. _Do not poke a fire with iron_—do not irritate a wrathful man (the right course being to let angry men go their own way). _Do not eat the heart_—do not injure [Sidenote: F] the mind with worry and brooding. _Abstain from beans_—avoid public life (office in former times being determined by voting with beans). _Do not put victuals in a chamber-vessel_—clever speech ought not to be put into a wicked mind, since speech, which is the food of thought, is polluted by the wickedness in a man. _Do not turn back on coming to the border_—when about to die, and with the end of life close in sight, behave calmly and without losing heart. To return to the topic with which we were dealing before this digression. While, as I observed, boys should be kept from every kind of vicious company, especially should they be kept [Sidenote: 13] from parasites. I venture to repeat here what I am continually urging upon fathers. There is no set of creatures so pernicious—none which so quickly and completely brings youth to headlong destruction—as parasites. They are utter ruin to both father and son, filling the old age of the one and the youth of the other with vexation. To gain their purpose they offer an irresistible bait in the shape of pleasure. In the case of rich men’s sons, the father preaches sobriety, the parasite drunkenness. The father urges temperance and economy, the parasite profligacy and extravagance. The father says: ‘Be industrious’; the parasite says: ‘Be idle; for life is only a moment altogether. [Sidenote: B] One ought to live, not merely exist. Why trouble about your father’s threats? He is an old driveller with one foot in the coffin, and we will promptly pick him up on our shoulders and carry him off to his grave.’ One person tempts him with a drab, or with the seduction of a married woman, plundering and stripping the father of all the provision for his old age. They are an abominable crew; their friendship is a sham; of candour they have no idea; they toady the rich and despise the poor. They are drawn to young men like puppets on a string; they [Sidenote: *] grin, when those who feed them laugh; they counterfeit the possession of a mind, and give a spurious imitation of details of real life. They live at the rich man’s beck, and though fortune [Sidenote: C] has made them free, their own choice makes them slaves. If they are not insulted, they regard it as an insult, their maintenance in that case being without a motive. If, therefore, a father is concerned for the obedient conduct of his children, he must keep these abominable creatures at a distance. And he must by all means do the same with vicious fellow-pupils, who are capable of corrupting the most moral of natures. While these principles are right and expedient, I have a word to say upon a human aspect of the matter. I have no desire, all this time, that a father’s disposition should be altogether [Sidenote: D] harsh and unyielding. I would have him frequently condone a fault in his junior and recollect that he was once young himself. The physician mixes his bitter drugs with syrup, and so finds a way to work benefit through the medium of enjoyment. In the same way a father should blend his severe reprimande with kindliness, at one time giving the boy’s desires a loose or easy rein, at another time tightening it. If possible, he should [Sidenote: E] take misdeeds calmly; failing that, his anger should be seasonable and should quickly cool down. It is better for a father to be sharp-tempered than sullen-tempered; to sulk and bear malice goes far to prove a lack of parental affection. Sometimes, when a fault is committed, it is a good thing to pretend ignorance, turning to advantage the dim sight and defective hearing of old age, and refusing to see or hear certain occurrences which one hears and sees. We put up with the lapses of a friend. Is it strange to do so with those of a child? A slave is often heavy-headed from a debauch, without our taking him to task. The other day you refused the boy money; there are times to meet his requests. The other day you were indignant; there are times to be lenient. Perhaps he has cozened you through a servant; [Sidenote: F] restrain your anger. Has he borrowed the team from the farm? Does he come reeking of yesterday’s bout? Do not notice it. Smelling of perfumes? Say nothing. Such is the way to manage the restiveness of youth. A son who cannot resist pleasure and is deaf to remonstrance should be put into matrimonial harness, that being the surest way of tying a young man down. The woman who becomes his wife should not, however, be to any great extent his superior either in birth or means. _Keep to your own level_ is a sound maxim, and a man who marries much above him finds himself, [Sidenote: 14] not the husband of the woman, but the slave of the dowry. A few words more, and I will conclude my list of principles. Above all things a father should set an example to his children in his own person, by avoiding all faults of commission or omission. His life should be the glass by which they form themselves and are put out of conceit with all ugliness of act or speech. For him to rebuke his erring sons when guilty of the same errors himself, is to become his own accuser while ostensibly theirs. Indeed, if his life is bad, he is disqualified from reproving even a slave, much more his son. Moreover, he will naturally [Sidenote: B] become their guide and teacher in wrongdoing. Where there are old men without shame, inevitably there are quite shameless young ones also. To obtain good behaviour from our children we should therefore strive to carry out every moral duty. An example to follow is that of Eurydice, who, though belonging to a thoroughly barbarous country like Illyria, nevertheless took to study and self-improvement late in life for the sake of her children’s education. Her maternal affection finds apt expression in the lines inscribed upon her offering to the Muses: [Sidenote: C] _In that, when mother to grown boys, she won Her soul’s well-known desire—the skill to use The lore of letters—this Eurydice From Hierapolis sends to each Muse._[60] To compass the whole of the foregoing elements of success is [Sidenote: *] perhaps visionary—a counsel of perfection. But to cultivate the majority of them, though itself requiring good fortune as well as much care, is at any rate a thing within the reach of a human being. Footnote 55: This article is in all probability not the work of Plutarch. See the Introduction. Footnote 56: The play upon words (_ēthikas_, ‘moral’ and _ĕthikas_, ‘of habit’) is not adequately translatable. Footnote 57: The Greek text is here corrupt; the translation represents the probable sense. Footnote 58: The Greek text is again faulty. The sense here given is approximate. Footnote 59: These maxims were probably in the first instance merely hygienic, or even popular superstitions, but subsequently they received recondite interpretations. Footnote 60: The Greek verse is doggerel, and no attempt is made to better it in the English.

The following brief notes are intended to supply the bare amount of information necessary for an understanding of the text. The pronunciation marks are, of course, added only for the sake of those who have no Greek. An accent marks the syllable which should bear the stress in the English pronunciation, and the signs [ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ] and [ā ē ī ō ū], imply that the vowels are short or long respectively. q.v. = see the note on that name. =Ábaris=: a legendary Scythian or ‘Hyperborean’ priest of Apollo, to whom miraculous powers were attributed in the way of cures and prophecy. =Aeolians=: inhabitants of Aeolis, the NE. coast of the Aegean, with the island of Lesbos. =Aeschĭnes=: (1) a philosopher, pupil of Socrates (hence Aeschines Socraticus). In the eyes of Plato he was a sophist, for the reason that he took fees. His character was not of the highest. Like Plato, he visited Syracuse during the philosophic pose of the elder Dionysius. (2) Athenian orator, constant opponent of Demosthenes, who charged him with being bribed by Philip. Died in exile 314 B.C. =Aeschylus=: the first in date and most severe in style of the three great Attic tragedians, 525-466 B.C. A master of condensed and sonorous language and of powerful situations. =Aesop=: the famous writer (or promulgator) of fables, _c._ 620-564 B.C. Said to have been an emancipated slave, who spent some time at the court of Croesus and was sent by him on a mission to Delphi to distribute largess. Practically nothing definite is known of him. His fables were most probably of Indo-Persian origin. Those which now pass under his name are a comparatively late compilation from various sources. =Agésilāus=: Agesilaus II, king of Sparta, 398-361 B.C.; the most important man in the Greek world of his day. His wars were numerous, the most important being with the Thebans. His character was noble, his ability great, but his physique and appearance poor. =Agis=: (1) Agis II, king of Sparta, 427-399 B.C.; commander against the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, his greatest exploit being the victory of Mantinea. (2) Base and toadying poet of Argos, who accompanied Alexander into Asia. The histories of the expedition agree with Plutarch as to his character. =Alcibíades=: a handsome noble of Athens; a type of ostentatious, ambitious, and unscrupulous brilliancy. After a measure of military and political prominence he was banished from Athens for sacrilege (415 B.C.). Becoming hostile to his country he first found a home at Sparta, thence migrated to Asia Minor and joined the Persian satrap, Tissaphernes, whom he endeavoured to bring over to the Athenian side as a means to his own recall. He returned to Athens for a brief space in 407 B.C., then removed to Thrace, and thence again to the Persian satrap. =Alcméōn=: son of Amphiaraus (q.v.), who avenged his father by putting to death his mother Eriphyle. =Alexander=: (1) the Great, of Macedon. (2) of Pherae, a despot who dominated Thessaly from 369 B.C. A cruel tyrant, assassinated through the agency of his wife. =Alexis=: poet of the ‘Middle Comedy’, who had migrated from South Italy to Athens. Plutarch says that he lived to the age of 106, and Suidas that his plays numbered 245. =Alyáttes=: king of Lydia and father of Croesus, carried on wars with the Greeks of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor and had apparently some designs upon the islands. =Amásis=: an insurgent Egyptian general who secured the throne (569 B.C.). His rule was beneficent and prosperous, and he cultivated the friendship of the Greeks, handing over to them the town of Naucratis (q. v.). When reproached with his humble origin he converted his bronze foot-pan into the effigy of a deity by way of instructive parable. He was visited by Solon and had amicable relations with Croesus. =Ammónius=: Peripatetic philosopher from Attica, teacher of Plutarch, who speaks elsewhere of his great erudition. =Amphiaráus=: legendary seer of Argos, who accompanied the ‘Seven’ in their expedition against Thebes. A pious and just man, who was led into this false step by the persuasions of his wife, who had been bribed. =Amphíctyons=: members of a religious Council meeting at Delphi and representing the older Greek communities. =Amphídămas=: ‘hero’ (i. e. demigod) of Chalcis in Euboea, conceived as a historical personage. =Amphitrítë=: wife of Poseidon and queen-goddess of the sea. =Anacharsis=: Scythian prince (of N. Thrace). To Greek literature he is the type of the observant and critical visitor from abroad. A pattern of the simple life and direct thinking. Said to have visited Athens about 600 B.C. =Anaxarchus=: an easy-going and witty philosopher of the school of Democritus (q. v.); in the suite of Alexander on his Asiatic expedition. =Antígŏnus=: a general of Alexander. On the partition of the empire he received Phrygia, Lycia, and Pamphylia, but afterwards extended his rule over all the Asiatic portion. He fell before a combination of the other Diadochi in 301 B.C. =Antímăchus=: epic poet of Colophon, who wrote at great length on the story of Thebes. He also composed a voluminous elegy on ‘Lyde’. Both pieces were crammed with mythological and other learning, and Plutarch appears to treat him as a type of the diffuse. He was a contemporary of Plato. =Antípăter=: (1) regent of Macedonia during the Asiatic expedition of Alexander and after his death (334-320 B.C.). A war with a Greek league headed by Athens ended in the submission of the latter. (2) A Stoic philosopher of Tyre; a friend of Cato the younger, about the middle of the first century B.C. =Antiphōn=: several persons were so named, e. g.: (1) an orator of the fifth century B.C. (2) An Athenian tragic poet, put to death by the elder Dionysius at Syracuse. (3) A sophist, epic poet, and antagonist of Socrates. =Apéllēs=: (1) of Colophon or Cos, _fl._ _c._ 335-305 B.C. The greatest painter of antiquity, especially favoured by Alexander the Great. His maxim for draughtsmen _nulla dies sine linea_ is famous. (2) Of Chios, apparently unknown beyond Plutarch. =Appius Claudius= (=Caecus=): Roman censor 312 B.C., originator of the Appian Way. =Aráspēs=: a Mede, friend of Cyrus, who became enamoured of Panthea (q. v.). =Arcĕsiláus=: latter part of third century B.C.; first a disciple of Theophrastus (q. v.), but took an independent line in philosophy as founder of the sceptical New Academy. A man of amiable character and a wit. =Archeláus=: king of Macedonia 413-399 B.C.; a lover of art and literature and a patron of Euripides and other Athenian men of letters. =Archidámus=: Archidamus II, king of Sparta, 469-427 B.C. There were several other kings of the name. =Archílŏchus=: of Paros, _fl._ _c._ 710-675 B.C. A lyrist of whom only fragments are extant; particularly famous for his iambic lampoons. =Archimédes=: the Newton of antiquity; an eminent scientist of Syracuse 287-212 B.C.; student of astronomy, applied mathematics, and engineering. He served as mechanical engineer in defending his city from the Romans, by whose soldiers he was killed in ignorance. =Archytas=: of Tarentum, in the early part of the fourth century B.C., noted as a mathematician and philosophic statesman of the Pythagorean order. Both in generalship and civil business of state he was eminently successful and was trusted with extraordinary powers. =Arēs=: the Greek War-God, answering generally to the Roman Mars. =Arȋdaeus= (=Arrhidaeus=): (1) feeble half-witted king of Macedonia after his brother Alexander’s death. (2) A general of Alexander, joint regent in 321 B.C., afterwards governor on the Hellespont. =Aríōn=: _c._ 600 B.C.; the famous bard and harp-player of Lesbos, and supposed inventor of the dithyramb. His favourite abode was at the court of Periander. =Aristarchus=: the prince of Greek grammarians and critics; flourished at Alexandria 181-146 B.C. Chiefly known for his commentaries on the language and matter of Homer, and his recension of the divergent manuscripts. =Aristeides= (=Aristídes=): with the sobriquet of ‘the Just’; a noble of Athens, statesman and general, who figures in the stirring times of the war with Persia. Died _c._ 470 B.C. =Aristíppus=: of Cyrene, disciple, but not imitator, of Socrates. A student and teacher of ethics, and founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy and its cult of pleasure: _fl._ _c._ 380-366 B.C. For a time he was at the court of Dionysius (q. v.) of Syracuse. =Arísto=: (1) the chief bearer of the name was a philosopher who became head of the Peripatetic school about 230 B.C. Anciently considered a writer of more elegance than weight. (2) A son of Sophocles, and probably himself a tragedian. =Aristómĕnes=: practically regent of Egypt from 202 B.C.; a sound adviser of the young Ptolemy Epiphanes (q. v.), who put him to death for his frankness in 192 B.C. =Aristóphănes=: of Athens, 444-380 B.C.; by far the greatest comic poet of antiquity. His comedy was of the ‘Old’, or personal-political type. Eleven of his plays are extant. =Arístŏphōn=: painter, brother of Polygnotus (who _fl._ _c._ 420 B.C.). =Aristotle=: of Stageira, but commonly domiciled in Athens or in Macedonia. Pupil of Plato and subsequently tutor of Alexander. Founder of the Peripatetic school, with its head-quarters in the Lyceum (q. v.). His whole tone of mind is strikingly unlike that of his teacher, being eminently precise, logical, and scientific. His writing is without literary charm. He aimed at sound and comprehensive knowledge as the basis of right principles in society, conduct, and the arts (384-322 B.C.). =Asclépius=: (= Aesculapius), the Greek ‘hero’ of medicine, converted by legend into a son of Apollo and ultimately into a god. =Atreides= (=Atrídes=): = ‘son of Atreus’, a title of Agamemnon and Menelaus. =Áttălus= (brother of Eumenes): Attalus Philadelphus, king of Pergamus, allied with the Romans in the middle of the second century B.C. Philopoemen was his controlling minister. =Bacchýlȋdes=: lyric poet of Ceos, _fl._ _c._ 470 B.C., principally at the court of Hiero of Syracuse. In general he may be called a smoother and weaker Pindar. =Bagóas=: a handsome young eunuch of Darius, afterwards taken into the service and affections of Alexander. =Báthycles=: an artist in metal-work, of uncertain date, but probably to be placed in the early part of the age of the Seven Sages. =Bato=: comic poet of Athens, _fl._ _c._ 280 B.C.; satirized philosophers. =Bias=: of Priene; precise date unknown, but _fl._ _c._ 550 B.C. He is invariably included in the list of the Seven Sages. =Biōn=: _fl._ _c._ 250 B.C., a philosopher from Olbia on the Black Sea, who settled at Athens, tried various systems, and ended by being a Peripatetic. He was noted for his keen sententious sayings, but was of dissolute character. Has been called ‘the Greek Voltaire’. =Brīséïs=: captive woman assigned to Achilles, but taken from him by Agamemnon when he surrendered Chryseis. =Busírites=: the people of Busiris (modern Abousir), about the middle of the Delta; one of the traditional birthplaces of Osiris. =Calchas=: the seer of the Achaean army before Troy. =Callísthĕnes=: philosopher and rhetorician; accompanied Alexander into Asia, where he used over-bold language in reproving him. Put to death 328 B.C. He wrote an account of the expedition and other historical works. =Calýpso=: nymph, on whose island the shipwrecked Odysseus was detained for seven years. =Carnĕădes=: of Cyrene, 213(?)-129 B.C.; a student of Stoicism, but leader of the Academics. He was ambassador on behalf of Athens (155 B.C.) to Rome, where he delivered striking discourses on ethics. His cardinal doctrine was the ‘withholding of assent’ to doctrines. =Cato=: (1) the elder (or ‘the Censor’), 234-149 B.C. The type of severe old-fashioned Roman morality; soldier, statesman, orator, and writer. (2) The younger (or ‘Uticensis’), 95-46 B.C.; modelled himself on his great-grandfather in respect of the moral and simple life, but was much inferior in gifts. Committed suicide 46 B.C., when the struggle against the domination of Julius Caesar had become hopeless. =Cĕbēs=: of Thebes, a pupil of Socrates and a _persona_ in Plato’s _Phaedo_. He is chiefly known for his (if it is his) symbolic picture or ‘table’ of human life. =Cĕrămeicus (-í-)=: a suburb without, and a broad street within, the west walls of Athens. =Cercópes=: mythical gnomes, mischievous and thievish, who annoyed Heracles by their monkey-like tricks. =Chábrȋas=: Athenian commander at various times between 392 and 357 B.C., gaining some successes by land and sea against the Spartans. An able tactician, adventurous, but of somewhat dissolute life. =Chalcis=: chief town of Euboea (Negropont), once a most important commercial centre. =Charēs=: Athenian general, of whose various operations we have records for 367-333 B.C. A man of little principle. He effected little against the Macedonians, and often followed independent and useless lines of action. =Chármȋdes=: uncle of Plato, who names one of his Socratic dialogues after him. At the supposed date he was a beautiful and charming youth, and the discussion is upon ‘self-control’. =Chīlōn=: of Lacedaemon: _fl._ _c._ 600-570 B.C. Poet and coiner of maxims, and shrewd man of affairs. =Chryséïs=: captive woman assigned to Agamemnon; surrendered by him at the bidding of Apollo, in order to check a pestilence. =Cimōn=: son of Miltiades, became prominent as a commander against the Persians in 477 B.C. His chief exploit was the victory of Eurymedon, 466 B.C. A handsome, liberal, affable, but somewhat self-indulgent person. =Cīnésias=: Athenian dithyrambic poet, much satirized by Aristophanes and others. His verse, music, and character appear all to have been of an inferior order. =Claudia=: Roman maiden, who, in full vindication of her chastity, was enabled to move the vessel containing the image of Cybele when it stuck fast in the Tiber. =Cleánthes=: Stoic philosopher, pupil and successor of Zeno (q. v.) 263 B.C. The only fragment of his writing still extant is from a Hymn to Zeus. =Cleárchus=: (1) of Heraclea on the Black Sea; availed himself of faction to make himself despot and tyrant (365 B.C.). Despite the precautions described by Plutarch he was assassinated in 353 B.C. (2) Of Sparta, leader of the 10,000 Greeks in the expedition of Cyrus the Younger against Babylon; decoyed and put to death by the Persians, 401 B.C. The retreat was led by Xenophon (q.v.). =Cleisthĕnes=: Athenian noble, who adopted the popular cause and made important democratic changes in the constitution; _fl._ from 510 B.C. =Cleitus= (=Clītus=): a Macedonian commander under Alexander, whose life he saved at the battle of Granícus (334 B.C.). He was killed (328 B.C.) by Alexander with a spear-thrust, after a quarrel at a carousal, in which he had spoken with excessive freedom to his chief. =Cleobulínë=: daughter (as the name implies) of Cleobulus (q.v.). Though her father is said to have named her Eumetis (‘sagacious’), the word may be suspected of being an afterthought. =Cleobúlus=: _c._ 610-560 B.C. A citizen of Lindus in Rhodes, who became its despot. His position may have been similar to that of Pittacus (q.v.). =Cleómĕnes=: Cleomenes III, high-minded king of Sparta, 240-222 B.C. On his defeat by the Achaeans he fled to Ptolemy Euergetes, with whom he was in alliance. The next Ptolemy (Philopator) suspected and imprisoned him. =Cleōn=: a tanner of Athens; an able but coarse-grained leader of the popular party 428-422 B.C. A special enemy of Aristophanes (q.v.), whose fiercest political attacks are delivered against him. A self-sufficient amateur in military operations, in one of which he was slain. =Clódius=: P. Clodius Pulcher; a daring and unscrupulous person, who became quaestor in 61 B.C. and tribune of the plebs in 59 B.C. The notorious and relentless enemy of Cicero. Killed by Milo on the high road 52 B.C. =Colónus=: a suburb of Athens outside the north wall, with a small hill, grove, and sanctuary. =Cólophōn=: Greek town of Asia Minor, near the Aegean coast, about ten miles north of Ephesus. =Cornelia=: daughter of Scipio Africanus; the famous ‘mother of the Gracchi’; the type of matronly virtue, dignity, cultivation, and high example. =Crátĕrus=: a noble type of Macedonian; one of Alexander’s generals. After the death of his chief (323 B.C.) he became colleague with Antipater in the Graeco-Macedonian portion of the empire. See also under Eumenes. =Cratēs=: of Thebes; pupil of Diogenes (q.v.) at Athens; _fl._ _c._ 320 B.C. A Cynic philosopher in practice as well as theory, he renounced his wealth and led the simple life in a cheerful manner. A philosophic writer and a tragic poet. =Croesus=: king of Lydia 560-546 B.C. A wealthy and powerful ruler, who made war upon the Persians when their empire was growing rapidly under Cyrus. Was defeated and carried off in the train of the conqueror. While in power he was in friendly or hostile relations with various Greek states, and was particularly noted for his liberality to the Delphian oracle. Whether Solon ever actually had the famous interview with Croesus is chronologically doubtful, but it is not impossible. =Cyáxares=: king of Media, appears in Xenophon’s _Cyropaedia_ as uncle of Cyrus the Great, but the whole book is something of a romance. =Cýpsĕlus=: father of Periander, established himself as despot of Corinth _c._ 656 B.C. His name was commonly associated with _cypsele_ (‘chest’). The designs upon him in his infancy were those of a Corinthian noble house, and were made in consequence of an oracle foretelling danger from the child. =Cyrus=: (1) the elder: the famous Persian monarch, founder of the empire, and subjugator of Babylon. The stories told of him in the _Cyropaedia_ of Xenophon are largely romance. (2) the younger: satrap of Lydia, Phrygia, &c., who sought, but failed, to dispossess his brother Artaxerxes with the assistance of a Greek force (401 B.C.). This was the expedition related in Xenophon’s _Anabasis_. =Daphnūs=: a river running into the Corinthian Gulf on the north side not far from the entrance. =Dāríus=: (1) Darius I; strong and able king of Persia (521-485 B.C.), previously satrap under Cyrus the Great. This is the Darius mentioned in connexion with Gobryas. (2) Darius II (Ochus or Nothus), or Darius the Younger, a weak monarch endangered by perpetual rebellions, 424-405 B.C. (3) Darius Codomannus, overthrown by Alexander. Died 330 B.C. =Délos=: central island of the south half of the Aegean, with a temple of Apollo, the gathering-place of a great religious confederacy of Ionians. =Dēmarátus=: of Corinth, in friendly relations with Philip and a mediator between him and Alexander after their quarrel in 337 B.C. =Dēmétrius=: (1) Demetrius I (or Poliorcetes), king of Macedonia. His father Antigonus, king of Asia, sent him in 307 B.C. to annex Greece, then under Cassander and Ptolemy. It was at this time that he took Megara and met with Stilpo (q. v.). (2) Demetrius Phaléreus: Athenian orator and writer (345-283 B.C.); an able and cultivated man, put in charge of Athens by the Macedonians, 317 B.C. First highly honoured, then expelled, he made his way to Thebes and subsequently to Alexandria. (3) The name of several Macedonian officers in the army of Alexander. =Dēmócrȋtus=: _c._ 460-360 B.C. Of Abdēra in Thrace. A great traveller and student, who developed (though he did not invent) the ‘Atomic Theory’. Ethically his aim was cheerfulness of mind (hence ‘the laughing philosopher’). His character was of the highest for truth and simplicity. =Dicaeárchus=: philosopher from Massana in Sicily; writer on history and geography. A follower of Aristotle, _fl._ _c._ 300 B.C. =Díŏcles=: the narrator of the Dinner of the Seven Sages: professional seer, and interpreter and expiator of omens and dreams. Nothing is known of such a person outside Plutarch. =Diógĕnes=: (1) the Cynic philosopher of Sinope, who migrated to Athens, and after being captured by pirates was sold as a slave to a Corinthian. Whether or not he ever lived in the famous (earthenware) ‘tub’ is doubtful. He was distinguished for his plainness of life, his shrewd good sense, his independence, and his caustic tongue. (2) Tragic poet of Athens, _c._ 404 B.C. =Diōn=: of Syracuse, brother-in-law of the elder Dionysius (q. v.). On the visit of Plato to Sicily he became a disciple of that philosopher. The younger Dionysius resented his reputation and his harshness. Dion therefore removed to Athens and other parts of Greece, whence he returned with a force, expelled Dionysius, and was himself appointed practically dictator. Assassinated 353 B.C. =Dionysius=: (i) the elder: despot of Syracuse (‘sole general’) 405-367 B.C. He extended its power over a great part of Sicily, and strongly fortified the city itself. In the end he became a veritable tyrant. Like many other despots he affected literature and philosophy, and himself wrote bad verses. After inviting Plato to Syracuse he quarrelled with and dismissed that philosopher. (2) the younger, who succeeded his father. For a time he was under the influence of Dion (q.v.) assisted by Plato. Of weaker character and more licentious than his father, he was compelled to abandon Syracuse after a rule of eleven years. Insecurely restored ten years later he was again driven out by Timoleon (343 B.C.). The remainder of his life was spent in poverty at Corinth, where he is said to have taught an elementary school. =Dōdóna=: in Epirus, near the modern Janina; a very ancient seat of the worship of Zeus. =Dolōn=: a Trojan in the _Iliad_, who undertakes to penetrate the Achaean camp as a spy, but is slain in the attempt. =Dryópians=: a people of Central Greece. =Elephantínë= = Djesiret-el-Sag; a garrisoned island in the Nile (First Cataract) opposite the modern Assouan; the frontier town of Egypt towards Ethiopia. =Empédŏcles=: Sicilian physical and practical philosopher of Acragas (= Girgenti); _fl._ _c._ 450 B.C. His studies of nature specially qualified him for the cure or ‘purification’ of epidemics due to insanitary conditions. His travels took him to Athens and other parts of Greece. The legend went that he threw himself into the crater of Etna. =Eōs=: = Aurora, dawn-goddess; wife of Tithonus; mother of Memnon, the opponent of Achilles. =Epáminōndas=: a type of patriotism, particularly to his compatriot Plutarch. The greatest of Theban commanders and statesmen, especially famous for his victory over the Spartans at Leuctra (371 B.C.). So far as he applied any philosophy to life, it was that of Pythagoras. =Éphŏrus=: historian of Cumae, _fl._ _c._ 340 B.C. His history, once very famous and much discussed, covered a period of 750 years. =Epichármus=: _c._ 540-450 B.C.; the great comic poet of Sicily, chiefly associated with the court of Hiero I (q.v.) at Syracuse. =Epicúrus=: 342-270 B.C. Athenian philosopher and founder of the Epicurean school, of which the aim was ‘peace of mind’ or ‘freedom from emotional disturbance’. His own life (as his tenets required) was simple and wholesome, and the self-indulgence of the sect in later days was either a parody or a misconception of his teachings. A voluminous writer on physics and ethics, but with a bad style. =Epiménȋdes=: priest-prophet and bard of Crete, with peculiar knowledge of medicine and methods of purification. Many fables were current concerning him (e.g. of his sleep of fifty-seven years). He was called in by the Athenians (_c._ 596 B.C.) to cleanse their city of a plague. =Epimétheus=: brother of Prometheus (q.v.). The name was taken to mean ‘After-thinker’, and hence arose a notion that he ‘thought too late’. =Erasístrătus=: a very distinguished physician in the earlier part of the third century B.C. He practised and taught in Syria and Alexandria. An eminent student of anatomy. =Eratósthĕnes=: librarian of Alexandria under the Ptolemies; a writer on mathematical geography, history, and grammar. Died about 196 B.C. =Érĕsus=: a town on the south-west coast of Lesbos (Mytilene); birthplace of Theophrastus. =Erétria=: the second town of Euboea, a little south of Chalcis. See Lelantum. =Erínys=: a spirit of vengeance sent up from the underworld to punish unnatural crimes and offences. =Éteŏcles=: (legendary): son of Oedipus, joint king of Thebes with Polyneices, whom he expelled through a selfish desire to rule alone. =Euénus=: two poets of Paros are so named, one of the date of Socrates and one earlier. It is, and was anciently, difficult to distinguish between the two. =Eúmĕnes=: an eminent and very able general (and also secretary) of Alexander, after whose death he obtained (322 B.C.) the chief command in Asia. His subordinate Neoptolemus, governor of Armenia, made head against him with the help of Craterus. Their defeat, mentioned in the article on Garrulity, took place in Cappadocia in 321 B.C. =Eúpŏlis=: one of the three chief poets of the ‘old’ comedy of Athens, a contemporary of Aristophanes (q.v.). =Eurípides=: 480-406 B.C.; third in date of the three great Athenian tragedians. His works were numerous and uneven. His poetical merits were (and are) variously estimated. =Fabius Maximus=: the best known person of the name was Q. Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who saved Rome by his waiting tactics against Hannibal; but the one who was associated with Polybius, as pupil and patron, was Q. F. M. Aemilianus, consul in 145 B.C., who served against Macedonia and in Spain. =Góbryes=: one of the seven Persian nobles (Darius being another) who conspired against the usurper Smerdis the Mage. Darius was raised to the throne and Gobryes became one of his lieutenants. =Górgȋas=: of Leontini in Sicily: orator, rhetorical teacher, and sophist, who visited Athens 427 B.C. and subsequently. His style, which was highly artificial, was widely imitated. He is the Gorgias of Plato’s dialogue. =Gorgo=: of Sparta; wife of Leonidas and daughter of Cleomenes I. Stories of her wisdom and sagacity are told by Herodotus (6. 49, 7. 239). =Gylippus=: Spartan general who came to the rescue of Syracuse and chiefly caused the utter collapse of the Athenian attack upon that city. After the fall of Athens (404 B.C.) it was his business to convey to Sparta the 1,500 talents of booty. He opened the seams of the sacks, filched about one-fifth of the amount, but was betrayed by the inventories enclosed. =Harmódius=: a handsome youth of Athens associated with Aristogeiton (the older man) in the assassination of Hipparchus, brother of the despot Hippias in 514 B.C. Though Athens was not liberated till four years later, these tyrannicides were canonized as saviours of their country. =Hecuba=: the aged wife of Priam, and mother of Hector. =Hephaestus=: practically the Greek equivalent of the Latin Vulcan or Fire-God. He is represented as a lame, but sturdy and somewhat humorous deity, a master of smithcraft. =Hēracleides= (=Héraclides=): It is not clear to which person of the name Plutarch refers. The best known was Heracleides Ponticus, a pupil of Plato and a miscellaneous writer. =Hēracleitus= (=Hēraclítus=): physical philosopher of Ephesus, _fl._ _c._ 515 B.C. Famous for the compression of his style, which became so cryptic that he earned the title of the ‘Obscure’. He was something of a hermit and favoured the simple vegetarian life. The ‘weeping philosopher’. =Hermíŏne=: daughter of Menelaus and Helen; married to Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) and jealous of Andromache, whom she tried to put to death. =Hēródŏtus=: _c._ 484-400 B.C.; the so-called ‘Father of History’. He travelled widely in the East and in the Grecian world, and wrote on Lydia, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, and the great Persian war. His desire is to get at the facts, but he displays a naïve fondness for story-telling and for wonders and miracles. =Hēróphȋlus=: of Chalcedon; a most eminent physician and a discoverer in anatomy and physiology; _fl._ _c._ 300 B.C. =Hiero I=: or the Magnificent, despot of Gelon and Syracuse (478-467 B.C.), and most powerful Sicilian of his day. Poets at one time or other associated with his court were Epicharmus, Xenophanes, Simonides, Aeschylus, Pindar, and Bacchylides. =Hierónymus=: tragic and dithyrambic poet of Athens and apparently a writer on poets. =Hippócrătes=: of Cos; the ‘father of medicine’; the most renowned physician and medical teacher and writer of antiquity: _c._ 460-357 B.C. =Hypereides= (=Hyperídes=): Attic orator; patriot, contemporary and, for the most part, supporter of Demosthenes in his anti-Macedonian policy. Put to death by Antipater (q.v.), 322 B.C. An elegant speaker, of dubious private life. =Íbycus=: of Rhegium, _fl._ _c._ 540 B.C. at the court of the despot of Samos; a lyric poet of the erotic type. The proverb, ‘the cranes of Ibycus’, arose from the story that, when being murdered by brigands near Corinth, he invoked a flock of cranes, then flying past, to avenge his death. Plutarch tells the sequel (_Garrulity_). =īno=: or Leucóthea; a mythological personage, daughter of Cadmus and wife of Athamas. One story went that, when she leapt into the sea, she was carried to Corinth by a dolphin. Hence the allusion in the story of Arion. =īphícrătes=: Athenian general in early part of the fourth century B.C. An innovator in tactics and military equipment, noted for his prudence and foresight. =Ischómăchus=: a character of the name appears in Xenophon’s _Oeconomicus_ as lecturing his wife upon the principles of domestic management. Such a philosophically disposed person may be the associate of Socrates mentioned by Plutarch. =Ithacans=: the people of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, one of the Ionian islands, south of Corfu. =Ixíon=: mythical Thessalian king, who made illicit love to Hera, wife of Zeus, and was punished by being fastened to a perpetually revolving wheel in Hades. =Laelius=: C. Laelius Sapiens, friend of Scipio Africanus Minor. Consul 140 B.C. Cicero’s _De Amicitia_ is otherwise named his _Laelius_. Philosopher, orator, and scholar. =Laértes=: aged father of Odysseus; superannuated king of Ithaca. =Lĕchaeum=: the port of Old Corinth, with which it was connected by walls one and a half miles in length. =Lēlántum=: a river of Euboea, flowing through the fertile Lelantine plain (between Chalcis and Eretria), which was long a bone of contention between the two cities. =Leónȋdas=: the famous Spartan king, who so stubbornly held the pass of Thermopylae against the Persians with his ‘Three Hundred’, 480 B.C. =Leptis=: a town in Africa near the modern Tripoli; a Phoenician settlement and afterwards a Roman colony. =Lesches=: one of the post-Homeric (‘Cyclic’) poets, and writer of the _Little Iliad_; a native of Lesbos, _fl._ _c._ 705 B.C. =Leuctra=: Boeotian village; the scene of the great defeat of the Spartans by Epaminondas, 371 B.C. =Livia=: Livia Drusilla, 56 B.C.-A.D. 29. Her first husband was Tiberius Claudius Nero, by whom she was the mother of Tiberius, the future emperor. Married to Augustus (then Octavianus) in 38 B.C., and having no children by him, she was anxious to keep the succession in her own family. A woman of strong character, she exerted a tactful control over Augustus and attempted one more imperious over Tiberius, but failed. =Locri=: Locri Epizephyrii, an important Greek town of South Italy, about the modern Gerace. Its constitutional code was often regarded as a model. =Locris=: a Greek community lying along the north side of the middle of the Corinthian Gulf. =Loxias=: Apollo as God of Oracles. The name was commonly interpreted as ‘Riddling’ or ‘Indirect’. =Lucullus=: Roman conqueror of Mithridates, succeeded in his command by Pompey, 66 B.C. Famous for his wealth and luxury, and particularly for his lavish feasts. A byword for self-indulgence. =Lycéum=: an exercise ground with terraces (‘walks’) and colonnades just outside the wall to the east of Athens. It was here that Aristotle discoursed on the ‘Walk’ (_peripatos_), whence the name ‘Peripatetic’ became applied to his school. =Lycurgus=: (1) the more or less legendary lawgiver and constitution-maker of Sparta. His date and personality are quite uncertain, and he is not improbably as mythical as Heracles. (2) son of Dryas, a legendary Thracian king who resisted the worship of Dionysius and hacked down his sacred plant, the vine. Dionysius punished him with madness, during which he killed his own son, thinking him a vine. The story is much varied in particulars. =Lysander=: Spartan admiral, who won the battle of Aegospotami against the Athenians and concluded the reduction of Athens in 404 B.C. He was afterwards distinguished for his ostentation and arrogance. =Lysias=: orator and professional rhetorician of Athens, distinguished for the purity and lucidity of his diction and his grace of style: _fl._ _c._ 403 B.C. The majority of his 230 speeches were written for litigants. =Lysímăchus=: of Macedonia; became king of Thrace on the partition of Alexander’s empire. A man of powerful physique and an able soldier. Later his territory included the western half of Asia Minor. Killed in battle 281 B.C. =Masinissa=: king of Numidia; first a supporter, then an enemy, of Carthage, he lent great assistance to the Romans from 204 B.C. to 148. His reign was long and he died at ninety. =Meidias= (=Mídias=): an Athenian citizen and bitter enemy of Demosthenes, one of whose best known speeches is a violent, and possibly a rather scurrilous, attack upon him. =Melánthius=: of Athens: an inferior tragic and elegiac poet of worthless character: a contemporary of Aristophanes and Plato. =Meleáger=: legendary prince of Calydon. Having slain his mother’s brothers, he was cursed by her, and thereupon refused to take further part in the war against the Curetes. No offers could induce him to leave his chamber and rout the enemy, until he yielded to the prayers of his wife Cleopatra. =Menander=: chief poet of the Athenian New Comedy (or comedy of manners), 342-291 B.C.; a polished and easy-tempered man of the world. His sententious writings lent themselves to quotation and were much read in schools. To moralizing critics of a later age he was to comedy what Homer was to epic. =Mĕnedémus=: philosopher and statesman of Euboea, of the ‘Megarian’ school. Died _c._ 277 B.C. =Méropë=: the name of several mythological semi-goddesses, mostly connected with the heavenly bodies. =Metellus=: Q. Caecilius Metellus, who successfully conducted the Numidian War against Jugurtha (109 B.C.) until superseded by Marius. A man of high character, military ability, and intellectual culture. =Mētrodórus=: favourite pupil of Epicurus (q.v.) and almost co-master of his school. Died 277 B.C. =Mithridátes=: Mithridates VI, or the Great, king of Pontus 120-63 B.C., a Hellenized oriental famed for his physical and intellectual ability, his ambition and daring; of importance in history for his wars with the Romans under Lucullus and Pompey. He made a special study of poisons and their antidotes. =Mnēsíphȋlus=: Athenian statesman of sound practical ability, taken by Themistocles as his model. It was he who urged Themistocles to force on the battle of Salamis (480 B.C.). In the _Dinner-Party_ Plutarch borrows the name for an imaginary friend of Solon. =Molycréa=: a town just inside the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf on the north side. =Myrōn=: Boeotian sculptor; _fl._ 430 B.C. Best known by his Discobolus and his ‘Cow’. His work included animal forms, and human figures in a state of muscular activity or tension. =Mýrsȋlus=: see Pittacus. =Naucrătis=: a Greek town in the Delta of Egypt, thirty miles from the sea. At first only a trading-station, it was granted privileges of internal self-government by Amasis (q.v.). =Neoptólĕmus=: see Eumenes. =Nestor=: the typical wise old man of the _Iliad_. =Nicander=: poet and physician of Colophon; _fl._ in earlier half of second century B.C. Two of his poems are extant: the _Theriaca_ on venomous animals, and the _Alexipharmaca_ (or ‘_Antidotes_‘) on poisons and their remedies. The verse in itself is poor. =Nícias=: (1) Athenian general in the calamitous expedition against Syracuse (415-413 B.C.). A man of wealth, but religious to the point of disastrous superstition; a commander of experience, though wanting in promptitude and self-reliance. He was put to death by the victors. (2) painter of Athens, _fl._ _c._ 310 B.C., particularly noted for his chiaroscuro and for improvements in encaustic painting. =Nilóxĕnus=: a character probably invented by Plutarch, with a name geographically suitable. =Numa=: Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome, famed for his piety and the excellence of his legislation. Much of his history is legendary. =Olympias=: wife of Philip (q.v.) and mother of Alexander. An imperious and vindictive woman, with good reasons for jealousy, who often figures in Macedonian feuds. =Olynthus=: a Greek town on the Chalcidic peninsula, south of Thessalonica. =Ómphălë=: queen of Lydia, to whom Heracles was for a time enslaved and for whom he played an effeminate part. In a sense she played the Delilah to his Samson. =Orchómĕnus=: a very ancient town in Boeotia. =Oromazdes=: = Ahuramazda, the great God of the Zoroastrians; deity of light and good, as opposed to Ahrimanes. =Pándărus=: a Lycian warrior on the Trojan side, famous for his skill as an archer. =Panthéa=: beautiful wife of Abradatas, king of Susa. Cyrus, who had captured her, showed her such respect that Abradatas came over to his side. =Parménȋdes=: philosopher and legislator of Elea, _fl._ _c._ 476 B.C. His writings were in the hexameter verse then usual as the vehicle of literary philosophy. =Parménio=: general under Philip and Alexander, and right-hand lieutenant of the latter. Accused of taking part in a conspiracy against his chief, he was assassinated at the age of seventy in 330 B.C. =Parrhásius=: painter of Ephesus, domiciled at Athens, _c._ 400 B.C.; famed for his accurate drawing and proportion. As a man he was arrogant and luxurious. =Pāsíphaë=: (legendary): wife of Minos of Crete; enamoured of a bull and mother of the Minotaur. =Patróclus=: the ‘squire’ and beloved friend of Achilles. Killed by Hector in battle, and avenged by Achilles. =Peísistrătus=: a younger relative of Solon; intrigued himself into the position of despot of Athens 560 B.C. He was twice expelled, but re-established himself. A highly capable ruler, beautifier of Athens, and a lover of literature. =Pēleides= (-=ī=-): (i.e. ‘son of Peleus’) = Achilles. =Péleus=: aged father of Achilles; superannuated king in Thessaly. =Periander=: despot of Corinth, _c._ 625-585 B.C. An able and powerful ruler, patron of literature and art, generally (but not invariably) included among the Seven Sages. His early mildness is commonly reported to have passed into tyranny (see Thrasybulus). His wife was Melissa. Pericles: the highest name among what may be called ‘Prime Ministers’ of Athens. His career may be dated 470-429 B.C., but his leadership became most pronounced about 444 B.C. A man of large conceptions, brilliant oratorical powers, and philosophic tastes, but of an aristocratic and exclusive temperament. =Perséphŏnë=: daughter of Demeter, wife of Pluto, and therefore, in one of her aspects, Queen of the Dead. =Perseus=: king of Macedonia, on whom the Romans made war in 171 B.C. At first victorious or equal, he was defeated at Pydna by L. Aemilius Paulus 168 B.C. He was carried to Rome and lived for some years at Alba. A weak, vacillating and parsimonious monarch. =Petrónius=: Titus (or Gaius) Petronius, the famous ‘arbiter of taste’ under Nero and director of his pleasures. Whether he was the author of the famous _Satyricon_ is doubtful. =Phaeácians=: seafaring inhabitants of the rich and fertile island of Phaeacia, traditionally identified with Corfu, but possibly Crete. When Odysseus arrived at the island on his raft he was hospitably entertained by King Alcinous and sent home to Ithaca by him on a ship. =Phaedra=: wife of Theseus and step-mother of Hippolytus, of whom she became enamoured. The allusion in Plutarch refers to the fondness of Hippolytus for hunting. =Phálăris=: despot of Agrigentum in Sicily _c._ 570 B.C. His name was in some legends proverbial for cruelty, and with him is associated the legend of roasting his victims in a brazen bull. Put he is sometimes represented otherwise and as a student of letters and philosophy. =Pheidias= (=Phíd=-) of Athens, the most eminent sculptor of antiquity: died 432 B.C. He is best known for his work upon the Parthenon and his colossal statue of Zeus at Olympia. =Phérae=: a town in Thessaly, somewhat west of the modern Volo, which became dominant under the despots Jason and Alexander (q.v.). =Philadolphus=: see Ptolemy (1). =Philémōn=: Athenian poet of the New Comedy, reckoned second only to Menander. Lived _c._ 360-262 B.C., and wrote ninety-seven plays. =Philétas=: of Cos, _c._ 300 B.C.; elegiac poet and critic, tutor of Ptolemy II. His thinness was a matter of jest for the comedians. =Philip=: 382-336 B.C. king of Macedon, father of Alexander, and, in a large measure, conqueror of Greece. Demosthenes’ _Philippics_ and other speeches were directed against him. An able, hard-working, ambitious, and rather unscrupulous man; a hard drinker and a sensualist, especially fond of rude jest, but with intellectual tastes. =Philíppȋdes=: one of the better Athenian poets of the New Comedy; _fl._ _c._ 335 B.C. At first he attacked the Macedonian rulers, but later became a friend of Lysimachus (q.v.). =Philóchŏrus=: Athenian writer on the history, antiquities, and legends of his country, and on miscellaneous subjects: _fl._ _c._ 300-260 B.C. =Philócrătes=: Athenian orator, first a supporter, then an opponent, of Demosthenes. His policy was consistently to abet the pretensions of Philip of Macedon, who had bribed him lavishly, to the detriment of Athens. He was ultimately impeached and compelled to go into exile, 330 B.C. =Philoctétos=: Greek hero (in the expedition to Troy) left desolate on the island of Lemnos, where he suffered deprivations and the agonies of a gangrened foot. =Philopoemen=: (1) the most distinguished Greek soldier of his day; head of the Achaean League several times from 208 B.C.; a man of culture and high character. (2) controlling minister of Attalus II (q.v.). =Philótas=: there were several Macedonians of the name in the service of Alexander. The two chief were (1) the son of Parmenio, a favourite of Alexander, but found guilty of conspiracy and executed; (2) a general who subsequently became governor of Cilicia. =Philotímus=: a distinguished physician and writer on medicine of the date of Erasistratus and Herophilus (q.v.), _c._ 300 B.C. =Philóxĕnus=: a dithyrambic poet of high repute: _fl._ at Athens 400 B.C. He thence moved to the court of Dionysius (q.v.), by whom he is said to have been imprisoned for his scathing criticism on the despot’s verses. =Phóciōn=: 402-317 B.C. An upright Athenian general and statesman, who favoured, though probably not in an unpatriotic spirit, the submission of Athens to the Macedonian power under Alexander (335) and Antipater (q.v.). He was frequently opposed to Demosthenes, and was put to death by his countrymen on a charge of treason. =Phōcýlȋdes=: epic and elegiac poet of Miletus, _fl._ _c._ 530 B.C. Many of his lines passed into current maxims, and were so intended. =Phoenix=: a fugitive kindly received by Peleus and entrusted with the bringing-up of his son Achilles. He had quarrelled with his own father, whose young mistress he had corrupted at the request of his jealous mother. =Pindar=: of Thebes, the most eminent lyrist of Greece, composer of songs, choral and processional odes, dirges, &c.; lived _c._ 522-442 B.C. =Píttăcus=: of Mytilene, _c._ 650-569. Contemporary of Sappho. During the struggles of the oligarchical and popular parties he was appointed by the latter ‘elective autocrat’ and legislator. The chief representative on the other side had been Myrsilus. A philosophic poet and the originator of moral maxims. =Plato=: the aristocratic and cultured philosopher of Athens, follower of Socrates, founder of the Academy, and writer of the Dialogues which go under his name. =Pólĕmo=: (1) of Athens, who in his youth abandoned profligate habits for the cult of the Platonic philosophy under the influence of Xenocrates (q.v.), whom he succeeded 315 B.C. (2) a Stoic philosopher, traveller, and geographer, who wrote copiously on inscriptions, &c.; _fl._ _c._ 195 B.C. =Polýbius=: Greek historian from Arcadia, carried to Italy by the Romans 167 B.C., and taken under the patronage of Q. Fabius Maximus and Scipio Aemilianus. He accompanied Scipio against Carthage and in Spain. Wrote a sound, useful, unimaginative history of the years 220-146 B.C. A practical statesman and a student of the military art. =Polycleitus= (-=clít=-): of Argos, _fl._ _c._ 450-412 B.C.; a sculptor of the first rank, particularly distinguished for his representation of human forms, to which he imparted his ideals of strength and beauty according to a ‘canon of proportions’. These were best typified in his _Doryphorus_ (‘spear-bearer’), which was itself sometimes called ‘the Canon’. His chief colossal statue was the chryselephantine Hera of Argos. =Pontus=: in two senses: (1) the Black Sea; (2) a province or region on the eastern half of the south coast of that sea. =Praxítĕles=: the second greatest name in Athenian sculpture; _fl._ _c._ 365 B.C. He is the head of the ‘later’ (or more graceful) Attic school, Pheidias (q.v.) representing the earlier, more massive and majestic. He particularly excelled with his statues of Aphrodite (e.g. the ‘Venus of Cnidos’). =Priam=: aged king of Troy, father of Hector, whose dead body he came to Achilles to ransom. =Priénë=: an Ionian Greek town in Asia Minor a little south of Ephesus; the home of Bias. =Pródȋcus=: of Ceos, sophist and rhetorical teacher; a contemporary of Plato and a frequent visitor to Athens. His bodily weakness was notorious. =Prométheus=: mythical semi-deity, gifted with great foresight; a benefactor of mankind by giving them fire stolen from heaven (an offence for which he was cruelly punished by Zeus), and by the invention of the civilizing arts. His name was commonly interpreted ‘Fore-thinker’. =Ptolemy=: (1) Ptolemy II (Philadelphus), king of Egypt 285-247 B.C. (2) Ptolemy III (Euergetes), king of Egypt 247-222 B.C. (3) Ptolemy IV (Philopator), king 222-205 B.C.; a vicious and sensual monarch, ruled by his minister Sosibius. (4) Ptolemy V (Epiphanes), king 205-181 B.C. See _Aristomenes_. It was in the early part of his reign that Egypt became a Roman protectorate. He came to the throne at the age of four. =Publius Nigidius=: contemporary of Cicero; a man of great scientific and mathematical learning, as became a Pythagorean. =Pūpius Piso=: Roman orator, and consul in 61 B.C.; a supporter of Clodius and therefore hostile to Cicero. =Pyrrhus=: king of Epirus, called in by the people of Tarentum against the Romans. After a dearly won victory in 280 B.C. he sent his eloquent minister to Rome to offer humiliating terms of peace. These were rejected, and after a practically equal contest he retired from Italy. =Pythagoras=: of Samos, _fl._ _c._ 540-520 B.C. He had apparently travelled in the East and acquired, besides mathematical knowledge (in which he made some advances), mystical theological views and probably also his doctrine of the transmigration of souls. He migrated to Croton in South Italy, and there became the founder of a close and aristocratic philosophical brotherhood, to whom the word of the master was sufficient (_ipse dixit_). Many legends gathered about him and a mystical interpretation was put upon his rather compressed maxims. =Pythian=: = ‘belonging to Pytho’, i.e. to Delphi, the seat of the chief oracle of Apollo. =Rhium=: the promontory on the south side of the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, the north promontory being Antirrhium. =Rusticus=: L. Junius Arulenus Rusticus, a Roman noble of the Stoic school and champion of liberty, so far as that was possible under the Roman emperors. Put to death by Domitian (emperor A.D. 81-96). =Samius=: lyrist and writer of epigrams at the Macedonian court, _c._ 300 B.C. =Scipio=: (1) P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major; the brilliant and almost ideal Roman general who conquered Hannibal in 202 B.C. (2) P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor, who completed the conquest of Carthage 146 B.C.; a student of letters and philosophy. =Scirōn=: a spot on the Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis. =Scyros=: island in the Aegean off north-east of Euboea. Here Achilles was for a time hidden by his mother in woman’s dress, and occupied in feminine tasks to keep him from the dangers of Troy. =Seleucus=: called Callinicus (the ‘Victorious’); king of Syria 246-226 B.C. He was defeated by Antiochus with the help of Gauls (= Galatians) at Ancyra, and it was for a time thought that he had perished in the rout. He managed, however, to retain his kingdom. =Silániōn=: Athenian portrait sculptor _c._ 324 B.C. His _Jocasta_ represented her as dying, her pallor being realistically rendered by the unworthy device of mixing silver with bronze. =Siléni=: a class of tipsy satyrs associated with Dionysus. _The_ Silenus was in a sense the Falstaff of Greek legend. =Simónȋdes=: a most distinguished poet of Ceos, writer of elegies, choral and processional odes, epigrams, and drinking songs (556-467 B.C.). He spent part of his life as a kind of court poet in Thessaly and at Syracuse, and visited Athens. His compositions were of a high order, and his moral maxims much in vogue, but he was notorious for worldliness and a love of money. =Sísyphus=: legendary king of Corinth; type of fraudulent and criminal cunning; punished in Hades by being compelled to roll a stone up a hill for ever and never establishing it at the top. =Socrates=: the Athenian philosopher (468-399 B.C.), from whose thinking most of the later schools were in some way descended. His object was to bring philosophy down to earth, and to arrive at true and universal definitions. His simple character, his whimsical irony, and his dialectical skill formed the groundwork for many stories. His method was conversational and non-didactic. He wrote nothing, and what we know of him is due to his disciples Plato and Xenophon, and to later writers. =Solōn=: of Athens, _c._ 638-558 B.C.; aristocrat, trader, traveller, poet and thinker. Chosen at a time of political and financial crisis as mediator between parties in Attica, and as constitution-maker, he behaved with strict impartiality and self-effacement. We may believe that he visited Egypt, but his intercourse with Croesus (q.v.) is of doubtful warrant. Author of much proverbial wisdom. =Sophocles=: 496-406 B.C.; second in date, and perhaps in merit, of three great Athenian tragedians; a genial and practical man of the world. =Sótădes=: a poet at Alexandria _c._ 280 B.C. He wrote songs and satires of a lascivious kind. One account states that in consequence of his abuse he was thrown into the sea in a leaden chest. =Speusippus=: of Athens, nephew and disciple of Plato, and his successor as head of the Academy (347-339 B.C.); a writer on ethical and dialectical subjects. His character is said to have excelled his intellect. =Spínthărus=: the best known person of the name was an inferior tragic poet of Heraclea on the Black Sea satirized by Aristophanes and other comedians. =Stilpo=: a high-minded and sane philosopher of great dialectical acuteness. Founder of the Megarian school, which made a cult of virtue while denying the possibility of knowledge. See also under Demetrius. =Sulla=: the distinguished Roman general, 138-78 B.C. He took charge of the war against Mithridates in 87 B.C., his capture of Athens taking place in the next year. His love of pleasure resulted in the pimpled face referred to in Plutarch’s article on _Garrulity_. Caecilia Metella was his fourth wife. =Sýbăris=: the oldest Greek settlement in the southernmost part of Italy, once large, prosperous, and a by-word for effeminate luxury (whence ‘sybarite’); afterwards completely overthrown and destroyed, its place being taken by Thurii (q.v.). =Taenărum=: now Matapan; cape at the end of the middle prong of the Peloponnese. =Télĕphus=: king of Mysia at the time of the Trojan war. He was wounded by Achilles, and could only be cured by ‘that which had wounded him’. The remedy turned out to be the rust of Achilles’ spear. =Tháïs=: a witty and beautiful courtesan of Athens, first associated with Alexander during his Asiatic campaigns and then with Ptolemy in Egypt. =Thales=: of Miletus, _c._ 635-555 B.C. Famous as a physical philosopher, mathematician, and shrewd practical man. He is regularly mentioned first among the Seven Sages. =Theaetétus=: a high-minded Athenian youth, eager for knowledge, who plays his part in Plato’s dialogue of that name. =Theágĕnes=: Theban general at Chaeronea (338 B.C.). =Theánō=: wife or pupil (or both) of Pythagoras (q.v.), herself a writer on philosophy and a pattern of virtue. =Themistŏcles=: became political leader at Athens 483 B.C., and commanded the Athenian contingent at the battle of Salamis. Subsequently (471 B.C.) this extremely able, but apparently not extremely honest, man was ostracised. His last days were spent in the service of Persia. His son Diophantus is of no note. =Theócritus=: of Chios, rhetorician and sophist, noted for his caustic wit. The Antigonus who put him to death was Antigonus the ‘One-Eyed’. =Theógnis=: elegiac poet of the sententious order. He flourished at Megara _c._ 550-540 B.C. Amid the feuds of his country he sides with the aristocrats, and allusions to political injustice are frequent. Many current maxims of proverbial wisdom were fathered on ‘Theognis’ as a matter of course. =Theōn=: painter of Samos, contemporary of Apelles (q.v.) and Alexander; spoken of by Pliny as ‘next to the first’. =Theophrastus=: of Lesbos and afterwards of Athens; disciple and successor of Aristotle as head of the Peripatetics (322 B.C.). An encyclopaedic writer on logic, physics, history, biology, zoology, &c. His best-known work is his _Characters_. =Theopompus=: king of Sparta, _fl._ _c._ 750 B.C. To his reign belonged the change of the form of government by the establishment of the popular ‘ephors’ to control the royal power. =Thersítes=: misshapen and virulent demagogue in the Greek army before Troy. =Thĕtis=: sea-goddess; mother of Achilles. =Thrasybúlus=: despot of Miletus, contemporary and friend of Periander (q.v.), over whom he exercised a bad influence, as in advising him to ‘cut down the tall poppies’. =Thúrii=: Greek city in South Italy on the west side of the Gulf of Tarentum, noted for its special democratic system. =Tīmágĕnes=: an Alexandrian or Syrian rhetorician and historian. He taught and wrote at Rome under Augustus, whose friendship he obtained, losing it, however, through his caustic freedom. =Tīmocléa=: of Thebes. Plutarch tells of her noble and daring spirit in his _Life of Alexander_ (c. 12). =Tīmomăchus=: painter of Byzantium, first century B.C.; particularly famed for his _Ajax_ and _Medea_, which were bought by Julius Caesar. Medea was represented meditating the murder of her children. =Timóthëus=: (1) an able and spirited Athenian general, who obtained several rather roving successes, chiefly against the Lacedaemonians. Something of a free lance; of popular character and considerable culture; _fl._ 378-354 B.C. (2) poet and musician of Miletus, settled at Athens; _fl._ _c._ 400-360 B.C. His poems were mainly dithyrambs (high-flown and wordy compositions) or cognate lyrics. His music, at first ill received on account of its vulgarizing innovations, became immensely popular. =Tissaphernes=: Persian satrap of lower Asia Minor. See Alcibiades. =Tīthónus=: a mortal beloved of Eos (Aurora), who obtained for him immortality, but forgot to obtain him immortal youth. =Troezen=: a town in the east of the Peloponnese near the entrance of the Saronic Gulf. =Tyndareus’ sons=: Castor and Pollux, the traditional preservers of seamen. =Typhōn=: = Set; Egyptian malignant deity; brother, enemy, and slayer of Osiris. =Xenócrătes=: 396-314 B.C.: philosopher from Chalcedon, disciple of Plato, and philosophic teacher and writer. His earnestness of character and application to study atoned for his lack of the Graces. Became head of the Academic school next but one after Plato. =Xenóphănes=: philosopher of Colophon, and afterwards of Elea in Italy, in later part of sixth century B.C. Noted for his high conception of a Deity as neither anthropomorphic nor subject to human passions. His doctrines were embodied in hexameter verse. =Xenophōn=: of Athens; the well-known historian, and leader of the retreat of the ‘Ten Thousand’ as recorded in his _Anabasis_. A philosophical adherent of Socrates and a voluminous writer. Lived _c._ 444-359 B.C. =Zacýnthus= = Zante, the southernmost of the Ionian islands. =Zéno=: (1) of Citium in Cyprus and subsequently of Athens; founder of the Stoic philosophy; a man of simple, if rather dour, character, and capable of an apt retort: _fl._ _c._ 270 B.C. A writer on ethical, physical, and other philosophic subjects. (2) Philosopher of Elea; disciple of Parmenides (q.v.); upholder of popular liberty against a usurping despot. APPENDIX NOTES ON THE GREEK TEXT 4 D ἐνίοτε γὰρ εἰδότες αἰσθομένοις μᾶλλον αὐτοῖς τοῦτο λεγόντων. Read ... εἰδότες, (ἢ) αἰσθόμενοι ἢ καὶ ἄλλων αὐτοῖς τοῦτο λεγόντων. 5 C ἵνα μάθῃς ὅτι τῶν ἀναξίων τὰ τίμια οὐδὲν διαφέρει. The sense requires ἀξίων ‘cheap’. 6 C πρὸς δὲ τούτοις τί ἄν τοὺς παῖδας ... καλὸν γάρ τοι κτλ. The cause of the lacuna is obvious if we read τί ἄν τοὺς παῖδας (καλὸν διδάσκοιεν;) καλὸν γάρ τοι κτλ. 7 B ἕως ἔτι μέμνημαι τῆς παιδείας. Rather ... (ταύτης) τῆς παιδείας. 7 F τὸ μὲν γὰρ εὐγενῶς εὐτυχεῖν ἀνδρός, τὸ δ᾽ ἀνεπιφθόνως εὐηνίου ἀνθρώπου. Read τὸ μὲν γὰρ εὐγενῶς ἀτυχεῖν ἀνδρός, τὸ δ᾽ ἀνεπιφθόνως εὐθηνεῖν ἀνθρώπου. 8 B καὶ ἀπὸ πηγῆς τὴν ἐπιστήμην τηρεῖν συμβέβηκεν. Read ἀπὸ πείνης ... 8 D ἰσχνὸς δὲ στρατιώτης πολεμικῶν ἀγώνων ἐθὰς ἀθλητῶν καὶ πολεμίων φάλαγγας διωθεῖ. Read ... ἀθλητῶν καταπιμέλων ... 8 F καὶ ταῦτα μὲν δὴ τῷ λόγῳ παρεφορτισάμην, ἵν᾽ ἐφεξῆς καὶ τἄλλα ... συνάψω. Read ... νῦν δ᾽ ἐφεξῆς. 11 A ἵνα δὲ γέλωτα παράσχῃ τοῖς ἄλλοις, αὐτὸς πολὺν χρόνον ἔκλαυσεν. We require the antithesis γέλωτα (βραχὺν) παράσχῃ. 12 E ὅτι δεῖ τὸν βίον ἐπιτηδεύειν καὶ μὴ δεῖν δεσμῷ προσάπτειν. Read ... καὶ μηδενὶ δεσμῷ ... 13 B ὡς ἐκ λυρικῆς τέχνης. The sense requires νευροσπαστικῆς, to which νευρικῆς may be equivalent. 14 C τὸ μὲν οὖν πάσας τὰς προειρημένας ... συμπεριλαβεῖν εὐχῆς ἴσως ἢ παραινέσεως ἔργον ἐστί. The word most easily lost would be (εὐημερίας). Also (μἂλλον) is to be supplied. 44 B ἐν τῷ καταφρονεῖν τιθέμενοι καὶ τὸ σεμνὸν ὑπεροψίᾳ διὼκοντες. Read ἐν τῷ καταφρονεῖν (τὸ φρονεῖν) τιθέμενοι ... 46 B ᾠδήν τινα πεποιημένην ἐφ᾽ ἁρμονίας. Read ἐφ᾽ ἁρμονίας (νέας) or the like. 74 A τοιοῦτον γὰρ ἡ θεραπευτικὴ παρρησία ζητεῖ τρόπον, ἡ δὲ πρακτικὴ τὸν ἐναντίον. The sense requires ἡ δὲ ταρακτικὴ ... 152 A εἰ μὴ μόνος εἴη φρόνιμος. Probably εἰ ἐμμόνως εἴη ... 152 D σὺ δὲ δεινὸς εἶ κοράκων ἐπαΐειν καὶ κολοιῶν, τῆς δὲ σοῦ φωνῆς οὐκ ἀκριβῶς ἐξακούεις. For τῆς δὲ σοῦ (δεσου) read τῆς (δεδουσ i.e.) δ᾽ Αἰδοῦς ... 158 D δεινὸν μὲν οὖν ... καὶ τὸ γεωργίας αὐτῇ. The sense requires αὐτῆς. 159 D ὥσπερ ἐν μυλῶνι τῷ σώματι τὴν ψυχὴν ἐγκεκαλυμμένην. Read ἐγκεκλῃμένην. 160 F ἐπὶ τὸν τόπον οἷ προσέμελλε. Read προσέκελλε. 163 D ... ἀπαντῆσαι μόνον ... θαλάττῃ ἕπεσθαι κτλ. The sense would be given by ... ἀπαντῆσαι μόνον (θαρρῆσαι, τὸ δ᾽ ἀπαλλάττεσθαι, καὶ ἐκ τῆς) θαλάττης ἕπεσθαι κτλ. 504 B ὅτι πρεσβύτης ἐστὶν ἐν Ἀθήναις παρὰ πότον σιωπᾶν δυνάμενος. Rather ... πρεσβύτης (εἷς) ... 504 C ἀλλ᾽ ὅμως εἰπὼν καὶ ἀναφωνήσας ἐκεῖνο περὶ αὑτοῦ τὸ ... Probably ἀλλ᾽ ὅμως (τὸ τοῦ Ὀδυσσέως) εἰπὼν κτλ. 513 A Φιλίππου γράψαντος εἰ δέχονται τῇ πόλει αὐτόν, εἰς χάρτην ΟΥ μέγα γράψαντες ἀπέστειλαν. There would be more point in ... εἰς χάρτην (τὴν αὐτὴν) ... Moreover, what they wrote was simply Ο. 514 F τὸ γὰρ μάτην καὶ διακενῆς οὐχ ἧττον ἐν τοῖς λόγοις ἢ τοῖς ἔργοις ἔστιν. Read ... οὐχ ἧττον (εὐλαβητέον) ἐν ... 515 D ὅσσον ὕδωρ κατ᾽ Ἀλίζονος ἢ δρυὸς ἀμφὶ πέτηλα. Perhaps ὅσσον ὕδωρ καταχεῖ νότος ἦ ... ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). ○ Text that was in bold face is enclosed by equals signs (=bold=). ○ Page references printed in the margin of the book have been moved into the paragraphs near where they appear, contained in square brackets, and begun with the word "Sidenote". ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are referenced. End of Project Gutenberg's Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I., by Plutarch *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTED ESSAYS OF PLUTARCH, VOL. I. *** Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed. 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Author: Plutarch Translator: A. O. Prickard Release date: August 5, 2020 [eBook #62858] Most recently updated: October 18, 2024 Language: English Credits: Produced by Turgut Dincer, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTED ESSAYS OF PLUTARCH, VOL. II. *** Selected Essays of Plutarch SELECTED ESSAYS OF PLUTARCH VOL. II TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTION BY A. O. PRICKARD ‘But the Author in whom he delighted most was Plutarch, of whose works he was lucky enough to possess the worthier half; if the other had perished Plutarch would not have been a popular writer, but he would have held a higher place in the estimation of the judicious.’—SOUTHEY, _The Doctor_, chapter vi, p. 1. OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1918 PREFACE This volume covers about one-eighth part of the miscellaneous works of Plutarch known as the _Moralia_, much the same quantity as is contained in Professor Tucker’s volume of this series which appeared in 1913. All the pieces now offered are in the form of dialogue, except the short treatise _On Superstition_, which seemed to justify its inclusion by a certain affinity of thought. The text followed is that of Wyttenbach, issued by the Clarendon Press in 1795-1800, or rather a text compounded of the Greek text there printed, his own critical notes and revision of the old Latin version, his commentary, where one exists, and his posthumous Index of Greek words used by Plutarch (1830). A few corrections by C. F. Hermann, Emperius, Madvig, and other scholars, have been introduced, for many of which I am indebted, in the first place, as I have acknowledged more particularly, to M. G. N. Bernardakis, the accomplished editor of the _Moralia_ in the Teubner series (1888-96). A very few fresh corrections, mostly on obvious points, have been admitted. The notes at the foot of the page are intended to show all deviations from Wyttenbach’s text, so constituted, or to give references to the authors of passages quoted by Plutarch; there may be a few exceptions, where an illustrative reference or an obvious explanation is given. For the plays and fragments of the Tragic Poets reference is made to Dindorf’s _Poetae Scenici_; for Pindar and other lyric poets, to Bergk’s _Poetae Lyrici Graeci_ (ed. 1900); for the fragments of Heraclitus, to Bywater’s _Heracliti Ephesii reliquiae_ (Oxford, 1877); those of other early philosophers will be found in their places in Diels’ _Vorsokratiker_ (1903) or other collections. To four of the dialogues I have with some reluctance prefixed a short running analysis. It is always a pity to anticipate what the author puts clearly before us;[1] but there is here a real practical difficulty, even for a careful reader, in being sure who is the speaker for the time being; and as he is often introduced by the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘he’, no typographical device quite serves. The other dialogues seem to explain themselves sufficiently. There is no attempt to supply a commentary; but it is hoped that the full index of proper names (which are very numerous) will enable a reader to distinguish those as to whom it is worth his while to inquire further from those who are only of passing interest. I have given here a good many references to other works of Plutarch, but more may usefully be sought, for instance in such an index as is appended to Clough’s edition of the _Lives_. I may perhaps be allowed to mention that the dialogue _On the Face which appears on the Orb of the Moon_ was translated by me, and tentatively published in 1911, with the hope of obtaining some helpful criticism. Having received several kind notices, and in particular a very full one in _Hermathena_ by Dr. L. G. Purser, to which I am deeply indebted, I have now ventured to reproduce this dialogue in somewhat fuller form than the others, and to retain some of my original notes. I should add that I have no competence to deal with any scientific matters as such. I have added two longer notes on special points of interest. Sir Thomas Browne, writing in 1681-2 to his son Edward who was by way of translating the _Lives_ of Plutarch, and in fact accomplished two of them, assumes that he will in the main follow Amyot’s version, which North had followed absolutely, and suggests that, with some corrections and the removal of obsolete words, North’s work might still serve ‘especially with gentlemen, who if the expression bee playne looke not into criticisme’. ‘If you have the Greek Plutarke,’ he writes, ‘have also the Latin adjoyned unto it, so you may consult either upon occasion, though you apply yourself to translate out of French, and the English translation may be sometimes helpful.’ Very likely an acceptable version of the _Moralia_ might now be produced out of Amyot and Philemon Holland, a racy and scholarly translator from the Greek, with the original and the old Latin at hand for reference. But Dr. Edward Browne was a physician, of little leisure and of delicate health, and it might hardly be respectful to Plutarch to adopt this procedure now; indeed it seems to recall that of ‘the dog’ in the proverb, who ‘drinks from the Nile’, running as he drinks, always with an eye on the crocodiles. However this may be, some indulgence may fairly be claimed by a translator of an author, who, however straight-forward himself, abounds in allusion and latent quotation, and also in difficulties of text not of his own making, and upon whom no commentary exists. I will mention, for the sake of clearness, two instances as to which I have troubled myself and, I fear, others a good deal: In the dialogue _On the Genius of Socrates_, chap. iii, end (577 A), the speaker says that his brother Epaminondas is keeping out of the patriotic enterprise in hand, on the ground that the more hot-headed members of the party will not stop short of a general massacre and the murder of many of the leading citizens. I have followed the Latin version in so rendering the words καὶ διαφθεῖραι πολλοὺς τῶν διαφερόντων. But I have felt some doubt—needlessly, I think—whether the Greek participle would bear this meaning, and also whether the sense so given is strong and suitable. Wyttenbach felt doubts too, for in his posthumous _Index_, s.v. διαφέρω, the rendering given is ‘hostes vel amici’, i.e. ‘friends or foes’. The sense is excellent, but seems hardly to be in the Greek; probably it was a mere query or jotting. The Teubner editor prints τῶν ἰδίᾳ διαφόρων ὄντων, i.e. ‘those with whom they had private differences’, giving Cobet’s name for the last two words. I have not been able to trace the reference in Cobet, but in _Novae Lectiones_, p. 565, he examines instances where he thinks that ἰδίᾳ should be supplied or suppressed, as the case may be, before compounds of διά. The sense seems good, but too special to be introduced into a text without cogent evidence, since, once given currency, it is difficult for a future critic to go back upon it. Meanwhile, in Wyttenbach’s note on ii, 75 A, he collects many instances where οἱ διάφοροι is used by Plutarch for ‘the enemy’, ‘the other party’, and τῶν διαφερόντων may have grown out of τῶν διαφόρων with τῶν repeated. I have thought it the more peaceable course to preserve the old rendering. I only quote this instance, which is of no great importance but is of some, as one where a _Variorum_ editor would have stated at length and evaluated the possible alternatives. That a translator should do so is perhaps a case of ‘putting the cart before the horse’. The other instance is one of real interest, where the problem is perhaps insoluble upon our present knowledge. In the long dialogue _On the Cessation of the Oracles_, c. 20 (420 c.), where Cleombrotus has been pressing a view that there may be daemons with a long, but yet a limited, term of existence, against the Epicureans, whose own strange theory of _Eidola_ he derides, Ammonius replies in words which appear thus in the Latin: ‘Recte, inquit, mihi pronunciare videtur Theophrastus, quid enim obstat quin sententiam gravissimam et philosophiae convenientissimam recipiamus dicentis: opinionem de Daemonibus, si reiciatur, multa eorum simul abolere quae fieri possunt demonstratione autem carent; _sin admittatur multa secum trahere impossibilia et quae non exstiterint_.’ Amyot and others write ‘Cleombrotus’ for ‘Theophrastus’, a change which, in view of Plutarch’s carelessness as to personal names, seems not unlikely, and helps a little. No doubt Theophrastus is quoted, but his name need not have been mentioned, and may have been brought into the text in the wrong place. The absurdity of the words which I have given in italics seems evident, and I have returned to a suggestion of Xylander,[2] by introducing a negative before πολλά, assuming that Theophrastus is quoted, not for any opinion about daemons, but for a canon of what is logically ‘probable’. More subtle solutions are suggested, which could not be discussed here properly: the question seems too intricate to be settled by a translator as he goes on his way. We really want to know what Theophrastus said. The remarks on the absence of a commentary do not apply to the dialogue on _Instances of Delay in Divine Punishment_, fully annotated by Wyttenbach in 1772, nor to the essay _On Superstition_ and the greater part of _The E at Delphi_, which are dealt with in his continuous commentary. Nor should I omit to mention the great help afforded by Kepler’s notes on the _Face in the Moon_ and his scholarly translation. The large number of poetical quotations in Plutarch often stop a translator’s hand. Wherever it is possible, I have turned to standard versions: for Homer to that of Worsley completed by Conington, for Pindar’s extant Odes to that of Bishop George Moberly, which it has been an especial pleasure to use; for some lines of the _Cyclops_ of Euripides I have been fortunate enough to draw upon Shelley. There remain a good many fragments, some of them of real poetical quality, and some jingling oracles and the like; for the latter doggerel is the proper vehicle, for the former the best attainable doggerel must serve. The range of Plutarch’s poetical quotations seems strangely limited considering their number. All are Greek, and most from the older poets; indeed, with the exception of a few from the New Comedy, nearly all might have been used by Plato. Those from the Tragedians are always to the point, but he does not appear to care from which of the three he is borrowing.[3] Homer and Hesiod always bring a welcome flavour of an older world. Perhaps Pindar is the poet whom he quotes with most hearty appreciation. Though he has given us many new poetical fragments, he introduces us to few, if any, new poets. Of Bacchylides there are only two slight quotations in all Plutarch’s works. A single reference to a passage of Horace is all that shows a knowledge of the existence of Roman poetry. Southey’s comparison between the _Moralia_ and the _Lives_ need not be pressed; it is the scholar’s preference for the rare, which is his by privilege, over the popular. But it is well to realize, as it is easy to do with the help of indices, that the author’s hand is one in both. It is agreed that the _Lives_ belong to Plutarch’s later years, and were written at Chaeroneia, under the limitations of his own library; the several books appeared at intervals, of what length we cannot say.[4] The few indications of date mentioned in the introductions to the dialogues now before us suggest the later part of Vespasian’s reign or the years nearly following it, say from A.D. 80 on. The dialogue on the _Instances of Delay in Divine Punishment_ from its simpler psychology and demonology, and perhaps from some crudity in style, suggests a date earlier than that of some of the others. Dr. Max Adler, in his lucid and learned dissertation, has established the close connexion between the _Face in the Moon_ and the _Cessation of the Oracles_, and thinks the former to have been the earlier, and to have been utilized for the latter piece.[5] Montaigne, who knew his Plutarch up and down, has said that he is one of the authors whom he likes to take after the manner of the Danaids,[6] which may be described as a method of ‘dip and waste’. You may dip anywhere, as you may into the pages of _The Doctor_, and be sure of finding something which you would wish to remember; but you may also find, on re-reading the same passage, that you have not remembered it at all, so that the waste is continual. The freshness need not be impaired by a little more system; indeed it would be enhanced, at least for the dialogues, for this reason, that they all represent real conversations between real persons, and it is worth our while to put together our impressions about each. The fullest materials for such an attempt will be found in the _Symposiacs_ or dialogues over wine.[7] The _Symposiacs_ are arranged in nine books, each of which contains ten conversations of unequal length, but all short, except the last which has fifteen. On the other hand nine, viz. four of the fourth book and five of the last, are missing, only the titles being preserved. All the books are dedicated to Sossius Senecio, who was consul first in A.D. 99; and as there is no reference to the dignity, we may perhaps infer that all were written before that year.[8] There is not a single reference in all the nine books to any public or personal event which might help us to a date. We hear of the ‘year’ of officials of the Greek games, of Plutarch’s return from a visit to Alexandria, and of a marriage in his family, which Sossius Senecio attended, but we cannot follow these clues.[9] Many of the discussions are about wine and wine-parties; in others the range of subject is very wide, from ‘What Plato meant by saying, if he did say, that God geometrizes’ to ‘Whether the table should be cleared after dinner’, or ‘Why truffles grow after thunder’. A good many are on medical subjects; in one of them the promising problem, ‘Whether new diseases can arise, and from what causes’, is well argued. The physicians present show a full knowledge of the Natural History found in the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus, and the laymen seem to argue with them on equal terms. There is little or no pleasantry about professional habits, the fees or the pedantry, except that in one party a physician is host, and sets on the table an inordinately good dinner, while certain young men of severe habits put him to a great deal of trouble to produce some cheese to eat with their dry bread.[10] In the first dialogue of the First Book the question is raised, ‘Whether philosophy may be discussed over wine’. The answer appears to be ‘Why not?’ but probably none of the following dialogues would be called ‘philosophical’ by philosophers. Plutarch loved a vigorous set-to, with no quarter given, ‘nothing for hate, but all for honour’, as much as did Montaigne.[11] But he felt deeply about the matters at issue between Stoics and Epicureans, the two schools which mattered. Believing himself in a Providence, kindly and particular, associated by him with the Apollo of Delphi, he disliked equally the Epicurean who flouted a Providence, and the Stoic who lowered it by his pedantry and contradictions. He would not have a scene over the wine. Even in the daylight dialogues now before us, the cynic ‘Planetiades’ is skilfully bowed out before there is trouble, and ‘Epicurus’ takes himself off before the reported discussion begins, leaving the company surprised rather than angry. The titles of the five lost dialogues of the last book (the others of that book being all on literary subjects) are curious. Three are connected with music; and I should have the permission of those who have kindly helped me here to say that there is about Greek music a considerable region of dim penumbra. Another raises a question discussed in the _De Facie_ and answered there out of Aristotle and Posidonius, as to the eclipses of sun and moon. Another is on the problem ‘Whether the total number of the stars is more probably even than odd’. The speakers (for a fragment is preserved) are quite aware that a game of odd-and-even on such a scale might seem childish. It need not be so, if the treatment were like that of the _Arenarius_ of Archimedes (all the better if in his Doric); it would then have contained some long numbers and some stiff reasoning. Of one thing we may be sure, that if Lamprias, who is much to the fore in the Ninth Book, took a part, he was ready with a received view, framed on the spot. M. Bernardakis[12] (who quotes a letter from M. Wessely) tells us that in the Paris E there is a blank space here of 2-¼ leaves, but that in the old Vienna MS., no. 148 (which contains the _Symposiacs_ only), three whole pages have been cut out, leaving a gap between what remains of the sixth dialogue and the fragment of the twelfth. Former editions had printed continuously, and our gratitude is due to M. Bernardakis for his restitution of the fragment to its proper place. The inference appears to be that the Vienna MS. is here the parent, though why the fragment stops short where it does is not clear. Probably the scribe was daunted by the technical language, and either left a blank space to be filled up by some one of greater experience, or so spoilt his sheets by errors and erasures that it was better to cut them out. Some such cause has been conjectured for the many gaps left in E, occurring where the subject-matter is difficult. Some ninety different persons are mentioned by name as taking part in the _Symposiac Dialogues_, and if we allow for the lost pieces, there must have been at least a hundred. These may be arranged in groups: Plutarch and his family—his grandfather, father, brothers, sons, sons-in-law—the doctors (8), the grammarians (5), and so on. Many of these reappear in the dialogues now before us, and much may be gained in distinctness of personality by following out the references given.[13] Ammonius, Plutarch’s teacher in the Platonic philosophy, comes out as a masterful person, and a past-master in the art of tactful arrangement of a debate. Theon (‘Our Comrade’, an appellation given to some half-dozen others), to be distinguished from ‘Theon the Grammarian’, is a close and much trusted family friend. Very few Roman names appear, but Sossius Senecio, Mestrius Florus, and one or two others, must have been intimates. None of the conversations in the _Symposiacs_ turn upon points which were Plutarch’s interest when he wrote the _Lives_; the study of character in stirring times, of the reaction of circumstances upon character and of character upon circumstances, of the insoluble problem which is always solving itself, as to ‘Virtue’ on the one hand and ‘Fortune’ on the other, determining success. The elaborate introduction to the _Genius of Socrates_, put side by side with that to the _Life of Pericles_, shows that the author wished to turn from subjects which made good talk over wine in hours of leisure, to others of a more virile stamp. The most convenient hypothesis would be that the success of the _Symposiacs_ suggested to the author to try his hand on more elaborate dialogue, and that, still later on, he settled to the _Lives_ in the spirit, not of an historian, but of an artist, filling his canvas with themes inspired by that great art, Virtue. The lost _Life of Epaminondas_, his favourite hero, would have told us a great deal about the artist himself. It was not Plutarch’s habit to sum up in such brilliant character sketches as stand out in other historians: this has been done for Epaminondas, on broad and generous lines, by Sir Walter Raleigh, and before him, not less generously, by Montaigne; and much material will be found scattered among Plutarch’s other _Lives_. Such an hypothesis can only be ventured in the broadest outline, for no one date covers all the _Lives_ or all the _Dialogues_, and some of the facts are perplexing. In the _Second Pythian Dialogue_ Diogenianus appears as a very young man, and is introduced as the son of a father known to the company; and Diogenianus of Pergamum takes part in several of the _Symposiacs_, but there is no mention of a son old enough to be brought with him. On the other hand, Boethus in the same dialogue is ‘on his way to the camp of the Epicureans’; in one of the _Symposiacs_ he is ‘an Epicurean’ simply. In the last book of the _Symposiacs_ Theon’s sons come in, but we do not hear of him elsewhere as a father of grown-up sons. The dialogue _On the Face which appears on the Orb of the Moon_ is unique as showing the interest taken by men of good general education in scientific subjects in the first century of our era, and as evidence of the point to which the natural sciences had then attained. Professional science may be said to have been almost limited to the province of the mathematician and his congeners. Natural History was part of the general outfit of the ‘Philosophers’, and there was no idea of the ‘Conquest of Nature’ for the relief of man’s estate, unless by the engineer or the physician. With these limitations, the progress made may strike some modern readers as surprisingly great, and a good example may be found in the very precise knowledge of Hipparchus and Ptolemy of the delicate phenomena of the moon’s movements. We are tempted to ask whether, if Greeks had not settled these problems, which men of no other ancient race attacked scientifically, they would have been settled to this day. To come down to a humbler matter: if the properties of the conic sections had not been discovered by Apollonius and his predecessors, would they stand in their place, probably a modest one, on a modern syllabus, and, meanwhile, could the mechanical arts have progressed without them? And the conic sections are simple things compared with the lines, surfaces, and solids determined once for all by Archimedes. Archimedes was a mathematician by the grace of Nature, and an engineer by the order of a prince; and the conic sections themselves were examined, not from any practical interest in the cone, but because they were found to furnish instances of the curves which might facilitate the line of inquiry, suggested by Plato with such amazing foresight, as a half-way house towards a solution of Apollo’s problem.[14] Of course this can only be stated as a question—not a rhetorical question—and must be left on the knees of the gods. The general subject is discussed in D. Ruhnken’s admirable _De Graecia artium ac doctrinarum inventrice_, an inaugural lecture delivered at Leyden in 1757 (just thirty years after Newton’s death). A few lines about the scholar to whose prolonged labours upon Plutarch we owe so much are only his due. Daniel Wyttenbach was born at Bern, where his father was a divine of good Swiss family, in 1746. He studied at Marburg and Göttingen, and passed to Holland, filling professorial chairs at Amsterdam, and, from 1798, at Leyden. In Holland he was the colleague and intimate friend of Valckenaer (1715-85) and David Ruhnken (1723-98), himself by birth a German. By their advice, he turned from a meditated edition of the Emperor Julian’s works to Plutarch. The two advisers were not quite at one, and Wyttenbach seemed to crouch between two burdens—Valckenaer wished him to produce a final edition of some one work, Ruhnken (who would gladly have faced the task himself if he had been a younger man) preferred that he should not stop short of all Plutarch. In 1772 he produced his learned and complete commentary on the _De sera numinum Vindicta_. About this time the Delegates of the Oxford Press were anxious to produce a worthy edition of a great classic; and in 1788 Thomas Burgess, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, afterwards Bishop of St. Davids and of Salisbury, visited Holland and sought an introduction to Wyttenbach, with whom an arrangement was concluded in the autumn of that year. The issue of the volumes of text, with critical notes and revised Latin version, began in 1795 and went on steadily till 1797; but there was much delay and many searchings of heart over the last volume, containing the fragments, the dispatch of which was hindered by the state of war and the occupation of Holland by foreign troops. It was at last discovered in 1800 in the port of Hamburg, and appears to have reached Oxford in that year. The first two volumes of the commentary, to page 242 C, had preceded it in 1798, and were also published in 1800. The last volume must have proceeded slowly, for it had only reached 392 D, near the end of the _E at Delphi_, when, on January 12, 1807, it was interrupted by an explosion due to the careless use of fire on a barge loaded with gunpowder. The effects of the conflagration which followed are visible in Leyden to this day. The disaster was ill-timed for us, for the commentary stops just short of a passage of great interest (see p. 75). Wyttenbach bore this trouble, which he has graphically described in several letters, and also those caused by ill health and narrowed means, with much fortitude. He died in 1820, and the last volume of the commentary was sent to Oxford and published in 1821, followed by the two volumes of the _Index Graecitatis_ in 1830. He was a most amiable man, and the letters which passed between him and Ruhnken have much charm of feeling and expression. Both wrote in admirable Latin; Wyttenbach’s style is always fluent and picturesque, but has certain idiosyncrasies, which may delay an English reader.[15] Of older scholars who had dealt with Plutarch, by far the most important was Turnebus[16] (1512-65). Of Xylander (W. Holzmann, 1532-76), who produced the Latin translation, the basis of his own commentary, and a Greek text, Wyttenbach writes with much respect and sympathy, as he does also of Reiske (1716-74), his own contemporary, who, however, was not quite adequately equipped, in point of material or of critical judgement. I should like to express my deep sense of the loss caused to classical scholarship by the lamented death of Herbert Richards. I have more than once referred to his critical notes on the _Moralia_, which have been appearing lately in the _Classical Review_: many of the finer points of Greek idiom do not concern a translator, but there are several most valuable suggestions and criticisms which I have felt confidence in adopting. A still more personal loss, which intimately concerns this volume, is that of Ingram Bywater. He had promised a revision of it in its passage through the press; and his vigilance as a Curator as well as his jealousy for the severer traditions of scholarship, apart from his personal kindness, would, I know, have made it a searching one. He did not specially care for English translation, and his own masterly version of the _Poetics_ of Aristotle is prefaced by something like a protest. Nor did he feel much sympathy with what he would call the ‘Realien’. On the realities of life no one had a saner or better informed judgement. For natural science and its representatives he cherished a genuine respect; and perhaps none of the tributes to his memory would have touched him more than one which was paid in the pages of _Nature_ by an old colleague and friend of the Exeter College days. But he had a certain shyness of the intrusion of arguments based, say, upon geometry or music, into problems of language already sufficiently perplexed. How generously his noble library and his own stores of wisdom were thrown open to those who sought them is known to many, as it is to myself. Yet another great loss to me has been that of the Rev. David Thomas, Rector of Garsington, in Oxfordshire, a veteran mathematician, my near neighbour and most kindly and helpful referee during many years. I cannot send out even so small a volume without a word of gratitude for affectionate and lifelong help received from John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury 1885-1911. His own enduring contribution to secular scholarship was made in 1874, and holds its place in the judgement of Latin scholars. He was always shouldering new burdens, the last being the mastering, for a definite purpose of friendship and public duty, of the language and history of Sweden. But his great stores of books and of knowledge were always in order, and always made available to others. He would often preface any opinion of his own by ‘My father used to think highly’ of such a book or such a person; and it was always well to be reminded of that true scholar and most courteous gentleman of an older day. I owe much, for help and advice, to living friends whom I should like to thank, but may not. But I must be allowed to acknowledge, in no conventional spirit, the great care bestowed on these pages by the Reader for the Delegates of the Press, who has entered into difficulties of matter as well as of language as few scholars can be expected to have the patience to do.[17] The style of Plutarch has not received much favour with scholars. He uses too many words, and writes in cumbrous sentences, and the words often seem ill-shapen. But it has merits which are acknowledged by all those who have dwelt much upon him. His style is a very honest one; at the end of the longest sentence it is always found that he has said something worth saying, and that no word can be retrenched as mere verbiage. And he is so much in earnest that he often reaches an eloquence, which burns, perhaps, with a dull glow, but which cannot be quite lost in any translation. Indeed the modern languages have sometimes an advantage in the fact that they do not possess counterparts, as long and as elaborate, of the terms used in the original. Of the first, and the best, of Plutarch’s translators, Montaigne[18] has written an opinion, to which it should be added that, in the judgement of very capable persons, Amyot[19] was a scholar of real knowledge and penetration, though he is sometimes content to paraphrase: ‘Ie donne avecque raison, ce me semble, la palme à Iacques Amyot sur touts nos escrivains françois, non seulement pour la naïfveté et pureté du langage, en quoy il surpasse touts aultres, ny pour la constance d’un si long travail, ny pour la profondeur de son sçavoir, ayant peu developper si heureusement un aucteur si espineux et ferré (car on m’en dira ce qu’on vouldra, ie n’entends rien au grec, mais ie veois un sens si bien ioinct et entretenu partout en sa traduction, que, ou il a certainement entendu l’imagination vraye de l’aucteur, ou ayant, par longue conversation, planté vifvement dans son ame une generale idee de celle de Plutarque, il ne luy a au moins rien presté qui le desmente ou qui le desdie); mais, sur tout, ie luy sçais bon gré d’avoir seu trier et choisir un livre si digne et si à propos pour en faire present à son pais.’ Since this Preface was written, early in 1916, a study of Plutarch, which should be of great value to his readers, has appeared in the _De Plutarcho scriptore et philosopho_, by Professor J. J. Hartman of Leyden. Professor Hartman is an enthusiast, and his book covers all the works of Plutarch, the _Moralia_ and the _Lives_, their relations to one another and to the author’s career. He is of opinion that the _Lives_ were taken in hand after all, or nearly all, the writings included in the _Moralia_ were completed, and then appeared in rapid succession of books. He observes that many of the pieces of the _Moralia_ suggest the date A.D. 107; the _Symposiacs_ he places somewhat later. Two conclusions, of much importance as coming from so serious a student, may be stated: the Christian teaching had never come into Plutarch’s hearing (p. 114, &c.), and there is no suggestion of any tendency to Oriental or Neoplatonic thought; Plutarch was the best living authority on Plato and his works, and aimed at being the Plato of his own day (pp. 389, 680, &c.). A large list of critical comments is appended to the general notice of each work. Professor Hartman takes as his basis the Teubner edition, and pays a well-merited tribute to the care and skill of M. Bernardakis (p. 237, &c.). His usual complaint is that the editor has lacked the boldness to incorporate in the text ingenious emendations which he mentions in notes. I had myself felt somewhat differently as to all unsupported emendations, though I am glad to repeat my sense of the great usefulness of the edition, my debt to which goes much beyond what I have expressly acknowledged. Footnote 1: ‘Tout abregé sur un bon livre est un sot abregé.’—_Montaigne_, iii. 8. Footnote 2: Xylander reads οὐδέν, but οὐ before πολλά seems simpler, and makes better logic. Footnote 3: See, e. g., p. 266. Footnote 4: On this point, and on Plutarch’s life generally, see the buoyant and chivalrous pages of the late Mr. George Wyndham’s introduction to North’s _Lives_ in the _Tudor Translations_. Footnote 5: See pp. 54, 253. I have searched such numbers of the _Dissertations_ as appear to have reached this country from Vienna since 1910, without coming upon the continuation of Dr. Adler’s argument. It will be of great interest when it comes to hand, but could not adequately be discussed here. Footnote 6: ‘Où je puyse comme les Danaïdes, remplissant et versant sans cesse.’—i. 25. Footnote 7: The _Symposiacs_ were specially favourite reading of Archbishop Trench, whose bright little volume of _Lectures_ is perhaps the best introduction for English readers to the _Moralia_. Footnote 8: The same argument might perhaps be applied to the _Lives_, even as far as that of Dion, but there is no elaborate dedication there. Footnote 9: Dr. Mahaffy has acutely pointed out that the tract _De Tranquillitate animi_ must have been written before the accession of Titus in A. D. 79, because it contains a remark (467 E) that no Roman Emperor had yet been succeeded by his son. It is this sort of evidence of a date which we seek, but do not find, in the _Symposiacs_. Footnote 10: Some of Plutarch’s characters exemplify the ‘sternness of the judgements of youth’, as the younger Diogenianus.—See p. 94. Footnote 11: See Vol. I, p. 25. Footnote 12: See his Preface in Vol. I, p. xlii. Footnote 13: M. Chenevière’s study mentioned on p. 53 is very helpful but not easily accessible. Footnote 14: See p. 14; see also _Apollonius of Perga_, by Sir Thomas Heath, F.R.S., Introd., p. xxi. Footnote 15: ‘Forte’ is always used where we expect ‘fortasse’, and ‘nisi’ often for ‘si non’. Footnote 16: Adrien Turnĕbus (i. q. Toranebus?) was a native of Les Andelys (Eure), near Rouen, and the name is said to be of local origin. Montaigne, who knew him personally, always writes Turnebus; the later form Turnèbe seems to be due to false analogy. Footnote 17: I may now name Mr. Walter Sumner Gibson, M.A. of Balliol College, formerly an assistant-master at Charterhouse, who died on the 20th January, 1918, having in recent years acted as a Reader to the Clarendon Press. Footnote 18: ii. 4. Footnote 19: 1514-93. CONTENTS On the Genius of Socrates 1 Three Pythian Dialogues 52 I. On the ‘E’ at Delphi 57 II. Why the Pythia does not now give 79 Oracles in Verse III. On the Cessation of the Oracles 112 On the Instances of Delay in Divine 171 Punishment From the Dialogue ‘On the Soul’ 214 On Superstition 219 Appendix: A Short Discourse of 236 Superstition. By John Smith On the Face which appears on the Orb of 246 the Moon Notes 309 Note on the Myths in Plutarch 313 Note on the Plurality of Worlds and the 318 Five Regular Solids Index 321 ON THE GENIUS OF SOCRATES INTRODUCTION The Dialogue on _The Genius of Socrates_, to follow the familiar Latin title, is in the main a detailed and spirited account of a gallant exploit, the recovery of the Cadmeia, or citadel of Thebes, treacherously taken by the Spartans, with the aid of the Theban oligarchs, two years before. The recovery was effected in the winter of 379-378 B.C. by a party of Theban patriots, returning from exile in Athens, led by Pelopidas. The discussions as to the real meaning of the ‘daemonic Sign’ of Socrates form interludes which fill in the hours of waiting, and serve to relieve the tension of the narrative. It is as though Ulysses were heard discoursing to Menelaus within the Wooden Horse on the personality of Pallas Athene, with Helen prowling around outside. There is nothing strained or dramatic, in any disparaging sense, in speculation thus rubbing shoulders with action. The simplicity and good faith of the speakers, and the attractive personality of Epaminondas, forbid any suspicion of affectation. Thus the Dialogue serves a double purpose: it redeems the character of the leading Thebans, and of Pelopidas in particular, from the habitual disparagement of Xenophon and others; and it redeems the intellectual character of the Boeotians from the reproach against which the most brilliant of Greek poets, himself a son of Thebes, protests, ‘Swine of Boeotia’. For the chief speaker on the Socratic question is Simmias, and Cebes is present, Thebans whose names are for ever associated with the last hours of the Athenian Master; and the story is brightened by glimpses into the home of Epaminondas, and by hallowed memories of the Pythagorean brotherhood. Early in 382 B.C. the Spartans had dispatched a force against Olynthus, the first division under Eudamidas, the second under his brother Phoebidas. The latter lingered under the walls of Thebes; and, whether led by personal ambition, or receiving secret orders from home, allowed himself to intrigue with the oligarchical leaders, who, though their party was not in power, were strong enough to be represented on the board of Polemarchs by Leontides, another, or the other, being Ismenias. Guided by Leontides, the Spartans, one hot summer day, seized the Cadmeia; Leontides arrested his colleague Ismenias, and caused Archias to be made Polemarch in his place. The popular leaders, some four hundred in number, took refuge in Athens. The Spartans disclaimed the action of Phoebidas, who was fined and superseded; and appropriated its results, strengthening the garrison of the Cadmeia. A commission of judges from the confederate states was appointed by Sparta to try Ismenias on a vague charge of Medizing; he was condemned and executed. Of the two Polemarchs, Archias was a man of pleasure, Leontides one of severe private life, but an unscrupulous party leader. He caused the lives of the refugees in Athens to be attempted, successfully in at least one case, that of Androcleidas. Of the patriots, Pelopidas, who had been formally exiled, was the leading spirit; Epaminondas, who remained at home, held back for good reasons which are stated in the course of the Dialogue (p. 9). One of the most useful confederates was Phyllidas; he had himself, when on a visit to Athens, suggested the enterprise, but he managed to retain the confidence of the party now in possession of Thebes, and held the office of Secretary to the Polemarchs. These facts are assumed to be familiar to his hearers by Capheisias, brother of Epaminondas, who had himself joined the liberators without any scruples, and later on had been sent to Athens on an embassy. His story of the sequel is told to a mixed company of Athenians and Thebans. It is a perfectly clear one, and needs no comment. The facts are again told by Plutarch in his _Life of Pelopidas_. The _Lives_ were the work of his later years; and the present Dialogue, with its fuller detail and more varied colouring, is an earlier attempt to draw an historical picture, a work of art which will bear the close inspection of those who love to hear of virtue, or valour, in action. The events are also narrated by Xenophon, who, from his usual Lacedaemonian and anti-Theban bias, omits all mention of Pelopidas. Thirlwall has preferred to base his account upon Plutarch; Grote follows Xenophon, but with a strong protest against his narrowness. The conduct of Sparta justifies the allegation made by the Athenians in 416 B.C., ‘that in her political transactions she measured honour by inclination and justice by expediency’ (Thuc. 5, 105). The most scathing verdict upon it is delivered by Xenophon himself, who pauses in his narrative to point the moral, that the fall and degradation of Sparta began from this turning-point: ‘It would be possible to mention many other instances, from Greek and foreign history, proving that the Gods do not fail to notice the authors of impious and wicked deeds; at present I shall only mention the case before us. The Lacedaemonians, who had sworn that they would leave the cities independent, and then seized the Acropolis of Thebes, were punished entirely by those whom they had wronged, having previously been beaten by no man then living. The Theban citizens who had introduced them into the citadel, and who wished the city to be subject to the Lacedaemonians that they themselves might enjoy absolute power, lost their supremacy, which seven exiles were enough to overthrow.’ These remarks are in the spirit of the Greek Tragedians, who love to bring into strong light an act or situation of pride and insolence as the turning-point from prosperity to ruin. Thucydides, as is pointed out by Grote in the masterly pages which end his fifty-sixth chapter, has brought the cynical injustice of the Athenians towards Melos into glaring prominence in order to prepare his readers for the disastrous sequel. The problem of the true nature of the ‘Divine Sign’ of Socrates is one of great interest and some mystery. The Latin word ‘Genius’, the attendant spirit who makes each of us what he is, in fact, his self, is familiar to us from Horace: _The Genius, guardian of each child of earth, Born when we’re born and dying when we die._ (_Epist._ 2, 2, 187.) The conception is thoroughly Greek, and may be paralleled abundantly from Plato as well as from Plutarch himself and contemporary writers. But it is really misapplied here, and is in fact a mistranslation, since the word used by Plato and Xenophon as well as by Plutarch is invariably not the daemon, but the neuter adjective, ‘the daemonic sc. Sign’. The passages of Plato and Xenophon are collected in the late James Riddell’s edition of the _Apology_ of Plato.[20] It is to be observed that in all the genuine works of Plato the operation of the Sign is negative and deterrent, in Xenophon it is sometimes positive and hortatory. The reader should consult the articles on Socrates by Professor Henry Jackson in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_. Professor Jackson is inclined to think that the evidence points to some abnormal condition of the sense of hearing, and there are expressions in this Dialogue of Plutarch which seem to bear out such a view. Apuleius’ treatise _On the God of Socrates_ (which St. Augustine tells us that he would have entitled _On the daemon of Socrates_ if he had dared) tells us much which is of interest about the daemons, but not very much about Socrates. He contributes, however, the pertinent remark that the Sign, according to Socrates himself, was not ‘a voice’, but ‘a sort of voice’. There is no indication of the date of composition of this Dialogue. Not many points of topography arise. The Cadmeia stood on a low hill or plateau rising from north to south on the eastern side of the Dirce stream and reaching a height of some 200 feet, now occupied by the modern town. The market-place was north-east of this, near the river Ismenus. Of the seven famous gates the returning exiles may probably have entered by the Electran, the one assailed by Capaneus in Aeschylus’ story (_Seven against Thebes_, 423). A DIALOGUE HELD AT ATHENS [Sidenote: 573] CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF THE RETURN OF THE THEBAN EXILES, 379 B.C. SPEAKERS CAPHEISIAS, a Theban (brother of Epaminondas), who tells the story of the return. TIMOTHEUS., Athenian ARCHIDAMUS., Athenian THE SONS OF ARCHINUS., Athenian LYSITHEIDES., Athenian OTHER FRIENDS. I. _Archidamus._ I once heard a painter, Capheisias, say a [Sidenote: B] striking thing about the different people who come to view pictures, which he put as a simile. Spectators with no technical knowledge, he said, are like those who greet a large company in the mass; others, who possess fine taste and a love of art, resemble those who have a personal word for all comers. The former get only a general view of the works before them, which is never accurate; the latter discuss each piece critically and in detail, and no point of execution, good or bad, escapes inspection and remark. Now I think that it is just the same with the [Sidenote: C] actions of real life. Duller minds are satisfied if they learn from history the summary account of what occurred and its outcome; lovers of what is honourable and beautiful take keener delight in hearing all particulars of the performances inspired by that great Art Virtue. To the actual result, Fortune has much to say; but he who dwells on causes and particulars sees Virtue at odds with circumstance, acts of rational daring done in the face of danger, and calculation meeting opportunity and passion. Take it that we belong to the second class. Begin at the beginning of the enterprise, and give us all the incidents and [Sidenote: D] all the speeches which were no doubt delivered in your presence; and believe that I would not have hesitated to go to Thebes on purpose to hear the story, but that the Athenians are already beginning to think me too much of a Boeotian. _Capheisias._ Indeed, Archidamus, since you are so kind as to press for the whole story, it would be my duty to make it, as Pindar[21] says, ‘a call before all business’ to come here to tell it; but as we are brought here on an embassy, and have nothing to do until we receive the answers of the people, I feel that any reluctance or embarrassment on my part towards so kind and good a friend might well wake up the old reproach against the Boeotians that they hate discussion. It was already fading [Sidenote: E] away, thanks to your Socrates; but our own care for Lysis,[22] of blessed memory, showed us true enthusiasts. But see whom we have present: is it convenient to them to listen to so long a story and to so many speeches? The narrative is not a short one, since you yourself bid me include the speeches. _Archidamus._ You do not know these friends, Capheisias? No, but you should; sons of good fathers who were good friends to your people. This is Lysitheides, nephew of Thrasybulus; [Sidenote: F] this is Timotheus, Conon’s son; these are the sons of Archinus; the others are all of our brotherhood; so your story finds a friendly and congenial audience. _Capheisias._ That is well. But what should you think a good point for me to start from, in view of what you know already? _Archidamus._ We know fairly well, Capheisias, how things were at Thebes before the return of the exiles. We had heard at Athens how Archias and Leontides persuaded Phoebidas to [Sidenote: 576] seize the Cadmeia during a truce; how they expelled some of the citizens and terrorized others, and seized office for themselves in defiance of law. We were the personal hosts here of Melon and Pelopidas, and constantly in their company so long as they were in exile. Again, we had heard how the Lacedaemonians fined Phoebidas for seizing the Cadmeia, removed him from the command against Olynthus, and then replaced him at Thebes by Lysanoridas and two others, and kept a stronger garrison than before in the Citadel. We were aware, too, how Ismenias met an unworthy death, since, immediately after his trial, Gorgidas wrote the whole account in a letter to the [Sidenote: B] exiles here. Thus it remains for you to tell us about the actual return of our friends and the capture of the tyrants. II. _Capheisias._ Well then, Archidamus, during those days, all of us who were concerned in the movement were accustomed to meet for conference when necessary in the house of Simmias, who was recovering from a wound in the leg; ostensibly passing the time in philosophical talk, into which, as a blind, we often drew Archias and Leontides, men not altogether strangers to [Sidenote: C] such discussion. For Simmias had spent much time abroad, and wandered among men of other lands, and had shortly before this returned to Thebes full of all sorts of stories and outlandish accounts. These stories Archias used to enjoy when he chanced to have leisure, taking his seat with the young men, and liking us to pass the time in talk rather than attend to their proceedings. On the day upon which the exiles were to reach the walls at dusk, a man came in from here, sent by Pherenicus, known to none of our party except Charon; he proceeded to explain that the younger exiles, twelve in number, had taken hounds to hunt the Cithaeron country, intending to reach Thebes towards evening. He had been sent, he said, in advance [Sidenote: D] to tell us this, and to find out who was to provide the house for their concealment on arrival, so that they might have notice and go straight to it. While we were puzzling it over, Charon agreed to provide his own house. So the man settled to return to the exiles as fast as he could. III. Here the prophet Theocritus pressed my hand hard, and looking at Charon, who was walking in front, said: ‘This man is no philosopher, Capheisias; he has received no extraordinary training, as Epaminondas your brother has; yet you see how he is naturally drawn by the laws towards the nobler [Sidenote: E] course, volunteering to encounter the greatest danger for our country’s sake. Whereas Epaminondas, who claims to have been trained to virtue above all Boeotians, is dull and spiritless;[23] what better opportunity than this will he ever have to bring into play his fine gifts and training?’ I said: ‘Not so fast, [Sidenote: F] Theocritus the eager! We are carrying out what we ourselves resolved; but Epaminondas, failing to persuade us to drop the plan, as he thinks would be best, naturally resists when invited to a course of action which he dislikes and disapproves. Suppose a physician undertook to cure a disease without the use of knife or fire: you would not be using him fairly, to my thinking, if you compelled him to cut or burn.[24] Very well; my brother, as you know, will not have any citizen die without a trial, yet is eager to work with those who wish to free the city from internal bloodshed and slaughter. As, however, he fails to convince the majority, and as we have embarked on this course, he bids you let him stand out, clear and guiltless of murder, and free to watch opportunities; when justice and expediency [Sidenote: 577] meet, he will strike in. He feels that, work once begun, there will be no limitations; perhaps Pherenicus and Pelopidas will turn their attack against the greatest criminals, but Eumolpidas and Samidas, men of fire and passion, when night puts power in their hands, will not sheathe their swords before they have filled the city with murder from end to end, and dispatched many of our leading men. IV. While I was thus conversing with Theocritus, Galaxidorus kept trying to check us;[25] Archias was near, and Lysanoridas the Spartan, both walking quickly from the Cadmeia, [Sidenote: B] apparently towards the same point as ourselves. So we broke off; Archias called Theocritus, and drew him towards Lysanoridas; then he talked a long time with them apart, having changed his direction a little towards the Amphion. Thus we were in an agony: had some hint or information reached them, upon which they were questioning Theocritus? In the meanwhile Phyllidas, whom you know, Archidamus, and who was at that time acting as clerk to Archias and the Polemarchs, and knew of the expected arrival of the exiles,[26] being privy to our scheme, pressed my hand as it was his way to do, and went on with bantering talk for every one’s benefit, about the gymnasia and the wrestling; then, having drawn me some distance from the others, he began to ask me about the exiles, and whether [Sidenote: C] they were keeping to their day. When I said that they were, he continued: ‘Then I have done right in preparing for to-day the party at which I mean to entertain Archias, and to deliver him into their hand in his cups.’ ‘Better than right, Phyllidas!’ I said; ‘and do you try to collect all or as many as you can of our enemies to the same place.’ ‘That is not easy;’ said he, ‘indeed, it is impossible; for Archias, expecting that a certain lady of high rank will come there to meet him, does not wish Leontides to be present. We must therefore mark [Sidenote: D] them down to separate houses. If Archias and Leontides are once captured, I think that the others will take themselves off, or else will remain quiet, glad to close with any offer of safety.’ ‘We will do so,’ I said, ‘but what can Theocritus have to talk about with these people?’ ‘I cannot answer clearly or from knowledge,’ said Phyllidas, ‘but I heard portents mentioned and prophecies disastrous to Sparta.’ [27][Meanwhile Theocritus rejoined us, and] Pheidolaus of Haliartus came up and said, ‘Simmias wants you to wait hereabouts a little. He is closeted with Leontides, interceding for Amphitheus to get his sentence of death commuted, if possible, to exile.’ V. ‘The very man!’ said Theocritus. ‘You might [Sidenote: E] have come on purpose, for I was longing to hear what the discoveries were, and about the general appearance of the tomb of Alcmena in your country when it was opened, if you were really present yourself when Agesilaus sent and removed the remains to Sparta.’ Pheidolaus answered: ‘I was not present; and vexed and indignant I was with my citizens for leaving me out. However, no vestige of a body was found, only a bracelet of brass, not a large one, and two earthenware jars containing [Sidenote: F] earth which had become solid as stone. Above the tomb lay a brass plate, with many letters wonderful for their great antiquity; they afforded no intelligible sense, though they came out clear to the eye when the brass was washed. The characters were of a peculiar and barbaric type, most closely resembling the Egyptian; and Agesilaus accordingly, as they said, sent copies to the king of Egypt, asking him to show them to the priests, on the chance of their understanding them. However, Simmias may, perhaps, have something to tell you about all this, as he was at that time in Egypt, and philosophy [Sidenote: 578] brought him much into the society of the priests. But the people of Haliartus believe that the great scarcity of crops and the advance of the lake were not accidental, but were an angry visitation because they allowed the tomb to be dug open.’ After a short pause Theocritus went on: ‘Nor yet are the Lacedaemonians themselves clear of the wrath of heaven, as is shown by the portents about which Lysanoridas was lately conferring with us. He is now off to Haliartus to fill in the [Sidenote: B] tomb again and to offer libations to Alcmena and Aleus, of course in accordance with some oracle, not knowing who Aleus was. When he comes back from there he intends to investigate the tomb of Dirce, which is unknown to the Thebans, except those who have acted as Hipparchs. The outgoing magistrate takes his successor in office, with no one else present, and shows it him at night; they perform certain fireless rites over the tomb, carefully obliterate all traces, and go off under cover of darkness by separate ways. And much chance, I think, they will have of finding it, Pheidolaus! For most of those who have served legally as Hipparchs are now in exile; I might say all, except [Sidenote: C] Gorgidas and Plato, whom they fear too much to examine. But the present magistrates receive the spear and the seal in the Cadmeia, and know absolutely nothing.’ VI. While Theocritus was saying this, Leontides was going out with his friends. We entered, and began to pay our compliments to Simmias, who was sitting on the couch, having been unsuccessful in his petition, I think, for he seemed wrapped in thought and much annoyed. Looking hard at us all, ‘Hercules!’ [Sidenote: D] he said, ‘what savage barbarous manners! How right, and more than right, old Thales was, when he came home from a long absence abroad, and his friends asked what was his rarest discovery, “An aged tyrant”, he said! For every one, even if he have not been personally wronged, is disgusted at mere oppression, and harshness, and so is an enemy to lawless irresponsible dynasties. Well, the God will see to this, perhaps; now, Capheisias, about your newcomer, do you know who he is?’ ‘I do not know’, said I, ‘whom you mean.’ ‘Yet Leontides tells us’, he said, ‘that a man has been seen by the tomb of Lysis, rising to go when night was done. His retinue and [Sidenote: E] equipment were stately. He had bivouacked there on a rough bed, for piles of agnus castus and tamarisk were visible, and also remains of burnt sacrifices and libations of milk. At dawn he asked those who met him whether he should find the sons of Polymnis in the country.’ ‘But who can the stranger be?’ I said; ‘from what you tell us it must be some uncommon person, one in no private station.’ VII. ‘Certainly not’, said Pheidolaus. ‘However, when he comes we will see to his reception. Now, as to those characters, Simmias, about which we were puzzling just now. If you know more than we do, tell us; for it is said that the Egyptian priests have made out the letters on the plate which Agesilaus [Sidenote: F] took from us when he opened the tomb of Alcmena.’ Simmias remembered at once. ‘I know nothing of that plate, Pheidolaus;’ he said, ‘but Agenoridas the Spartan brought a number of characters from Agesilaus to Memphis, to Chonuphis the prophet, with whom Plato and I and Hellopion of Peparethus were staying to enjoy Philosophy together. He had been sent by the king, who desired Chonuphis, if he could make anything out of the inscription, to interpret and return it quickly. After spending three days in retirement, reading up characters from all countries in ancient books, he wrote his answer to the king. [Sidenote: 579] He explained to us that this inscription directs the holding of a competition in honour of the Muses. The characters belonged to the system of the reign of Proteus, the one learnt by Hercules the son of Amphitryon. The God therein directs and charges the Greeks to observe a time of peace and leisure, spending it in continuous philosophical debate, with the help of the Muses and of Reason, for the decision of points relating to Justice, all arms being laid aside. We thought at the time that what Chonuphis said was good, and we thought so still more when, in our journey from Egypt round Caria, we met certain Delians [Sidenote: B] who begged Plato, as a geometrician, to solve the problem propounded in a mysterious oracle of the God. The oracle was this: “The Delians and the other Greeks shall have respite from their present ills when they have doubled the altar at Delos.” The Delians were unable to guess the meaning, and, moreover, had brought themselves into a ludicrous difficulty about the construction of the altar. They had doubled each of the four sides,[28] and so unconsciously produced a solid figure eight times greater than the original, in ignorance of the factor which must be applied to the side, in order to double the solid. [Sidenote: C] So they appealed to Plato for help in the difficulty. Plato, remembering the Egyptian, said that the God was rallying the Greeks on their neglect of liberal studies, mocking our ignorance, and commanding us to take up geometry in real earnest; that it required no slight or dim-sighted intellect, but a first-rate training in linear geometry, to find two mean proportionals, the only method by which a solid in the form of a cube can be doubled, if all its dimensions are to be increased uniformly. Eudoxus of Cnidos, he said, or Helicon of Cyzicus, would work this out for them.[29] However, in his opinion, the God did not desire this; he was enjoining all the Greeks to cease from war [Sidenote: D] and trouble and devote themselves to the Muses, to soften their passions by discussions and Mathematics, and to associate profitably with one another.’ VIII. While Simmias was speaking, our father Polymnis came in upon us. He sat down by Simmias and said: ‘Epaminondas invites you and all present, if you have no more pressing engagement, to wait hereabouts; he wants to introduce to you the stranger, a man noble himself, and brought here by a noble and generous errand. He comes from the Pythagoreans of [Sidenote: E] Italy, to pour offerings on the tomb of old Lysis, in accordance, as he says, with certain dreams and clear visions. He brings a large sum in gold, thinking that Epaminondas ought to be reimbursed for the care of Lysis in his old age, and on this he insists most keenly, though we neither ask nor wish assistance for our poverty.’ Simmias was pleased: ‘A really wonderful man,’ he said, ‘and worthy of Philosophy; but what is the reason that he has not come straight to us?’ ‘He passed the night, I think,’ said he, ‘near the tomb of Lysis; Epaminondas [Sidenote: F] was to take him on to the Ismenus to bathe, and then they will come on to us here. Before he met us, he had made his night’s lodging near the tomb, intending to take up the remains and convey them to Italy, unless prevented by some divine warning in the night.’ Having said this, my father was silent. IX. Then Galaxidorus spoke: ‘Hercules! how hard it is to find a man quite free from vanity and superstition! Some are caught by these weaknesses against their will, owing to want of experience or of strength. Others, in order to appear singular and to be taken for friends of the Gods, bring the divine into all they do, making dreams and portents and such stuff a pretext for anything that enters their head. Now, to men in public [Sidenote: 580] stations, who are compelled to adapt their lives to a self-willed and petulant multitude, this may have its advantage; superstition is a bit wherewith to check a populace, and direct it to what is expedient. But to Philosophy such posturing is unbecoming in itself, and, moreover, it contradicts her professions; she undertakes to teach all that is good and expedient by the reason, and then, as though in despite of reason, goes back upon the Gods and away from the first principles of action; and, dishonouring demonstration, in which her own excellence is supposed to lie, turns to prophecies and visions seen in dreams, [Sidenote: B] things in which the weakest often have as great success as the strongest. This, I think, Simmias, is why your Socrates embraced a system of intellectual training which bore a more philosophical stamp, choosing that simple artless type as being liberal and most friendly to truth; and casting to the winds for the sophists, as a mere smoke from Philosophy, all pretentious nonsense.’ Theocritus broke in: ‘What, Galaxidorus, and has Meletus persuaded even you too that Socrates despised [Sidenote: C] what was divine, for that was the charge which he actually brought before the Athenians?’ ‘What was divine—no;’ he said, ‘but he received Philosophy from Pythagoras and Empedocles full of visions and myths and superstitions, and deeply dipped in mysteries; and trained her to look at facts, and be sensible, and pursue truth in soberness of reason.’ X. ‘Granted;’ said Theocritus, ‘but as to the Divine Sign of Socrates, good friend, are we to call it a falsity or what? To me, nothing recorded about Pythagoras seems to go so far towards the prophetic and divine. For, in plain words, as Homer has drawn Athena to Odysseus _In all his toils a presence and a stay_,[30] even so, apparently, did the spirit attach to Socrates, from the first, a sort of vision to go before and guide his steps in life, which alone _Passing before him shed a light around_[31] [Sidenote: D] in matters of uncertainty, too hard for the wit of man to solve; upon these the spirit used often to converse with him, adding a divine touch to his own resolutions. For more, and more important, instances you must ask Simmias and the other companions of Socrates. But I was myself present, having come to stay with Euthyphron the prophet, when Socrates, as you remember, Simmias, was going up to the Symbolum and the house of Andocides, asking some question as he walked and playfully cross-examining Euthyphron. Suddenly he stopped and closed his lips tightly[32] and was wrapt in thought for some time. Then he turned back and took the way through the [Sidenote: E] Trunkmakers’ Street, and tried to recall those of our friends who were already in advance, saying that the Sign was upon him. Most of them turned in a body, amongst whom was I, keeping close to Euthyphron. But some young members of the party, no doubt to put the Sign of Socrates to the test, held on, and drew into their number Charillus the flute-player, who had come to Athens with myself, staying with Cebes. Now as they were going through the street of the Statuaries near the Law Courts, they were met by a whole herd of swine loaded with mud and hustling one another by press of numbers. There was no [Sidenote: F] getting out of the way; on they charged, upsetting some, bespattering others. At any rate, Charillus came home with his clothes full of mud and his legs too, so that we always laugh when we remember Socrates and his Sign, and wonder that this divine presence of his should never fail him or forget.’ XI. Then Galaxidorus said: ‘Do you think then, Theocritus, that the Sign of Socrates possessed a special and extraordinary power, not that some fragment of the ready wit which we all share determined him by an empiric process, turning the scale of his reasoning in cases which were uncertain and incalculable? For as a single weight does not by itself incline the balance, but, if added to one scale when the weights are even, sinks the whole of that one on its own side, so [Sidenote: 581] a cry, or any such feather-weight sign, will fit[33] a mind already weighted, and draw it into action; and when two trains of thought are in conflict, it reinforces one, and solves the difficulty by removing the equality, so that there is a movement and an inclination.’ My father broke in: ‘Well, but I have myself heard, Galaxidorus, from a certain Megarian, who had it from Terpsion, that the Sign of Socrates was a sneeze, proceeding either from himself or from other persons; if some one else sneezed on his [Sidenote: B] right, whether behind or in front, it encouraged him to the action; if on the left, it warned him off it. Of his own sneezings there was one kind which confirmed his purpose when he was still intending to act; another stopped him when he was already acting and checked his impulse. The wonder to me is that if he made use of a sneeze he did not so call it to his companions, but was in the habit of saying that what checked or commanded him was a Divine Sign. For that would be like vanity and idle boasting, not like truth and simplicity, in which lay, as we suppose, his greatness and his superiority to men in general, to be disturbed by a sound from outside or a casual sneeze, and so be diverted from acting, and give up what he had resolved. [Sidenote: C] Now the impulses of Socrates, on the other hand, show firmness and intensity in every direction, as though issuing from a right and powerful judgement and principle. Thus for a man to remain in voluntary poverty all his life, when he might have had plenty, and the givers would have been pleased and thankful, and never to swerve from Philosophy in the face of all those hindrances; and at last, when the zeal and ingenuity of his friends had made his way easy to safety and retreat, not to be bent by their entreaties, nor yield to the near approach of [Sidenote: D] death—all this is not like a man whose judgement might be changed by random voices or sneezings; it is like one led to what is noble by some greater and more sovereign authority. I hear also that he foretold to some of his friends the disaster which befell the power of Athens in Sicily. At a still earlier time, Pyrilampes, the son of Antiphon, when taken prisoner in the pursuit near Delium, after having received from us a javelin wound, as soon as he had heard from those who had arrived from Athens to arrange the truce that Socrates had returned home in safety by The Gullies[34] with Alcibiades and Laches, often called upon him by name, and often on friends and comrades of [Sidenote: E] his own who had fled with him by way of Parnes, and been slain by our cavalry; they had disobeyed the Sign of Socrates, he said, in turning from the battle by a different way instead of following his lead. This, I think, Simmias too must have heard.’ ‘Often,’ said Simmias, ‘and from many persons. For there was no little noise at Athens about the Sign of Socrates in consequence.’ XII. ‘Well, then, Simmias,’ said Pheidolaus, ‘are we to allow Galaxidorus in his jesting way to bring down this great fact of divination to sneezings and cries, which plenty of common [Sidenote: F] ignorant persons apply to trifles in mere sport, whereas, when grave dangers overtake them, or more serious business, we may quote Euripides:[35] _These follies have a truce when steel is near_‘? Galaxidorus said: ‘I am quite ready to listen to Simmias on this subject, Pheidolaus, if he has himself heard Socrates speak about it, and to join you in believing; but as for all that you and Polymnis have mentioned, it is not hard to refute it. For as in medicine a throb or a pimple is a small matter, but is the indication of what is not small; and as to a pilot the cry of a bird from the open sea, or the scudding of a thin film of cloud, [Sidenote: 582] signifies wind and rougher seas, so to a prophetic soul a sneeze or a voice is nothing great in itself, but is the sign of a great conjuncture. There is no art in which it is thought contemptible to forecast great things by small, many things through few. Suppose a man ignorant of the meaning of letters were to see a few insignificant-looking characters, and to refuse to believe that one who knew grammar could, by their help, repeat the story of great wars between old-world peoples, and foundings of cities, and what kings did or suffered, and then were to say [Sidenote: B] that a voice, or something like a voice, revealed and repeated each of these things to that historian, a pleasant laugh would come over your face, my friend, at the ignorance of that man. Now, consider, may it not be so with us? In our ignorance of the meaning of different things by which the prophetic art hits the coming event, are we simple enough to rebel if a man of intellect uses them to reveal something not yet evident, and says, moreover, that a Divine Sign, not a sneeze or a voice, directs him to the facts? For now I turn to you, Polymnis, who wonder that Socrates, a man who did so very much to make Philosophy human by simplicity and absence of cant, should [Sidenote: C] have named his Sign, not a sneeze or a voice, but, in full tragic phrase, his Divine Sign. I, on the contrary, should be surprised if a man so excellent in Dialectic and mastery of terms had said that the sneeze and not the Divine Sign gave him the intimation. As if a man were to say that he had been wounded “by the javelin”, not “by the thrower with his javelin”, or, again, that the weight had been measured “by the balance”, not “by the weigher with his balance”. For the work is not the work of the tool but of the owner of the tool which he uses for the work; and the Sign is a kind of tool used by the signifying power. But, as I said, if Simmias should have anything to tell us we must listen, for his knowledge is more exact.’ XIII. Then Theocritus said: ‘Yes, but first let us see [Sidenote: D] who these persons are who are coming in; or, rather, it is surely Epaminondas bringing the stranger to us.’ We looked towards the doors, and saw Epaminondas leading the way, then Ismenidorus, Bacchylidas, and Melissus the flute-player, all of them our friends and confederates; then the stranger followed, a man of much nobility of mien, but with a gentle and kindly character apparent beneath it, and dressed in a grave fashion. He took his seat by Simmias, my brother next to me, and the rest as they found places. Then, when there was silence, Simmias called on my brother: ‘Well, Epaminondas, how are we to address our friend? Who and what is he, and [Sidenote: E] whence? That is the usual formula for beginning an introduction and an acquaintance.’[36] Epaminondas replied: ‘Theanor is his name, Simmias, and his family is of Crotona, where he belongs to the local school of Philosophy and does no discredit to the great fame of Pythagoras; he has just taken the long journey from Italy here, to confirm noble doctrines by noble acts.’ The stranger broke in: ‘Indeed, Epaminondas, you are now hindering the noblest of all actions. For if to confer a benefit on friends be noble, it is no shame to receive [Sidenote: F] one from them. A favour needs one to receive, no less than one to bestow it; both must join to ensure a noble result. It is like a ball well delivered; to allow it to drop idle to the ground is to shame it. Now what mark is there for a ball, so agreeable for the thrower to hit and so distressing to miss, as a man at whom one aims a favour when he well deserves it? But in the one case the mark stands still, and he who misses has himself to thank; in the other, he who excuses himself and swerves aside does a wrong to the favour which never reaches its goal. You have yourself heard fully from me the reasons of my voyage here; but I should like to go through the story [Sidenote: 583] as fully to those now present, and let them be judges between us. ‘When the Pythagoreans had been overpowered by faction in the different cities, and their brotherhoods expelled, and when the party of Cylon had piled up a fire round a house in Metapontum in which those still settled there were holding a meeting, and had dispatched all those in the place except Philolaus and Lysis, who were still young, and were strong enough and active enough to push through the fire, Philolaus escaped thence to Lucania and joined in safety the rest of our friends, who were by this time rallying and holding their own against the Cylonians. Where Lysis was, no one knew for a long time; however, Gorgias of Leontini, sailing back from [Sidenote: B] Greece to Sicily, brought certain news to Arcesus and his friends that he had met Lysis, who was staying near Thebes. Arcesus longed to see the man, and was eager to sail straight off himself; but being quite disabled by age and infirmity, gave orders to bring Lysis alive to Italy if possible, or his remains if he should have died. Then came wars, revolutions, and periods of tyranny which made it impossible for the friends to perform the task in his lifetime. But when the spirit of Lysis, now dead, had shown us clearly of his end, and well informed persons told us of all the care and entertainment which he had [Sidenote: C] received from your family, Polymnis; how richly his age had been cared for in a poor house, and how he had been adopted as father to your sons before his blessed end came, I was sent out, a young man and alone, to represent many of my elders who have money and wish to offer it to those who have not, in return for favour and friendship richly bestowed. Lysis lies where you have honourably laid him; yet the honour of that tomb is greater when recompense is made for it to friends by friends dear and close.’ XIV. While the stranger was speaking thus, my father wept a long while over the memory of Lysis, but my brother [Sidenote: D] with his usual gentle smile said to me: ‘What is it to be, Capheisias? Are we to surrender poverty to riches, and to say nothing?’ ‘No! no!’ said I, ‘the dear “good nurse of young manhood”[37]—to her rescue! it is your turn to speak.’ ‘See, father;’ he said, ‘that was the only side on which I used to fear that our house might be captured by money. I mean through Capheisias and his person, which needs beautiful clothes that he may make a brave show before all his admiring friends, and needs food of the best, and plenty of it, that he may have strength for the gymnasia and wrestling matches. Now that he does not betray poverty, or throw off our ancestral poverty like a coat of paint, but, boy though he is, goes proudly [Sidenote: E] in thrift, and is content with what we have, to what possible use could we put money? Shall we plate our armour, say, with gold, and make the shield gay with purple and gold together, as Nicias of Athens did?[38] Shall we buy you, father, a Milesian cloak, or a dress with a purple border for mother? You know, we are not likely to spend the present on our table, or to feast ourselves more sumptuously, as having admitted a guest of such importance as wealth.’ ‘Away with it, boy!’ said my father, ‘never may I see our life new-modelled like that!’ [Sidenote: F] ‘No,’ my brother went on, ‘nor will we sit idle at home and guard our wealth; that would be a “boonless boon”[39] indeed, and a getting with no honour to it.’ ‘Of course’, said our father. ‘You know,’ Epaminondas went on, ‘when Jason, the Thessalian Tagus, lately sent a large sum of money here to us and begged us to take it, he thought me something of a boor when I answered that he was making the first move in wrong and robbery, when a lover of monarchy like himself tempted with money a private citizen of a free self-governed state. From you, Sir, I accept your generous intention, and admire it [Sidenote: 584] more than I can say; it is beautiful and philosophical too; but you are bringing medicines to friends who are not sick! Suppose that you had heard that we were attacked in war, and had sailed with arms and ammunition to help us, and on arrival had found that all was friendliness and peace; you would not think it necessary to hand over the stores and leave them where they were not needed. Even so, you have come to be our ally against poverty, thinking that we were pinched by her, but there is none so easy to be endured as she, our dear fellow-lodger. [Sidenote: B] So no need for money or arms against her who vexes us not. Take back this message to your brotherhood: that they themselves use their wealth most nobly, but that there are friends here who make noble use of poverty: and that, as to the entertainment of Lysis and his burial, Lysis has paid the score in full for himself, not least by teaching us not to fret at poverty.’ XV. Theanor broke in: ‘Then, if it is ignoble to fret at poverty, is it not eccentric to fear and shun wealth?’ ‘Eccentric it is if it is rejected on no rational grounds, but in order to pose or because of insipid taste or affectation of some kind.’ ‘But what rational grounds’, he said, ‘could bar the getting of wealth by good and honest means, Epaminondas? Or rather—and surrender more gently than you did to the Thessalian in [Sidenote: C] answering our questions about these matters—tell me whether you think that the giving of money may sometimes be right, but the receiving never; or that givers and receivers alike are in all cases wrong?’ ‘No, no!’ said Epaminondas, ‘I hold that, as with everything else, so with wealth; there is a giving and a getting which are ugly, and a giving and a getting which are fine.’ ‘Then,’ said Theanor, ‘when a man gives readily and heartily what he owes, is not that beautiful?’ He assented. ‘But when one receives what another beautifully gives, is not the taking beautiful? Or could there be a fairer taking of [Sidenote: D] money than when it comes from one who gives fairly?’ ‘There could not’, he said. ‘Then of two friends, Epaminondas,’ said he, ‘if one is to give, it looks as if the other must take. For in battles one must swerve away from a marksman in the enemy’s ranks; in the conflict of benefits it is not fair to avoid or thrust aside the friend who nobly gives. For, if poverty is no affliction, yet wealth, on its side, is not a thing to be flouted and refused like that.’ ‘It is not,’ said Epaminondas, ‘but there is a case where the gift which may be nobly offered remains more honoured and more noble if it is refused. Look at it with us in this way: you will allow that there are many desires, and desires of many things; some inborn, as we call them, which grow up about the body and are directed towards its necessary pleasures; others adventitious, grounded on mere fancies, but [Sidenote: E] gaining strength and power by time and use, where there is vicious education, and often dragging down the soul more forcibly than do those which are necessary. Now, by habits and training, men have before now succeeded in drawing off and subjecting to reason, in great measure, the innate affections. But the whole force of discipline, my friend, must be brought to bear against those which are adventitious and extraordinary; we must work them out, and hack them off, and use restraints and checks to school them to reason. For if thirst and hunger are forced out by rational resistance in the matter of food and [Sidenote: F] drink, far easier surely is it to stunt, and in the end to annihilate, love of wealth and love of glory by refusing and prohibiting the things at which they aim. Do you not agree?’ The stranger assented. ‘Then, do you see a distinction’, Epaminondas went on, ‘between training and the intended result of the training? Thus the result of athletic exercise would be the contest against a competitor for the crown; training would be the preparation of the body for this contest of the gymnasia. So with virtue, do you allow that there are two things, the result and the training?’ The stranger assented. ‘Now then,’ Epaminondas resumed, ‘tell me first with respect to temperance; do you take abstinence from base and lawless pleasures [Sidenote: 585] to be a training, or rather a result and a proof of training?’ ‘A result and a proof’, he said. ‘But it is a training or study in temperance—is it not?—which still draws all of you on when you go to the gymnasia and have stirred up your desires for food, as though they were wild beasts, and then stand for a long time over bright tables with a variety of dishes, and at last pass the good cheer for your servants to enjoy, offering to your own now chastened appetites only what is plain and simple, since abstinence from pleasures in things allowed is a training for the soul against pleasures which are forbidden?’ ‘No doubt’, he said. ‘Then there is, friend, a way of training ourselves for [Sidenote: B] justice against the love of wealth and money; I do not mean never to enter our neighbour’s premises by night and steal his goods, and never to take his clothes at the bath; nor yet if a man does not betray country and friends for money is he training himself against covetousness (since here, perhaps, the law comes in and fear, to hinder greediness from doing acts of wrong). No, the man who often and voluntarily sets himself aloof from gains which are just and are allowed by law is training and habituating himself in advance to keep his distance from every gain which is unrighteous and forbidden. For as, when it encounters great pleasures which are also strange and hurtful, the mind cannot avoid a flutter unless it has often despised [Sidenote: C] permitted enjoyments, so to pass by vicious gains and great advancement when they come within reach is not easy, unless from a great way off the love of gain has been fettered and chastened; whereas, if it has been brought up to gain, and there has been no check on its license, it makes a riotous growth towards all iniquity, and only with the greatest effort is it withheld from grasping an advantage. But if a man does not surrender himself to the favours of friends or to the bounties of kings, but has said no even to an inheritance which Fortune offers, and has put far off that love of wealth which springs up to meet a treasure as it comes into sight, he finds that covetousness rises up against him no longer, nor tempts him to what is wrong, nor disturbs his understanding. He is gentle, and possesses himself for noble uses; he has great thoughts and [Sidenote: D] shares with his soul the noblest secrets. We, Capheisias and I, are lovers of such men, dear Simmias, and we entreat the stranger to allow us so to train ourselves in poverty that we may reach virtue such as that.’ XVI. My brother finished his argument, and then Simmias nodded his head two or three times. ‘A great man,’ he said, ‘a great man is Epaminondas, and thanks to Polymnis here for that, who procured for his sons from the first the best training in Philosophy. However, with regard to this question, Sir, do you and they settle it between you. Now about Lysis, if we [Sidenote: E] may be allowed to hear. Do you mean to move him from his tomb and to transfer him to Italy; or will you allow him to remain here with us, where he shall find kind and friendly fellow-lodgers when our time comes?’ Theanor smiled on him: ‘Lysis appears, Simmias, to love this country, in which by the good offices of Epaminondas he has wanted nothing that is honourable. For there is a certain holy rite connected with our Pythagorean burials, which if we lack we do not seem to attain our full and blessed consummation. So when we knew from dreams of the death of Lysis (we distinguish by a certain sign which is revealed in sleep whether an appearance belongs [Sidenote: F] to a dead person or a living), this thought came over many of us: so Lysis has been buried in another land with strange rites; he must be moved here to us, that he may share in all that is customary. Coming with such an intention, and guided straight to the tomb by people of the place, I was pouring libations just at evening time, and calling on the soul of Lysis to return and declare solemnly how we ought to act. The night went on and I saw nothing, but thought I heard a voice: “Stir not what is best unstirred; the body of Lysis has been buried with holy rites by friends; his soul has already been parted from it and dismissed to another birth, with another spirit for its partner.” Accordingly, when I met Epaminondas at dawn [Sidenote: 586] and heard the manner in which he buried Lysis, I recognized that he had been well trained by that great teacher, even to the rules which must not be spoken, and had enjoyed the guidance in life from the same spirit as he, unless I fail to guess the pilot aright from the course steered. For “wide are the tracks”[40] of our lives, and few there are of them by which the spirits lead men.’ When Theanor had said this, he looked closely at Epaminondas, as though scrutinizing him afresh without and within. [Sidenote: B] XVII. In the meantime the surgeon came up and loosened Simmias’ bandage, intending to dress the limb. But Phyllidas came in upon us with Hippostheneidas, and bidding me, and also Charon and Theocritus, rise and follow him, led us to a corner of the colonnade, his face showing great agitation. To my question, ‘Any news, Phyllidas?’ he answered, ‘No news to me; I knew and told you all the time how weak Hippostheneidas was, and implored you not to admit him as an associate of our enterprise.’ We were dismayed at this, and Hippostheneidas said: ‘In Heaven’s name, Phyllidas, do not say that; do not take rashness to be courage, and thereby ruin us and the city too; [Sidenote: C] but allow the men to make their own return in safety if it is so appointed.’ Phyllidas was nettled: ‘Tell me, Hippostheneidas,’ he said, ‘how many do you think share the inner secrets of our plan?’ ‘Not less than thirty, to my knowledge’, he said. ‘Very well,’ said Phyllidas, ‘there is all that number, and you have taken on your single self to annul and check the plan on which all had resolved, you sent a mounted messenger to the men when already on their road, bidding them turn back and not press on to-day, when most of the arrangements for their return have settled themselves without us.’ When Phyllidas had said this we were all much disturbed, but Charon fastened [Sidenote: D] his eyes very severely on Hippostheneidas: ‘Villain!’ he said, ‘what have you done to us?’ ‘Nothing terrible,’ answered Hippostheneidas, ‘if you will drop your harsh tone and listen to the calculations of a man of your own age, with grey hairs like yourself. If we have resolved to give our countrymen an exhibition of a courage which loves danger, and a spirit which makes little of life, then there is much of the day still before us, Phyllidas; let us not wait for the evening, but march at once against the tyrants, our swords in our hands—let us slay, let us die, let us never spare ourselves! But say we find no difficulty in this, whether of action or of endurance, yet to rescue Thebes [Sidenote: E] from an armed force, when encompassed by so many enemies, and to expel the Spartan garrison at a cost of two or three lives, is not easy; for Phyllidas has never prepared so much strong liquor for his parties and receptions that all the fifteen hundred men of Archias’ bodyguard will be made drunk; yet, even if we get rid of him, Herippidas is on for night duty and sober, and Arcesus too. This being so, why hurry to bring home friends and relatives to manifest destruction, and that when the very fact of their return is not unknown to the enemy? Or why have [Sidenote: F] the Thespians been ordered to be under arms for these two days past, and ready whenever the Spartan officers call? Again, I hear that Amphitheus is to be examined and put to death to-day, whenever Archias returns. Are not these strong signs that our action is not unmarked? Is it not best to pause, not for a long time, but long enough to make the auspices right? For the prophets declare, that in sacrificing the ox to Demeter, they found that the entrails prognosticated much commotion and public danger. Again, and this needs the greatest caution on your part, Charon, yesterday Hypatodorus son of Erianthes walked back with me from the farm, quite a good and friendly [Sidenote: 587] person, but certainly not in our secrets. “Charon is your friend, Hippostheneidas,” he said, “but I do not know him well; tell him, if you think good, to be on his guard against a certain danger revealed in a very strange and disagreeable dream. Last night I thought that his house was in pangs as of labour, and that he and the friends who shared his anxiety prayed and stood around it, while it moaned and uttered inarticulate sounds. At last the fire flared out strong and terrible from within, so that most of the city was caught by the blaze, but the Cadmeia was only wrapped in smoke, the fire not spreading [Sidenote: B] up to it.” The vision which the man described was something like this, Charon; I was alarmed at the time, and much more so when I heard to-day that the exiles are to be put up at your house; I am now in an agony lest we may be bringing a load of troubles upon ourselves, yet not doing any harm worth mentioning to the enemies, but simply stirring them up. For I reckon the city to be on our side, the Cadmeia with them, as it certainly is.’ XVIII. Theocritus broke in, stopping Charon who wanted to say something to Hippostheneidas: ‘Well, Hippostheneidas, [Sidenote: C] nothing has ever struck me as so encouraging for action (although I have myself always found my sacrifices favourable for the exiles), as this vision; strong, clear light over the city, rising, you tell us, out of a friendly house; the head-quarters of our enemies wrapped in black smoke, which always imports, at the best, tears and confusion; then inarticulate utterances proceeding from our side, so that, even if any one were to attempt to inform against us, only an indistinct rumour and blind suspicion can attach to our enterprise, which will have succeeded by the time it is evident. That the priests should find sacrifices unfavourable is natural; officials and victim belong to those in power, not to the people.’ While Theocritus was still speaking, I turned to Hippostheneidas: ‘What messenger did you send [Sidenote: D] out to them? Unless you have allowed a very long start we will give chase.’ ‘I do not know,’ he said, ‘for I must tell you the truth, Capheisias, whether you could possibly overtake the man; he has the best horse in Thebes. The man is known to you; he is head groom in Melon’s chariot stables, and through Melon knows our enterprise from its beginning.’ Meanwhile I had espied the man, and said, ‘Hippostheneidas, do you not mean Chlidon, who won the single-horse race in last year’s Heraea?’ ‘That is the man’, he said. ‘And who is that,’ I said, ‘standing this long time at the outer gates, and looking in at us?’ Then Hippostheneidas turned: ‘Chlidon,’ he [Sidenote: E] said, ‘yes, by Hercules, I fear something has gone very wrong.’ Meanwhile, the man saw that we were observing him, and drew up quietly from the door. Hippostheneidas gave him a nod and bade him speak out to all present. ‘I know these gentlemen, Hippostheneidas, perfectly well; and finding you neither at home nor in the market-place, I guessed that you had come to them, so I took the shortest way here, that you may all know [Sidenote: F] everything which has happened. When you ordered me to use all speed and meet the party in the hill country, I went home to get my horse; but when I asked for the bridle, my wife could not give it me, but stayed a long time in the store room. She searched and turned out everything inside, and after fooling me to her heart’s content, at last confessed that she had lent the bridle to our neighbour the evening before, his wife having come in to ask for one. I was angry and used strong words to her, upon which she took to horrible imprecations—“A bad journey [Sidenote: 588] and a bad return to you all!” May Heaven throw it all back upon herself, by Zeus, yes! At last, in my anger, I got as far as blows; then a crowd of neighbours and women ran up; I have behaved shamefully and have been treated no better, and have just managed to make my way to you, that you may send some one else to the exiles, for I am fairly off my head by this time and feel badly upset.’ XIX. We now experienced a strange revulsion of feeling. A little before we were chafing at the check we had received; now that the crisis was upon us short and sharp, and no delay possible, we found ourselves passing into an anguish of alarm. However, I said a word of greeting and encouragement to Hippostheneidas, to the effect that the very Gods were calling us [Sidenote: B] on to action. After this Phyllidas went out to arrange for his party, and to get Archias plunged straight into his drink, Charon to see to his house, while Theocritus and I returned to Simmias on the chance of getting a word with Epaminondas. XX. However, they were far on in an inquiry of no mean import, Heaven knows, but one which Galaxidorus and Pheidolaus had started a little earlier, the problem of the real nature [Sidenote: C] and potency of the Divine Sign of Socrates, so called. What Simmias said in reply to the argument of Galaxidorus we did not hear; but he went on to say that he had himself once asked Socrates on the subject, and failed to get an answer, and so had never asked again; but that he had often been with him when he gave his opinion that those who claim intercourse with the divine by way of vision are impostors, whereas he attended to those who professed to hear a voice, and put serious questions to them. Hence it began to occur to us, as we were discussing the matter among ourselves, to suspect that the Divine Sign of Socrates might possibly be no vision but a special sense for [Sidenote: D] sounds or words, with which he had contact in some strange manner; just as in sleep there is no voice heard, but fancies and notions as to particular words reach the sleepers, who then think that they hear people talking. Only sleepers receive such conceptions in a real dream because of the tranquillity and calm of the body in sleep, whereas in waking moments the soul can hardly attend to greater powers, being so choked by thronging emotions and distracting needs that they are unable to listen and to give their attention to clear revelations. But the mind of Socrates, pure and passionless, and intermingling itself but [Sidenote: E] little with the body for necessary purposes, was fine and light of touch, and quickly changed under any impression. The impression we may conjecture to have been no voice, but the utterance of a spirit, which without vocal sound reached the perceiving mind by the revelation itself. For voice is like a blow upon the soul, which perforce admits its utterance by way of the ears, whenever we converse with one another. But the mind of a stronger being leads the gifted soul, touching it with the thing thought, and no blow is needed. To such a being soul yields as it relaxes or tightens the impulses, which are never [Sidenote: F] violent, as when there are passions to resist, but supple and pliant like reins which give. There is nothing wonderful in this; as we see great cargo-vessels turned about by little helms, and, again, potters’ wheels whirling round in even revolution at the light touch of a hand. These are things without a soul no doubt, yet so constructed as to run swiftly and smoothly, and therefore to yield to a motive force when a touch is given. But the soul of a man, being strained by countless impulses, as by cords, is far the easiest of all machines to turn, if it be touched rationally; it accepts the touch of thought, and moves as thought directs. For here the passions and impulses are stretched towards the [Sidenote: 589] thinking principle and end in it; if that principle be stirred they receive a pull, and in turn draw and strain the man. And thus we are allowed to learn how great is the power of a thought. For bones, which have no sensation, and nerves and fleshy parts charged with humours, and the whole resultant mass in its ponderous quiescence, do yet, as soon as the soul sets something a going in thought and directs its impulse towards it, rise up, alert and tense, a whole which moves to action in all its members, as though it had wings. But it is hard, nay, perhaps, altogether beyond our powers, to take in at one glance the [Sidenote: B] system of excitation, complex strain, and divine prompting, whereby the soul, after conceiving a thought, draws on the mass of the body by the impulses which it gives.[41] Yet whereas a word thus intellectually apprehended excites the soul, while no sort of voice is heard and no action takes place, even so we need not, I think, find it hard to believe that mind may be led by a stronger mind and a more divine soul external to itself, having contact with it after its kind, as word with word or light with reflection. For in actual fact we recognize the thoughts of one another by groping as it were in darkness with the assistance of voice; whereas the thoughts of spirits have light, they shine upon men capable of receiving them, they need not verbs [Sidenote: C] or nouns, those symbols whereby men in their intercourse with men see resemblances and images of the things thought, yet never apprehend the things themselves, save only those upon whom, as we have said, there shines from within a peculiar and spiritual light. And yet what we see happen in the case of the voice may partly reassure the incredulous. The air is impressed with articulate sounds, it becomes all word and voice, and brings the meaning home to the soul of the hearer. Therefore we need not wonder if, in regard to this special mode of thought also, the air is sensitive to the touch of higher beings, and is so modified as to convey to the mind of godlike and extraordinary men the thought of him who thought it. For as the strokes of miners[42] are caught on brazen shields because of the reverberation, [Sidenote: D] when they rise from below ground and fall upon them, whereas falling on any other surface they are indistinct and pass to nothing, even so the words of spirits pass through all Nature, but only sound for those who possess the soul in untroubled calm, holy and spiritual men as we emphatically call them. The view of most people is that spiritual visitations come to men in sleep; that they should be similarly stirred when awake and in their full faculties they think marvellous and beyond belief. As though a musician were thought to use his lyre when the strings are let down, and not to touch or use it when it is strung up and tuned! They do not see the cause, their [Sidenote: E] own inner tunelessness and discord, from which Socrates our friend had been set free, as the oracle given to his father when he was yet a boy declared. For it bade him allow his son to do whatever came into his mind; not to force nor direct his goings, but to let his impulse have free play, only to pray for him to Zeus Agoraios and to the Muses, but for all else not to meddle with Socrates; meaning no doubt that he had within him a guide for [Sidenote: F] his life who was better than ten thousand teachers and directors. XXI. This, Pheidolaus, is what has occurred to me to think about the Divine Sign of Socrates, in his lifetime and since his death, dismissing with contempt those who have suggested voices or sneezings or anything of that sort. But what I have heard Timarchus of Chaeroneia relate on this head it may perhaps be better to pass over in silence, as more like myth than history. ‘Not at all;’ said Theocritus, ‘let us have it all. Even myth touches truth, not too closely, perhaps, but it does touch it at points. But first, who was this Timarchus? Explain, for I do not know him.’ ‘Naturally, Theocritus,’ [Sidenote: 590] said Simmias, ‘for he died quite young, having begged that he might be buried near Lamprocles, the son of Socrates, who had died a few days before, his own friend and contemporary. He then greatly wished to know what was really meant by the Divine Sign of Socrates, and so, like a generous youth fresh to the taste of Philosophy, having taken no one but Cebes and myself into his plan, went down into the cave of Trophonius, after performing the usual rites of the oracle. Two nights and one day he remained below; and when most people had given him up, and his family was mourning for [Sidenote: B] him, at early dawn he came up very radiant. He knelt to the God, then made his way at once through the crowd, and related to us many wonderful things which he had seen and heard. XXII. ‘He said that, when he descended into the oracular chamber, he first found himself in a great darkness; then, after a prayer, lay a long while not very clearly conscious whether he was awake or dreaming; only he fancied that his head received a blow, while a dull noise fell on his ears, and then the sutures parted and allowed his soul to issue forth. As it passed upwards, rejoicing to mingle with the pure transparent air, it appeared [Sidenote: C] first to draw a long deep breath, after its narrow compression, and to become larger than before, like a sail as it is filled out. Then he heard dimly a whirring noise overhead out of which came a sweet voice. He looked up and saw land nowhere, only islands shining with lambent fire, from time to time changing colour with one another, as though it were a coat of dye, while the light became spangled in the transition. They appeared to be countless in number and in size enormous, not all equal but all alike circular. He thought that as these moved around there was an answering hum of the air, for the gentleness of [Sidenote: D] that voice which was harmonized out of all corresponded to the smoothness of the motion. Through the midst of the islands a sea or lake was interfused, all shining with the colours as they were commingled over its grey surface. Some few islands floated in a straight course and were conveyed across the current; many others were drawn on by the flood, being almost submerged. The sea was of great depth in some parts towards the south, but [northwards[43]] there were very shallow reaches, and it often swept over places and then left them dry, having no strong [Sidenote: E] ebb. The colour was in places pure as that of the open sea, in others turbid and marsh-like. As the islands passed through the surf they never came round to their starting-point again or described a circle, but slightly varied the points of impact, thus describing a continuous spiral as they went round. The sea was inclined to the approximate middle and highest part of the encompassing firmament by a little less than eight-ninths of the whole, as it appeared to him. It had two openings which [Sidenote: F] received rivers of fire pouring in from opposite sides, so that it was lashed into foam, and its grey surface was turned to white. This he saw, delighted at the spectacle; but as he turned his eyes downwards, there appeared a chasm, vast and round as though hewn out of a sphere; it was strangely terrible and deep and full of utter darkness, not in repose but often agitated and surging up; from which were heard roarings innumerable and groanings of beasts, and wailings of innumerable infants, and with these mingled cries of men and women, dim sounds of all sorts, and turmoils sent up indistinctly from the distant depth, [Sidenote: 591] to his no small consternation. Time passed, and an unseen person said to him, “Timarchus, what do you wish to learn?” “Everything,” he replied, “for all is wonderful.” “We”, the voice said, “have little to do with the regions above, they belong to other Gods; but the province of Persephone which we administer, being one of the four which Styx bounds, you may survey if you will.” To his question, “What is Styx?” “A way to Hades,” was the reply, “and it passes right opposite, parting the light at its very vertex, but reaching up, as you see, from Hades below; where it touches the light in its revolution [Sidenote: B] it marks off the remotest region of all. Now, there are four first principles of all things, the first of life, the second of motion, the third of birth, the fourth of death. The first is linked to the second by Unity, in the Unseen: the second to the third by Mind, in the sun: the third to the fourth by Nature, in the moon. Over each of these combinations a Fate, daughter of Necessity, presides, and holds the keys; of the first Atropus, of the second, Clotho, of the one belonging to the moon Lachesis, and the turning-point of birth is there. For the other islands contain Gods, but the moon, which belongs to [Sidenote: C] earthly spirits, only avoids Styx by a slight elevation, and is caught once in one hundred and seventy-seven secondary measures[44]. As Styx moves upon her, the souls cry aloud in terror; for many slip from off her and are caught by Hades. Others the moon bears upwards from below, as they turn towards her; and for these death coincides with the moment of birth, those excepted which are guilty and impure, and which are not allowed to approach her while she lightens and bellows fearfully; mourning for their own fate they slip away and are borne downwards for another birth, as you see.” “But I see [Sidenote: D] nothing,” said Timarchus, “save many stars quivering around the gulf, others sinking into it, others, again, darting up from below.” “Then you see the spirits themselves,” the voice said, “though you do not know it. It is thus: every soul partakes of mind, there is none irrational or mindless; but so much of soul as is mingled with flesh and with affections is altered and turned towards the irrational by its sense of pleasures and pains. But the mode of mingling is not the same for every soul. Some are merged entirely into body, and are disturbed by passions throughout their whole being during life. Others [Sidenote: E] are in part mixed up with it, but leave outside their purest part, which is not drawn in, but is like a life-buoy which floats on the surface, and touches the head of one who has sunk into the depth, the soul clinging around it and being kept upright, while so much of it is supported as obeys and is not overmastered by the affections. The part which is borne below the surface within the body is called soul. That which is left free from dissolution most persons call mind, taking it to be something inside themselves, resembling the reflected images in mirrors; but those who are rightly informed know that it is outside themselves and address it as spirit. The stars, Timarchus,” the voice went on, “which you see extinguished, you are to [Sidenote: F] think of as souls entirely merged in bodies; those which give light again and shine from below upwards, shaking off, as though it were mud, a sort of gloom and dimness, are those which sail up again out of their bodies after death; those which are parted upwards are spirits, and belong to men who are said to have understanding. Try to see clearly in each the bond by which it coheres with soul.” Hearing this, he paid closer attention himself, and saw the stars tossing about, some less, some more, as we see the corks which mark out nets in the sea move over its surface; but some, like the shuttles used in [Sidenote: 592] weaving, in entangled and irregular figures, not able to settle the motion into a straight line. The voice said that those who kept a straight and orderly movement were men whose souls had been well broken in by fair nurture and training, and did not allow their irrational part to be too harsh and rough. Those which often inclined upwards and downwards in an irregular and confused manner, like horses plunging off from a halter, were [Sidenote: B] fighting against the yoke with tempers disobedient and ill-trained for want of education; sometimes getting the mastery and swerving round to the right; again bent by passions and drawn on to share in sins, then again resisting and putting force upon them. The coupling bond, like a curb set on the irrational part of the soul whenever it resists, brings on repentance, as we call it, for sins, and shame for all lawless and intemperate pleasures, being really a pain and a stroke inflicted by it on the soul when it is bitted by that which masters and rules it, until at length, being thus punished, it becomes obedient to the rein [Sidenote: C] and familiar with it, and then, like a tame creature, without blow or pain, understands the spirit quickly by signs and hints. These then are led, late in the day and by slow degrees, to their duty. Out of those who are docile and obedient to their spirit from the first birth, is formed the prophetic and inspired class, to which belonged the soul of Hermodorus[45] of Clazomenae, of which you have surely heard; how it would leave the body entirely and wander over a wide range by night and by day, and [Sidenote: D] then come back again, having been present where many things were said and done far off, until the enemy found the body, which his wife had betrayed, left at home deserted by its soul, and burnt it. Now this part is not true; the soul used not to go out from the body; but by always yielding to the spirit, and slackening the coupling-band, he gave it constant liberty to range around, so that it saw and heard and reported many things from the world outside. But those who destroyed the body while he was asleep are paying the penalty in Tartarus unto [Sidenote: E] this day. All this, young man, you shall know more clearly in the third month from this; now begone!” When the voice ceased, Timarchus wished to turn round, he said, and see who the speaker was; but his head again ached violently, as though forcibly compressed, and he could no longer hear or perceive anything passing about him; afterwards, however, he came to [Sidenote: F] by degrees, and saw that he was lying in the cave of Trophonius, near the entrance where he had originally sunk down. XXIII. ‘Such was the tale of Timarchus. When he died, having returned to Athens in the third month after hearing the voice, and when, in our wonder, we told Socrates of the story, he blamed us for not reporting it while Timarchus was still alive, since he would gladly have heard it more clearly from himself, and have questioned him further. There, Theocritus, you have all, tale and theory both. But perhaps we ought to invite the stranger to join our inquiry; the subject comes nearly home to inspired men.’ ‘Well, but’, the stranger answered, ‘Epaminondas, who puts out from the same port, is not contributing his opinion.’ Our father smiled: ‘That is just his character, Sir. Silent and cautious in speaking, but a glutton for learning and listening. That is why Spintharus of Tarentum, after spending no little time with him here, is always saying, as you know, that he never met [Sidenote: 593] any man of his own standing who knew more or who spoke less. So pray let us have all your own thoughts on the subject.’ XXIV. ‘Then, for my part,’ said Theanor, ‘I think that the story of Timarchus ought to be dedicated to the God, as holy and inviolable. But it will be strange to me if any shall be found to discredit what Simmias tells us about the matter; thus, while they designate swans, serpents, dogs and horses as sacred, refusing to believe that men may be godlike and friends of God, yet holding that God is not a friend of birds but a friend of man. As, then, a man who loves horses does not care equally for all individuals which make the class, but always picks out and separates [Sidenote: B] some excellent member of the class, and trains him by himself and feeds him and loves him beyond others; so it is with ourselves; the higher powers extract, if the word may pass, the best out of the herd, and deem them worthy of a very special training, directing their course, not by reins nor by halters, but by reason, through signs utterly incomprehensible to the general herd. Why, most dogs do not understand the signals used in hunting, nor most horses those used in the manège; but those who have learned know at once from a whistle or a chirrup what they are required to do, and easily take the right position. Homer clearly knows the distinction [Sidenote: C] to which I refer. Some of his prophets he calls “readers of dreams” and “priests”, others understand the conversation of the Gods themselves, he thinks, by sympathy, and signify the future to us. For instance: _Thus they conferred: but Helenus, Priam’s son, That scheme, which pleased them, in his heart divined._[46] And again: _So the everlasting voice I have heard and known._[47] The mind of kings and generals is made known to outsiders through the senses, by special beacons or proclamation, or calls on the trumpet; and so the divine message reaches few of us in and [Sidenote: D] through itself, and that rarely; for ordinary men signals are employed and these are the groundwork of what we call divination. The Gods, then, regulate life only for a few, for those whom they wish to make blessed in a single degree, and truly divine; but souls released from coming to the birth, and now for ever at rest from a body, and dismissed into freedom, are spirits who care for men, in Hesiod’s sense. For as athletes, when age has brought them an end of training, do not wholly lose the spirit of competition or of care for the body, but delight to see others in practice, and cheer them on and run beside them, so [Sidenote: E] those who have ceased from the struggles of life, made spirits because of the excellence of their soul, do not utterly despise our earthly affairs, our discussions and our interests: they have a kindly feeling for those training with the same end before them, they share their eagerness for virtue, encourage them, and join them in their bursts, whenever they see them running with hope near at hand and already within touch. For the spirit does not help [Sidenote: F] all men as they come. It is as with swimmers upon the sea; spectators on the shore merely gaze in silence on those who are out in the open, drifting far from land; whereas they run along the beach towards those who are already nearing it, they dash in to meet them, and with hand, and voice, and endeavour, hasten to the rescue. Such, Simmias, is the way of a spirit; while we are dipped beneath the tides of life, changing body for body, like relays on a road, he allows us to struggle out for ourselves, to be brave and patient, to try by our own virtue to reach the harbour in safety. But when any soul through a myriad of births has striven once and again a long-drawn strife well and stoutly, and when, with the cycle now wellnigh complete, it [Sidenote: 594] takes the risks, and sets its hope high, as it nears the landing-place, and presses upwards with sweat and endeavour, the God thinks it no wrong that its own spirit should go to the help of such a soul, but lets zeal go free, and the Gods are zealous to encourage and to save, one this soul and one that. The soul hearkens because it is so near, and it is saved; but if it does not hearken the spirit leaves it, and its happy chance is gone.’ XXV. As he finished, Epaminondas looked at me. ‘It is nearly your time, Capheisias, to go to the gymnasium and not fail your comrades; we will take care of Theanor, and break up [Sidenote: B] our conference whenever he likes.’ ‘Let us do so,’ I said, ‘but I think Theocritus here wants a few words with you while Galaxidorus and I are present.’ ‘By all means’, said he; he rose and led the way to the angle of the portico. We stood round and tried to encourage him to join the scheme. He answered that he perfectly well knew the day of the return of the exiles, and had arranged with Gorgidas as to all that was necessary for our friends, but that he refused to take the life of any citizen without trial, unless there were an urgent necessity; also, looking to the body of the Thebans, it was specially convenient that there should be some person with hands clean [Sidenote: C] and beyond suspicion, when the time should come to advise the people for the best. We agreed, and he returned at once to Simmias and his party. We went down to the gymnasium and met our friends, and, pairing off for wrestling matches, exchanged information and plans for action. We saw also Archias and Philippus, anointed and starting for the supper. For Phyllidas, [Sidenote: D] fearing that they might put Amphitheus to death first, called on Archias immediately after he had escorted Lysanoridas, and by suggesting hopes that the lady he desired to meet would come to the place, persuaded him to turn his mind to having a good time with the usual companions of his revels. XXVI. It was now getting late, and the cold was intense, as the wind had got up. Most people had therefore made for their homes more quickly than usual. We had fallen in with Damocleidas, Pelopidas, and Theopompus, and were taking them with us, as others took others of the exiles. For the party had broken up immediately after crossing Cithaeron; and the bitter [Sidenote: E] weather allowed them to muffle up their faces and pass through the city in security. Some of them were met by a lightning flash on the right without thunder, as they entered through the gates; and the sign seemed favourable for safety and glory, with a bright issue to follow and no danger. XXVII. So when we were all inside, two short of fifty, while Theocritus was sacrificing by himself in an outbuilding, there was a loud knocking at the door; and presently some one came in to say that two servants of Archias, sent on an urgent message to Charon, were knocking at the courtyard gate and calling for it to [Sidenote: F] be opened, and were angry at the slowness of the response. Charon was much disturbed, and gave orders to open to them at once, while he himself went to meet them, the crown on his head showing that he had sacrificed and was at his wine, and asked the messengers what they wanted. One of them replied: ‘Archias and Philippus sent us, you are to come to them as quickly as you can.’ When Charon asked, ‘What is the reason of this hasty summons, and is there anything new?’ ‘We know nothing further,’ answered the messenger, ‘but what shall we tell them?’ ‘This, by Zeus,’ said Charon, ‘that as soon as I have put off this crown and got my cloak, I will follow you. For, if I go straight off with you, there will be an alarm; people will think that I am in [Sidenote: 595] custody.’ ‘Do so,’ they said, ‘for we too have orders to convey from the magistrates to the guard of the lower city.’ So they went off. When Charon came in and told us this, we were all aghast, thinking we had been betrayed. Most of us were inclined to suspect Hippostheneidas; he had tried to hinder the return by sending Chlidon, and when that failed and the dread moment was upon us, he had used his plausible tongue to betray the scheme, out of fear; for he did not come with the rest into the house, but the whole impression he gave us was of a coward and turncoat. However, we all thought that Charon ought to go, and obey the [Sidenote: B] summons of the magistrates. He ordered his son to come in, the handsomest boy in Thebes, Archidamus, and the most painstaking in his gymnastics; barely fifteen, but in strength and size far above others of his age. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘he is my only one, and, as you know, I love him dearly; I place him in your hands, and charge you in the name of the Gods, and in the name of the spirits, if I should appear a traitor to your cause, slay him, and spare us not. For the rest, my gallant friends, set yourselves to meet the event; do not give in like shabby cowards, or allow this scum to slay your bodies; defend yourselves, keep your souls [Sidenote: C] above defeat, they are our country’s!’ As Charon said this, we were wondering at his spirit and noble heart, though indignant at his idea of suspicion on our part, and bade him take the boy away. ‘More than that, Charon,’ said Pelopidas, ‘we think that you have not been well advised in that you have not already removed your son to another house. What need for him to run our risks if taken with us? You must send him away even now, so that, if anything happen to us, one noble nursling may be left to be our avenger on the tyrants.’ ‘Not so;’ said Charon, ‘here he shall stay and share your risks; for, even in his interest, it is not [Sidenote: D] good that he should fall into the enemy’s hands. But you, my boy, be daring beyond your years, taste the struggles which must come, take risks with our many brave countrymen in the cause of freedom and valour; much hope still is left, and I think that a God is surely watching over us in our contest for the right.’ XXVIII. Tears came to many of us, Archidamus, at the words of Charon. Dry-eyed himself and unmoved, he placed his son in the hands of Pelopidas, and made his way through the doors with a word of greeting and encouragement for each of us. Even more would you have admired the bright and fearless bearing of the boy himself in the peril. Like Neoptolemus,[48] he showed no [Sidenote: E] paleness or alarm, but drew the sword of Pelopidas and seemed to study it. In the meantime, Diotonus, a friend of Cephisodorus, came in to us, sword in hand, and wearing a steel breastplate under his clothes; and when we told him of Charon being sent for by Archias, blamed us for losing time, and implored us to go straight to the houses, where we should be upon them before they were ready; failing that, it would be better, he said, to go out into the open and form our parties there out of the scattered and uncombined units, rather than shut ourselves up in a chamber [Sidenote: F] and wait like a swarm of bees to be cut out by the enemy. The prophet Theocritus added his urgent appeal; his victims showed a clear and good result, and assured him of safety. XXIX. While we were arming and making arrangements, Charon reappeared, his face radiant. Smiling as he looked at us, he bade us take heart; there was no danger and the business was moving on. ‘Archias’, he said, ‘and Philippus, when they heard [Sidenote: 596] that I had obeyed their summons, were already heavy with drink, sodden alike in body and mind; it was all they could do to stand upon their feet and move out towards the door. When Archias said: “Charon, we hear that exiles have passed into the city and are being concealed”, I was not a little troubled. “Where are they said to be?” I asked, “and who are they?” “We do not know,” replied Archias, “and therefore ordered you to come, on the chance that you might have heard something more certain.” I took a moment to recover my senses, as if after a blow, and began to put things together. The information given could be no substantial story; the plot had not been betrayed by any of those privy to it; for the tyrants could not be in ignorance as to [Sidenote: B] the house if their information came from any person with real knowledge; it must be merely a suspicion or some indefinite rumour circulating in the city which had reached them. So I answered: “I remember that in the lifetime of Androcleidas there were often reports of the kind floating idly about and causing us annoyance. But at the present time, Archias,” I went on, “I have heard nothing of the sort; however, I will inquire into the story, if you so desire, and, if I hear anything worth attention, you shall not fail to know.” “By all means,” said Phyllidas, “look well into this matter and leave no stone unturned. What is to prevent us? We must think nothing beneath our notice, but must take all precautions and pay attention. Forethought is good; safety is good!” As he said [Sidenote: C] this, he took Archias by the arm and led him off into the house where they are drinking. ‘Now, friends,’ he went on, ‘no delay for us, a prayer to the Gods, and forth we go!’ When Charon had said this, we spent a while in prayer and mutual encouragement. XXX. It was now the hour at which people are mostly at supper; the wind was still rising and drove beneath it snow with drizzle, so that the narrow streets were quite empty as we made our way through them. The party told off against Leontides and Hypates, who lived near one another, went out cloaked and carrying no arms but a sword apiece (among [Sidenote: D] these were Pelopidas, Damocleidas, and Cephisodorus). Charon, Melon, and the rest who were to attack Archias, wore half-cuirasses, and thick wreaths, some of firwood, some of pine. Some were in women’s tunics, which gave the effect of a drinking procession with women. But our ill-fortune, Archidamus, which set all the weakness and ignorance of the enemy on a level with all our daring and preparation, and chequered our action from the outset with perilous episodes like a stage play, met us at [Sidenote: E] the moment of action, and sharp and terrible was the crisis with its dramatic surprise. Charon, having satisfied Archias and Philippus, had returned home and was putting us through our parts, when there came a letter from this city; it was from Archias the priest to Archias of Thebes, an old friend and guest, it would seem, with full news of the return and plot of the exiles, of the house [Sidenote: F] to which they had repaired, and of those who were acting with them. Archias was by this time drenched with wine, and excited about the expected arrival of the ladies; he took the letter, but when the bearer said that it was addressed to him about certain urgent business: “Then urgent business to-morrow!” he said, and thrust the letter under his head cushion; then he asked for a cup, kept calling for wine, the whole time ordering Phyllidas to go out to the door and see whether the women were near. XXXI. As they had beguiled their drinking with this hope, we joined the company, and pushing our way through the servants to the banqueting hall stood a short time at the door looking [Sidenote: 597] at each of the party. Our crowns and dress and make-up, while apologizing for our presence, caused a silence: but as soon as Melon rushed first up the hall, his hand upon his sword-hilt, Cabirichus, the appointed president, plucked him by the arm as he passed, and shouted out, ‘Phyllidas, is not this Melon?’ Melon shook off his grasp, drawing his sword as he did so, then, rushing upon Archias as with difficulty he found his feet, struck and struck till he had killed him. Philippus received a neck wound from Charon; he tried to defend himself with the drinking-cups [Sidenote: B] which were near his hand, but Lysitheus threw him off the couch to the ground and slew him. We tried to pacify Cabirichus, imploring him not to assist the tyrants, but to join in our country’s deliverance, remembering that he was a holy person and consecrated to the Gods for her sake. As, however, from the wine he had taken, it was not easy to carry his thoughts to the proper course, while he stood excited and confused, and kept presenting the point of his spear (customarily worn by our magistrates at all times), I myself seized it at the middle and swung it over his head, crying to him to let go and save himself, or he would be wounded. But Theopompus, standing near him [Sidenote: C] on the right, struck him with his sword, and said: ‘Lie there with those whom thou hast been flattering; never mayest thou wear a crown in a free Thebes, nor sacrifice any longer to the Gods, in whose names thou hast often called down curses on our country, and prayers for her enemies!’ When Cabirichus was down, Theocritus, who was with us, snatched the sacred spear out of the wound; and we slew a few of the servants who ventured on resistance, while we shut up in the hall those who behaved quietly, not wishing them to slip away and spread news of what had happened, before we knew whether things had gone [Sidenote: D] well with our comrades also. XXXII. Their history was this. Pelopidas and his party quietly approached the courtyard door of Leontides, and told the servant who answered their knock that they had come from Athens with letters for Leontides from Callistratus. When he had given the message and received orders to open, and had removed the bar and set the door a little ajar, they burst in in a body, upset the man, and charged on through the court to the bedroom of Leontides. His suspicions carrying him at once to the truth he drew his dagger and rushed to defend himself; an unjust and tyrannical man he was, but of sturdy courage and a [Sidenote: E] powerful fighter. However, he did not make up his mind to throw down the torch and close with the attacking party in the dark; but in the light, and in their full view, as soon as they began to open the door, he smote Cephisodorus on the groin, and closed with Pelopidas next, shouting loudly all the time to call the attendants. These were held in check by Samidas’ party, not venturing to come to blows with some of the best known and bravest men in Thebes. Pelopidas and Leontides had to fight it [Sidenote: F] out; it was a sword duel in the doorway of the chamber, a narrow one, in the middle of which lay Cephisodorus, fallen and dying, so that the others could not come in to the rescue. At last our man, having received a slight wound in the head and having given many, and thrown Leontides down, ran him through over the still warm body of Cephisodorus. The latter saw the enemy falling, and placed his hand in that of Pelopidas, saluted the others, and cheerfully breathed his last. Leaving them, they turned against Hypates, and the door having been opened to them there, in the same way, they cut him down while trying to escape over a roof to the neighbours. [Sidenote: 598] XXXIII. Thence they hastened towards us, joining us outside, near the Polystyle. After mutual greetings and talk, we proceeded to the prison. Phyllidas called the head jailer out and said: ‘Archias and Philippus order you to bring Amphitheus to them at once.’ He, remarking the strangeness of the hour, and that Phyllidas did not seem composed as he spoke to him, but hot from the struggle and excited, saw through our artifice: ‘When did the Polemarchs send for a prisoner at such an hour, [Sidenote: B] Phyllidas,’ he asked, ‘and when by you? What password do you bring?’ As he was speaking, Phyllidas, who carried a cavalry lance, drove it through his ribs and brought the scoundrel to the ground, where he was trampled and spat upon the next day by a number of women. We burst open the doors of the prison, and called on the prisoners by name; first Amphitheus, then our acquaintances among the others. As they recognized the voices they leapt up from their pallet beds, dragging their chains, while those whose feet were fast in the stocks stretched out their hands, shouting and imploring us not to leave them behind. As these were being released, many of those who lived near came up, perceiving [Sidenote: C] what was going on and delighting in it. The women, as soon as each heard about her own relation, dropped Boeotian habits, and ran out to one another, asking questions from the men who met them. Those who found their own fathers or husbands followed, and no one tried to hinder them, for all who met them were deeply affected by pity for the men, and by the tears and prayers of modest women. XXXIV. While things were thus, learning that Epaminondas [Sidenote: D] and Gorgidas were already forgathering with our friends near the temple of Athena, I took my way to join them. Many loyal citizens had already arrived, and more kept pouring in. When I had told them in detail the story of what had happened, and while I was imploring them to rally to the market-place, all agreed to summon the citizens at once ‘For Liberty!’ The crowds now forming up found arms to their hand in the warehouses full of spoils from all lands and in the factories of the swordmakers living near. Hippostheneidas had also arrived with friends and servants, bringing the trumpeters, who had, as it happened, been quartered in the town for the feast of Hercules. All at once they began to sound calls, some in the market-place, [Sidenote: E] others elsewhere, from every direction, to cause a panic among the other side, and make them think that the rising was general. Some lighted smoky fires[49] and so escaped to the Cadmeia, drawing with them also the aristocrats, so called, who were accustomed to pass the night on the low ground near the fortress. Those who were above, seeing this disorderly and confused stream of incomers, and ourselves about the market-place, no quiet anywhere, but indistinct noise and bustle rising up to them from all quarters, never made up their minds to come down, though there were some five thousand of them. They [Sidenote: F] thoroughly lost their heads in the danger, and Lysanoridas was a mere excuse: they professed to wait for his return, which was due that day. In consequence, he was afterwards sentenced to a heavy fine by the Lacedaemonian senate. Herippidas and Arcesus were arrested at Corinth later on and put to death. The Cadmeia was evacuated by them and surrendered to us under treaty, and the garrison withdrawn. Footnote 20: See, however, an article by Mr. R. F. Macnaghten in the _Classical Review_ of September 1914 (vol. 28, p. 185 foll.). Footnote 21: _Isthm._ 1, 2. Footnote 22: So C. F. Hermann (ap. Ed. Teub.) for δυσί τῶν ἱερῶν. Footnote 23: Here several words of the text have been lost. Footnote 24: Many words have been lost (three separate lacunae). Footnote 25: Reading διεκώλυεν for διακούων. Footnote 26: Supplying προσδοκῶν, as Ed. Teub. Footnote 27: Many words are here lost, to the general effect of those in the brackets. Footnote 28: i. e. each of the four sides of each of the six faces. The Greek word for ‘side’ and ‘face’ is the same. Footnote 29: This problem (mentioned by Plutarch also in the _E at Delphi_, see p. 63) was in fact solved by Menaechmus, a pupil of Eudoxus, through Conic Sections, and also by Archytas, whose method is much more elaborate. See Preface, p. xiv. Footnote 30: _Il._ 10, 279; _Od._ 13, 300-1. Footnote 31: _Il._ 20, 95. Footnote 32: συμπιέσας for the MSS. reading συμπείσας (Reiske). Footnote 33: πταρμὸς ἤ (Ed. Teub.), for ἐφαρμόσει, is attractive, but it seems better not to anticipate the word. Footnote 34: ἐπὶ ῥειτοῖς is K. O. Müller’s reading for ἐπὶ ρητις της of the MSS. See Wordsworth’s _Athens and Attica_, p. 9. Footnote 35: Fr. 284 (the well-known fragment of the _Autolycus_ about Athletes) l. 22. Footnote 36: Cp. _Od._ 1, 170, &c. Footnote 37: _Od._ 1, 27. Footnote 38: See _Life of Nicias_, c. 3. Footnote 39: Aeschylus, _Prometheus_, 545. Footnote 40: Cp. Bacchylides, Fr. 37 (_Life of Numa_, c. 4): ‘Broad is the road’, i. e. ‘there is room for divergent opinions.’ Footnote 41: Compare _Life of Coriolanus_, c. 32, p. 229, with this difficult passage. Footnote 42: Of the participle so translated only the termination remains. Reiske’s μεταλλευόντων well completes this fine image. Footnote 43: This word is not in the Greek text. Footnote 44: See note on the Myths of Plutarch, p. 315. Footnote 45: Lucian (Musc. Encom. c. 7) tells the same story of Hermodorus. Plutarch has probably made a slip, as elsewhere, in names. See p. 99. Footnote 46: _Il._ 7, 44-5. Footnote 47: l. 53. Footnote 48: i. e. in the Wooden Horse, _Od._ 11, 526-32. Footnote 49: Perhaps rather ‘the Laconizing party’, as the Teubner editor suggests. THREE PYTHIAN DIALOGUES INTRODUCTION The three Dialogues of Plutarch entitled: I. On the E at Delphi, II. Why the Pythia does not now give her Oracles in Verse, III. On the cessation of the Oracles, may be conveniently treated as a group, and assumed to be a collection of those ‘Pythian Dialogues’ which the author sent to his friend Serapion. I and II certainly are so, III has a separate dedication. Other Dialogues, e. g. that on _Delays in Divine Punishment_, are also records of conversations which took place at Delphi; but these three are concerned with questions suggested by the temple and prophetic office of Apollo, as to which they give much curious information. If they leave us unsatisfied as to matters of still deeper interest, and tell us nothing about the policy of Delphi in the Persian wars, the counsel given to Orestes, which is fiercely controversial matter, or the popular feeling towards the oracle represented in the _Ion_ of Euripides, this is only what we learn to put up with in reading Greek books. Indeed it is of a piece with the purposes imputed to Apollo himself, who sets us problems but does not supply their solution. ‘The king whose oracle is in Delphi neither tells nor conceals, but signifies.’ We have few indications of date, or of mutual relations between the three Dialogues. I is based upon the author’s recollection of a conversation which took place ‘a long time ago’, about A. D. 66, the date of Nero’s visit to Greece. A principal speaker is Ammonius the Peripatetic philosopher of Lamprae, Plutarch’s instructor, who also speaks, with the same authority, in III. In II, Serapion, the Athenian poet, to whom the collection is dedicated in I, takes a leading part. Theon, a literary friend, who appears frequently in the _Symposiacs_ and in the _Face in the Moon_ comes into I and II. An interesting person is Demetrius of Tarsus, another literary friend, who, in III, has just returned from Britain, and who has been probably identified with ‘Demetrius the Scribe’, named on two bronze tablets found at York, and now in the York Museum (see _Hermes_, vol. 46, p. 156). The year of Callistratus at Delphi, which marks the date of III, is conjecturally fixed as A. D. 83-4 (see Pontow in _Philologus_ for 1895, and cp. _Sympos._ vii. 5). As Agricola’s term of office ended in A. D. 84 or 85, Demetrius may have served under him. The general tranquillity of the world depicted in III hardly gives us much to build upon. In I Plutarch and his brother Lamprias are both speakers. Lamprias appears in his usual character, a good companion, light-hearted and reckless; Plutarch speaks gravely and at length, and the debate is closed by Ammonius. In III Lamprias, Plutarch not being named, speaks gravely throughout, and, on the suggestion of Ammonius, closes the debate. In II, neither brother is named, and the last speaker is Theon. In the Symposiac Dialogues one or other brother is usually present, sometimes both. In the _Face in the Moon_ Lamprias alone takes part, and he acts as moderator. It is not easy to interpret these facts. M. Gréard concludes that Lamprias died early. If so, was the name, which was borne by the grandfather and by one of the sons, transferred, for literary purposes, to Plutarch himself? M. Chenevière, in his pleasant essay on Plutarch’s friends (a Latin prize dissertation) suggests that, under whatever name, the leading speaker always conveys Plutarch’s own views. Certain topics recur in this series of Dialogues. Thus the problem as to the meaning of the E at Delphi, which is the main subject of I, is glanced at, with some impatience, by Philippus the historian in III. The identification of Apollo with the sun, dismissed at the end of I as a mere beautiful fancy, is questioned again in III and allowed to stand over as unsettled. It is touched upon in II, c. 12. The hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, brought forward by Plutarch in I. c. 11, with special reference to the views of Plato in the _Timaeus_, reappears, again in connexion with the five regular solids, in III. It may be noticed that Plutarch was not, at the date of the conversation narrated in I, a priest of the temple (see c. 16). Much of the matter of III reappears, with little variety of substance, in the _Face in the Moon_, the attack on Aristotle’s theory of the distribution of matter in the one corresponding to that upon the Stoics in the other, and the accounts of the imprisonment of Cronus by his son (or Briareus) being almost identical. It is probable that in both Plutarch has drawn immediately upon Posidonius, and through him from Xenocrates and others. The question is discussed with great thoroughness by Dr. Max Adler (_Dissertationes Vindobonenses_, 1910). The situation of Delphi is one of extraordinary beauty, as well as interest: Some few miles north-east of the ancient site of Cirrha the mountainous range of Parnassus shoots out two little spurs towards the sea, thus locking on three sides an inclined valley, as the tiers of an ancient circus embrace the arena below. Upon the fourth side a small river runs, by name the Pleistus, which has forced its way between the eastern spur and Mount Cirphius, directly south and opposite; crosses laterally at the foot of the glen; then, sweeping round in a shining curve, before many leagues unites its waters to the bay. The descending slope that forms the amphitheatre is broken by ridges into three terraces, such as the traveller is wont to see in hilly countries. On the highest rose the sanctuary; below was the town and the cultivated hollow which poets called the Vale of Delphi; above all towered the ridges of Parnassus itself,[50] sheer walls of rock, rising inland towards the summit of the chain, desolate, grand, and picturesque. Those who stood above the level of the temple, and turned their gaze toward the south-west, might perhaps have looked far over to the smiling gulf of Corinth, an unbroken prospect of well-watered fields. Upon their left was the famous plane-tree, and the spring of Castalia, whose stream, leaping down between two rocks, out of a huge cleft that divided them, lost itself in a dell below, till it fell finally into the Pleistus; and mounting the rough ascent, just beyond the little torrent, might be seen the sacred way, which, issuing from the same gorge as the Pleistus, rounded the flank of the promontory of rock and climbed up its warm side. Few are the shadows that pass over the valley; through the long day the southern sun beats down on it, and the brilliancy of the sky is immortalized in the name which the inhabitants conferred upon the hills about, of Phaedriades, or shining cliffs. But the property of the temple was not bounded by the extent of the _view_. Above, on the heights, as far as Ligorea and Tithorea, both Doric villages—towards the west, beyond the Stadium, and the hill on which it nestled, to Amphissa and the pasturages along its stream—all was part of the Ager Apollinis, sacred to the god and to his priests for ever. From the Arnold Prize Essay for 1859, by Charles (afterwards Lord) Bowen. The topographical and archaeological facts to be gathered from authorities prior to modern excavations are collected by Dr. J. H. Middleton in the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_ for 1888. The results of the subsequent work of the French excavators, directed by M. Homolle, may conveniently be studied in Dr. J. G. Frazer’s Commentary on Pausanias, Book 10, where the history of the successive temples is followed out. The dimensions of the temple itself, which stood on a rocky plateau or terrace, were about 197 feet by 72 feet. The Sacred Way ran round the temple, and close to it on its northern and western sides, and was followed by the party described by Plutarch in the second of the three Dialogues (c. 17) in order to reach the southern steps. Footnote 50: 8,000 feet above the sea. The Phaedriades rose to about 800 feet. I ON THE ‘E’ AT DELPHI (In the Pronaos of the temple at Delphi the visitor was confronted by certain inscriptions (γράμματα): ‘Know thyself’—‘Nothing too much’—‘Go bail and woe is at hand’—all exhortations to wisdom or prudence (Plato, _Charmides_, 163-4). To these is to be added, on the sole authority of Plutarch’s Dialogue, the letter E, pronounced EI.) THE SPEAKERS AMMONIUS, the Platonist philosopher, Plutarch’s teacher. LAMPRIAS, Plutarch’s brother. PLUTARCH. THEON, a literary friend. EUSTROPHUS, an Athenian. NICANDER, a priest of the temple. Chap. 1. Dedication to Serapion at Athens. I am sending you, as an instalment, some of my Pythian Dialogues. What is the problem put before us by Apollo under the form of the letter E? I had always avoided the question, but here is a report of a conversation with some visitors, of whom Ammonius was one, in, or soon after, the year A. D. 66, when Nero came to Greece. 2. AMMONIUS was arguing that Apollo propounds subjects for philosophical inquiry in the ordinances and emblems of his temple, not least in this letter E. 3. LAMPRIAS quoted the traditional account, that the Wise Men, who were properly five, not seven, met here, and, after discussion, set up the letter E, as a numeral, for a protest against the intrusion of a sixth and seventh into their company. The ancient wooden E is still called that of the Wise Men. 4. AMMONIUS smiled, knowing Lamprias to be capable of improvising a ‘traditional view’. One of the company mentioned a Chaldaean visitor, who had lately talked much nonsense about the number seven. The officials of the temple know no view except that the letter is significant as a word (‘if’ or ‘whether’). 5. NICANDER confirmed this. ‘If’ is used with us in the formula of questions put to the god, or, as ‘if only’, in prayers. 6. THEON puts in a plea for ‘Dialectic’, i.e. Logic. ‘If’ is the conjunction which holds together the conjunctive proposition or syllogism, the special prerogative of _human_ intellect. Hercules, in his early days, mocked at Logic and the E, and then removed the tripod by force. 7. EUSTROPHUS: ‘Bravo, Theon, a Hercules, all but the lion’s skin!’ He appeals to the devotees of Mathematics to say a word for the arithmetical virtues of the number five (a thrust at Plutarch himself, who had yet to learn Academic moderation in his zeal for Mathematics). 8-16. PLUTARCH _loq._: 8. Yes, five has virtues: 5 = 2 + 3, the first even added to the first odd. It is called ‘Marriage’. After multiplication it reproduces itself, and so symbolizes the ‘Conflagration’ and ‘Renovation’ of Heraclitus (and the Stoics), 9. Which relate to the legends of Apollo and also of Dionysus. 10. Five, when multiplied, gives alternately five itself and the perfect ten. It is also essential in harmonies. 11. Plato holds that, _if_ there are more worlds than one, there _may_ be five, and no more. Aristotle that there is one world composed of five elements, the five regular solids. 12. The five senses are related to the five elements and the five solids. 13. We must not forget Homer, and his five-fold division of the universe. But, going back: Four dimensions (point, line, plane, solid) are all very well. But animate being requires a fifth. 14. The true derivation is not 2 + 3 = 5 but 1 + 4 i.e., unity (which is itself really a square) _plus_ the first square. 15. There are five modes of being (see the _Sophist_, and _Philebus_ of Plato). Some early inquirer saw this, and set up _two_ E’s. 16. I ask the initiated whether five has not a special virtue in their mysteries. (‘Yes,’ from NICANDER, ‘but it is a secret.’) Well I must wait till I become a priest myself. 17. AMMONIUS, though in sympathy with Mathematics, deprecates too much exactness. There is much to be said for the number seven. But the ‘E’ is really something different from all the suggestions. The God greets his visitors with ‘Know Thyself.’ They answer, THOU ART. 18. _We_ ‘are’ not at all, but always change from state to state, and so (says Heraclitus) does all Nature. 19. In true being is no past, present, or future; our common speech confesses to our not being. 20. But God IS, and is rightly addressed as ‘Thou Art’ or ‘Thou Art One’. 21. The identification of Apollo with the sun is a beautiful attempt to grasp the spiritual through the sensible. Not so the stories of his change into fire, and the like, which are better ascribed to some daemon than to the God. ‘Know Thyself’ calls us back from these lofty speculations: ‘Man, know thy nature and its limitations!’ ON THE ‘E’ AT DELPHI I. A day or two ago, dear Serapion, I met with some [Sidenote: 384 D] rather good lines, addressed, Dicaearchus thinks, to Archelaus by Euripides:[51] _No gifts, my wealthy friend, from humble me; You’ll think me fool, or think I did but beg._ He who out of his narrow store offers trifles to men of great possessions, confers no favour; no one believes that he gives something for nothing, and he gets credit for a jealous and ungenerous temper. Now surely as money presents fall far [Sidenote: E] below those of literature and learning, so there is beauty in giving these, and beauty in claiming a return in kind. At any rate, I am sending to you, and so to my friends down there, some of our Pythian Dialogues, as a sort of first-fruits; and, in doing so, confess that I expect others from you, and more and better ones, since you enjoy a great city and abundant leisure, with many books and discussions of every sort. Well then, our kind Apollo, in the oracles which he gives his consultants, seems to [Sidenote: F] solve the problems of life and to find a remedy, while problems of the intellect he actually suggests and propounds to the born love of wisdom in the soul, thus implanting an appetite which leads to truth. Among many other instances, this is made clear as to the consecration of the letter ‘E’. We may well guess that it was not by chance, or by lot, that, alone among [Sidenote: 385] the letters, it received pre-eminence in the God’s house, and took rank as a sacred offering and a show object. No, the officials of the God in early times, when they came to speculate, either saw in it a special and extraordinary virtue, or found it a symbol for something else of serious importance, and so adopted it. I had often myself avoided the question and quietly declined it when raised in the school. However, I was lately surprised by my sons in earnest discussion with certain strangers, who were just starting from Delphi; it was not decent to put them off with excuses, they were so anxious to receive some [Sidenote: B] account. We sat down near the temple, and I began to raise questions with myself, and to put others to them; and the place, and what they said, reminded me of a discussion which we heard a long time ago from Ammonius and others, at the time of Nero’s visit, when the same problem had been started here in the same way. II. That the God is no less philosopher than he is prophet appeared to all to come out directly from the exposition which Ammonius gave us of each of his names. He is ‘Pythian’ (The Inquirer) to those who are beginning to learn and to inquire; ‘Delian’ (The Clear One) and ‘Phanaean’ to those who are already getting something clear and a glimmering of [Sidenote: C] the truth; ‘Ismenian’ (The Knowing) to those who possess the knowledge; ‘Leschenorian’ (God of Discourse) when they are in active enjoyment of dialectical and philosophic intercourse. ‘Now since’, he continued, ‘Philosophy embraces inquiry, wonder, and doubt, it seems natural that most of the things relating to the God should have been hidden away in riddles, and should require some account of their purpose, and an explanation of cause. For instance, in the case of the undying fire, why the only woods used here are pine for burning and laurel for fumigation; again, why two Fates are here installed, whereas their number is everywhere else taken as three; why no woman is allowed to approach the place of the oracles; questions about the tripod, and the rest. These problems, [Sidenote: D] when suggested to persons not altogether wanting in reason and soul, lure them on, and challenge them to inquire, to listen, and to discuss. Look again at those inscriptions, KNOW THYSELF and NOTHING TOO MUCH; how many philosophic inquiries have they provoked! What a multitude of arguments has sprung up out of each, as from a seed! Not one of them I think is more fruitful in this way than the subject of our present inquiry.’ III. When Ammonius had said this, my brother Lamprias spoke: ‘After all, the account which we have heard of the matter is simple enough and quite short. They say that the famous Wise Men, also called by some “Sophists”, were [Sidenote: E] properly only five, Chilon, Thales, Solon, Bias, and Pittacus. But Cleobulus, tyrant of Lindos, and, later on, Periander of Corinth, men with no wisdom or virtue in them, but forcing public opinion by influence, friends, and favours, thrust themselves into the list of the wise, and disseminated through Greece maxims and sayings resembling the utterances of the five. Then the five were vexed, but did not choose to expose the imposture, or to have an open quarrel on the matter of title, and to fight it out with such powerful persons. They met here [Sidenote: F] by themselves; and after discussing the matter, dedicated the letter which is fifth in the alphabet, and also as a numeral signifies five, thus making their own protest before the God, that they were five, discarding and rejecting the seventh and the sixth, as having no part or lot with themselves. That this account is not beside the mark may be recognized by any one who has heard the officials of the temple naming the golden “E” as that of Livia the wife of Caesar, the brazen one as that [Sidenote: 386] of the Athenians, whereas the original and oldest letter, which is of wood, is to this day called that “Of the Wise Men”, as having been the offering of all in common, not of anyone of them.’ IV. Ammonius gave a quiet smile; he had a suspicion that Lamprias had been giving us a view of his own, making up history and legend at discretion. Some one else said that it was like the nonsense which they had heard from the Chaldaean stranger a day or so before; that there were seven letters which were vowels, seven stars that have an independent motion and [Sidenote: B] are unattached to the heavens; moreover that ‘E’ is the second vowel from the beginning, and the sun the second planet, after the moon, and that all Greeks, or nearly all, identify Apollo with the sun. ‘But all that’, he said, ‘is pernicious nonsense. Lamprias, however, has, probably without knowing it, made a move[52] which stirs up all who have to do with the temple against his view. What he told us was unknown to any of the Delphians; they used to give the regular guides’ account, that neither the appearance nor the sound of the letter has any significance, but only the name.’ [Sidenote: C] V. ‘No, the Delphic Officials’, said Nicander the priest, speaking for them, ‘believe that it is a vehicle, a form assumed by the petition addressed to the God; it has a leading place in the questions of those who consult him, and inquire, _If_ they shall conquer; _If_ they shall marry; _If_ it is advisable to sail; _If_ to farm; _If_ to travel. The God in his wisdom would bow out the dialecticians when they think that nothing practical comes of the “_If_” part with its clause attached; he admits as practical, in his sense of the word, all questions so attached. Then, since it is our personal concern to question him as prophet, but [Sidenote: D] a general concern to pray to him as God, they hold that the letter embraces the virtue of prayer no less than that of inquiry; “O, If I might!” says every one who prays, as Archilochus,[53] If _it might be mine, prevailing, Neobule’s hand to touch_! When _If-so-be_ is used, the latter part is dragged in (compare Sophron’s “Bereaved of children, I trow”, or Homer’s “As I will break thy might, I trow”[54]). But _If_ gives the sense of prayer sufficiently.’ VI. When Nicander had finished, our friend Theon, whom I am sure you know, asked Ammonius whether Dialectic might [Sidenote: E] speak freely, after the insulting remarks to which she had been treated. Ammonius told him to speak out on her behalf. ‘That the God is a master of Dialectic,’ Theon said, ‘is shown clearly by most of his oracles; for you will grant that the solution of puzzles belongs to the same person as their invention. Again, as Plato used to say, when a response was given that the altar at Delos should be doubled,[55] a matter requiring the most advanced geometry, the God was not merely enjoining this, but was also putting his strong command upon the Greeks to practise geometry. Just so, when the God puts out ambiguous [Sidenote: F] oracles, he is exalting and establishing Dialectic, as essential to the right understanding of himself. You will grant again, that in Dialectic this conjunctive particle has great force, because it formulates the most logical of all sentences. This is certainly the “conjunctive”, seeing that the other animals know the existence of things, but man alone has been gifted by nature with the power of observing and discerning their sequence. That “it is day” and “it is light” we may take it that wolves and dogs and birds perceive. But “if it is day it is light”, is [Sidenote: 387] intelligible only to man; he alone can apprehend antecedent and consequent, the enunciation of each and their connexion, their mutual relation and difference, and it is in these that all demonstration has its first and governing principle. Since then Philosophy is concerned with truth, and the light of truth is demonstration, and the principle of demonstration is the conjunctive proposition, the faculty which includes and produces this was rightly consecrated by the wise men to that [Sidenote: B] God who is above all things a lover of truth. Also, the God is a prophet, and prophetic art deals with that future which is to come out of things present or things past. Nothing comes into being without a cause, nothing is known beforehand without a reason. Things which come into being follow things which have been, things which are to be follow things which now are coming into being, all bound in one continuous chain of evolution. Therefore he who knows how to link causes together into one, and combine them into a natural process, can also declare beforehand things _Which are, which shall be, and which were of old._[56] Homer did well in putting the present first, the future next, and the past last. Inference starts with the present, and works [Sidenote: C] by the force of the conjunction: “If this is, that was its antecedent”, “If this is, that will be.” As we have said, the technical and logical requirement is knowledge of consequence; sense supplies the minor premiss. Hence, though it may perhaps seem a petty thing to say, I will not shrink from it; the real tripod of truth is the logical process which assumes the relation of consequent to antecedent, then introduces the fact, and so establishes the conclusion. If the Pythian God really finds pleasure in music, and in the voices of swans, and the [Sidenote: D] tones of the lyre, what wonder is it that as a friend to Dialectic, he should welcome and love that part of speech which he sees philosophers use more, and more often, than any other. So Hercules, when he had not yet loosed Prometheus, nor yet conversed with the sophists Chiron and Atlas, but was young and just a Boeotian, first abolished Dialectic, made a mock at the “_If the first then the second_”[57], and bethought him to remove the tripod by force, and to try conclusions with the God for his art. At any rate, as time went on, he also appears to [Sidenote: E] have become a great prophet and a great dialectician.’ VII. When Theon had done, I think it was Eustrophus of Athens who addressed us: ‘Do you see with what a will Theon backs Dialectic? He has only to put on the lion’s skin! Now then for you who put down under number all things in one mass, all natures and principles divine as well as human, and take it to be leader and lord in all that is beautiful and honourable! It is no time for you to keep quiet; offer to the God a first-fruits of your dear Mathematics, if you think that “E” rises above [Sidenote: F] the other letters, not in its own right by power or shape, or by its meaning as a word, but as the honoured symbol of an absolutely great and sovereign number, the “Pempad”, from which the Wise Men took their verb “to count”.’ Eustrophus was not jesting when he said this to us; he said it because I was at the time passionately devoted to Mathematics, though soon to find the value of the maxim, ‘NOTHING TOO MUCH‘, having joined the Academy. VIII. So I said that Eustrophus’ solution of the problem by number was excellent. ‘For since,’ I continued, ‘when all number is divided into even and odd, unity alone is in its effect [Sidenote: 388] common to both, and therefore, if added to an odd number makes it even, and vice versa; and since even numbers start with two, odd numbers with three, and five is produced by combination of these, it has rightly received honour as the product of first principles, and it has further been called “Marriage”, because even resembles the female, odd the male. For when we divide the several numbers into equal segments, the even parts asunder perfectly, and leaves inside a sort of recipient principle or space; if the odd is treated in the same way, a middle part is always left [Sidenote: B] over, which is generative. Hence the odd is the more generative, and when brought into combination invariably prevails; in no combination does it give an even result, but in all cases an odd. Moreover, when each is applied to itself and added, the difference is shown. Even with even never gives odd, or passes out of its proper nature; it wants the strength to produce anything different. Odd numbers with odd yield even numbers in [Sidenote: C] plenty because of their unfailing fertility. The other powers of numbers and their distinctions cannot be now pursued in detail. However, the Pythagoreans called five “Marriage”, as produced by the union of the first male number and the first female. From another point of view it has been called “Nature”, because when multiplied into itself it ends at last in itself. For as Nature takes a grain of wheat, and in the intermediate stages of growth gives forms and shapes in abundance, through which she brings her work to perfection, and, after them all, shows us again a grain of wheat, thus restoring the beginning in the end of the whole process, so it is with numbers. When other numbers are multiplied into themselves, they end in different numbers after being squared; only those formed [Sidenote: D] of five or of six recover and preserve themselves every time. Thus six times six gives thirty-six, five times five twenty-five. And again, a number formed of six does this only once, in the single case of being squared. Five has the same property in multiplication, and also a special property of its own when added to itself; it produces alternately itself or ten, and that to infinity. For this number mimics the principle which orders all things. As Heraclitus[58] tells us that Nature successively produces the universe out of herself and herself out of the universe, bartering “fire for things and things for fire, as goods for gold [Sidenote: E] and gold for goods”, even so it is with the Pempad. In union with itself, it does not by its nature produce anything imperfect or foreign. All its changes are defined; it either produces itself or the Decad, either the homogeneous or the perfect. IX. ‘Then if any one ask “What is all this to Apollo?”[59] Much, we will answer, not to Apollo only but also to Dionysus, who has no less to do with Delphi than has Apollo. Now we [Sidenote: F] hear theologians saying or singing, in poems or in plain prose, that the God subsists indestructible and eternal, and that, by force of some appointed plan and method, he passes through changes of his person; at one time he sets fire to Nature and so makes all like unto all, at another passes through all phases of difference—shapes, sufferings, powers—at the present time, for instance, he becomes “Cosmos”, and that is his most familiar name. The wiser people disguise from the vulgar the change [Sidenote: 389] into fire, and call him “Apollo[60]” from his isolation, “Phoebus[61]” from his undefiled purity. As for his passage and distribution into waves and water, and earth, and stars, and nascent plants and animals, they hint at the actual change undergone as a rending and dismemberment, but name the God himself Dionysus or Zagreus or Nyctelius or Isodaites. Deaths too and vanishings do they construct, passages out of life and new births, all riddles and tales to match the changes mentioned. So they sing to Dionysus dithyrambic strains, charged with sufferings and a change wherein are wanderings and dismemberment. [Sidenote: B] _In mingled cries_ (says Aeschylus)[62] _the dithyramb should ring, With Dionysus revelling, its King._ ‘But Apollo has the Paean, a set and sober music. Apollo is ever ageless and young; Dionysus has many forms and many shapes as represented in paintings and sculpture, which attribute to Apollo smoothness and order and a gravity with no admixture, to Dionysus a blend of sport and sauciness with seriousness and frenzy: _God that sett’st maiden’s blood Dancing in frenzied mood, Blooming with pageantry! Evoe! we cry._ ‘So do they summon him, rightly catching the character of either change. But since the periods of change are not equal, that [Sidenote: C] called “satiety” being longer, that of “stint” shorter, they here preserve a proportion, and use the Paean with their sacrifice for the rest of the year, but at the beginning of winter awake the dithyramb, and stop the Paean, and invoke this God instead of the other, supposing that this ratio of three to one is that of the “Arrangement” to the “Conflagration”.[63] X. ‘But perhaps this has been drawn out at too great length for the present opportunity. This much is clear, that they do associate the Pempad with the God, as it now produces its own [Sidenote: D] self like fire, and again produces the Decad out of itself like the universe. Now take music, which the God favours so highly, are we not to suppose that this number has its share here? ‘Most of the science of harmonies, to put it in a word, is concerned with consonances. That these are five and no more is proved by reason, as against the man who is all for strings and holes, and wants to explore these points irrationally by the senses; they all have their origin in numerical ratios. The ratio of the fourth is four to three, of the fifth three to two, of the octave two to one, of the octave and fifth three to one, of the double octave four to one. The additional consonance which writers of [Sidenote: E] harmony introduce under the name of octave and fourth, does not merit admission, being extra-metrical; to admit it would be to indulge the irrational side of our sense of hearing, and to violate reason, or law. Passing by then five arrangements of tetrachords, and the first five “tones”, or “tropes”, or “harmonies”, whichever name is right, by variations of which, made higher or lower, the remaining scales, high and low, are produced, is it not true that, though intervals are many, indeed infinite, the principles of melody are five only, quarter tone, [Sidenote: F] half tone, tone, tone and a half, double tone? In sounds no other interval of high and low, be it smaller or greater, can be used for melody. XI. ‘Passing over many similar points, I will’, I said, ‘produce Plato,[64] who, in discussing the question of a single universe, says that if there are others besides ours, and it is not alone, then the whole number of them is five and no more; not but that, if ours is the only universe in being, as Aristotle[65] also thinks, even this one is in a fashion composite and formed out of five; one of earth, one of water, a third of fire, and a fourth of air, [Sidenote: 390] while the fifth is called heaven or light or air, or by others “fifth substance”, to which alone of all bodies circular motion is natural, not due to force or other accidental cause. Therefore it is that Plato, observing the five perfect figures of Nature—Pyramid, Cube, Octahedron, Eicosahedron, and Dodecahedron—assigned them to the elements, each to each. XII. ‘There are some who appropriate to the same elements our own senses, also five in number. Touch, as they see, is [Sidenote: B] resistent and earthy. Taste takes in properties by moisture in the things tasted. Air when struck becomes audible voice or sound. There remain two: smell, the object of our olfactory sense, is an exhalation engendered by heat, and so resembles fire; sight is akin to air and light, which give it a luminous passage, so there is a commixture of both which is sympathetic. Besides these, the animal has no other sense, and the universe no other substance, which is simple and not blended. A marvellous [Sidenote: C] apportionment of the five to the five!’ XIII. Here, I think, I paused, and after an interval I went on: ‘What has happened to us, Eustrophus? We have almost forgotten Homer,[66] as if he had not been the first to divide the universe into five parts, assigning the three in the middle to the three Gods, while he left common and unapportioned the two extremes, Olympus and earth, one the limit of what is below, the other of what is above. “We must cry back”, as Euripides says.[67] Now those who exalt the number four as the basis of the [Sidenote: D] genesis of every body, make out a fairly good case. For every solid body possesses length, breadth, and depth; but length presupposes a point as an unit; the line is called length without breadth, and is length; the movement of a line in breadth produces a plane surface, and that is three; add depth, and we get to a solid with four factors. Any one can see that the number four carries Nature up to this point, that is, to the formation of a complete body, which may be touched, weighed, or struck; there it has left her, wanting in what is greatest. [Sidenote: E] For that which has no soul is, in plain terms, orphaned and incomplete and fit for nothing, unless it be employed by soul. But the movement or disposition which sets soul therein—a change introducing a fifth factor—restores to Nature her completeness, its rational basis is as much more commanding than that of the Tetrad as the animal is above the inanimate. Further, the symmetry and potency of the whole five prevails, so as not to allow the animate to form classes without limit, but gives five types for all living things. There are Gods, we know, and [Sidenote: F] daemons, and heroes, and after these, fourth in all, the race of men: fifth, and last, the irrational order of brutes. Again, if you make a natural division of the soul itself, the first and least distinct principle is that of growth; second is that of sense, then comes appetite, then the spirited part; when it has reached the power of reasoning and perfected its nature, it stays at rest in the fifth stage as its upper limit. XIV. ‘Now as this number five has powers so many and so great, its origin is also noble: not the process already described, out of the numbers two and three, but that given by the combination of the first principle of number with the first square. The first principle is unity, the first square is four; from these [Sidenote: 391] as from idea and limited substance, comes five. Or, if it be really correct, as some hold, to reckon unity as a square, being a power of itself and working out to itself, then the Pempad is formed out of the first two squares, and so has not missed noble birth and that the highest. XV. ‘My most important point’, I went on, ‘may, I fear, bear hardly on Plato, just as he said that Anaxagoras “was hardly used by the name Selene”, when he had wished to appropriate the theory of her illumination, really a very old one. Are not [Sidenote: B] these Plato’s words, in the _Cratylus_?‘[68] ‘They certainly are,’ said Eustrophus, ‘but I fail to see the resemblance.’ ‘Very well then; you know, I suppose, that in the “_Sophist_”[69] he proves that the supreme principles are five: being, identity, difference, and after these, as fourth and fifth, movement and position. But in the _Philebus_[70] he divides on a different plan. He distinguishes the unlimited and the limited, from whose combination comes the origin of all being. The cause of combination he takes to be a fourth. The fifth, whereby things so mingled are again parted and distinguished, he has left to us to guess. I [Sidenote: C] conjecture that those on the one list are figures of those on the other; to being corresponds that which becomes, to motion the unlimited; to position the limited, to identity the combining principle, to difference that which distinguishes. But if the two sets are different, yet, on one view as on the other, there would be five classes, and five modes of difference. Some early inquirer, it will surely be said, saw into this before Plato, and consecrated two “E’s” to the God, as a manifestation and symbol of the number of all things. But further, having perceived that the good also takes shape under five heads, firstly [Sidenote: D] moderation, secondly symmetry, thirdly mind, fourthly the sciences and arts and true opinions which relate to soul, fifthly every pleasure which is pure and unmingled with what causes pain, he there leaves off, merely suggesting the Orphic verse, _In the sixth order let the strain be stayed!_ XVI. ‘Having said so much’, I went on, ‘to you all, I will sing one short stave to Nicander and “his cunning men”.[71] ‘On the sixth day of the new moon, when the Pythia is introduced into the Prytaneum by one person, the first of your three castings of lot is a single one, namely the five: the three [Sidenote: E] against the two.’ ‘It is so,’ said Nicander, ‘but the reason may not be disclosed to others.’ ‘Then,’ I answered with a smile, ‘until such time as we become priests, and the God allows us to know the truth, this much and no more shall be added to what we have to say about the Pempad.’ Such, so far as I remember, was the end of our account of the arithmetical or mathematical reasons for extolling the letter ‘E’. XVII. Ammonius, as one who himself gave Mathematics no mean place in Philosophy, was pleased at the course the conversation was taking, and said: ‘It is not worth our while to answer our young friends with too absolute accuracy on these points; I will only observe that any one of the numbers will provide not a few points for those who choose to sing its praises. [Sidenote: F] Why speak about the others? Apollo’s holy “Seven” will take up all one day before we have exhausted its powers. Are we then to show the Seven Wise Men at odds with common usage, and “the time which runs”[72], and to suppose that they ousted the “Seven” from its pre-eminence before the God, and consecrated the “Five” as perhaps more appropriate? ‘My own view is that the letter signifies neither number, nor [Sidenote: 392] order, nor conjunction, nor any other omitted part of speech; it is a complete and self-operating mode of addressing the God; the word once spoken brings the speaker into apprehension of his power. The God, as it were, addresses each of us, as he enters, with his “KNOW THYSELF”, which is at least as good as “Hail”. We answer the God back with “EI” (Thou Art), rendering to him the designation which is true and has no lie in it, and alone belongs to him, and to no other, that of BEING. XVIII. ‘For we have, really, no part in real being; all mortal nature is in a middle state between becoming and perishing, and presents but an appearance, a faint unstable image, of itself. If you strain the intellect, and wish to grasp this, it [Sidenote: B] is as with water; compress it too much and force it violently into one space as it tries to flow through, and you destroy the enveloping substance; even so when the reason tries to follow out too closely the clear truth about each particular thing in a world of phase and change, it is foiled, and rests either on the becoming of that thing or on its perishing; it cannot apprehend anything which abides or really is. “It is impossible to go into the same river twice”, said Heraclitus;[73] no more can you grasp mortal being twice, so as to hold it. So sharp and so swift is change; it scatters and brings together again, nay not again, no nor afterwards; even while it is being formed it fails, [Sidenote: C] it approaches, and it is gone. Hence becoming never ends in being, for the process never leaves off, or is stayed. From seed it produces, in its constant changes, an embryo, then an infant, then a child; in due order a boy, a young man; then a man, an elderly man, an old man; it undoes the former becomings and the age which has been, to make those which come after. Yet we fear (how absurdly!) a single death, we who have died so many deaths, and yet are dying. For it is not only that, as Heraclitus[74] would say, “death of fire is birth of air”, and “death of air is birth of water”; the thing is much clearer in [Sidenote: D] our own selves. The man in his strength is destroyed when the old man comes into being, the young man was destroyed for the man in his strength to be, so the boy for the young man, the babe for the boy. He of yesterday has died into him of to-day; he of to-day is dying into him of to-morrow. No one abides, no one is; we that come into being are many, while matter is driven around, and then glides away, about some one appearance and a common mould. Else how is it, if we remain the same, that the things in which we find pleasure now are different from those of a former time; that we love, hate, admire, and censure [Sidenote: E] different things; that our words are different and our feelings; that our look, our bodily form, our intellect are not the same now as then? If a man does not change, these various conditions are unnatural; if he does change, he is not the same man. But if he is not the same man, he is not at all; his so-called being is simply change and new birth of man out of man. In our ignorance of what being is, sense falsely tells us that what appears is. XIX. ‘What then really is? That which is eternal, was never brought into being, is never destroyed, to which no time ever brings change. Time is a thing which moves and takes the fashion of moving matter, which ever flows or is a sort of leaky vessel which holds destruction and becoming. Of time we use the words “afterwards”, “before”, “shall be”, and [Sidenote: F] “has been”, each on its face an avowal of not being. For, in this question of being, to say of a thing which has not yet come into being, or which has already ceased from being, that “it is”, is silly and absurd. When we strain to the uttermost our apprehension of time, and say “it is at hand”, “it is here”, or “now”, a rational development of the argument brings it all to nothing. “Now” is squeezed out into the future or into the past, as though we should try to see a point, which of necessity passes away to right or left. But if the case be the [Sidenote: 393] same with Nature, which is measured, as with time which measures, nothing in it abides or really is. All things are coming into being, or being destroyed, even while we measure them by time. Hence it is not permissible, even in speaking of that which is, to say that “it was”, or “it shall be”; these all are inclinations, transitions, passages, for of permanent being there is none in Nature. XX. ‘But the God IS, we are bound to assert; he is, with reference to no time but to that age wherein is no movement, or time, or duration; to which nothing is prior or subsequent; no future, no past, no elder, no younger, which by one long “now” has made the “always” perfect. Only with reference to this that which really is, is; it has not come into being, it is [Sidenote: B] not yet to be, it did not begin, it will not cease. Thus then we ought to hail him in worship, and thus to address him as “Thou Art”, aye, or in the very words of some of the old people, “Ei Hen”, “Thou art one thing”.[75] For the Divine is not many things, in the sense in which each one of us is made up of ten thousand different and successive states, a scrap-heap of units, a mob of individuals. No, that which is must be one, as that which is one is. Variety, any difference in being, passes to one side to produce that which is not. Therefore the first [Sidenote: C] of the names of the God is right, and the second, and the third. “Apollo” (Not-many) denies plurality and excludes multitude. Ieïus means one and one only; Phoebus, we know, is a word by which the ancients expressed that which is clean and pure, even as to this day the Thessalians, when their priests pass their solemn days in strict seclusion outside the temple, apply to them a verb formed from Phoebus. Now The One is transparent and pure, pollution comes by commixture of this with that, just as Homer,[76] you remember, says of ivory dyed red that it is stained, and dyers say of mingled pigments that they are [Sidenote: D] destroyed, and call the process “destruction”. Therefore it is the property of that which is indestructible and pure to be one and without admixture. XXI. ‘There are those who think that Apollo and the sun are the same; we hail them and love them for the fair name they give, and it is fitting to do so; for they associate their idea of the God with that which they honour and desire more than all other things which they know. But now that we see them dreaming of the God in the fairest of nightly visions, let us rise and encourage them to mount yet higher, to contemplate him in a dream of the day, and to see his own being. Let them pay honour also to the image of him and worship the principle of increase which is about it; so far as what is of sense can lead to what is of mind, a moving body to that which abides, it allows presentments and appearances of his kind and blessed [Sidenote: E] self to shine through after a fashion. But as to transitions and changes in himself, that he now discharges fire, and so is drawn up, as they put it, or again presses down and strains himself into earth and sea, winds and animals, and all the strange passages into animals and also plants, piety forbids us so much as to hear them. Otherwise the God will be a greater trifler than the boy in Homer,[77] for ever playing with the universe the game which the boy plays with a pile of sand, which is heaped together and sucked away under his hand; moulding the universe when there is none, and again destroying it when it has come into being. The opposite principle which we find in the [Sidenote: F] universe, whatever its origin, is that which binds being together and prevails over the corporeal weakness tending to destruction. To my thinking the word “EI” is confronted with this false view, and testifies to the God that THOU ART, meaning that no shift or change has place in him, but that such things belong [Sidenote: 394] to some other God, or rather to some Spirit set over Nature in its perishing and becoming, whether to effect either process or to undergo it. This appears from the names, in themselves opposite and contradictory. He is called Apollo, another is called Pluto; he is Delius, the other Aidoneus; he is Phoebus, the other “Skotios”; by his side are the Muses, and Memory, with the other are Oblivion and Silence; he is Theorius and Phanaeus, the other is “King of dim Night and ineffectual Sleep”.[78] The other is [Sidenote: B] _Of all the Gods to men the direst foe._[79] Whereas of him Pindar[80] has pleasantly said: _Well tried and mildest found, to men who live and die._ so Euripides[81] was right: _Draughts to the dead out-poured, Songs which our bright-haired lord Apollo hath abhorred._ And still earlier Stesichorus:[82] _Jest and song Apollo owns, Let Hades keep his woes and groans._ Sophocles again,[83] in his actual assignment of instruments to each, is quite clear, thus: _Nor harp nor lyre to wailing strains is dear_, for it was quite late, indeed only the other day, that the flute [Sidenote: C] ventured to let itself speak “on themes of joy”; in early times it trailed along in mourning, nor was its service therein much esteemed or very cheerful; then there came a general confusion. It was specially by mingling things which were of Gods with those which were of daemons that the distinction of the instruments was lost. Anyhow, the phrase “KNOW THYSELF” seems to stand in a sort of antithesis to the letter “E”, and yet, again, to accord with it. The letter is an appeal, a cry raised in awe and worship to the God, as being throughout all eternity; the phrase is a reminder to mortal man of his own nature and of his weakness.’ Footnote 51: Fr. 960. Footnote 52: i.e. at draughts, with a play on words. Footnote 53: Fr. 71. Footnote 54: _Il._ 17, 29. Footnote 55: See p. 14. Footnote 56: _Il._ 1, 70. Footnote 57: So Emperius, whose reading is that of the Paris MS. E. (See Paton _in loco_.) Footnote 58: Fr. 22. Footnote 59: A reference to the complaint with which the first attempts of Aeschylus and others to give literary form to the popular hymns in honour of Dionysus were greeted. Footnote 60: i.e. ‘not many’. Footnote 61: See p. 76. Footnote 62: Fr. 392. Footnote 63: Terms used by Heraclitus (Fr. 24), adapted by the Stoics for the periodic conflagration and renewal of the universe. Footnote 64: _Timaeus_, 31 A and 55 E foll. Footnote 65: _De Caelo_, 1, 8-9, 276 a 18. Footnote 66: _Il._ 15, 190. Footnote 67: See _Iph. Aul._ 865 and _Herc. Fur._ 1221. Footnote 68: P. 409 A. Footnote 69: Pp. 255-6. Footnote 70: P. 23 D and p. 66 C. Footnote 71: Cp. Pindar’s: _All vocal to the hearing of the wise, All voiceless to the herd._—_Ol._ 2, 152-3. Footnote 72: From Simonides, a favourite phrase with Plutarch. Footnote 73: Fr. 41. Footnote 74: Fr. 25. Footnote 75: See on this remarkable passage E. Norden, _Agnostos Theos_, p. 231 f., and the view of H. Diels, communicated to him. I have followed Norden in reading εἶ, ἤ (he suggests with hesitation προσεπιθειάζειν) (and so Paton and Diels). Diels thinks that οἱ παλαιοί may cover later philosophers such as Xenophanes. Footnote 76: _Il._ 4, 141. Footnote 77: _Il._ 15, 362. Footnote 78: Pindar (probably from a Threnos). Footnote 79: _Il._ 9, 158. Footnote 80: Fr. 149. Footnote 81: _Suppl._ 975. Footnote 82: Fr. 50. Footnote 83: Fr. 728, probably from the _Thamyras_. II WHY THE PYTHIA DOES NOT NOW GIVE ORACLES IN VERSE THE SPEAKERS A. Introductory BASILOCLES, a citizen of Delphi. PHILINUS, a friend (perhaps also of Delphi). B. Philinus narrates a Conversation between PHILINUS. DIOGENIANUS, a young visitor from Pergamum, son of a friend of the same name. THEON, a literary friend. SERAPION, the Athenian poet. BOETHUS, a geometrician, almost a convinced Epicurean. TWO GUIDES of the temple of Delphi. 1. PHILINUS, coming out of the temple, explains to BASILOCLES why his party has been so long in making the round of the sights. It included an intelligent and inquisitive visitor, the younger Diogenianus, of Pergamum. He continues:— 2. DIOGENIANUS raised a point about the tint of the Corinthian bronze. THEON interposed with a story: 3. And discussed the properties of olive oil, which produces a crust on metals. He refers to Aristotle’s view (which cannot be traced in his extant works). 4. He suggested special properties in the air of Delphi—density and rarity—and quotes Homer for the combination of such opposites. 5. A verse inscription catching the eye of DIOGENIANUS caused him to ask why the verses of oracles are so poor. SERAPION suggested that perhaps our standard ought to be revised by that of the God. BOETHUS told a story about Pauson the painter. He added that there is no excuse in the subject-matter, witness Serapion, who wrote excellent poetry on dry science! 6. SERAPION agreed that our standards are wrong—they lack severity. Pleasure was cast out, once for all, from the seat of the Sibyl. 7. THEON disclaimed the false theory of inspiration. The verses are not the God’s, he only gives the impulse. But there is no pleasing the Epicureans, whether the prophetess uses verse or prose. DIOGENIANUS protested against levity on a subject of profound interest to all Greeks. THEON asked that the question might be reserved, and the round continued. 8. Instances from Hiero’s statue, and others, of the jealous care of Providence for human affairs. BOETHUS thought Chance, or Spontaneity, sufficient to account for all, and was answered by PHILINUS, who continued, 9. And referred to the history of the first Sibyl. BOETHUS mocked, and was met by DIOGENIANUS with instances of prophecies verified, 10. Which BOETHUS would explain as successful guesses. 11. SERAPION called for a distinction to be made between prophecies made in general terms, and those which go into details. 12. DIOGENIANUS asked the emblematic import of the frogs on the Corinthian brazen bowl. SERAPION suggested a reference to the Sun rising out of water. PHILINUS here detected an intrusion of the Stoic ‘Conflagration’ into the discussion. A casual remark raised the question of the identity of the sun with Phoebus. ‘They are as different’, said DIOGENIANUS, ‘as the sun and the moon, only the sun has permanently eclipsed the God, the sensible, the spiritual.’ 13. SERAPION asked a question which the guides had already answered: ‘No wonder if they are bewildered by our high-flown talk.’ 14. The statue of Rhodope, the courtesan, called forth a stern protest from DIOGENIANUS. 15. THEON, on an appeal from SERAPION, pointed out the greater scandal of offerings made by Greeks for victories over Greeks. 16. One of the GUIDES reminded the company of the story of Croesus and the baker-woman. 17. DIOGENIANUS begged that, instead of more anecdotes, the original question might be discussed: ‘Why has the use of verse in oracular answers been discontinued?’ The company seated itself in a new position, and BOETHUS genially remarked on its appropriateness, the place of origin of the heroic metre. 18. SERAPION congratulated him on his improved tone, and PHILINUS agreed. Philosophers have dropped verse, yet we do not infer that Philosophy has died out. PHILINUS agreed. 19-end. THEON spoke to the original question. 19. He mentioned ancient oracles delivered in prose, 20. And modern oracles given in verse. 21. To sum up: Soul is the instrument of the God, body of soul; the result must partake in the infirmity of body. The cases of reflecting mirrors, and of the moon. Thus there are two separate emotions in the prophetess—inspiration and Nature. 22. Homeric instances of the choice of human instruments—Story of Battus. 23. Of the ancient oracles (1) many were delivered in prose, (2) the fashion of the times was for verse (cp. c. 18). 24. It is better that oracles should be given in current coin, not in the depreciated coin of verse. History of poetical usage. 25. In old times obscurity was thought dignified, now it provokes impatience; and it has become vulgarized through charlatans. 26. When cities and statesmen used to consult the oracle on questions of high policy, circumlocution was necessary. 27. Again, verse was a great help to memory, when intricate advice was given, as to Battus. 28. In these days of general rest, only homely questions are asked, and are best answered in homely prose. 29. Yet we fear lest the credit acquired in three thousand years by the straight concise answers of the oracle should be lost! We gush out with wealth, as the mythical Galaesus with milk. I am proud to have had some hand in this. 30. People who regret the old obscurity and bombast are like children who admire a rainbow more than the sun which makes it. In Theon’s long concluding speech (c. 19, p. 403 A to the end) he is no doubt expressing Plutarch’s own views. But the literary references and the touch of levity are quite in Theon’s style; ‘my young friend’, in c. 20, recalls the same phrase in c. 3. Later on, Plutarch is, as Wyttenbach has observed, indicated by τὸν καθηγεμόνα ταύτης τῆς πολιτείας. Professor Hartman (see Preface, p. xx) states his conviction that Theon was an older friend of Plutarch and his predecessor in the priesthood (pp. 166 and 617). In a Dialogue in which the Epicureans are attacked (_Non posse suaviter_, p. 1088 D) a long speech clearly belonging to Theon is introduced by the words ‘I (Plutarch) said’. This slip is probably due to the author. (See, on the general subject, Mr. John Oakesmith’s note on p. 149 of The Religion of Plutarch.) WHY THE PYTHIA DOES NOT NOW GIVE ORACLES IN VERSE [Sidenote: 394 D] _Basilocles._ The shades of evening, Philinus, while you are conducting the stranger round the votive gifts! Here am I, [Sidenote: E] fairly tired out in waiting for you. _Philinus._ Yes, Basilocles, we made slow progress, sowing arguments as we went and reaping them too; battle and war were beneath them, as they sprang and sprouted in our faces, like the ‘sown men’ of old. _Basilocles._ Then shall I have to call in some one else of your [Sidenote: F] company, or will you oblige us with the whole story? What were the arguments, and who were the speakers? _Philinus._ I shall have to do that myself, Basilocles, it seems, for you will not easily meet with any of the others in the town; I saw most of them going back to the Corycium and the Lycuria with the stranger. _Basilocles._ A good sight-seer this stranger, and a mighty good listener! _Philinus._ Say rather a good scholar and a good learner. Not that these are his most admirable points; there is a gentleness [Sidenote: 395] which is full of charm; and then his readiness to do battle and to raise sensible points: nothing captious or hard in his way of taking the answers. After a very short time in his company you would have to say ‘good father, good child’, for you know that Diogenianus was one of the very best. _Basilocles._ I never saw him myself, but I have met many who spoke with warm approval of his talk and his character, and in just the same terms about this young man. But how did the argument begin, and what started it? II. _Philinus._ The guides were going through their lectures, as prepared, showing no regard for our entreaties that they would cut short their periods and skip most of the inscriptions. The stranger was but moderately interested in the form and workmanship of the different statues; it appears that he has [Sidenote: B] seen many beautiful objects of art. What he did admire was the lustre on the bronze, unlike rust or deposit, but rather resembling a coat of deep shining blue, so much so, that it rather well became the sea-captains, with whom the round had begun, standing up out of the deep so naively with the true sea tint. ‘Now was there’, he asked, ‘some receipt of pharmacy known to the old artists in brass like that method of tempering swords of which we read? It was forgotten in time, and then bronze had a truce from works of war. As to the Corinthian bronze, that came by its beautiful colour accidentally, not through art. A fire spread over a house in which were stored some gold and silver and a large quantity of bronze. The whole was fused into one stream of metal, which took its name [Sidenote: C] from the bronze, as the largest ingredient.’ Theon broke in: ‘We have heard a different story, with a spice of mischief in it. A Corinthian bronze-worker found a chest containing much gold. Fearing discovery, he chipped it off little by little, and quietly mixed the bits with the bronze; the result was a marvellous blend, which he sold at a high price, as people were delighted with the beauty of the colour. However, the one story is as mythical as the other; what we may suppose is that some method was known of mixing and preparing, much as now they mix gold with silver, and get a peculiar and rare effect, [Sidenote: D] which to me appears a sickly pallor and a loss of colour with no beauty in it.’ III. ‘What has been the cause, then,’ said Diogenianus, ‘do you think, of the colour of the bronze here?’ ‘Here is a case’, said Theon, ‘in which, of the first and most natural elements which are or ever will be, fire, earth, air, water, none approaches or touches the bronze, save air only: clearly then, air is the agent; from its constant presence and contact the bronze gets its exceptional quality, or perhaps _Thus much you knew before Theognis was_,[84] as the comic poet has it; but what you want to learn is the [Sidenote: E] nature of air, and the property in virtue of which its repeated contact has coloured the bronze.’ Diogenianus said that it was. ‘And I too,’ Theon continued, ‘my young friend, let us follow the quest together; and first, if you will agree, ask why olive oil produces a more copious rust on the metal than other liquids; it does not, of course, actually make the deposit, being pure and uncontaminated when it is applied.’ ‘Certainly not;’ said the young man, ‘the real cause appears to me to be something different; the oil is fine, pure, and transparent, so the rust when it meets it is specially evident, whereas with other liquids it becomes invisible.’ ‘Excellent,’ said Theon, ‘my [Sidenote: F] young friend, that is prettily put. But consider also, if you please, the cause given by Aristotle.’ ‘I do please’, he said. ‘Aristotle says that the rust, when it comes over other liquids, passes invisibly through and is dispersed, because the particles are irregular and fine, whereas in the density of oil it is held up and permanently condensed. If, then, we can frame some such hypothesis for ourselves, we shall not be wholly at a loss for a spell to charm away this difficulty.’ IV. We encouraged him and agreed, so he (Theon) went [Sidenote: 396] on to say that the air of Delphi is thick and close of texture, with a tenseness caused by reflection from the hills and their resistance, but is also fine and biting, as seems to be proved by the facts of digestion of food. The tenuity allows it to enter the bronze, and to scrape up from it much solid rust, which rust again is held up and compressed, because the density of the air does not allow it a passage through; but the deposit breaks out, because it is so copious, and takes on a rich bright colour on the surface. We applauded this, but the stranger remarked that either hypothesis alone was sufficient for the argument. ‘The fineness’, [Sidenote: B] he went on, ‘will be found to be in contradiction to the density of which you speak, but there is no necessity to assume it. The bronze, as it ages, exhales or throws off the rust by its own inherent action; the density holds together and solidifies the rust, and makes it apparent because of its quantity.’ Theon broke in: ‘What is to prevent, Sir, the same thing being both fine and dense, as silks or fine linen stuffs, of which Homer says _And from the close-spun weft the trickling oil will fall_,[85] where he indicates the minute and delicate workmanship of the fabric by the fact that the oil would not remain, but trickled [Sidenote: C] or glided off, the fineness at once and the density refusing it a passage. And, again, the scraping up of the rust is not the only purpose served by the tenuity of the air; it also makes the colour itself pleasanter to the eye and brighter, it mingles light and lustre with the blue.’ V. Here there was an interval of silence; the guides were again getting their speeches in hand. A certain oracle given in verse was mentioned—I think it was one about the reign of Aegon the Argive—when Diogenianus observed that he had often been surprised at the badness and common quality of the verses in which the oracles are delivered. Yet the God is Choirmaster of the Muses, and eloquent language is no less [Sidenote: D] his function than beauty of ode or tune, and he should have a voice far above that of Homer and Hesiod in verse. Here we have most of the oracles saturated with bad taste and poverty of metre and diction. Then Serapion, the poet, who was with us from Athens, said: ‘Then do we really believe that these verses are the God’s, yet venture to say that they fall behind Homer and Hesiod in beauty? Shall we not rather take them for all that is best and most beautiful in poetry, and revise our judgement of them prejudiced by familiarity with a bad standard?’ Boethus, the geometer—you know the man, [Sidenote: E] already on his way to the camp of Epicurus—broke in: ‘Have you ever heard the story of Pauson the painter?’ ‘Not I’, said Serapion. ‘Well, it is worth hearing. It appears that he had contracted to paint a horse rolling, and painted him galloping. The owner was indignant; so Pauson laughed and turned the canvas upside down, with the result that the lower parts became the upper, and there was the horse rolling, not galloping. So [Sidenote: F] it is, Bion tells us, with certain syllogisms when converted. Thus some will tell us not that the oracles are quite beautiful because they are the God’s, but that they are not the God’s because they are bad! That point may be left unsettled. But that the verses used in the oracles are bad poetry,’ he went on, ‘is made clear also in your judgement, my dear Serapion, is it not so? For you write poems which are philosophical and severe as to matter, but in force and grace and diction more like the work of Homer and Hesiod than the utterances of the Pythia.’ VI. Then Serapion: ‘Yes, we are sick, Boethus, sick in ears and in eyes; luxury and softness have accustomed us to think things beautiful as they are more sweet, and to call them so. Soon we shall actually be finding fault with the Pythia because [Sidenote: 397] she does not speak with a more thrilling voice than Glauce the singing-girl, or use costly ointments, or put on purple robes to go down into the sanctuary, or burn on her censer cassia, mastic, and frankincense, but only bay leaves and barley meal. Do you not see’, he went on, ‘what grace the songs of Sappho have, how they charm and soothe the hearers, while the Sibyl “with raving mouth”, as Heraclitus says, “utters words with no laughter, no adornment, no spices”,[86] yet makes her voice carry to ten thousand years, because of the God. And Pindar[87] tells us that Cadmus heard from the God “right music”, not [Sidenote: B] sweet music, or delicate music, or twittering music. What is passionless and pure gives no admission to pleasure; she was cast out in this very place, together with pain,[88] and the most of her has dribbled away, it seems, into the ears of men.’ VII. When Serapion had done, Theon smiled. ‘Serapion’, he said, ‘has paid his usual tribute to his own proclivities, making capital out of the turn which the conversation had taken about pain and pleasure! But for us, Boethus, even if these verses are inferior to Homer, let us never suppose that the God has composed them; he only gives the initial impulse according to the capacity of each prophetess. Why, suppose the answers had [Sidenote: C] to be written, not spoken. I do not think we should suppose that the letters were made by the God, and find fault with the calligraphy as below royal standard. The strain is not the God’s, but the woman’s, and so with the voice and the phrasing and the metre; he only provides the fantasies, and puts light into her soul to illuminate the future; for that is what inspiration is. To put it plainly, there is no escaping you prophets of Epicurus—yes, you too, Boethus, are drifting that way—you blame those old prophetesses because they used bad poetry, and you also blame those of to-day because they speak their answers in [Sidenote: D] prose, and use the first words which come, that they may not be overhauled by you for headless, hollow, crop-tailed lines.’ Then Diogenianus: ‘Do not jest, in Heaven’s name, no! but help us to solve the problem which is common to us all. There is not a Greek[89] living who is not in search of a rational account of the fact that the oracle has ceased to use verse, epic or other.’ Theon interrupted: ‘At the present moment, my young friend, we seem to be doing a shabby turn by the guides, taking the bread out of their mouths. Suffer them first to do [Sidenote: E] their office, afterwards you shall discuss in peace whatever you wish.’ VIII. Our round had now brought us in front of the statue of Hiero, the tyrant. Most of the stories the stranger knew well, but he good-naturedly lent his ear to them. At last, when he heard that a certain bronze pillar given by Hiero, which had been standing upright, fell of its own accord on the very day when Hiero died at Syracuse, he showed surprise. I set myself to remember similar instances, such as the notable one of Hiero the Spartan, how before his death at Leuctra the eyes fell out [Sidenote: F] of his statue, and the gold stars disappeared which Lysander had dedicated after the naval battle of Aegospotami. Then the stone statue of Lysander himself broke out into such a growth of weeds and grass that the face was hidden. At the time of the Athenian disaster at Syracuse, the golden berries kept dropping off from the palm trees, and crows chipped the shield on the figure of Pallas. Again, the crown of the Cnidians, which Philomelus, tyrant of Phocis, had given to Pharsalia the dancing [Sidenote: 398] girl, caused her death, as she was playing near the temple of Apollo in Metapontum, after she had removed from Greece into Italy. The young men made a rush at the crown, and in their struggle to get it from one another, tore the woman to pieces. Now Aristotle used to say that no one but Homer made ‘words which stir, because of their energy’.[90] But I would say that there have been votive offerings sent here which have movement in a high degree, and help the God’s foreknowledge to signify things; that none of them is void or without feeling, but all are full of Divinity. ‘Very good!’ said Boethus; ‘so it is not enough to shut the God into a mortal body once every month. We will also knead him into every morsel of stone and brass, to [Sidenote: B] show that we do not choose to hold Fortune, or Spontaneity, a sufficient author of such occurrences.’ ‘Then in your opinion’, I said, ‘each of the occurrences looks like Fortune or Spontaneity; and it seems probable to you that the atoms glided forth, and were dispersed, and swerved, not sooner and not later, but at the precise moment when each of the dedicators was to fare worse or better. Epicurus helps you now by what he said or wrote three hundred years ago; but the God, unless [Sidenote: C] he take and shut himself up in all things, and be mingled with all, could not, you think, initiate movement, or cause change of condition in anything which is!’ IX. Such was my answer to Boethus, and to the same effect about the Sibyl and her utterances. For when we stood near the rock by the Council Chamber, on which the first Sibyl is said to have been seated on her arrival from Helicon, where she had been brought up by the Muses (though others say that she came from the Maleans, and was the daughter of Lamia the daughter of Poseidon), Serapion remembered the verses in which she hymned herself; how she will never cease from [Sidenote: D] prophesying, even after death, but will herself go round in the moon, being turned into what we call the ‘bright face’, while her breath is mingled with the air and borne about in rumours and voices for ever and ever; and her body within the earth suffers change, so that from it spring grass and weeds, the pasture of sacred cattle, which have all colour, shapes, and qualities in their inward parts whereby men obtain forecasts of future things. Here Boethus made his derision still more evident. [Sidenote: E] The stranger observed that, although these things have a mythical appearance, yet the prophecies are attested by many overturnings and removals of Greek cities, inroads of barbarian hordes, and upsettings of dynasties. ‘These still recent troubles at Cumae and Dicaearchia[91], were they not chanted long ago in the songs of the Sibyl, so that Time was only discharging his debts in the fires which have burst out of the mountain, the boiling seas, the masses of burning rocks[92] tossed aloft by the winds, the ruin of cities many and great, so that if you visit them in broad daylight you cannot get a clear idea of the site, the ground being covered with confused ruins? It is [Sidenote: F] hard to believe that such things have happened, much harder to predict them without divine power.’ X. ‘My good Sir,’ said Boethus, ‘what does happen in Nature which is not Time paying his debts? Of all the strange unexpected things, by land or sea, among cities and men, is there any which some one might not foretell, and then, after it has happened, find himself right? Yet this is hardly foretelling at all; it is telling, rather it is tossing or scattering words into the infinite, with no principle in them. They wander about, often Fortune meets them and throws in with them, but it is all spontaneous. It is one thing, I think, when what has been foretold happens, quite another when what will happen is foretold. Any statement made about things then non-existent contains intrinsic error, it has no right to await the confirmation [Sidenote: 399] which comes from spontaneous happening; nor is it any true proof of having foretold with knowledge that the thing happened after it was foretold, for Infinity brings all things. No, the “good guesser”, whom the proverb[93] has announced to be the best prophet, is like a man who hunts on the trail of the future, by the help of the plausible. These Sibyls and Bacises threw into the sea, that is, into time, without having any real clue, nouns and verbs about troubles and occurrences of every description. Some of these prophecies came about, but they were lies; and what is now pronounced is a lie like them, even if, later on, it should happen to turn out true.’ [Sidenote: B] XI. When Boethus had finished, Serapion spoke: ‘The case is quite fairly put by Boethus against prophecies so indefinitely worded as those he mentions, with no basis of circumstance: “If victory has been foretold to a general, he has conquered. If the destruction of a city, it is lost.” But where not only the thing which is to happen is stated, but also the how, the when, after what event, with whose help, then it is not a guess at things which will perhaps be, but a clear prediction of things which will certainly be. Here are the lines[94] with reference to the lameness of Agesilaus: [Sidenote: C] _Sure though thy feet, proud Sparta, have a care, A lame king’s reign may see thee trip—Beware! Troubles unlooked for long shall vex thy shore, And rolling Time his tide of carnage pour._ And then those about the island[95] which the sea cast up off Thera and Therasia, and also about Philip and his war with the Romans: _When Trojan race the victory shall win From Punic foe, lo! wonders shall begin; Unearthly fires from out the sea shall flash, Whirlwinds toss stones aloft, and thunders crash, An isle unnamed, unknown, shall stand upright, The worse shall beat the stronger in the fight._ What happened within a short time—that the Romans mastered the Carthaginians, and brought the war with Philip to a finish, [Sidenote: D] that Philip met the Aetolians and Romans in battle and was defeated, and, lastly, that an island rose out of the depths of the sea, with much fire and boiling waves—could not all be set down to chance and spontaneous occurrence. Why, the order emphasizes the foreknowledge, and so does the time predicted to the Romans, some five hundred years before the event, as that in which they were to be at war with all the races at once, which meant the war with the slaves after their revolt. In all this nothing is unascertainable, the story is not left in dim light to [Sidenote: E] be groped out with reference to Fortune “in Infinity”, it gives many securities, and is open to trial, it points the road which the destined event is to tread. For I do not think that any one will say that the agreement with the details as foretold was accidental. Otherwise, what prevents some one else from saying that Epicurus did not write his _Leading Principles_ for our use, Boethus, but that the letters fell together by chance and just spontaneously, and so the book was finished off?’ XII. While we were talking thus, we were moving forward. [Sidenote: F] In the store-house of the Corinthians we were looking at the golden palm tree, the only remnant of their offerings, when the frogs and water-snakes embossed round the roots caused much surprise to Diogenianus, and, for the matter of that, to us. For the palm tree is not, like many others, a marshy or water-loving plant, nor have frogs anything specially to do with the Corinthians. Thus they must be a symbolical or canting device of that city, just as the men of Selinus are said to have dedicated a golden plant of parsley (selinon), and those of Tenedos the axe, because of the crabs found round the place which they [Sidenote: 400] call Asterium, the only ones, it appears, with the brand of an axe on the shell. Yet the God himself is supposed to have a partiality for crows and swans and wolves and hawks, for anything rather than beasts like crabs. Serapion observed that the artist intended a veiled hint at the sun drawing his aliment and origin from exhalations out of moist places, whether he had it from Homer, _Leaving the beauteous lake, the great sun scaled The brazen sky_,[96] or whether he had seen the sun painted by the Egyptians as a newly-born child seated on a lotus. I laughed: ‘Where have you got to again, my good Sir,’ I said, ‘thrusting the [Sidenote: B] Porch in here, and quietly slipping into our discussion their “Conflagrations” and “Exhalations”? Thessalian women fetch the sun and the moon down to us, but you are assuming that they are first born and then watered out of earth and its waters. Plato[97] dubbed man “a heavenly plant”, rearing himself up from a root on high, namely, his head; but you laugh down Empedocles when he tells us how the sun, having been brought into being by reflection of heavenly light around the earth _Beams back upon Olympus undismayed!_ Yet, on your own showing, the sun is a creature or plant of the marshes, naturalized by you in the country of frogs or [Sidenote: C] water-snakes. However, all this may be reserved for the Stoics and their tragedies; here we have the incidental works of the artists, and let us examine them incidentally. In many respects they are clever people, but they have not in all cases avoided coldness and elaboration. Just as the man who designed Apollo with the cock in his hand meant to suggest the early morning hour when dawn is coming, so here the frogs may be taken for a symbol of the spring season when the sun begins to have power over the air and to break up winter; always supposing [Sidenote: D] that, with you, we are to reckon Apollo and the sun one God, not two.’ ‘What?’ said Serapion, ‘do you not agree? Do you hold the sun to be different from Apollo?’ ‘As different as the moon from the sun;’ I replied, ‘only she does not hide the sun often or from all the world,[98] whereas the sun has made, we may almost say, all the world ignorant of Apollo, diverting thought by sensation, to the apparent from the real.’ XIII. Next Serapion asked the guides the real reason why they call the chamber not after Cypselus, the Dedicator, but [Sidenote: E] after the Corinthians. When they were silent, being, as I privately believe, at a loss for a reason, I laughed, and said: ‘What can these men possibly know or remember, utterly dazed as they must be by our high celestial talk? Why, it was only just now that we heard them saying that, after the tyranny was overthrown, the Corinthians wished to inscribe the golden statue at Pisa, and also this treasure-house, with the name of the city. So the Delphians granted it as a right, and agreed; but the Corinthians passed a vote to exclude the Eleians, who had shown jealousy of them, from the Isthmian meetings, and from that time to [Sidenote: F] this there has been no competitor from Elis. The murder of the Molionidae by Hercules near Cleonae has nothing to do with the exclusion of the Eleians, though some think that it has. On the contrary, it would have been for them to exclude the Corinthians if that had been the cause of collision.’ Such were my remarks. XIV. When we passed the chamber of the Acanthians and Brasidas, the guide showed us a place where iron obelisks to Rhodopis the courtesan once used to stand. Diogenianus showed annoyance: ‘So it was left for the same state’, he said, [Sidenote: 401] ‘to find a place for Rhodopis to deposit the tithes of her earnings, and to put Aesop, her fellow servant, to death!’ ‘Bless you, friend,’ said Serapion, ‘why so vexed at that? Carry your eyes upwards, and behold among the generals and kings the golden Mnesarete, which Crates called a standing trophy of the lewdness of the Greeks.’ The young man looked: ‘Was it then about Phryne that Crates said that?’ ‘Yes, it was,’ said Serapion, ‘her name was Mnesarete, but she took on that of Phryne (toad) as a nickname because of her yellow skin. Many names, it would seem, are concealed by these nicknames. There was Polyxena, mother of Alexander, afterwards said to have been called Myrtale and Olympias and Stratonice. Then Eumetis [Sidenote: B] of Rhodes is to this day called by most people Cleobuline, after her father; and Herophile of Erythrae, when she showed a prophetic gift, was addressed as Sibylla. You will hear the grammarians telling us that Leda has been named Mnesinoe, and Orestes Achaeus. But how do you propose’, he went on, looking hard at Theon, ‘to get rid of the charge as to Phryne?’ XV. Theon smiled quietly: ‘In this way:’ he said, ‘by a cross charge against you for raking up the pettiest of the [Sidenote: C] Greek misdoings. For as Socrates,[99] when entertained in the house of Callias, makes war upon the ointment only, but looks on at all the dancing and tumbling and kisses and buffoonery, and holds his tongue, so you, it seems to me, want to exclude from the temple a poor woman who made an unworthy use of her charms; but when you see the God encompassed by first-fruits and tithes of murders, wars, and raids, and his temple loaded with Greek spoils and booty, you show no disgust; you have no pity for the Greeks when you read on the beautiful offerings such deeply disgraceful inscriptions as “Brasidas and the Acanthians from the Athenians”, “Athenians from [Sidenote: D] Corinthians”, “Phocians from Thessalians”, “Orneatans from Sicyonians”, “Amphictyones from Phocians”. So Praxiteles, it seems, was the one person who offended Crates by finding[100] room for his mistress to stand here, whereas Crates ought to have commended him for placing beside those golden kings a golden courtesan, a strong rebuke to wealth as having nothing wonderful or worshipful about it. It would be good if kings [Sidenote: E] and rulers were to set up in the God’s house offerings to Justice Temperance, Magnanimity, not to golden and delicate Abundance, in which the very foulest lives have their share.’ XVI. ‘You are forgetting to mention’, said one or other of the guides, ‘how Croesus had a golden figure of the baker-woman made, and dedicated it here.’ ‘Yes,’ said Theon, ‘but that was not to flout the temple with his luxury of wealth, but for a good and righteous cause. The story is[101] that Alyattes, father of Croesus, married a second wife, and brought up a fresh family. This woman made a plot against Croesus; she gave poison to the baker and told her to knead a loaf with it and serve [Sidenote: F] to Croesus. The baker told Croesus secretly, and set the loaf before the wife’s children. And so, when Croesus became king, he requited the baker-woman’s service in a way which made the God a witness, and moreover did a good turn to him. Hence’, he said, ‘it is quite proper to honour and love any such offering from cities as that of the Opuntians. When the Phocian tyrants had melted up many of the gold and silver offerings and struck coined money, which they distributed among the cities, the Opuntians collected all the silver they could find, and sent a large jar to be consecrated here to the God. I commend the [Sidenote: 402] Myrinaeans also, and the Apollonians, who sent hither sheaves of gold, and even more highly the Eretrians and Magnesians, who endowed the God with firstfruits of men, as being the giver of crops and also ancestral, racial, humane. Whereas I blame the Megarians, because they were almost alone in setting up the God holding a lance; this was after the battle in which they defeated and expelled the Athenians when holding their city, after the Persian wars. Later on, however, they offered to him a golden harp-quill, attaching it, as it appears, to Scythinus, [Sidenote: B] who says of the lyre: _which the son of Zeus Wears, the comely God Apollo, gathering first and last in one, And he holds a golden harp-quill flashing as the very sun._’ XVII. Serapion wanted to put In some further remark on this, when the stranger said: ‘It is delightful to listen to such speeches as we have heard, but I feel myself obliged to claim fulfilment of the original promise, that we should hear the cause which has made the Pythia cease to prophesy in epic or other verse. So, if it be your pleasure, let us leave to another time the remainder of the sights, sit down where we are, and hear about that. For it is this more than anything else which militates against the credibility of the oracle; it must be one of two things, either the Pythia does not get near the spot where the Divinity is, or the current is altogether exhausted, and [Sidenote: C] the power has failed.’ Accordingly, we went round and seated ourselves on the southern plinth of the temple, in view of the temple of Earth and the fountain, which made Boethus at once observe that the very place where the problem was raised lent itself to the stranger’s case. For here was a temple of the Muses where the exhalation rises from the fountain; from which they drew the water used for the lustrations, as Simonides[102] has it: _Whence is drawn for holy washings Water of the Muses bright._ And again, in a rather more elaborate strain, the same poet [Sidenote: D] addressing Clio: _Holy patron of our washings, Goddess sought with many a vow, By no golden robe encumbered, hear thy servants drawing now Water, fragrant and delightful, from ambrosial depths below._ So Eudoxus was wrong in believing those who have made out that this was called ‘Water of Styx’. But they installed the Muses as assessors in prophecy and guardians of the place, by the fountain and the temple of Earth where the oracle used to be, because the responses were given in metre and in lyric strains. And some say further that the heroic metre was heard for the [Sidenote: E] first time here: _Bring in your feathers, ye birds, ye bees, bring wax at his bidding._ The God was in need, and dignity was waived![103] XVIII. ‘More reasonable, that, Boethus,’ said Serapion, ‘and more in tune with the Muses. For we ought not to fight against the God, nor to remove, along with his prophecy, his Providence and Godhead also, but rather to seek fresh solutions for apparent contradictions, and never to surrender the reverent belief of our fathers.’ ‘Excellent Serapion!’ I said, ‘you are right. We were not abandoning Philosophy, as cleared out of the way and done for, because once upon a time philosophers [Sidenote: F] put out their dogmas and theories in verse, as Orpheus, Hesiod, Parmenides, Empedocles, Thales, whereas later on they gave it up, and have now all given it up—except you! In your hands Poetry is returning home to Philosophy, and clear and noble is the strain in which she rallies our young people. Astronomy again: she was not lowered in the hands of Aristarchus, Timocharis, Aristyllus, Hipparchus, all writing in prose, whereas Eudoxus, [Sidenote: 403] Hesiod, and Thales used metre, if we assume that Thales really wrote the _Astronomy_ attributed to him. Pindar actually expresses surprise at the neglect, in his own day, of a mode of melody....[104] There is nothing out of the way or absurd in seeking out the causes of such changes; but to remove arts and faculties altogether, whenever there is disturbance or variation in their details, is not fair.’ XIX. ‘And yet’, interposed Theon, ‘those instances have involved really great variations and novelties, whereas of the [Sidenote: B] oracles given here we know of many in prose even in old days, and those on no trifling matters. When the Lacedaemonians, as Thucydides[105] has told us in his history, consulted the God about their war with the Athenians, he promised them victory and mastery, and that “he himself will help them, invited or uninvited.” And again, that, if they did not restore Pleistoanax[106], they shall plough with a silver share.[107] When the Athenians consulted him about their expedition in Sicily, he directed them to bring the priestess of Erythrae to Athens; now the woman’s name was Peace. When Deinomenes the Siceliot inquired about his sons, the answer was that all three should [Sidenote: C] reign as tyrants. “And the worse for them, O Master Apollo”, rejoined Deinomenes. “That too”, added the God, “to form part of the answer.” You know that Gelo had the dropsy and Hiero the stone, while they reigned; Thrasybulus, the third, was involved in revolutions and wars and soon lost his throne. Then Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus, after putting many others to death in cruel and unlawful ways, at last killed Timarchus, who had come to him from Athens with money, after receiving him with hospitality and kindness; he thrust his body into a crate and flung it out to sea. This he did by the hands of Cleander of Aegina, no one else knew. Afterwards, when [Sidenote: D] himself in trouble, he sent his brother Cleotimus, to consult the oracle secretly about his own exile and retirement. The God answered that he granted exile to Procles, and retirement either to the place where he had ordered his Aeginetan friend to lodge the crate, or where the stag sheds his horn. The tyrant understood the God to bid him fling himself into the sea, or bury himself underground (for the stag buries his horn deep out of sight, when it falls off). He waited a short time, then, when his affairs became desperate, went into exile. But the friends of Timarchus caught and slew him, and cast out the corpse into the sea. [Sidenote: E] Now comes the strongest instance: the statutes by which Lycurgus regulated the Lacedaemonian constitution were given to him in prose. So Alyrius, Herodotus, Philochorus, and Ister, the men who most zealously set about collecting metrical prophecies, have written down oracular responses which were not in metre, and Theopompus, who was exceptionally interested [Sidenote: F] about the oracle, has administered a vigorous rebuke to those who do not hold that the Pythia prophesied in metre in those days; yet, when he wanted to prove the point, he has found an exceedingly small number of such answers, which shows that the others, even at that early time, were put forth in prose. XX. ‘Some oracles, however, still run into metres, one of which has made “necessary business”[108] a household word. There is in Phocis a temple of “Hercules Woman-Hater”, where the practice is for the consecrated priest not to associate with a woman during his year. So they appoint comparatively old men to the priesthood. However, not very long ago, a young man of good character, but ambitious, who was in love with [Sidenote: 404] a girl, accepted the office. At first he put constraint on himself and avoided her; but one day, when he was resting after wine and dancing, she burst in, and he yielded. Then, in his fear and confusion, he fled to the oracle, and proceeded to ask the God about his offence, and whether it admitted of excuse or expiation. He received this reply: _All needful business doth the God allow._ All the same, if it be granted that nothing is prophesied in our own day, otherwise than in metre, the difficulty will be so much greater about the ancients, who sometimes employed metre for the responses, sometimes not. There is nothing strange, my [Sidenote: B] young friend, in either one or the other, so long as we hold sound, pure views about the God, and do not suppose that it is himself who formerly used to compose the verses, or who now suggests the answers to the Pythia, speaking as it were from under a mask. XXI. ‘However, it is worth our while to pursue this inquiry at greater length another time. For the present, let us remember our results, which are briefly these: Body uses many instruments, soul uses body and its parts, soul has been brought into being as the instrument of God. The excellence of an instrument is to imitate most closely the power which uses it, with all its [Sidenote: C] own natural power, and to reproduce the effect of his essential thought, but to exhibit it, not pure and passionless and free from error, as it was in the creative artist, but with a large admixture of foreign element. For in itself it is invisible to us, but appearing “other” and through another medium it is saturated with the nature of that medium. I pass over wax and gold and silver and copper, and all other varieties of moulded substance, which take on one common form of impressed likeness, but add to the copy, each its own distinct speciality. I pass over the myriad distortions of images and reflections from a single form in [Sidenote: D] mirrors, plane, hollow, or convex. For nothing seems better to reproduce the type, no instrument more obediently to use its own nature, than the moon. Yet taking from the sun his bright and fiery rays, she does not transmit them so to us; mingled with herself they change colour and also take on a different power; the heat has wholly disappeared, and the light fails from weakness before it reaches us. I think you know the saying found in Heraclitus, that “The King whose seat is at [Sidenote: E] Delphi, speaks not, nor conceals, but signifies.”[109] Take and add then to what is here so well said, the conception that the God of this place employs the Pythia for the hearing as the sun employs the moon for the seeing. He shows and reveals his own thoughts, but shows them mingled in their passage through a mortal body, and a soul which cannot remain at rest or present itself to the exciting power unexcited and inwardly composed, but which boils and surges and is involved in the stirrings and troublesome passions from within. As whirlpools do not keep [Sidenote: F] a steady hold on bodies borne round and round and also downwards, since an outer force carries them round, but they sink down of their own nature, so that there is a compound spiral movement, of a confused and distorted kind, even so what we call inspiration seems to be a mixture of two impulses, and the soul is stirred by two forces, one of which it is a passive recipient, one from its own nature. We see that inanimate and stationary bodies cannot be used or forced contrary to their own nature, that a cylinder cannot be moved as if it were a sphere or a cube, that a lyre cannot be played like a flute or a trumpet like a harp, but that the artistic use of a thing is no other than the natural use. Is it possible then that the animate and self-moving, which has both impulse and reason, can be treated in any other way than is agreeable to the habit, force, or natural condition which [Sidenote: 405] is already existent within it? Can an unmusical mind be excited like a musical, an unlettered mind by literature, a mind untrained in reasoning, whether speculative or disciplinary, by logic? It is not to be spoken of. XXII. ‘Again, Homer is my witness: he assumes[110] that nothing, so to speak, is brought about without a God; he does not, however, describe the God as using all things for all ends, but according to the art or faculty which each possesses. For do you not see, dear Diogenianus, that Athena, when she wants to persuade the Achaeans, calls in Odysseus;[111] when to wreck the truce, she looks for Pandarus;[112] when to rout the Trojans, she [Sidenote: B] approaches Diomede?[113] Why? because Diomede is a sturdy man and a fighter, Pandarus an archer and a fool, Odysseus a clever speaker and a sensible man. For Homer was not of the same mind as Pindar[114], if Pindar it was who wrote _Sail on a crate, if God so choose ‘twill swim._ He knew that different faculties and natural gifts are appointed for different ends; each is moved in its own way, even if the moving force be one for all. As then the force cannot move that which walks so as to make it fly, nor that which lisps to speak clearly, nor the thin voice to be melodious—why, Battus himself was sent as colonist of Libya to get his voice, because he was a lisper, with a thin voice, but withal a kingly, statesman-like, [Sidenote: C] prudent man—, even so it is impossible for one who has no letters and knows no verse to talk like a poet. And so she who now serves the God has been born as respectably as any man here, and has lived as good and orderly a life; but having been reared in the house of small farmer folk, she brings nothing with her from art or from any practice or faculty whatsoever, as she goes down into the sanctuary. As Xenophon[115] thinks that the bride should step into her husband’s home having seen as little as may be, and heard as little, so she, ignorant and untried in almost all things, and a true virgin in soul, is associated with [Sidenote: D] the God. Yet we, who think that the God, when he “signifies”, uses the cries of herons and wrens and ravens, and never ask that they, as the messengers and heralds of the God, should put things into clear rational phrases, do nevertheless ask that the Pythia should use a voice and style as though from the Thymele, not unembellished and plain, but with metre and elevation, and trills, and verbal metaphors, and a flute accompaniment! XXIII. ‘What shall we say then about her older predecessors? Not one thing, I think, but several. In the first place, [Sidenote: E] as has been already said, they, too, for the most part, used to give the responses in prose. In the second place, those times produced temperaments and natural conditions which offered an easy and convenient channel for the stream of poetry, to which were at once superadded, in one and another, an eagerness, an impulse, a preparation of soul, all resulting in a readiness which needed but a slight initial movement from without to give the imagination a turn. So it was that not only were astronomers and philosophers drawn, as Philinus says, in their several directions, but also, when men were mellow with wine and sentiment, some undercurrent of pity or joy would come, and they would [Sidenote: F] glide into a song-like voice; drinking parties were filled with amorous strains and songs, books with poems in writing. When Euripides wrote:[116] _Love can teach, he makes A poet of a stranger to the Muse_, he did not mean that Love implants a faculty for poetry or music; the faculty is there already, but Love stirs and warms what was latent and idle. Or are we to say, Sir Stranger, that no one now loves, that Love has gone by the heels, because there is none who, to quote Pindar,[117] _Scatters with easy grace The vocal shafts of love and joy._ [Sidenote: 406] That is absurd. Loves there are and many of them, and they master men; but when they associate with souls which have no natural turn for music, they drop the flute and the lyre, yet are vocal still and fiery through and through, as much as of old. It is an unhallowed thing to say, and an unfair, that the Academy was loveless, or the choir of Socrates and Plato; yet, while we have their love dialogues to read, they have left no poems. Why not declare at once that Sappho was the only woman who [Sidenote: B] ever loved, if you are to say that Sibylla alone had the gift of prophecy, or Aristonica, and the others who delivered themselves in verse? Wine, as Chaeremon[118] used to say, _Is mingled with the moods of them that drink_, and the prophetic inspiration, like that of love, uses the faculty which is subjected to it, and stirs its recipients according to the nature of each. XXIV. ‘Not but that, if we look also into the subject of the God and his foreknowledge, we shall see that the change has taken place for the better. For the use of language is like exchange in coined money. Here also it is familiarity which gives currency, the purchasing power varies with the times. There was a day when metres, tunes, odes were the coins of language in use; all History and Philosophy, in a word, every [Sidenote: C] feeling and action which called for a more solemn utterance, were drawn to poetry and music. It is not only that now but few understand, and they with effort, whereas then all the world were listeners, and all felt pleasure in what was sung, _who fats his flock, Who ploughs the soil, who snares the wingèd game_, as Pindar[119] has it. More than that, there was an aptitude for poetry, most men used the lyre and the ode to rebuke, to encourage, to frame myths and proverbs; also hymns to the Gods, prayers, thanksgivings, were composed in metre and song, as genius or practice enabled them to do. And so it was with prophecy; the God did not grudge it ornament and grace, or drive from hence into disgrace the honoured Muse of the tripod; [Sidenote: D] he rather led her on, awakening and welcoming poetic natures; he gave them visions from himself, he lent his aid to draw out pomp and eloquence as being fitting and admirable things. Then there was a change in human life, affecting men both in fortune and in genius. Expediency banished what was superfluous, top-knots of gold were dropped, rich robes discarded; probably too clustering curls were shorn off, and the buskin discontinued. It was not a bad training, to set the beauty of [Sidenote: E] frugality against that of profusion, to account what was plain and simple a better ornament than the pompous and elaborate. So it was with language, it changed with the times, and shared the general break-up. History got down from its coach, and dropped metre. Truth was best sifted out from Myth in prose; Philosophy welcomed clearness, and found it better to instruct than to astonish, so she pursued her inquiry in plain language. The God made the Pythia leave off calling her own fellow townsmen “fire-burners”, the Spartans “serpent-eaters”, [Sidenote: F] men “mountaineers”, rivers “mountain-drainers”. He cleared the oracles of epic verses, unusual words, circumlocutions, and vagueness, and so prepared the way to converse with his consultants just as laws converse with states, as kings address subjects, as disciples hear their masters speak, so framing language as to be intelligible and convincing. XXV. ‘For it should be clearly understood that the God is, in the words of Sophocles,[120] _Unto the wise a riddling prophet aye, To silly souls a teacher plain and brief._ [Sidenote: 407] The same turn of things which brought clearness brought also a new standard of belief; it shared the general change. Whereas of old that which was not familiar or common, but, in plain words, contorted and over-phrased, was ascribed by the many to an implied Divinity, and received with awe and reverence; in later times men were content to learn things clearly and easily with no pomp or artifice; they began to find fault with the poetical setting of the oracles, not only as a hindrance to the perception of truth, because it mingled indistinctness and [Sidenote: B] shadow with the meaning, but also because by this time they were getting to mistrust metaphors, riddles, and ambiguities, as so many holes or hiding-places provided for him who should trip in his prophecy, that he might step into them and secure his retreat. You might have heard it told by many, how certain persons with a turn for poetry still sit about the place of oracles, waiting to catch the utterances, and then weaving verses, metres, rhythms, according to occasion, as a sort of vehicle. As to your Onomacrituses, and Herodotuses, and Cinaethons,[121] and the censures which they brought upon the oracles, by importing tragedy and pomp where they were out of place, I let the charge pass, and do not admit it. Most, [Sidenote: C] however, of the discredit which attached so copiously to poetry came from the gang of soothsayers and scamps who strolled around the ceremonies of the Great Mother and of Serapis, with their mummeries and tricks, turning verses out of their own heads, or taking them at random from handbooks, for servant boys and silly girls, such as are best attracted by metre and a poetic cast of words; from all which causes poetry seemed to put herself at the service of cheats, and jugglers, and lying prophets, and was lost to truth and to the tripod. XXVI. ‘Thus I should not be surprised to find that the old people sometimes required a certain ambiguity, circumlocution, [Sidenote: D] indistinctness. For it was not then a case of “A” approaching the oracle with a question, if you please, about the purchase of a slave, or “B” about business; powerful states, haughty kings and tyrants, would consult the God on public affairs, men whom it did not answer the officials of his temple to vex and provoke by letting them hear what they did not wish to hear. For the God does not obey Euripides,[122] who sets up as a lawgiver with _Phoebus, none but he, May give men prophecies._ [Sidenote: E] He uses mortal men as ministers and prophets, whom it is his duty to make his care, and to protect, lest they perish at the hands of the bad while serving him. He does not then choose to conceal the truth; what he used to do was to give a twist to its manifestation, which, like a beam of light, is refracted more than once in its passage, and is parted into many rays as it becomes poetry, and so to remove whatever in it was harsh and hard. Tyrants might thus be left in ignorance, and enemies not be forewarned. For them he threw a veil in the innuendoes [Sidenote: F] and ambiguities which hid the meaning from others, but did not elude the intelligence of the actual consultants who gave their whole mind to the answers. Hence, now that things have changed, it is sheer folly to criticize and find fault with the God, because he thinks right to give his aid no longer in the same manner but in another. XXVII. ‘Another thing is this: Language receives no greater advantage from a poetical form than this, that a meaning which is wrapped and bound in metre is more easily remembered and grasped. Now in those days much memory was required. Many things used to be explained orally; local indications, the times when things were to be done, rites of Gods across the seas, secret burying-places of heroes, hard to be discovered by those setting off for lands far from Greece. You know about Chius [Sidenote: 408] and Cretinus, and Nesichus, and Phalanthus, and many other leaders of expeditions, how many clues they needed to find the proper place appointed to each for settlement, while some of them missed the way, as did Battus.[123] He thought that he would be turned out, not understanding what the place was to which he had been sent; then he came a second time loudly complaining. Then the God answered: _Thou that hast never been there, if thou know’st Libya the sheepland Better than I that have been, then wonderful wise is thy wisdom._ So he sent him out again. Then Lysander entirely failed to make out the hill Orchalides,[124] otherwise called Alopecus, and the river Hoplites, _Also the dragon, earthborn, in craftiness coming behind thee_, and was defeated in battle and slain in those very spots by [Sidenote: B] Neochorus, a man of Haliartus, who bore a shield with the device of a serpent. There are many such answers given to the old people, all hard to grasp and remember, which I need not give you at length, since you know them. XXVIII. ‘Our present settled condition, out of which the questions now put to the God arise, I welcome and accept. There is great peace and tranquillity, war has been made to cease, there are no wanderings in exile, no revolutions, no tyrannies, no other plagues or ills in Greece asking for potent and extraordinary remedies. But when there is nothing complicated or mysterious, or dangerous, only questions on petty [Sidenote: C] popular matters, like school themes, “whether I should marry”, “whether I should sail”, “whether I should lend”, and the most serious responses given to states are concerning harvests and cattle-breeding and public health, to clothe these in metre, to devise circumlocutions, to introduce strange words on questions calling for a plain, concise answer, is what an ambitious sophist might do, bedizening the oracle for his own glory. But the Pythia is a lady in herself, and when she descends thither and is in the presence of the God, she cares for truth rather than for [Sidenote: D] glory, or for the praise or blame of men. XXIX. ‘So perhaps ought we too to feel. As it is, in a sort of agony of fear, lest the place should lose its reputation of three thousand years, and a few persons should think lightly of it and cease to visit the oracle, for all the world as if it were a sophist’s school, we apologize, and make up reasons and theories about things which we neither know nor ought to know. We smooth the critic down, and try to persuade him, whereas we ought to bid him be gone— _He shall first suffer in a loss not light_—[125] [Sidenote: E] if that is the view which he takes of the God. Thus, while you welcome and admire what the Wise Men of old have written up: “Know thyself”, and “Nothing too much”, not least because of the brevity which includes in a small compass a close hammer-beaten sense, you blame the oracles because they mostly use concise, plain, direct phrases. It is with sayings like those of the Wise Men as with streams compressed into a narrow channel; there is no distinctness or transparency to the eye of the mind, but if you look into what has been written or said about them by those who have wished to learn the full meaning of each, you [Sidenote: F] will not easily find longer treatises elsewhere. The language of the Pythia illustrates what mathematicians mean by calling a straight line the shortest between the same points; it makes no bending, or curve, or doubling or ambiguity; it lies straight towards truth, it takes risks,[126] its good faith is open to examination, and it has never yet been found wrong; it has filled the shrine [Sidenote: 409] with offerings from Barbarians and Greeks, and has beautified it with noble buildings and Amphictyonic fittings. Why, you see for yourselves many buildings added which were not here formerly, many restored which were ruinous or destroyed. As new trees spring up by the side of those in vigorous bearing, so the Pylaea flourishes together with Delphi and is fed upon the same meat; the plenty of the one causes the other to take on shapeliness and figure and a beauty of temples, and halls of meeting and fountains of water, such as it never had in the thousand years before. Now those who dwell about Galaxius [Sidenote: B] in Boeotia felt the manifest presence of the God in the abundance and more than abundance of milk: _From all the kine and every flock, Plenteous as water from the rock, Came welling, gurgling on its way The milk that day. Hot foot they hied them to the task, To fill the pail, to fill the cask; No beechen bowl or crock of clay, No pot or pan had holiday; Wine-skin or flagon, none might stay Within, that day._[127] But to us he gives tokens brighter and stronger and more evident than these, in having, after the days of drought, of desertion and poverty, brought us plenty, splendour, and reputation. True, I am well pleased with myself for anything which my own [Sidenote: C] zeal or service may have contributed to this result in support of Polycrates and Petraeus, well pleased too with him who has been our leader in this policy, to whose thought and planning most of the improvements are due; but it is wholly impossible that so great, so vast a change could have been effected in this short time by merely human care, with no God present here or lending his Divinity to the place of the oracle. XXX. ‘But as in those days there were some who found fault with the responses for obliquity and want of clearness, so now there are those who criticize them as too simple, which is childishness indeed and rank stupidity! For as children show more glee and satisfaction at the sight of rainbows or haloes or comets than in that of the sun or of the moon, so do these [Sidenote: D] people regret the riddles, allegories, and metaphors which are so many modes of refraction of prophetic art in a mortal and fanciful medium. And if they do not fully inquire into the cause of the change, they go away having passed judgement against the God, rather than against ourselves or themselves, for having a power of thought which is too feeble to attain to his counsels.’ Footnote 84: Again quoted by Plutarch, p. 777 C. Footnote 85: _Od._ 7, 107. Footnote 86: Fr. 7. Footnote 87: In a lost ‘Hymn’, Fr. 32. Footnote 88: See H. Richards in _Classical Review_, vol. 29, p. 233. Footnote 89: Reading Ἑλλήνων as Ed. Teub. fr. Stegmann. Footnote 90: _Rhet._ 3, 11. Footnote 91: Puteoli. Footnote 92: πετρῶν καταφλεγομένων (J. H. W. Strijd in _Class. Rev._ vol. 28, p. 218). Footnote 93: Quoted by Menander, Fr. 243 (Meineke). Footnote 94: Quoted also in the _Life of Agesilaus_, c. 3, p. 597. Footnote 95: Palaea Kaumene, a volcanic island ejected in 196 B. C. See Tozer’s _Islands of the Aegean_, p. 97 foll. Footnote 96: _Od._ 3, 1. Footnote 97: _Tim._ 90. Footnote 98: See p. 283. Footnote 99: Xen. _Sympos._ c. 2. Footnote 100: Reading χώρας for δωρεᾶς with Emperius (ap. Ed. Teub.). Footnote 101: See Herod. 1, 51. Footnote 102: Fr. 44. Footnote 103: Here the text is defective. Footnote 104: Here the text is defective. Footnote 105: I, 118. Footnote 106: MSS. have ‘Pausanias’. Footnote 107: These words are supplied from the text of Thucydides, 5, 10. Footnote 108: The word ἀναγκαῖον is suggested by the Teubner Editor. Footnote 109: Fr. 11. Footnote 110: _Od._ 2, 372. Footnote 111: _Il._ 2, 169 foll. Footnote 112: _Il._ 4, 86 foll. Footnote 113: _Il._ 5, beg. Footnote 114: The MSS. have ‘Pandarus’, but ‘Pindar’ is a likely correction. Yet Plutarch cannot have supposed Pindar to have written this iambic line. It is quoted by Aristophanes, _Peace_, 699, in connexion with the stinginess of Sophocles _or_ Simonides, and the scholiast quotes from Pindar a censure of that vice in a poet: so some confusion is possible. Footnote 115: _Oeconom._ 7, 4 foll. Footnote 116: In the _Stheneboea_. Footnote 117: _Isthm._ 2, 3. Footnote 118: Fr. 16 (Nauck). Footnote 119: _Isthm._ 1, 69. Footnote 120: Fr. 707. Footnote 121: So Cobet (for Cinesons). Footnote 122: _Phoen._ 958. Footnote 123: See Herod. 4, 155 foll. and Pind. _Pyth._ 4. There is something amiss with Plutarch’s text here. Footnote 124: See his _Life_, c. 29. Footnote 125: _Od._ 2, 190. Footnote 126: See additional note on p. 312. Footnote 127: Fragm. adespota, 90. III ON THE CESSATION OF THE ORACLES A DIALOGUE INSCRIBED TO TERENTIUS PRISCUS THE SPEAKERS LAMPRIAS, Plutarch’s brother. CLEOMBROTUS, of Lacedaemon, a scientific traveller, and a theologian, who had been up the Red Sea, and, lately, to Ammon. DIDYMUS, a Cynic philosopher. PHILIPPUS, an historian. DEMETRIUS, a ‘grammarian’ of Tarsus, now returning from Britain. AMMONIUS, the philosopher. HERACLEON, of Megara, a young man. TIME: A little before the Pythian games of Callistratus’ year, perhaps A. D. 83-4. 1 and 2. CLEOMBROTUS mentions the undying lamp flame at Ammon, said to require less oil each year, a proof that the years are growing shorter. 3. DEMETRIUS thinks the cause inadequate and CLEOMBROTUS mentions other instances of important phenomena due to insignificant causes. 4. AMMONIUS points out that all the heavenly bodies are involved in the hypothesis, and suggests other causes, as changes in temperature or in the quality of the oil. 5. LAMPRIAS invites Cleombrotus to tell the company about the oracle of Ammon. DEMETRIUS suggests, as a subject nearer home, the failure of the oracles in Boeotia (except those in the neighbourhood of Lebadeia). 6. We were passing out of the temple, and were near the Hall of the Cnidians, where HERACLEON and our other friends were waiting for us, in silence. On a request from DEMETRIUS they agree to join in our discussion. 7. DIDYMUS the Cynic (‘Planetiades’) makes an angry protest: the wonder being that Providence itself had not deserted this bad world long ago. Heracleon and LAMPRIAS humour him, and he leaves the place quietly. 8. AMMONIUS addresses Lamprias: ‘I too deprecate the tone of Didymus. Still we may recognize other causes, besides providential action, for the cessation of the oracles, e.g. the depopulation of Greece and specially of Boeotia.’ 9. LAMPRIAS: ‘We may believe in Gods, yet hold that their works may be interrupted by specific causes. It is not necessary that the God should personally operate in his oracles.’ 10. CLEOMBROTUS agreed, but observed that the hypothesis was much relieved by assuming the existence of daemons, a middle order between Gods and men, and not immortal, 11. But long-lived—say 9,720 years (as Hesiod)—‘What?’ interrupted DEMETRIUS; ‘Hesiod was leading up to the Stoic “Conflagration”!’ 12. CLEOMBROTUS refuses to split straws as to the duration of a daemon’s life; the point is that there are such things as daemons. 13. The daemons have been compared (by Xenocrates) to an isosceles triangle (Gods to an equilateral, men to a scalene). Or again to the moon, which is half earth, half star. 14. Instances of daemonic rites, 15. And daemonic stories, wrongly attributed to Gods, as that of Delphi (PHILIPPUS shows surprise) and the flight of Apollo. 16. HERACLEON (first addressing PHILIPPUS) allows that daemons, not Gods, may be concerned with oracles, but then they must be sinless beings—CLEOMBROTUS: “Sinless daemons—if so, they would no longer be daemons”: 17. And quotes stories to prove that daemons may be faulty, and one as to the death of Pan to prove that they may be mortal. 18. DEMETRIUS confirms this from his experiences in and about Britain. 19. CLEOMBROTUS compares the Stoic view of Gods who are perishable with the Epicurean ‘Infinity’. 20. AMMONIUS defends Empedocles’ view of faulty daemons against the Epicureans, who held that, if faulty, they must be short-lived. As the Epicureans are not represented, he calls on Cleombrotus to continue his argument for the migration of daemons. 21. CLEOMBROTUS, first referring to Plato, has a story of an oriental recluse, whom he had met about the Red Sea. He knew all the Delphi legend, and referred it to the struggles of daemons, who took on the names of the Gods to whom they were severally attached. 22. ‘But how does Plato come in?’ asked HERACLEON. ‘Because’, replied CLEOMBROTUS, ‘Plato allowed a possibility of more worlds than one, up to five; the recluse asserted (giving no proof) that there were exactly one hundred and eighty-three worlds.’ 23. ‘The impostor!’ says LAMPRIAS; ‘that view is purely Greek, and was put into a book by one Petron of Himera long ago.’ HERACLEON and DEMETRIUS exchange remarks about Plato’s views on a plurality of worlds, and agree to refer the matter to LAMPRIAS, who offers to give a cursory account, the discussion then to revert to the original question. [24-end. Lamprias is the speaker, with an interposition by Ammonius in c. 33 and again in c. 46, and by Demetrius, who answers a question in c. 45, and some shorter ones.] 24. LAMPRIAS _loq._: It is _a priori_ likely that this world is not a sole creation. 25. There need be no fear of interference from outside, of world with world. Aristotle’s view of the arrangement of matter stated, 26. And considered. 27. The idea of a middle point is applicable to each world severally, not to the confederation of worlds. 28. The case of the ‘stone outside the world’ (the moon?), which some regard as no part of our earth, and therefore not bound to move towards it. The paradoxical views of Chrysippus. 29. The Stoic difficulty as to Zeus or Providence in the plural met. Why not a choir of such powers, free to range from part to part of the universe? 30. Such a view of deities sociable and free to communicate with each other is the grander one. 31. (PHILIPPUS asks to have the bearing of the number five and the five solid figures on Plato’s scheme explained.) 32. LAMPRIAS: The matter is thus explained by Theodorus of Soli:[128] There are five and no more solid figures having all the faces and all the solid angles in each equal. These are— (_a_) The Pyramid (Tetrahedron) with four faces, each an equilateral triangle, and four solid angles, (_b_) The Cube, six faces, each a square, and eight solid angles, (_c_) The Octahedron, eight faces, each an equilateral triangle, and six solid angles, (_d_) The Dodecahedron, twelve faces, each a regular pentagon, and twenty solid angles, (_e_) The Eicosahedron, twenty faces, each an equilateral triangle, and twelve solid angles. [It follows that (_d_) having more, and blunter, solid angles than any, most nearly approximates to the Sphere. (And, in fact, if the content of the Sphere be 100, that of (_d_) is 66·5, that of (_e_) only 60·5, that of (_c_) 36·75, and so on). Plato (_Timaeus_, pp. 53-5, where see Archer-Hind) shows that each equilateral triangle may easily be broken into six ‘primary scalenes’, i. e. triangles with angles 90°, 60°, 30°, which again will reproduce themselves _ad infinitum_ (Euclid, 6, 8). Hence, if a universe be constructed out of (_a_) or (_c_) or (_e_) or their plane faces, or of all of these, it can, in case of dissolution, be reconstructed. This does not apply to the Cube, the faces of which, however, yield isosceles right-angled triangles, also available as ‘constituents’ in infinite number, nor yet to (_d_) which is therefore reserved for another purpose, as to which see Burnet (_Early Greek Philosophers_, c. 7, sect. 148).] The solid figures may be used to construct five different worlds, or omitting (_d_) for the four ‘elements’ (fire, &c.). 33. AMMONIUS criticizes; he points out that the difficulty about the figure (_d_) has been ignored. 34. LAMPRIAS drops the subject for the present, and turns to the five categories of being in the _Sophistes_ and _Philebus_. It is reasonable to assume that the physical universe may correspond. 35. Consider the Pythagorean first principles of number and the origin of the number five out of the first odd and the first even. 36. Five senses, five fingers, five planets (the sun with the two inner planets taken as one). 37. The relation of the five solid figures to Plato’s theory of creation further considered. But we are on slippery ground here. 38. LAMPRIAS is invited to return to the original question, as to the oracles and the migration of daemons. 39. LAMPRIAS resumes: Why should the prophetic gift be associated with daemons, i.e. souls which have left the body, rather than with those still in the flesh, though it may be more energetic after death? Compare the processes of Memory. 40. Divination touches on the future through bodily conditions assisted by emanations and the like. 41. The special virtues of certain vapours or streams, as the Cydnus at Tarsus. 42. The story of the first discovery of the Adytum of Delphi by the shepherd Coretas. There must be sympathy of soul with prophecy, as of the eye with light. The identification of Apollo with the sun. 43. The local prophetic currents may shift their place about, as rivers and lakes are known to do. 44. Physical commotions, especially earthquakes, may be expected to cause such shiftings. 45. DEMETRIUS has been too long away from home to answer as to the Cydnus, but he tells a story about the oracle of Mopsus, which had convinced a sceptical magistrate. 46. AMMONIUS and PHILIPPUS have points to raise. That of the latter is as to the identity of the sun with Apollo, and is allowed to stand over. AMMONIUS protests against the ascription of all prophecy to material causes, but wishes to hear the view of LAMPRIAS. 47. LAMPRIAS observes that Plato had made a similar protest against Anaxagoras. _Both_ sets of causes must be recognized. 48. And so in the case of prophetic utterances. 49. The actual procedure of Delphi, and the tests applied to the victim, justified. 50. The influences to which the prophetess is subject. 51. Story of a prophetess who was wrongly pressed when the conditions were adverse. The force of the exhalation affects different persons differently. It is essentially daemonic, but not exempt from change or decay. 52. The subject is difficult, and must remain open to discussion, as also the question raised by Philippus about Apollo and the sun. ON THE CESSATION OF THE ORACLES I. There is a story, Terentius Priscus, that certain eagles [Sidenote: 409] or swans, in flight from the extremities of earth to its middle [Sidenote: F] point, met at Delphi near the Navel, as we call it; that later on Epimenides of Phaestus came to examine into the story in the God’s house, and, receiving an indistinct and ambiguous response, wrote _No central boss there is of land or sea, The Gods may know one, but from man ’tis hid._ As for the inquirer, he was properly punished by the God for putting an old story to the proof as though fingering a picture. [Sidenote: 410] II. However, shortly before the Pythian games of Callistratus’ year, it happened that two holy men, travelling from opposite ends of the inhabited globe, met at Delphi; Demetrius the grammarian, on his homeward voyage from Britain to Tarsus, and Cleombrotus the Lacedaemonian, who had wandered much in Egypt and about the land of the Troglodytes, and had sailed far up the Red Sea, not for commerce, but because he loved sights and information. Possessing a competence, and being indifferent to having more, he would use his leisure [Sidenote: B] in such ways, putting together facts as material for a Philosophy which was to end in what he himself called Theology. Having lately been at the temple of Ammon, he made it clear that he was far from admiring its general arrangements, but he told us a story worthy of serious interest as related by the priests, about the lamp which is never extinguished. They say that it consumes less oil each successive year, and claim this as a proof of an inequality in the years which makes each less in duration [Sidenote: C] than its predecessor. Of course, the shorter the period the less the consumption. III. All present found this wonderful, and Demetrius observed that it was quite absurd to hunt out such great results from trifles; not, as Alcaeus puts it, to take the claw and paint the lion from it, but with a wick and a lamp to shift the whole order of the heavens, and make a clean sweep of Mathematics. ‘Nothing of that sort will disturb those gentlemen;’ said Cleombrotus, ‘they will never give in to the mathematicians on the point of accuracy; they would think it easier for them to be wrong in their time about movements and periods so [Sidenote: D] very remote, than for themselves to be wrong in measuring the oil, when they had their attention jealously fixed all the time on so strange a phenomenon. Besides, Demetrius, not to allow small things as indications of great ones would be to stop the way against many arts; many proofs will be put out of account, and many predictions. Yet you grammarians prove a fact of no less importance than that the heroes of old shaved with the razor, because you meet with the word “razor” in Homer,[129] and again, that they lent money at interest, because he has _Since of a debt there owing I have need, Long-standing and not small_,[130] where the word for “to owe” imports increase! Again, when [Sidenote: E] he calls night “swift”,[131] you fasten lovingly on the word, and actually say that it implies that the shadow is conical, as thrown by a spherical body. Then Medicine tells us that an abundance of spiders prognosticates a summer of pestilence, and so does a crow’s-foot on the fig leaves in spring. Who is going to allow this, unless he grants that small things may be indications of great ones? Who will endure that the magnitude of the sun should be measured by “half-gallon or half-pint”, or that the acute angle made on the sundial here by the gnomon with the surface should be a measure of the elevation of the [Sidenote: F] visible poles above the horizon? Such, at any rate, were the accounts to be heard from the prophets down there, so that we must have some other answer to give if we wish to keep for the sun his constitutional order without deviation.’ IV. ‘Not for the sun only,’ cried Ammonius the philosopher, who was present, ‘but for the whole heavens! For his passage from solstice to solstice must of necessity be curtailed and not [Sidenote: 411] cover so large a portion of the firmament as mathematicians say, its southern parts constantly shrinking towards the more northerly. Our summer, too, must become shorter, and its temperature colder, as his course curves inwards, and he covers wider parallels among the tropical constellations. Again, the gnomons at Syene must cease to throw no shadow at the summer solstice; many fixed stars would be found to have closed in, some of them touching others and being mingled with them as the interval disappeared. If, on the other hand, they shall [Sidenote: B] assert that the other bodies remain as they are, the sun alone being irregular in his movements, they will be unable to state the cause which accelerates him alone out of so many bodies, and will throw most of the phenomena into confusion, those of the moon entirely, so that there will be no need of measures of oil to prove the difference; eclipses will prove it, when the sun comes into contact with the moon more frequently, and the moon with the earth’s shadow. The rest is clear, and there is no need to unravel any further the imposture of the theory.’ ‘For all that,’ said Cleombrotus, ‘I saw the measures with my own eyes, for they showed me several; that of the current year [Sidenote: C] fell considerably short of the oldest.’ Ammonius rejoined: ‘Then it has escaped all the others who keep up unextinguished fires, and preserve them for a number of years which we may call infinite. Assume, however, that what is said is true; is it not better to take the cause to be atmospheric chills or moisture, which might probably weaken the fire so that it would not consume or need so much fuel; on the other hand, times of dryness or heat? Before now I have heard it said of fire that it burns better and with more strength in winter, being [Sidenote: D] contracted and condensed by the cold, whereas in hot times it loses power, and becomes attenuated and feeble; again, that in sunlight it is less efficient, attacking the fuel sluggishly and consuming it more slowly. Most likely of all, the true cause may be in the oil. There is no improbability in thinking that it was in old days unsubstantial and watery, being produced from a young plant, but afterwards, when well matured and condensed, it had more force and better nutritive power in an equal quantity. I am supposing that we are bound to save this hypothesis for the servants of Ammon, absurd and unnatural as it is.’ [Sidenote: E] V. When Ammonius had done, ‘Rather’, said I, ‘tell us all about the oracle, Cleombrotus; for the old reputation of the divine power there was great, nowadays it seems to be somewhat dwindling.’ As Cleombrotus was silent, and cast his eyes downwards, Demetrius said: ‘There is no need to raise questions about what is happening there, when we see the growing enfeeblement of the oracles nearer home, I might rather say the cessation of all save one or two; the question is from what cause has their power thus passed away? Why mention others, when Boeotia, in old times full of voices with her oracles, has now been quite deserted, as though by sources of [Sidenote: F] water, and a great drought of prophecy has possessed the land? Nowhere, except round Lebadeia, has Boeotia anything to give to those who wish to draw water from prophetic art; for the rest, silence or utter desertion is the order. Yet in the times of the Persian wars it was in no less repute than that of [Sidenote: 412] Amphiaraus, and Mys, as it would seem, tried both.[132] So the prophet of the Ptoan Oracle, in former times accustomed to use Aeolian, uttered a response in the tongue of the Barbarians, which none of the local persons present understood, but Mys alone; however, the Barbarian caught the inspiration, and the injunction did not need to be translated into Greek. As to the slave sent to the shrine of Amphiaraus, he seemed to see in his sleep a minister of the God, who first spoke to turn him out telling him that the God was not present, then used his hands to push him, and, when he persisted, took a great stone and smote him on the head. This was all a [Sidenote: B] prediction in act of what was to come about; for Mardonius was defeated by the Greeks under no king but a regent and a lieutenant of a king, and he fell struck by a stone,[133] just as the Lydian appeared in his sleep to be struck. At that time the oracle at Tegyrae was flourishing; there they say that the God was born, and of the streams which flow past it one, as some tell, is called the “Palm”, the other the “Olive” to this day. Again, in the Persian wars, when Echecrates was prophet, the God promised victory and might in war to [Sidenote: C] the Greeks. Then in the Peloponnesian war, when the Delians had been turned out of their island, it is said that an oracle was brought from Delphi, ordering them to discover the place where Apollo was born, and to perform certain sacrifices there. When they were in wonder and perplexity at the idea that the God had not been born among them but elsewhere, the Pythia added that a crow should reveal to them the spot. They went away and reached Chaeroneia, where they heard the landlord of the inn conversing with certain strangers on their way to Tegyrae about the oracle. These strangers, on leaving, addressed the woman in saying farewell as Corone (Crow). Then they [Sidenote: D] understood the oracle, and having sacrificed at Tegyrae, managed shortly to effect their return. There have been more recent manifestations at these prophetic shrines, but now they have failed; so that it may well be worth while here, in the home of the Pythian, to discuss the cause of the change.’ VI. By this time we were away from the temple, and had reached the doors of the Hall of the Cnidians. Passing inside, we saw the friends for whom we were making, seated and waiting for us. There was a general stillness because of the hour; people were anointing themselves or watching the athletes. Then Demetrius, with a quiet smile, said: ‘Shall [Sidenote: E] I tell a story, or shall I speak the truth? My belief is that you have no problem in hand worth a thought; I see you seated much at your ease, with relaxation on your faces.‘ ‘Oh yes;’ broke in the Megarian Heracleon, ‘we are not inquiring whether the verb “to throw” loses a lambda in the future, nor as to the positive forms of “worse”, “better”, “worst”, [Sidenote: F] “best”. Those are the questions, those and others like them, which bring frowns and wrinkles! All others we may examine like philosophers, with brows steady, and quietly, not looking death and daggers at the company.’ ‘Then take us as we are,’ said Demetrius, ‘and with us the subject upon which we have actually fallen, one which is proper to the place, and concerns us all for the God’s sake. And mind! no wrinkled eyebrows when you attack it!’ VII. We mingled our companies and sate down in and out [Sidenote: 413] of each other, and Demetrius had propounded the subject, when up sprang the Cynic Didymus, by nickname Planetiades, struck the ground two or three times and shouted out: ‘Oho! Oho! a mighty difficult subject, which needs much inquiry, you have brought us! A wonder indeed that, with so much wickedness poured over the earth, not only “Modesty and Sense of Justice”, to quote Hesiod,[134] have deserted human life, but Divine Providence, too, has packed up its oracles and is gone from everywhere. I throw out the opposite problem for you to discuss. Why have they not ceased long ago? Why has not Hercules or some other God withdrawn the tripod, [Sidenote: B] filled every day with foul ungodly questions, propounded to the God by some as if he were a sophist whom they were to catch out, by others to ask about treasures or inheritances or marriages which law forbids. The result is that Pythagoras is proved mighty wrong when he said that men are always at their best when they approach the Gods.[135] Accordingly, things which it were decent to cloak and deny in the presence of an older man, diseases and affections of the soul, these they lay bare and open before the God!’ He wanted to go on, but Heracleon plucked at his cloak, and I, almost his greatest [Sidenote: C] intimate present, said: ‘Dear Planetiades, leave off provoking the God. He is easy to be entreated and gentle: _Mildest to mortal men pronounced to be_, as Pindar[136] says. And whether he be sun, or lord and father of the sun, lord and father beyond all that is visible, it is not likely that he should deem us modern men unworthy of a voice from himself, being to them the cause of birth and nurture and being and thinking. It is not seemly, either, that Providence, our thoughtful kindly mother, who produces and maintains all things for us, should remember our misdeeds in one matter only—prophecy, and should take away what she [Sidenote: D] originally gave. As if in those old days there were not more bad men because men were more, when oracles were set up in so many parts of the inhabited world! Come here, and sit down again! Swear a Pythian truce with wickedness, whom you are chastising in word every day; join us in seeking some other cause for the alleged failure of the oracles.’ My words had some effect; Planetiades went away by the doors and in silence. VIII. There was a short interval of quiet, then Ammonius [Sidenote: E] addressed me. ‘Lamprias,’ he said, ‘take care what we are doing, and give your mind to the discussion, lest we find ourselves making out that the God is no true cause. He who thinks that the cessation of the oracles is due to something other than the will of a God, suggests the thought that they come into being and exist, not because of the God, but in some other way. For if prophecy be the work of a God, there is no greater or stronger power to remove and abolish it. Now the argument of Planetiades displeased me in many points, especially as to the inconsistency which he makes out in the God, at one time [Sidenote: F] turning away from vice and disowning it, at another admitting it; as though a king or tyrant were to shut out bad men at one door, and admit them to interviews by another. Start with the operation most proper to the Gods, which is great, yet never excessive, always sufficient in itself; and tell me that [Sidenote: 414] Hellas has had the largest share in the general depopulation caused by former revolutions and wars over the whole perhaps of the inhabited globe, and could now scarcely provide all round three thousand hoplites, the number which the single state of Megara sent out to Plataea.[137] Why, for the God to have left many places of his oracle would be merely to expose the desolation of Greece. Then I will put myself in your hands for ingenuity. For who would get the good if there were an oracle at Tegyrae as there formerly was, or near Ptoum, where it is a day’s work to meet one man minding his flocks. This very spot, most venerable of all and most renowned “for time and fame”, was for a long time made desert and unapproachable by a savage beast, a female dragon as the story goes; but this is to invert the facts of its lying idle; the [Sidenote: B] wilderness invited the beast, the beast did not make the wilderness. But when, in the good pleasure of the God, Hellas revived in her cities, and the place had men in plenty, two prophetesses were employed, who were lowered in turn, and a third was appointed to relieve. Now there is only one, and we do not complain, for she is enough for those who need her. So we have no cause to blame the God; the prophetic establishment now subsisting suffices for all, and sends away all with what they want. Agamemnon used to employ seven heralds, yet [Sidenote: C] scarcely could control the numerous assembly, whereas in a few days you will see in the theatre here that a single voice reaches all present, and even so it is with prophecy; then it used more voices to reach more persons, now we should fairly wonder at the God if he allowed his prophecy to flow to waste like water, or like the rocks to find an echo for the voices of shepherds and their flocks.’ IX. When Ammonius had said this, and I remained silent, Cleombrotus addressed me: ‘Have you now granted’, he said, [Sidenote: D] ‘that the God makes and also destroys the oracles?’ ‘By no means’, I said. ‘I maintain that no prophetic shrine or oracle is destroyed by the God’s agency. It is as with many other things which he makes or provides; Nature brings in destruction and negation; or rather Matter, which is negation, unweaves and breaks up that which is brought into being by the more powerful cause. Even so I think there are times of obscuration and withdrawal of prophetic forces. The God gives many fair things to men, but gives nothing immortal, so that, in the words of Sophocles:[138] _The works of Gods may die, but not the Gods._ I say that their essence and their power must be sought in [Sidenote: E] Nature and in Matter, the origin being rightly reserved to the God. It would be simple and childish to suppose that the God himself creeps into the bodies of the prophets and speaks from there, using as instruments their mouths and voices, like those ventriloquists once called “Eurycleis”, now “Pythones”. He who mixes up the God with mortal needs does not spare [Sidenote: F] his majesty nor preserve the dignity and the greatness of his excellence.’ X. Then Cleombrotus: ‘You are right. Yet it is hard to grasp and to define how, and up to what point, we may make use of Providence; and therefore those who make the God the cause of nothing at all, and also those who make him the common cause of all, go wide of moderation and decency. It is well said, on the one hand, that Plato, in discovering the element which underlies created qualities, now called “Matter” or “Nature”, relieved philosophers from perplexities [Sidenote: 415] many and great. It seems to me, on the other, that those who have inserted the class of daemons between Gods and men, to draw and knit together the fellowship of the two orders after a fashion, have cleared away more perplexities and greater; whether the view belongs to Zoroaster and the Magi, or comes from Thrace and Orpheus, or from Egypt, or from Phrygia, as we conjecture from seeing in both those countries many elements of death and mourning in the rites celebrated there, mingled with those of initiation. Among the Greeks, Homer appears still to use both names indifferently, and sometimes [Sidenote: B] to call the Gods daemons. Hesiod first clearly and distinctly laid down four classes of reasonable beings, Gods, then daemons, then heroes, last of all men; and here he appears to admit transition, the golden race of men passing into daemons many and great, the demigods at last into heroes.[139] Others make out a change for bodies and souls alike. As water is seen to be produced out of earth, air from water, and fire from air, and the substance is borne upwards, even so the better souls receive their change from men into heroes, from heroes into daemons. From the daemons again, a few in a long course of time, upborne [Sidenote: C] through virtue, become full partakers of divine nature. To some it happens not to have control of themselves; so they subside and again enter mortal bodies, and endure a life as dim and unillumined as an exhalation. XI. ‘Hesiod thinks that in certain periods of time the daemons die. Speaking in the person of the Naïd he darkly indicates the time: _Full ages nine of men that live their prime Lives the hoarse crow, four crows the stag outlives, Three stags the ancient raven, ravens nine The phoenix, but the phoenix, ten times told, We fair-haired nymphs, daughters of Zeus most dread._[140] [Sidenote: D] Those who take the word “age” wrong bring this to a very large total; it means a year, so that the sum comes out nine thousand seven hundred and twenty for the years of life of the daemons. Most mathematicians think it to be less; not even Pindar[141] has called it greater, when he tells us that the nymphs live _Their term appointed even as the trees_, and therefore names them Hamadryads.’ He was still [Sidenote: E] speaking when Demetrius broke in: ‘What was that, Cleombrotus? The year called an “age of man”? Human life, whether “at its prime” or, as some[142] read “in its old age” is not of that length. Those who read “at its prime”, follow Heraclitus[143] in taking “an age” to be thirty years, the time in which the parent sees his offspring a parent. Those who read “in its old age” instead of “at its prime” give a hundred and eight years to the “age”, taking the middle term of human life to be fifty-four, the number made up of unity, the two first surfaces, the two first squares and the two [Sidenote: F] first cubes,[144] the number taken by Plato[145] in his “Generation of the Soul”. Hesiod’s whole story seems to have been framed with a veiled reference to the “Conflagration”, when all things moist will probably disappear and with them the Nymphs, _Who in fair glades their habitation have By river sources and in grassy meads._‘[146] XII. Then Cleombrotus: ‘I hear of this from many, and now I see the Stoic “Conflagration”, which already spreads over the verses of Heraclitus and Orpheus, catching those of Hesiod [Sidenote: 416] too! I have no patience with this “World-Conflagration”, and then the impossibility of the thing! When one can remember the periods, as it is easiest to do with the crow and the hind, one sees how exaggeration passes in. The year has within itself the beginning and the end _Of all things which the circling seasons bear, And parent earth_,[147] so there is nothing against usage in calling it an “age of man”. You allow yourselves, I believe, that Hesiod means human life by “the age”. Is it not so?’ Demetrius agreed. ‘Well, [Sidenote: B] but this is also clear,’ said Cleombrotus, ‘that the same words are often used for the measure and the things measured, as pint, quart, gallon, bushel. As then we call unity a number, being the smallest measure of number and its origin, so he has called our first measure of human life by the same word as the thing measured—“an age”. The numbers which the others invent have none of the clarity or distinctness usual in numbers. As to the nine thousand seven hundred and twenty, it has come about by taking the sum of the first four numbers, starting with [Sidenote: C] unity, and multiplying it by four, or four by ten.[148] Thus we get forty in either way, which, when five times multiplied [triangle-wise][149] by three, gave the number proposed. But about these matters there need be no difference between us and Demetrius. Whether the time be longer or shorter, determinate or not, in which the soul of a daemon shifts and the life of a demigod, the point will have been proved, before any judge he chooses, on the evidence of wise and ancient witnesses, that there are certain natures on the borderland between Gods and men, subject to mortal affections and enforced changes, who may rightly receive our worship according to the custom of our fathers, and be thought of as daemons and called so. XIII. ‘Xenocrates, the companion of Plato, used triangles [Sidenote: D] in illustration of the doctrine; he compared the equilateral to a divine nature, the scalene to a mortal, and the isosceles to a daemonic; the first equal in all relations, the second unequal in all, the third equal in some, unequal in others, like the daemonic nature with its mortal passions and divine power. Nature has put forward images, which our sense can perceive, visible likenesses; the sun and the stars standing for Gods, flashes and comets and meteors for mortal men, an image which Euripides[150] drew in the lines: [Sidenote: E] _In all his bloom, like to a falling star His light was quenched, his spirit passed, to air._ But there is a being which is mixed, and really an imitation of the daemons, the moon. Men, seeing her circumference so much in accord with that order of beings, the manifest wanings and waxings and phases which she undergoes, have called her, some an earthlike star, others an Olympian earth, others “the portion of Hecate”, who belongs at once to heaven and earth. As, then, if one were to remove the lower air, withdrawing all [Sidenote: F] between earth and moon, an empty unconnected space would be left, and the unity and continuity of the whole dissolved, even so those who refuse to leave us the daemons break off all intercourse and mutual dealing between Gods and men, by removing that order in Nature which could “interpret”, in Plato’s[151] words, and “minister”, or else they compel us to mingle all things into one mass, forcing the God into human passions and business, and drawing him down to our needs, [Sidenote: 417] as Thessalian witches are said to draw the moon. Only their imposture found credit with women, when Aglaonice the daughter of Hegetor, who knew her astronomy, chose an eclipse of the moon, and then pretended to do magic and draw her down. But as for us, let us never listen when we are told that there are prophecies with no divine agency, or rites and orgiastic services which the Gods do not heed; nor on the other hand suppose that the God is in and out and present there, taking part in the business. Let us leave all this to those [Sidenote: B] rightful ministers of the Gods, their ushers or clerks. Let us hold that there are daemons who watch the performance of rites, and inspire the mysteries, while others go about to avenge crimes of insolence and pride, and to others Hesiod[152] has given a venerable name, _of wealth The saintly givers; such their kingly trust_. Observe that to do so is kingly. For there are, as among men, so among daemons, degrees of excellence, and in some subsists still some slight, faint, almost excremental remnant of passion and absence of reason; in others this is strong and hard to do away, its traces and symbols being in many places preserved and sporadically found in sacrifices and rites and tales of wonder. [Sidenote: C] XIV. ‘Now as to the mystic rites, in which the most evident and transparent indication may be had of the truth about daemons, “peace be upon my lips”, as Herodotus[153] says. Feasts and sacrifices, days sinister and gloomy, so to call them, when are meals of raw flesh, and rendings and fastings and beaten breasts, and in many places unholy spells over the sacrifices: _Whoopings wild, and cries of frenzy, necks together tossed in air_,[154] all these, I would say, belong to no God, but are modes of appeasement and soothing to avert bad daemons. The human sacrifices which used to be performed were neither asked for nor accepted by Gods, we cannot believe it; yet kings and [Sidenote: D] captains would not have endured to give up their own children by way of initiating the rites, or to cut their throats, without a purpose; it was to soothe and satisfy the heavy displeasure of beings cruel and hard to be moved, or in some cases their frantic low passions, worthy of tyrants, when bodily approach was impossible or not desired. As Hercules besieged the town of Oechalia for the sake of a maiden, so strong and violent daemons, requiring in vain a human soul still enveloped in the body, bring pestilences to cities and sterility of land, and stir up wars and seditions, until they succeed in getting that on which their affection is set. Some have fared otherwise; [Sidenote: E] thus in a long stay in Crete I came to know of an absurd festival observed there: the headless form of a man is shown, and you are told that this was Molus, father of Meriones, who assaulted a maiden and was found without a head. XV. ‘Now all the crimes of violence, all the wanderings of Gods, all tales of hiding, banishment, servitude, which are [Sidenote: F] said or sung in myth or hymn, are adventures which happened not to Gods but to daemons, and are recorded to show their excellence or power; Aeschylus[155] was wrong when he wrote _Apollo pure, the God exil’d from heav’n_, and so was the Admetus in Sophocles[156] wrong: _Mine was the cock who called him to the mill._ Widest of the truth of all are the theologians of Delphi, who, thinking that a battle once took place here between the God and a serpent for the possession of the oracle, allow poets and speech-writers contending in the theatres to tell these stories, [Sidenote: 418] expressly belying their own most sacred rites.’ Philippus, the historian, who chanced to be present, here expressed surprise, and asked: ‘What rites such competitors belied?’ ‘Those relating to the oracle,’ was the reply, ‘whereby the city, admitting to initiation those from here to Tempe has now banished all Greeks dwelling beyond Thermopylae.[157] For the booth set up afresh every nine years near the court of the temple is not like any den or serpent’s haunt, but is an imitation of the dwelling of a tyrant or king. And the assault made upon it in silence through what they call “Dolon’s Way”, by [Sidenote: B] which the Aeolidae bring the boy, both of whose parents are living, with lighted torches, put fire to the booth, overturn the table, and then flee through the gates of the temple without turning back; and lastly the wanderings of the boy and his servile offices, and the purification rites at Tempe, all convey a suspicion of some great crime of shocking audacity. For it is quite absurd, my friend, that Apollo, after killing a beast, should flee to the extremities of Greece in quest of purification, and then should pour libations there and do all which men do to [Sidenote: C] appease and soften the wrath of daemons (fiends and avengers as they are called, because they pursue the memories of old unforgotten stains). The story which I once heard about that flight and removal is strangely absurd and surprising; but if there be any truth in it, let us never believe that what passed about the oracle in these old times was any trifling or ordinary matter. However, fearing to seem to do what Empedocles describes: _Stringing sundry myths, nor ever keeping to a single path_, I will ask you to allow me to affix the proper conclusion to my first tale, for we have just reached it. Many have said it before [Sidenote: D] us; let us dare to say it now. When the daemons who have to do with oracles and prophecies fail, all such things fail too, and lose their force if the daemons flee or shift their place; then, if they return after an interval, the things speak aloud, like instruments of music when those who can play them are present to play.’ XVI. When Cleombrotus had finished, Heracleon spoke: ‘There is no profane or uninitiated person present, no one who holds views about the Gods discordant with our own; but let us keep jealous watch on ourselves, Philippus, lest without our own knowledge we assume strange and even monstrous [Sidenote: E] hypotheses.’ ‘Well said,’ answered Philippus, ‘but what shocks you specially in what Cleombrotus is advancing?’ ‘That the oracles should be administered,’ said Heracleon, ‘not by Gods, who may well be quit of earthly concerns, but by daemons, assistants of the God, seems to me a not unfair assumption; but then to pluck, I had almost said by the handful, out of the verses of Empedocles, sins, infatuations, and God-inflicted wanderings, and to fasten them upon these daemons, and to suppose that in the end they die like men, this I do think a somewhat bold and barbarian view.’ Here Cleombrotus [Sidenote: F] asked Philippus who and whence the young man was, and, after learning his name and city, said: ‘No, Heracleon, it is by no means “without our own knowledge” that we have reached strange propositions; but in discussing great matters it is not possible to attain what is probable in opinion without starting from great premisses. But you, though you do not know it yourself, are taking back what you grant. You allow that there are daemons; but when you require that they should not be faulty [Sidenote: 419] nor yet mortal, it is no longer daemons that you retain. For in what do they differ from Gods if as to their being they are immortal, and as to virtue are passionless and impeccable?’ XVII. As Heracleon remained silent and in deep thought, he went on: ‘Faulty daemons come to us not from Empedocles only, but from Plato and Xenocrates and Chrysippus; yes, and Democritus,[158] when he prays to meet “fair-falling phantoms”, shows that he knew of others which were disagreeable, with definitely vicious intentions and impulses. As to death in such beings, I have heard a story from a man who was no fool or [Sidenote: B] romancer. Some of you have heard Aemilianus the orator; Epitherses was his father, my fellow-townsman and teacher in grammar. He said that he was once on a voyage to Italy, and embarked on board a ship carrying cargo and many passengers. It was already evening when the breeze died down off the Echinades Islands; and the ship drifted till it was near Paxi. Most on board were awake, and many still drinking after supper. Suddenly a voice was heard from the island of Paxi; some one was calling Thamus in a loud voice, so that they all wondered. [Sidenote: C] Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not even known by name to many of the passengers. Twice he was called, and remained silent; the third time he paid attention to the caller, who raised his voice and said: “When you reach the Palodes, tell them that Great Pan is dead.” Hearing this, Epitherses said, all were in consternation, and began discussing with one another whether “it were better to do as was ordered, or to refuse to meddle and to let it be. They decided in the end that, if there were a breeze, Thamus should sail past quietly, but if there should be calm about the place, he should hail, and report. When he was off the Palodes, as there was neither wind nor wave, [Sidenote: D] Thamus at the helm looked to land and repeated the words he had heard: “Great Pan is dead.” He had no sooner done this than a great groaning was heard, proceeding not from one but from many, mingled with cries of wonder. As there were many present, the story was soon spread in Rome, and Thamus was sent for by Tiberius Caesar, who so entirely credited the story, that he caused inquiry to be made about Pan. The scholars, of whom there were many round him, conjectured that he was the son born of Hermes and Penelope.’[159] (Philippus [Sidenote: E] was able to produce several witnesses from the company who had heard the old Aemilianus.) XVIII. Demetrius told us that, among the islands near Britain, many were deserted and lay scattered (Sporades), some of them bearing the names of daemons and demigods. He himself, by the Emperor’s command, made a voyage of inquiry and observation to the nearest of the deserted islands, which had a few inhabitants, all sacred persons and never molested by the Britons. Just after his arrival, there was a great confusion in the atmosphere, many portents from the sky with gusts of wind and fiery blasts. When these calmed [Sidenote: F] down, the islanders said that ‘one of the mightier ones has ceased to be.’ For as a lamp when lighted, so they explained, has no unpleasant effect, but when extinguished is disagreeable to many people, so it is with great souls: their kindling into life is easy and free from pain; their extinction and death often breed winds and tempests, ‘such as you see now’, and infect the air with pestilence and sickness. They added that there is one island in particular where Cronus is a prisoner, being guarded in his sleep by Briareus; for sleep has been devised to be a chain to bind him, and there are many daemons about him as satellites and attendants.[160] XIX. Cleombrotus spoke next: ‘I have stories of the same [Sidenote: 420] kind which I might tell; but it is enough for our hypothesis that there is nothing which actually contradicts it or makes such things impossible. Yet we know’, he continued, ‘that the Stoics not only hold the view which I am advancing with [Sidenote: B] reference to daemons, but also recognize one out of the great multitude of Gods who is eternal and immortal; the others, they think, have come into being, and will perish. From the flouts and laughter of the Epicureans, which they venture to employ against Providence also, calling it a mere myth, we have nothing to fear. We maintain that their “Infinity” is a myth; so many worlds, not one of which is governed by divine reason, all produced spontaneously, and so subsisting. If it be permissible to laugh in speaking of Philosophy, we may laugh at the dumb, blind, soulless images which they shepherd during countless cycles of years, to reappear and anon return in all directions, some issuing from bodies still living, some [Sidenote: C] from those long ago burned or rotted. Thus they drag into physiology cyphers and shadows; yet if one asserts that daemons exist not in physical nature only, but as matter of theory, able to remain in being for long periods of time, they show irritation.’ XX. When these views had been stated, Ammonius spoke: ‘I think’, he said, ‘the dictum of Theophrastus was right. For what prevents our accepting a view which is dignified and highly philosophical? To disallow it is to reject many things possible but incapable of positive proof; to allow it is not[161] necessarily to import many which are impossible and [Sidenote: D] baseless. However, the only argument which I have heard the Epicureans employ against the daemons as introduced by Empedocles, that, if they are faulty and liable to sins, they cannot be blessed beings and long-lived, because vice implies much blindness and a liability to destructive accidents, is a foolish one. For, on this showing, Epicurus will be a worse man than Gorgias the sophist, and Metrodorus than Alexis the writer of comedies. For Alexis lived twice as long as Metrodorus, and Gorgias more than a third as long again as Epicurus. It is in another sense that we call virtue strong and [Sidenote: E] vice weak, not with regard to the duration or dissolution of body. Look at the lower animals: many which are sluggish in limb and dull in spirit, loose or disorderly in habits, live longer terms than the sensible and ingenious. Hence the Epicureans do wrong in ascribing the immortality of God to the caution and resistance which he opposes to destructive forces. No, the immunity from suffering and death should be laid in the nature of the blessed being, and should imply no trouble on his part. Perhaps, however, it is inconsiderate to argue against persons not present. It is now for Cleombrotus to resume his [Sidenote: F] argument lately interrupted, about the migration and exile of the daemons.’ XXI. Then Cleombrotus: ‘Very well; I shall be surprised, however, if it does not appear to you much stranger than what we have already said. Yet its basis lies in Nature, and Plato struck the note, not stating his view in plain terms, but as an obscure theory, cautiously throwing out a hint in enigmatical form; for all which even he has been met with a great outcry [Sidenote: 421] from the other philosophers. Now since we are here with a bowl in our midst of mingled myths and theories—and where should a man meet with kinder listeners before whom to try theories as foreign coins are tried?—I do not hesitate to give you the benefit of the story of a certain outlandish man. It was after many wanderings and after paying heavy search fees, that I found him at last with difficulty, and enjoyed his conversation and kindly welcome. It was near the Red Sea, where once every year he associated with men, spending the rest of his time, as he used to say, with nomad nymphs and deities. He was the handsomest man I ever saw, and kept free from sickness [Sidenote: B] of any sort, treating himself once a month with the medicinal and bitter fruit of a grass. He was practised in the use of many tongues; to me he would mostly use a Doric, which was very nearly a song. While he was speaking, there was a fragrance in all the place from the sweet breath passing out of his mouth. His general learning and information were with him all the time; but one day in every year he was inspired with prophecy, and would then go down to the sea and foretell the future; potentates and secretaries of kings would come to visit him and then go away. He used to refer prophecy to daemons; [Sidenote: C] he paid the greatest attention to Delphi, and there were none of the stories told of Dionysus, or of the rites performed here, of which he had not heard. But he would say that all those stories belonged to mighty sufferings of daemons, and among them this of the Python; only that his slayer was not exiled for nine years nor to Tempe, but was turned out into another universe, returning thence after nine revolutions of the Great Year, purified and “Phoebus” indeed, to resume possession of the oracle, which had been guarded in the meanwhile by Themis. That the stories of the Typhons and Titans were [Sidenote: D] similar; there had been battles of daemons against daemons, followed by banishment of the defeated or expiation of offenders by a God, for instance, Typhon is said to have sinned against Osiris, and Cronus against Uranus; deities whose honours have become dim or been altogether forgotten since they were removed to another universe. Thus I hear that the Solymi, who dwell near the Lycians, hold Cronus in special honour; but when he had slain their princes, Arsalus, Dryus, and Trosobius, he was banished and removed (whither they cannot say). So he passed out of account, but Arsalus and his fellows are called “stern Gods”, and the Lycians publicly [Sidenote: E] and in private make execrations in their names. Many stories like these may be had out of theological collections.’ ‘But if we call certain daemons by the recognized names of Gods,’ the stranger said, ‘it should be no wonder, for to whatever God each has been assigned, to share his power and honour, after him he likes to be called; even as among ourselves one is “of Zeus”, one “of Athena”, one “of Apollo,” one “of Dionysus”, one “of Hermes”; only some have by accident been rightly called, most have received names quite inappropriate, [Sidenote: F] misapplied names of Gods.’ XXII. Here Cleombrotus paused. All present found his story a marvellous one, but Heracleon asked how it bore upon Plato, and in what sense he had given the note. ‘You perfectly remember’, said Cleombrotus, ‘that he rejected, on the face of it, an infinity of worlds, but felt a difficulty as to [Sidenote: 422] a limited number, and was ready to go up to five,[162] thus conceding probability to those who assume one world for each element, but himself keeping to one. This appears to be peculiar to Plato, the other philosophers[163] regarding with horror any plurality, because, if you do not limit matter to one world, when you pass outside unity you arrive at once at an unlimited and perplexing infinity.’ ‘But did your stranger’, I asked, ‘limit the number of worlds as Plato does, or did you neglect to find this out when you were with him?’ ‘Was it [Sidenote: B] likely,’ said Cleombrotus, ‘when he graciously put himself at my disposal? On these points, if on nothing else, I was, of course, an attentive and eager listener. What he said was that there is not an infinite number of worlds, nor yet one, nor yet five, but one hundred and eighty-three, arranged in a triangle with sixty worlds in each side. Of the three left over, each is placed at one angle. Each world keeps a light touch on its neighbours while they revolve as in a dance. The area inside the triangle is the common hearth of all, and is called the “Plain of Truth”, and within it the formulae, and ideas, and patterns, [Sidenote: C] of things which have been and things which are, lie undisturbed. Eternity is around them, and from it, like a stream drawn off from it, Time passes to the worlds. Once in ten thousand years human souls, if they have lived good lives, are allowed to see and inspect this sight; and the best of the initiations performed here are a dream of that review and that initiation. In our philosophical discourses we are working on the memory of the fair things which are seen there, or else our discourse is vain. This’, he said, ‘is the tale I heard from him; he spoke as a man does in the mystery of an initiation, and offered no demonstration or evidence.’ XXIII. I turned to Demetrius: ‘How’, I said, ‘do the [Sidenote: D] lines about the Suitors run, where they wondered to see Ulysses handling the bow?’ When he had remembered them, ‘Just’, I said, ‘what it comes into my head to say about your stranger: _Surely the rogue some pilfering expert is_[164] in doctrines and theories from everywhere. He had travelled widely in letters, and he was no Barbarian, but a Greek steeped deeply in Greek learning. The number of his worlds proves it against him, for it is not Egyptian nor yet Indian, but Dorian of Sicily, and comes from a man of Himera named Petron. [Sidenote: E] His own pamphlet I never read and I do not know whether it is extant; but Hippys of Rhegium, mentioned by Phanias of Eresus, records it as his view or theory that there are one hundred and eighty-three worlds all in touch with one another “by elements”, whatever that may mean; he gives no further explanation or proof of any sort.’ ‘What proof could there be’, broke in Demetrius, ‘in matters of that sort, where Plato, without a word to make it reasonable or likely, simply laid down his theory?’ ‘And yet’, said Heracleon, [Sidenote: F] ‘we hear you grammarians referring the view to Homer,[165] on the ground that he distributes the whole into five worlds, Heaven, Water, Air, Earth, Olympus. Two of these he leaves “common”, namely, Earth with all the lower portion of the whole, Olympus with all the upper. The three in the middle have been allotted to the three Gods. So also Plato,[166] apparently assigning to the different aspects of the whole the bodily forms [Sidenote: 423] and figures which are the most beautiful and the first, spoke of five worlds, one each for earth, water, air, fire, but kept for last that which includes the others, the world of the Dodecahedron, an expansible and versatile body, and assigned to it the figure which suits the psychical periods and movements.’ Demetrius said: ‘Why not let sleeping Homers lie for the present? We have had enough of myths. But as to Plato, he is very far from calling the five different aspects of the world five worlds; and, where he is combating those who assume an infinite number, states his own opinion that this is the only one, and is the sole creation of God and beloved by him, brought into being [Sidenote: B] out of the corporeal whole, entire, complete, and self-sufficing. Hence it may appear strange that he should himself state the truth, yet supply to others the fundamental principle of a view which is improbable and irrational. To give up the defence of a single world was in a sort to grant the assumption of the infinity of the whole. To make the definite number of worlds five, neither more nor less, was quite against reason and removed from all probability. Unless’, he added, turning to me, ‘you have anything to say?’ ‘It seems to me’, I said, ‘to come to this, that you have now dropped our discussion about oracles, as concluded, and are taking up a fresh one of equal [Sidenote: C] importance.’ ‘We have not dropped the old one,’ said Demetrius, ‘only we do not decline the new when it fastens on us. For we do not mean to linger upon it, only to touch on it sufficiently to ask how far it is probable; then we will return to the original subject.’ XXIV. ‘In the first place then,’ I said, ‘the reasons which prevent the making of an infinite number of worlds do not prevent the making of more worlds than one. It is possible that both prophecy and a Providence may find place in several worlds, and that the intrusion of Chance may be very small, while most things, and those the greatest, observe order in [Sidenote: D] their origin and their transition, none of which suppositions is consistent with Infinity. In the next place, it is most consonant with reason that God should not have made the world a sole creation and left it to itself. For, being perfectly good, he is lacking in no virtue, least of all in the virtues of Justice and Friendliness, for these are most beautiful and becoming Gods. Now it is the nature of God to have nothing which is idle or without use. Therefore there are other Gods and worlds outside, towards which he exercises the social virtues; for Justice, or Gratitude, or Benevolence, cannot be exercised towards himself or any part of himself, it must be towards [Sidenote: E] others. So it is not likely that this world should toss about in the infinite void without friends, without neighbours, without communication; since we see Nature herself wrapping up individuals in classes and species, as though in jars or seed-vessels. There is nothing in the whole list of things which has not some common formula, nor can anything be called by a distinctive name which does not possess, generically or individually, certain qualities.[167] But the world is not spoken of as possessing generic qualities; it has qualities then as an individual, which distinguish it from others akin to and resembling itself. For [Sidenote: F] if there is not in the world such a thing as one man, one horse, one star, one God, one daemon, what is to prevent there being in Nature not one world, but several? If any one says that Nature has one earth and one sea, he fails to see the obvious fact of similar parts. For we divide earth into parts, all with one common name, and sea likewise. But a part of the world is no longer a world; it is composed of parts naturally different. XXV. ‘Again, the chief fear which has led some to use [Sidenote: 424] up the whole of matter on our world, that nothing may be left outside to disturb its coherence by resistance or thrusts, is a needless one. For suppose several worlds, to each of which is apportioned its own being, and matter definitely measured and limited, then nothing will be left outside without place or formation, like an extruded remnant, to put pressure from without. For the law which has control of the matter allotted to each world will not allow anything to be thrust out and wander to strike upon another world, or anything from another to strike its own, because Nature admits neither quantity without limit, nor movement without law and arrangement. [Sidenote: B] Or, even if any stream be drawn off and pass from worlds to other worlds, it must needs be homogeneous and kindly, mingling itself mildly with all, as the stars when they blend their rays. And the worlds themselves must have delight, as they gaze on one another in friendliness, and must also provide for the Gods in each, who are many and good, times of intercourse and common cheerfulness. There is nothing impossible in all this, no fairy tale and no paradox; unless, mark me, the views of Aristotle[168] are to bring it into suspicion on physical grounds. For if each body has its own place, as he says it has, earth must necessarily move towards the centre [Sidenote: C] from every side, and the water rest upon it, underlying the lighter elements because of its weight. If, then, there are many worlds, the result will be that earth is in many places above fire and air, and in many below them; and the same with air and water too, which will be here in natural places, there in unnatural. Which being impossible, as he thinks, there must neither be two worlds nor more than two, but this one only, composed of all matter, and established according to Nature and to the several qualities of matter. XXVI. ‘However, all this is more plausible than true. Look at it in this way,’ I went on, ‘dear Demetrius: when [Sidenote: D] he says that some bodies move downward towards the middle, others upwards from the middle, others around the middle, with reference to what does he take the middle? Not to the void surely, for on his view there is none. But in the view of those who allow a void, it has no middle, just as it has no first or last, for these are limits, but the infinite has no limits. Or if a man were to force himself, by sheer thinking, to conceive any middle point in an infinite void, what is the resulting difference in the movements of the different bodies towards it? Bodies have no force in the void, nor yet have bodies any choice or impulse to make them aim at the middle and tend towards it from all sides. Besides, where there are bodies with [Sidenote: E] no soul, and a place which is incorporeal and without difference of parts, it is as impossible to conceive of any movement towards it arising out of themselves, as of any attraction upon them arising out of it. It remains that the middle is spoken of not in a local sense but in a corporeal. For granted that this world has unity of structure with many dissimilar elements, the different parts have necessarily different movements towards different objects. This is clear from the consideration [Sidenote: F] that different elements, where their substance is transferred, change their places at the same time; rarefaction distributes in a circular movement the matter raised upwards from the middle; consolidation and condensation press matter downward towards the middle and force it together. XXVII. ‘On this subject more words are needless here. Whatever you assume to be the effective cause of these vicissitudes and changes, it will hold each world together within itself. Each world has earth and sea, each has a middle point [Sidenote: 425] of its own, its own vicissitudes and changes of the bodies upon it, and a nature and a force which preserve everything and keep it in its place. As for what is outside, whether it be nothing or an infinite void, it presents no middle point, as we have said; while, if there be many worlds, each has a middle point of its own, and therefore a special movement of bodies to or from or about that middle (to follow the distinction made by these thinkers). To insist that, where there are many middle points, weights press from all sides to one, is as though we should insist that, whereas there are many men, the blood from all should flow together into a single vein, and the brains of all be enveloped in a single pia mater; and to make it a grievance [Sidenote: B] that all hard bodies in nature should not be together in one place, and all rarefied bodies in another. That would be preposterous, and equally so to complain that wholes should have their parts disposed in their natural order within each of them. It might be absurd to call that a world which has a moon low down[169] within it, like a man with his brain lodged in his ankles or his heart in his temples. But to make several independent worlds, and then to differentiate the parts in sets to follow their wholes, and so divide them, is not absurd. Earth, [Sidenote: C] sea, and heaven will be in their natural and proper arrangement within each. Above, below, around, middle have no relation to another world or to the outside, each world has them all in and for itself. XXVIII. ‘As to the “stone” which some assume to be outside the world, it is not easy to form a conception of it, either as at rest or in motion. For how is it either to remain at rest, being weighty, or to move towards the world, like other heavy bodies, being no part of it nor reckoned in with its substance? Earth embraced in another world, and attached to it, need cause [Sidenote: D] no difficulty, when it does not part from the whole because of its weight, and shift hitherwards, since we see the natural strain by which each of the parts is held in its place. For if we look, not to the world but outside it, to get our conception of “below” and “above”, we shall find ourselves in the same difficulties as Epicurus, who made all his atoms move to places under our feet, as though either the void had feet, or infinite space permitted us to conceive of “above” or “below” within itself! Hence, again, we must feel surprise at Chrysippus, or indeed be quite at a loss as to what possessed him to say that the world has been settled “in the middle”, and that its substance, having occupied this middle place from all eternity, [Sidenote: E] works therewith for permanence and in fact for indestructibility. These are his words in the Fourth Book of his work on “_Things Possible_”, where he falsely dreams of a middle of the infinite, and assigns, still more preposterously, to that non-existent middle the cause of the stability of the world; and yet he had often said in other works, that substance is controlled and maintained by the movements towards and away from its own middle point. XXIX. ‘Then as to the other arguments of the Stoics, who can find them alarming? They ask how we are to keep one Destiny and one Providence if there are many worlds, and whether we shall not have many “Diès” and many “Zenès”. [Sidenote: F] In the first place, if it is absurd that we should have Zeus in the plural number, surely their scheme will be far more absurd; for they make, in the revolutions of infinite worlds, sun, moon, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, all multiplied to infinity. Then, what makes it necessary that there should be many “Diès”, if there are more worlds than one, rather than one principal God the emperor of the whole, possessing intelligence and reason, sovereign in each world, such a one as he who is called with us lord and father of all? Or what is to prevent all worlds [Sidenote: 426] from being subject to the Destiny and Providence of Zeus, and that he should overlook and control each in turn, supplying to each the principles, the seeds, the formulae of all which is brought about? It cannot be that here we often have a single body composed of diverse bodies, as an assembly, an army, a choir, each of whose component bodies has life, thought, apprehension (and this is the view of Chrysippus), and yet that it should be impossible that in the Whole there should be ten worlds or fifty, or a hundred, all based on a common [Sidenote: B] formula, and ranged under a single principle. Nay, such a disposition is altogether worthy of Gods. We have not to make them sovereigns of a hive out of which they never pass; to guard, nor to enclose or imprison them in matter, which is what the Stoics do when they make the Gods atmospheric phases, or powers of the waters or the fire, infused therein, brought into being with their world and again burnt up with it, not leaving them unattached or free, as charioteers or steersmen might be; but rather, as statues are nailed or soldered to their bases, shut into the corporeal and clamped thereto, to share with it till there come destruction and general dissolution and change. XXX. ‘Yet the other theory is loftier and more magnificent, [Sidenote: C] that the Gods are masterless and self-controlled, as the Tyndaridae when they help sailors in storm. _They visit them, the waves they bind By soothing pow’r, and tame the wind_, not going on board themselves to share the peril, but appearing from above and delivering men; even so the Gods visit the worlds, now one and now another; drawn on by joy as they contemplate, and steering each in its natural course. [Sidenote: D] For the Zeus of Homer[170] had not very far to carry his eye from Troy to the parts of Thrace, and the wandering tribes about the Ister; but the real Zeus has beautiful passages and becoming to himself among worlds more than one, not looking out upon an infinite void, nor having his mind intent upon himself and nothing else (as was the view of some), but surveying many works of Gods and men, and movements and periodic orbits of stars. The divine nature is no foe to changes, but takes much delight in them, if we may judge from the bodies which [Sidenote: E] appear in the heavens, their changes and periods. Now Infinity is altogether without feeling or reason; it has no room to admit a God, all goes by chance and spontaneously. But the Providence which cares for worlds defined and limited in number appears to me to involve nothing less dignified or more laborious than that which has entered a single body, and attached itself thereto, to refashion or shape it anew in infinite particulars.’ XXXI. Having said so much, I paused. Philippus, after a short interval, went on: ‘Whether the truth about these [Sidenote: F] things be so, or not, I could not, for my own part, assert with confidence. But if we are to force the God outside one world, why make him the artificer of five worlds and no more; and what is the bearing of that number on the plurality of worlds? I would rather be informed on this point than as to the inner meaning of the consecration of the letter “E” in this place. That letter is neither triangle, nor square, nor “perfect”, nor cubic, nor has it any other apparent elegance for those who love and admire such things. The process out of the elements, at which the Master obscurely hinted, is hard to grasp [Sidenote: 427] in every respect, and shows none of that probability which must have drawn him on to say that it is likely that out of five solid bodies having equal angles and equal faces and enclosed by figures of equal area, when set into matter, the same number of perfect worlds was at once produced.’ XXXII. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘yet Theodorus of Soli seems to treat the argument very fairly, in expounding the Mathematics of Plato. This is his method: the Pyramid, the Octahedron, the Eicosahedron and the Dodecahedron, the solid figures which Plato ranks first, are all beautiful because of the symmetry and equality of their formulae; nothing better than these or equal to them has been left over for Nature to compose [Sidenote: B] or to frame. They have not, however, all been constructed on a single plan, nor have all a similar origin. The Pyramid is the finest and smallest, the largest and the one of most parts is the Dodecahedron; of the remaining two the Eicosahedron is more than double the Octahedron in number of triangles.[171] It follows that it is impossible for all to take their origin at once from one and the same matter. For those which are fine and small, and more simple in their structures, must be the first to obey him who stirs and fashions the mass; they must sooner cohere and be completed than those whose parts are abundant, and the figures complex, and their construction more laborious, [Sidenote: C] as the Dodecahedron. It follows that the Pyramid is the only primal body, and that none of the others is so; they are left behind by Nature in the becoming. For this strange result there is, however, a remedy, the division and distribution of matter into five worlds. Here the Pyramid (for it first formed substance), there the Octahedron, in a third world the Eicosahedron. But from the figure which first took substance in each the rest will take their origin, all change arising by concretion or dissolution of parts, as Plato himself shows.[172] He goes thoroughly into nearly all the cases, but for us a brief survey will suffice. Since air is formed when fire is extinguished, and when rarefied [Sidenote: D] again yields fire out of itself, we must observe what happens to the seeds of either element, and the changes. The seeds of fire[173] are the Pyramid with its twenty-four primary triangles; the seeds of air are the Octahedron with its forty-eight. Therefore one element of air is formed by the commixture and coherence of two of fire; and one of air is exchanged into two of [Sidenote: E] fire, or by close pressure into itself passes away into the form of water. Thus, universally, that which is first formed readily allows the others to come into being by transmutation. It is not the case that one is first; different elements in different structures give the initial and prerogative movement into being, yet the common name is kept throughout.’ XXXIII. ‘Bravo, Theodorus!’ said Ammonius; ‘he has worked out his task with spirit. Yet I shall be surprised if he is not found to be using assumptions which are mutually destructive. He wants to have it that all five solids do not attain their structure together, the finest and easiest of [Sidenote: F] composition always breaking first into being. Then, as though following upon this, and not conflicting with it, he lays it down that it is not all matter which admits the finest and simplest element first, but that sometimes the heavy and complex objects are the first to emerge out of matter. But to pass over this, whereas it is assumed that there are five primal bodies, and therefore an equal number of worlds, he makes out probability for four only; he has discarded the Cube as if playing at [Sidenote: 428] counters, since Nature does not adapt it to pass into the others or them into itself, because the triangles are not of the same kind. In the other cases the basis of formation is the semi-(equilateral) triangle; to the Cube the right-angled isosceles is peculiar, which is incapable of converging towards the others or joining with them to form one solid angle. If then, there are five bodies and five worlds, and in each the primary belongs to some one, then where the Cube has been the first to come into being, the rest will be nowhere, for it is unable to change into any of them. I pass by the fact that they make the element of the Dodecahedron also a different thing from that scalene [Sidenote: B] out of which Plato constructs the Pyramid, the Octahedron, and the Eicosahedron. And so’, added Ammonius, with a laugh, ‘you must either resolve these difficulties, or give us something of your own about the common problem.’ XXXIV. ‘I have nothing more probable to offer, at least at the moment;’ I said, ‘yet perhaps it is better to show cause for one’s own view than for that of others. I say then, going back to the beginning, that if we assume two natures, one sensible, liable to changes of becoming and perishing, and to various movements at different times, the other essential, intellectual, always behaving alike under the same conditions, it is strange, friend, that the intellectual should admit of distinction and division within itself, while with regard to that which is bodily, and subject to affections, there should be trouble and [Sidenote: C] dissatisfaction if we refuse to leave it one, self-coherent and self-convergent, but separate and part it. Surely it is rather the permanent and divine which should hold together and shrink, as far as may be, from all dissection and analysis. Yet the force of “the Other” has gripped them, and has worked greater divergences than those of place in things intellectual, I mean those made by Reason and Idea. Hence Plato,[174] opposing those who make out the Whole to be one, tells us of Being, and the [Sidenote: D] Same, and the Different, and, besides all these, of Movement and Rest. Given then these five, it would not be wonderful if these five corporeal elements have been made by Nature copies and images of them severally, none free from admixture or transparent, but each element so far as it could best participate in each principle. Thus the Cube is clearly a body congenial to Rest, because of the stability and firmness of its surfaces. No one can fail to detect the fire-like, active character of the Pyramid in the fineness of its sides and the sharpness of its angles. The nature of the Dodecahedron, which embraces [Sidenote: E] the other figures, might well be taken for an image of Being in relation to all that is corporeal. Of the remaining two, the Eicosahedron is found most to partake of the idea of the Different, the Octahedron of that of the Same. Therefore the latter represented air, which holds all being in one constant form, the former water, which when mixed assumes new qualities the most numerous. If then Nature requires throughout equality before the law, it is probable that worlds have been created neither more nor less in number than the patterns, in order that each pattern in each world may hold that primacy and power which it has had in the composition of the elementary bodies. [Sidenote: F] XXXV. ‘So much for that! May it reassure any one who is surprised at our dividing the natural processes of becoming and mutation into so many classes! Now comes another point, which I will ask you all to consider with me. Of the ultimate first principles, by which I mean unity and the undelimited two, the latter, as the element of all shapelessness and disorder, has been called Infinity; but unity by its nature limits and arrests what is void and irrational and undetermined in [Sidenote: 429] Infinity, and imparts shape, and fits it to receive and endure that definition of things apprehended by the senses which is implied in counting. These principles appear first in connexion with number; but I would rather say, universally, that plurality is not number until unity supervenes, as form upon matter, and cuts off from undetermined Infinity, more on this side, less on that. For plurality in each case only becomes number when it is determined by unity. Again, if unity be struck off, the undetermined two throws all into a confusion without balance or limit or measure. Now since form is not a withdrawal [Sidenote: B] of underlying matter but is shape and order thereof, both principles must necessarily be found in number, and hence arises the first and greatest difference or dissimilarity. The undetermined principle is the constructive cause of the even, the better one of the odd. Two is the first of the even numbers, three of the odd; out of them comes five, in its composition common to both lists, in its effect, odd. For when the sensible and corporeal was to be divided into several parts, in virtue of the inherent cogency of the Other, their number must not be the first even nor yet the first odd, but the third, that formed out of these, so that it may take its origin from both [Sidenote: C] principles, that which constructs the even and that which constructs the odd; for neither could possibly be separated from the other; each possesses the nature and power of a principle. Both principles then being paired, the better one checked the indeterminate when it was dividing up the corporeal; and prevailed; when matter was being distributed between the two it set unity in the middle, and did not allow an equal division of the whole. So a plurality of worlds has been brought into being by the “Other” quality in the undetermined, and by difference; but that plurality is odd, made so by the operation of “the Same” and “the Determinate”, and odd in such a sense that Nature was not allowed to advance beyond what was best. For if the unity had been without admixture [Sidenote: D] and pure, matter would have been exempt from any breaking up whatever; but as it has been mingled with the discriminative power of the two, separation and division were so far accepted; but there it stopped, the even overcome by the odd. XXXVI. ‘Hence again the ancients were accustomed to use the words “to take fives” for to count. I think, too, that the word for “all” (_panta_) has been logically formed as though from “five” (_pente_) because the number five is composed of the first numbers. For the others when multiplied by other numbers come out to a product different from themselves; but five if taken an even number of times gives a perfect ten, if an odd, it reproduces itself. I pass over the facts [Sidenote: E] that five is composed of the first two squares, one and four, and that its own square is equal to the sum of the two before it, forming with them the most beautiful of right-angled triangles, and that it is the first number to give sesquiplicate ratio. For perhaps they are not germane to the subject before us. This, however, is more germane, that the number five has a divisory virtue, and Nature divides most things by five. In [Sidenote: F] ourselves are five senses, and there are five parts of the soul, those of growth, sense, appetite, passion, reason. We have five fingers on each hand; seed is most fertile when it parts into five (no instance has been recorded of a woman bearing more than five at a birth); Rhea is said in Egyptian mythology to have given birth to five Gods,[175] a veiled reference to the production of the five worlds out of one matter. Turning to the universe, the surface of earth is divided into five zones, and the Heavens are divided by five circles, two Arctic, two [Sidenote: 430] Tropic, one in the middle, the Equinoctial. Five are the orbits of the planets, if we take those of the sun and Venus and Mercury as one. Lastly, the universe has been composed in the Enharmonic Scale, just as our melody is made up of the arrangement of five Tetrachords, lowest, middle, conjunct, disjunct, highest. And the intervals are five: diesis, semitone, tone, tone and a half, double tone. Thus it seems that Nature loves to make all things on the principle of five, rather than, as Aristotle[176] used to say, of the Sphere. XXXVII. ‘What is the real reason, some one will ask, why Plato[177] referred the number of five for his worlds to the five solid figures, saying that “God used the fifth formation on the universe to mark it out”? In the sequel, when he raises the [Sidenote: B] problem of plurality of worlds, whether we should properly speak of one or of five as naturally existing, he shows clearly that the suggestion came from the solids. If, then, we are to adjust what is actually probable to his conception, let us consider that difference in movement must in each case follow difference in the solids and their shapes, as Plato[178] himself teaches, when he [Sidenote: C] shows that what is rarefied or condensed suffers a change of place simultaneously with alteration of substance. If from air fire be formed, the Octahedron being resolved and broken up into Pyramids, or again if air from fire, when compressed and thrust into an Octahedron, it is impossible that either should remain where it was before; they fly off rapidly to another place, forcing a way out and battling with whatever resists and presses upon them. The result is shown still more clearly by an illustration from grain “tossed and winnowed by the fans and implements used for cleaning corn”; Plato[179] says that [Sidenote: D] in like manner the elements toss matter about and are tossed by it; like approaches like, different objects take different places, before the whole comes out finally marshalled. Thus then, matter being what any universe must be from which God is absent, the first five properties, each with its own tendency, at once began to move apart, not being entirely or purely separated, because, when all things were mixed up together, the vanquished particles always followed their conquerors, in despite of Nature. Hence they produced in the kinds of bodies, as they were borne in different directions, parts and divisions as many as themselves: one not of pure fire but [Sidenote: E] resembling fire, one not of unmixed air but resembling air, one not of earth simple and absolute but resembling earth. Most general was the association of air with water, because they passed out saturated with the many other classes. For God did not separate nor disperse being; but taking it up dispersed by its own operation and borne about in so many streams of disorder, he ordered and disposed it in symmetry and proportion. [Sidenote: F] Then he set reason in each to be a governor and guardian, and created as many worlds as there were kinds of primal bodies. Let so much then be inscribed to Plato for Ammonius’ sake. For myself, I could never speak with confidence as to the number of worlds and affirm that there are so many: but I think the view that there are more than one, yet not an indefinite but a limited number, as reasonable as either of the other views, when I see how scattered and divided matter naturally is, that it does not abide in one place, nor yet [Sidenote: 431] is suffered by reason to pass into Infinity. Here, if anywhere, let us remember the Academy rule, and clear ourselves of excessive credulity, and treading on this slippery ground when reasoning about Infinity, only make sure that we keep our footing.’ XXXVIII. When I had finished, ‘Lamprias gives us sound advice’, said Demetrius. ‘The Gods by many forms—not “of sophistries”, as it is in Euripides,[180] but of things—deceive us, when we dare to pronounce opinions about these [Sidenote: B] great matters as if we knew. But “we must cry back”, to quote the same authority,[181] to the assumption from which our argument started. The statement that the oracles, when the daemons move off and desert them, lie idle and speechless, like musical instruments with none to play on them, raises another and a greater question as to the cause and power whereby they make the prophets and prophetesses subject to fits of inspiration and fancy. For it is impossible to allege the desertion as a cause of the silence unless we are first satisfied in what sense they preside and by their presence make the oracle active and vocal.’ ‘What?’ rejoined Ammonius, ‘do you suppose that the daemons are anything but souls which move around, as Hesiod[182] says “garmented in mist”? In my view, as man differs from man when he plays tragedy or [Sidenote: C] plays comedy, so soul differs from soul after it has fashioned for itself a body convenient to its present life. It is not then irrational or even wonderful that souls meeting souls should create within them fancies of that which is to be, just as we convey to one another, not only through voice, but often by written signs, by a touch, a glance, many intimations of things past, and forewarnings of things future. Or perhaps you have something different to tell us, Lamprias? For a rumour reached us lately that you had held a long discussion on these subjects with strangers at Lebadeia; but our informant [Sidenote: D] did not clearly remember any of it.’ ‘Do not be surprised at that,’ I said, ‘for there were many interruptions and much was going on, because it was a day of consultation and sacrifice, which made our conversation fragmentary and intermittent.’ ‘But now’, said Ammonius, ‘you have listeners with full leisure, and eager to inquire and to be told. There is no question of rivalry or faction, and you see what a frank full hearing has been accorded to every view.’ XXXIX. The others joined in encouraging me, and after a few minutes of silence I went on: ‘I must begin by saying [Sidenote: E] that it so happens that you, Ammonius, have given me a sort of opening for bringing forward now what I then said. For if the souls which have been separated from the body or have never had commerce with one at all, are daemons as you say, and God-like Hesiod[183] also: _Holy visitants of Earth and guardians sure of mortal men_, on what principle do we deprive souls while in their bodies of that faculty whereby the daemons know and declare beforehand things to be? It is not likely that any power or new part accrues to souls when they leave the body, which they did not possess before. Rather, they always have it, but in a weak degree while they are intermingled with the body; it is sometimes quite invisible and veiled, sometimes weak and dim, and, as with those who see through a mist or who try to move in a marshy place, inoperative and dull, demanding much attention to the virtue that is in them, and much pains to raise and remove and purify the obstructing veil. The sun when he chases the clouds away does not then become bright; he is bright always, [Sidenote: 432] but to us through the mist his light appears dim and struggling. Even so the soul does not assume the prophetic power when it passes out of the body as out of a cloud; it has it even now, but is blinded by its close admixture with the mortal state. We should not be surprised or incredulous, if only because we see the great energy which Memory, as we call the faculty in the soul which answers to prophecy, exhibits, in preserving and protecting things that are past, or rather things that now are,[184] since of things past none is or has substance; all things [Sidenote: B] come into being and at the same time perish, all actions, words, and feelings, as time like a river bears each along. But this faculty of the soul, I know not how, gets a grasp of them, and invests with appearance and being that which is not present. The oracle given to the Thessalians about Arne[185] bade them attend to _That which a deaf man hears, a blind man sees._ But Memory is the hearing of things to which the ear is deaf, the seeing of things to which the eye is blind. Wherefore, as I said, it is no marvel that, as it grasps things which no longer are, so it should anticipate things which have not yet come into being. For these touch it more nearly, and with these it has sympathy; it confronts the future and attaches itself [Sidenote: C] thereto, whereas it is quit of things past and finished, saving only to remember them. XL. ‘Having then this inborn power yet dimmed and hardly appearing, souls nevertheless break out and are uplifted, in dreams some of them or when nearing initiation, as the body becomes pure, and takes on a temperature, so to speak, which is suitable, or whether it be that the rational and intellectual part is relaxed and discharged from the present things, and so with the irrational and imaginative they reach towards futurity. That line of Euripides[186] is not true: _The best of prophets he who guesses well._ No, the prophet is the sensible man, he who follows the rational part of his soul in the road where it leads him with probability. Divination, like a scroll with no writing or method, in itself [Sidenote: D] indeterminate, but capable of receiving fancies and presentiments by the feelings, gets touch with the future, yet not by inference, when it passes most completely outside the present. It passes out through such a temperament and disposition of the body as produce a change called by us inspiration. Often the body attains this disposition of itself; but the earth sends up many streams of many potencies, some which bring trances, diseases, or death, others beneficial, mild, and serviceable, as is proved on those who chance upon them. Of all the currents the stream, or breath, of prophecy is most divine and holy, [Sidenote: E] whether it be drawn from the air direct, or come mingled with the moisture of a spring; for when absorbed into the body it produces in souls a temperament unfamiliar and strange, the special quality of which it is hard to state in clear words, though reason suggests many conjectures. Probably, by heat and dispersion, it opens certain passages to admit imaginings of the future, just as the fumes of wine bring many other stirrings, and unveil words and thoughts which were stored away and unheeded, [Sidenote: F] _For in the wine-god’s votary’s mood, As in the madman’s, lies much prophecy_, says Euripides;[187] when the soul, warmed and set on fire, rejects the caution which human prudence brings, to avert inspiration, as it so often does, and to quench it. XLI. ‘After all, it might be not unreasonably asserted that a dryness introduced with the heat subtilizes the current and makes it ethereal and pure. “Best a dry soul”, says Heraclitus;[188] moisture not only dulls sight and hearing, but if it [Sidenote: 433] touch a mirror or raises[189] a mist upon it, takes away brightness and lustre. As the opposite to this, it is not impossible that, by a sort of chilling and condensation of the breath of air, the organ of prognostication is made tense and keen, like steel out of the bath. Or again, as tin when melted in with copper, itself rarefied and full of apertures, welds it together and condenses it, and yet in the result makes it brighter to the eye and purer, so there is nothing to prevent the prophetic exhalation, [Sidenote: B] wherein is something congenial and akin to souls, from filling up their rarefied places, and inserting itself, and pressing all together. For certain things are congenial and proper to certain other things; thus an infusion of the bean into the dyer’s bath seems to assist its efficacy for purple, of nitre for saffron. _Scarlet is mingled for the pearly weft_, says Empedocles. But about Cydnus, and the sacred sword of Apollo at Tarsus, we used to hear the story from you, dear Demetrius, how Cydnus cleans that steel best, and no other water suits the sword. And again, at Olympia, water from [Sidenote: C] Alpheus is poured on the ashes to make them adhere to the altar in a mass, and the water of no other river which has been found has the power of cementing the ash. XLII. ‘It is not to be wondered at, then, that of the many streams which the earth sends up, these alone affect souls with inspiration and give them imagination of the future. Certainly legend agrees with reason as to this. In this very place it is related that the prophetic virtue was first made manifest by the accidental falling into it of a shepherd, who thereupon uttered sounds as of one inspired. These passed at first unheeded by those present; but afterwards, when the things which the man foretold had happened, there was astonishment. The most learned of the Delphians even mention [Sidenote: D] the man’s name, which was Coretas. I am, however, myself strongly of opinion that a soul acquires a temperature congruous with the prophetic current, such as the eye has with light sympathetic to it. Though the eye possesses the power of seeing, this cannot act without light; and the prophetic organ of the soul needs, as the eye does, a congenial medium to help in kindling its flame, or whetting its edge. Hence most of the older generations used to think that Apollo and the sun were one and the same God, while those who knew and honoured that beautiful and wise proportion, “as body to soul, so sight [Sidenote: E] to intellect, so light to truth”, would add the conjecture “so the power of the sun to the nature of Apollo”, declaring the sun to be his offspring and scion, the ever becoming of the ever subsisting. For the sun kindles and enhances and helps to excite the visual power of the sense, as the God that of prophecy in the soul. XLIII. ‘It was natural, however, that those who take the view that they are one and the same God should have dedicated this oracle to Apollo and Earth in common, thinking that the sun produces in the earth the disposition and temperament from which come the prophetic exhalations out of her. We [Sidenote: F] then, like Hesiod,[190] who understood the matter better than some philosophers, when he called her _Unshaken base of all_, consider her to be eternal and imperishable. But of the powers which are about her it is to be expected that some should fail here, and others come into being there, and that there should be shiftings from place to place, and cross-currents, and that such cycles should often revolve within her if we take time as a whole; and the phenomena point to such an inference. For in the case of lakes and rivers, and still more frequently in that of hot springs, there have been failure and entire disappearance in some places, in others a retreat so to call it, and an absorption; [Sidenote: 434] then they reappear at intervals of time in the same places, or bubble up in their neighbourhood. Again, we hear of mines where the ore has been exhausted and then renewed, as in the silver mines of Attica, and the copper lodes of Euboea, out of which the chilled sword-blades used to be manufactured, as Aeschylus[191] has said _Th’ Euboean blade, self-tempered, in his hand._ Then there is the rock at Carystus where it is only lately that the yield of delicate thread-like filaments of mineral has ceased. I think some of you will remember having seen towels, and nets, and caps made of these, which were non-inflammable. [Sidenote: B] Any which were soiled by use were placed in a flame out of which they came bright and clear. Now there has been an entire disappearance of these, and scarcely a few fibres or thin filaments run in streaks about the mines. XLIV. ‘Yet Aristotle[192] holds that exhalation is the operative cause within the earth of all these things, that is, of the natural effects which necessarily fail, shift place, and break out concomitantly. The same view must be taken of prophetic currents; the power which they have is not perennial nor ageless, it is liable to changes. Probably they are extinguished by excessive storms of rain, and dispersed by thunderbolts [Sidenote: C] falling upon them; above all, when the earth is shaken, and subsidence or conglomeration takes place in her depths, the exhalations are shifted or wholly lost to view; thus the effects of the great earthquake which actually overturned the town are said to be permanent here. In Orchomenus they say that there was a pestilence in which many men perished, and that the oracle of Teiresias then wholly failed, and remains to this day idle and voiceless. If the like happened also to those in Cilicia, as we hear it did, there is no one, Demetrius, who could tell us about it more clearly than you.’ XLV. Demetrius said: ‘I cannot say how things are now, for it is a long time since I left home, as you know; the [Sidenote: D] oracle of Mopsus was in full force when I was there, and also that of Amphilochus. I can tell you of a very remarkable thing which happened to that of Mopsus, in my presence. The propraetor of Cilicia was himself still of two minds about religious questions; from the weakness of his scepticism, I imagine, for his general character was violent and bad; but he had about him certain Epicureans, professed mockers at all such things on the strength of their fine physiology. He sent in a freedman, equipping him like a spy going into an enemy’s land, with sealed tablets inside which was written the question, but no one knew what it was. The man spent a night in the [Sidenote: E] sanctuary, as the custom was, and went to sleep. The following day he reported a dream, which was this. He thought that a handsome man stood over him, and said the one word “Black”, nothing more, and went straight away. This appeared to us strange, and caused much perplexity. However, that propraetor was struck with consternation, and worshipped; then he opened the tablets and showed us this question written inside: “Shall I sacrifice a white bull or a black?” Even the Epicureans [Sidenote: F] were confounded at this, and he himself completed his sacrifice, and ever afterwards held Mopsus in reverence.’ XLVI. After saying this, Demetrius was silent. As I wished to bring the discussion to a head, I glanced again at Philippus and Ammonius, who were sitting together. They appeared to me to wish to exchange some remarks, and again paused. Then Ammonius spoke: ‘Philippus has also something to say on our past discussion; his own view, as that of most people, is that Apollo is not a different God from the sun, but the same. [Sidenote: 435] My own difficulty is a greater one, and turns on greater matters. Just now we managed to let the argument take its own way with due solemnity, to transfer prophetic art simply from Gods to daemons. But now it seems to me that we are thrusting the latter out in their turn, chasing them hence from oracle and tripod, and resolving the origin—I would rather say the existence and power—of prophecy into winds, and vapours, and exhalations. What we have heard about temperatures, and [Sidenote: B] heatings and sharpenings, withdraws no doubt the credit from the Gods, but thereby suggests the inference as to cause which the Cyclops in Euripides[193] draws: _The earth by force, whether it will or no, Bringing forth grass, fattens my flocks and hinds._ Only he says that he does not sacrifice to Gods, _but to myself, And this great belly first of deities_, whereas we sacrifice and pray to get our oracles; and why do we do it, if souls carry within themselves a power of prophecy, which power is stirred up by temperature of some sort in air or breeze? And then the condition of the priestesses, what does [Sidenote: C] that mean, and the refusal to respond unless the whole victim from the hoof-joint up be set quivering when it is sprinkled? For it is not enough, as in other sacrifices, for it to shake the head, the shivering must be in all the parts, and with a tremulous sound; otherwise they tell you that the oracle is not giving responses, and do not bring in the Pythia. Now, if they ascribe the cause mainly to a God or daemon, it is reasonable to do and think thus, but on your view it is not reasonable. For the exhalation, if it be there, will produce the transport whether the sacrifice quiver or not, and will affect the soul, [Sidenote: D] not only of the Pythia, but equally of any chance comer who has physical contact with it. Thus it is mere folly to employ one woman only for the oracles, and to take trouble to keep her chaste and holy all her life. For that Coretas who fell in, as the Delphians tell you, and was the first to make evident the virtue of the place, was in no respect different, as I think, from the other goatherds and shepherds, always supposing that this is not a story and an idle fiction, which I think it is. Then, when I reckon up the great benefits of which this oracle has been the cause to the Greeks, in wars, in the founding of cities, in [Sidenote: E] times of pestilence and of failure of crops, I think it dreadful to ascribe its discovery and origin, not to God and Providence, but to Chance and automatic causes. It is this point’, he added, ‘that I want Lamprias to argue; will you not wait?’ ‘Indeed I will,’ said Philippus, ‘and so will the others, the discussion has stirred us all.’ XLVII. I turned to him. ‘Stirred us, Philippus? It has confounded me, to think that before so large and so grave a company I should seem so to forget my years as with a show of plausible rhetoric to upset and disturb any view about religion which is established in truth and holiness. I will [Sidenote: F] defend myself by producing Plato, as witness and advocate in one. Plato[194] found fault with old Anaxagoras because he attached himself too much to physical causes, and because, in his constant pursuit of the working of necessary law in all which affects bodies, he dismissed the better causes or principles, the Final and the Efficient. He himself, first of the philosophers or more than any of them, went into both sets, attributing to God the origin of all things which are according to reason, but [Sidenote: 436] refusing to deprive matter of the causes necessary for their production; he recognized that in some such way the whole sensible universe is organized, yet is not pure nor free from admixture, but has its origin in matter involved with reason. Now look at this first in the case of the artists. Take, for instance, the famous base or stand, called by Herodotus[195] “cup-stand”, of the bowl here; it had its physical causes, iron, steel, fire to soften and water to temper it, without all which the object could not possibly be produced; but the more potent principle [Sidenote: B] which stirred the others and was working through them, was furnished to it by Art and Reason. Now the name of the maker or artificer has been inscribed on these several figures or works of imitation: _Here Polygnotus, son of Aglaophon, The Thasian, painted towering Ilion’s sack._ You may see it for yourself. But without pigments crushed and compounded it would be impossible to present such a composition to the eye. Does then the man who seeks to grasp the physical principle, investigating and laying down the effects and [Sidenote: C] the changes of a mixture of Sinopic red earth with yellow, or Melian gray with black, rob the painter of his glory? Or he who follows out the processes of tempering or softening steel, how it is weakened by fire and submits itself to be drawn and hammered, then, plunged into fresh water and compressed and densified by the cold, because of the softness and rarefication induced by the fire, acquires temper and consistence—“the iron’s might” Homer[196] calls it—does he any the less preserve for the artist his part in the causation? I think not! There [Sidenote: D] are those who criticize the properties of medical appliances; they do not overthrow the art of Medicine. As, for the matter of that, Plato[197] in proving that we see by means of the flash of our eyes mingling with that of the sun, and hear by the pulsations of the air, did not rule out the fact that we have received our sight and our hearing in accordance with Reason and Providence. XLVIII. ‘The whole matter, as I maintain, stands thus. All becoming has two causes, of which the most ancient theologians and poets chose to turn their attention to the stronger only, pronouncing over all things the universal refrain: _Zeus first, Zeus middle, all things are of Zeus_,[198] while they never approached the necessary or physical causes. Their successors, called physicists, did the very reverse; they [Sidenote: E] strayed away from that beautiful and divine principle, and refer everything to bodies, and pulsations, and changes, and temperaments. Hence the systems of both are deficient; they have ignored or neglected, the latter the person through whom and the agent by whom, the former the things from which and the means through which. He who first distinctly grasped both, and attached by necessary law the subject affected to the rational Maker and Mover, relieves us as well as himself from any charge of contempt or detraction. We do not make [Sidenote: F] prophecy a godless or irrational thing, when we assign to it for its matter the soul of man, and for its instrument, or harp-quill, the inspiring current and the exhalation. For, in the first place, the earth which breeds the exhalations, and the sun who gives to earth all power of temperature or of change, are reckoned Gods in the traditions of our fathers. Further, in leaving daemons to preside over and guard this temperature, as though it were a melody, to relax the strings in due course [Sidenote: 437] or to tighten, to clear away that excess of ecstasy and agitation which it causes in the worshippers, and to leave excitement a painless and harmless compound, we shall not be thought to do what is irrational or impossible. XLIX. ‘Nor can we allow that in offering the previous sacrifice, or crowning the victim, or pouring on it lustral draughts, we do anything repugnant to this view. For when the priests and holy men sacrifice the victim, and sprinkle it, and watch its movement and its trembling, they do not profess to get from it an intimation of anything but the one fact that the God is giving answers. For the thing offered in sacrifice must be pure both in body and in soul, and free from any injury or taint. As to body, it is not very difficult to make [Sidenote: B] out visible proof; the test of soul is to offer corn to the bulls, pease to the he-goats; an animal which refuses is reckoned out of health. For the she-goat it is cold water; a soul in a normal state cannot be apathetic and motionless under the sprinkling. For my own part, even if it be certain that trembling is a sign that the God is ready to give responses, the contrary that he [Sidenote: C] is not, I see no disastrous consequence. As I said before, every natural force produces its result better or worse according to season; if the right season is escaping us, it is to be expected that the God should signify the fact. L. ‘I think, further, that the exhalation is not always the same, it has times of relaxation and of intensity. In proof, I can bring forward witnesses, many of them strangers, and all the members of the temple staff. For the room in which they place consultants of the God, is, at intervals, which are not frequent or fixed, but come as it may happen, filled with fragrance and a sweet gale, such as the most costly spices might emit, which are thrown up, as out of a well, from the sanctuary. [Sidenote: D] We may suppose that they burst out by the action of heat or of some other force within. Or, if this does not seem to you convincing, you will at least grant that the Pythia herself appears to show at different times different states and moods of that part of the soul which is in contact with the current, and does not present throughout one temperament, like a melody which never changes. Many conscious troubles and excitements, more which are unnoticed, seize her body and stream on into the soul; and when she is charged with these, it is better for her not to go in, not to present herself to the God when she is not perfectly pure, like an instrument well strung and tuneful, but is passionate and disordered. Wine does not always affect [Sidenote: E] the hard drinker in the same way, nor the flute one susceptible to its music; the same men are stirred to tipsy revelling, now less now more, according to difference of temperament. The imaginative part of the soul seems, more than any other, to be controlled by variations in the body, and to change with it. This is clearly shown by dreams; sometimes we find ourselves among many visions of every sort in our sleep, at others again there is a perfect calm and relief from such illusions. We know [Sidenote: F] ourselves Cleon here of Daulia, who says that in the many years which he has lived he has never once seen a dream-vision. In an older generation the same is recorded of Thrasymedes of Heraea. The cause is bodily temperament, just as, on the other side, there is that of melancholic persons, all dreams and phantoms; although these are supposed to have the gift of dreaming right, for their imagination turns them this way or that, [Sidenote: 438] just as those who shoot often, often hit. LI. ‘When then the imaginative and prophetic faculty of the soul is attempered to the current as to a drug, the inspiration must be brought about in the persons who are to prophesy, when not, not; otherwise the result will be a distortion by no means free from trouble and disturbance, as we know was the case with the Pythia who lately died. A deputation came from abroad to consult the God; the victim remained motionless and impassive under the first sprinkling, then the priests in [Sidenote: B] excess of zeal persisted, and at last it did give in when drenched with their shower-bath. What happened to the Pythia? Unwillingly and with no alacrity, they say, she went down into the vault. In her very first answers she made it clear by the hoarseness of her voice that she could not bear up; she was like a ship driven by the wind, filled with a dumb bad spirit. At last she became all agitation; with a terrible cry she made towards the door of exit, and dashed against it, so that not only the members of the deputation fled, but also the prophet Nicander and the holy persons present. However, after a short [Sidenote: C] time, they went in and recovered her. She was then in her senses, and lived on for a few days. For these reasons, they keep the person of the Pythia free from intercourse, and from any sort of communication or contact with strangers; and they take the signs before proceeding to the oracle, thinking that it is quite clear to the God when she has the temperament and condition which will allow her to undergo the inspiration with impunity. For the force of the exhaled air does not affect all persons, nor the same persons always in the same way; it only provides fuel, a foundation, as has been explained, for [Sidenote: D] those who are fit to be subjected to the change. It is essentially divine and daemonic, not however exempt from failure, or destruction, or age, nor is it capable of enduring through that infinite space of time in which all things between moon and earth are exhausted, according to our theory. Some go on to say that the things also which are above the moon do not endure, but fail in presence of the eternal infinite, and suffer abrupt changes and new births. LII. ‘These things’, I continued, ‘I commend to your repeated consideration, and my own, as offering many openings for objection and many suggestions of an opposite view, which the present opportunity does not allow us to follow out in their [Sidenote: E] entirety. Let them stand over then, and also the problem raised by Philippus about the sun and Apollo.’ Footnote 128: Whose account is, for convenience, somewhat recast and amplified. The fact is understated. ‘There cannot be more than five solids, each of which has all its faces with the same number of sides, and all its solid angles formed with the same number of plane angles.’ Todhunter, _Spherical Trigonometry_, c. 151. Footnote 129: _Il._ 10, 173, and Leaf’s note. Footnote 130: _Od._ 3, 367-8. Footnote 131: _Il._ 10, 394. See p. 265. Footnote 132: Herodotus, 8, 133-5. I have followed W.’s reconstruction. Footnote 133: See _Life of Aristides_, c. 19. Footnote 134: _W. and D._ 199. Footnote 135: See p. 231. Footnote 136: Fr. 149: see above, p. 77. Footnote 137: Herod. 9, 28 (and see ib. c. 21). Footnote 138: Fr. 729. Cp. _O. C._ 607. Footnote 139: The words ‘and here—heroes’ have been supplied from a quotation in Eusebius, _Praep. Evan._ 5, 4. Footnote 140: From a fragment, Gaisford, _Poetae Minores_, ii, p. 489 (cp. Ausonius, _Id._ 18; and Sir T. Browne, _Vulgar Errors_, 3, 9). Footnote 141: Fr. 165. Footnote 142: As Ausonius, loc. cit. Footnote 143: Fr. 87. Footnote 144: 1 + 2 × 1 + 3 × 1 + 2^2 + 3^2 + 2^3 + 3^3 = 54. Footnote 145: See _Timaeus_, 35. Footnote 146: _Il._ 20, 8-9. Footnote 147: See Heraclitus, Fr. 34. Footnote 148: Inserting, with Mezirius, ἢ δεκάκις before τεσσάρων. Footnote 149: The meaning is simply that 40 × 3^5 = 9720, and ‘triangle-wise’ seems irrelevant. Footnote 150: Fr. 961 (from the _Phaethon_). Footnote 151: _Sympos._ 202 F. Footnote 152: _W. and D._ 125. Cp. Plato, _Crat._ 397. Footnote 153: 2, 171. Footnote 154: Pindar, Fr. 208 (cp. _Sympos._ 7, 5, 4). Footnote 155: _Suppl._ 214. Footnote 156: Fr. 730. Footnote 157: See additional note, p. 312. Footnote 158: Cp. _Life of Timoleon_, c. 1. Footnote 159: Cp. Herod. 2, 145. Footnote 160: See p. 54. Footnote 161: Reading οὐ πολλά (‘nihil secum trahit impossibile’. Xylander). See Preface, p. vi. Footnote 162: _Timaeus_, 55. Footnote 163: As Aristotle, _De Caelo_, I, 8, 276 a 18. Footnote 164: _Od._ 21, 397. Footnote 165: _Il._ 15, 189. Footnote 166: _Tim._ 31 A, 55 C. Footnote 167: Reading, with Madvig (partly anticipated by Emperius) ... ὃ μὴ κοινῶς ποιὸν ἢ ἰδίως ἐστίν· ὁ δὲ κόσμος οὐ λέγεται κοινῶς εἶναι ποιός· ἰδίως τοίνυν ... Footnote 168: See e. g. _De Caelo_, 1, 6, 275 b 29, and Burnet, _Early Greek Philosophy_, p. 397 note; see also p. 270 foll. Footnote 169: Inserting κάτω, with Meziriac. Footnote 170: _Il._ 13, 1 foll. Footnote 171: See p. 115. Footnote 172: _Tim._ 55 E, foll. Footnote 173: There is a play on the words for ‘fire’, ‘Pyramid’. Footnote 174: _Soph._ 249 B. Footnote 175: _Is. et Osir._ c. 12. Footnote 176: _De Caelo_, 2, 4, 286 b 10. Footnote 177: _Tim._ 55 C. Footnote 178: _Tim._ 57 C. Footnote 179: _Tim._ 52 E. Footnote 180: Fr. 925. Footnote 181: See p. 70. Footnote 182: _W. and D._ 124. Footnote 183: _W. and D._ 122. Footnote 184: μᾶλλον δὲ ὄντα. Cp. Plato, _Philebus_, 33, διὰ μνήμης πᾶν ἔστι τὸ γεγονός. Footnote 185: See Thuc. 1, 12. Footnote 186: Fr. 963. Footnote 187: _Bacchae_, 297-8. Footnote 188: Fr. 75. Footnote 189: The text is corrupt, but probably contained ὁμίχλην. Cp. Plato, _Sympos._ 736 A. Footnote 190: _Theogon._ 117. Footnote 191: Fr. 371. Footnote 192: _Meteor._ 1, 3, 340 b 29. Footnote 193: _Cyclops_, I. 332-3 (Shelley’s tr.). Footnote 194: _Phaedo_, 97 C. Footnote 195: 1, 25, where the work is ascribed to Glaucus. Footnote 196: _Od._ 9, 393. Footnote 197: _Rep._ 6, 18, 507 C. Footnote 198: Cp. Plato, _Laws_, 716 E. ON THE INSTANCES OF DELAY IN DIVINE PUNISHMENT INTRODUCTION The Dialogue on _Delay in Divine Punishment_ stands somewhat apart from the others. It deals gravely with grave matters, the ways of Providence with man, and the ‘last things’. The method is ingenious and satisfactory. An Epicurean, after scoffing at Providence in a manner which deeply offends the company, leaves them abruptly. We are reminded of the departure of the Cynic Didymus at Delphi (p. 124), and of the immortal episode of Thrasymachus in the First Book of the _Republic_ of Plato. The small family party which remains, Plutarch, his brother Timon, his son-in-law Patrocleas, and an intimate friend Olympicus, take up the points suggested by the attack, not contentiously, or in the language of the Schools, but with a view to ascertain whether there is anything in them which concerns reasonable men. The friends successively raise these points: the slowness of the Gods in punishing, and their purposes in the delay; the justice of visiting the sins of parents upon children, or of a city upon a new generation of citizens; the persistence of the soul after physical death here. In all cases it is Plutarch who supplies the answer, whereas, in the other long Dialogues, there is some distribution of parts and an interplay of character. In the tone of the dissertations, which is sustained, and little relieved by humour, the piece most nearly resembles the essay _On Superstition_. Plutarch’s argument is marked by truly academic caution, and an admission of man’s ignorance and limitations, which might have come from the pen of Bishop Butler. When Plutarch has sufficiently established ‘to demonstration’ the ‘probability’ of his position, he adds, at the urgent desire of the company, a myth, which he had already offered to produce. The ‘myth’ is a device of which Plato has many examples, intended to give symmetry to the Dialogue, ‘that it may not go about without a head’. But it is more than a literary device; it is a satisfaction of the desire for something poetical and constructive which mere Dialectic can never feed. The myth about Thespesius here must be compared with that of Timarchus in the _Genius of Socrates_ and with the traveller’s tale of the Island of Cronus in the _Face in the Moon_.[199] Of Platonic myths, we are first reminded of that of Er, which closes the _Republic_, and raises to a higher plane the question whether the just man or the unjust has the best of it. There are necessarily strong points of resemblance to the magnificent judgement myth of the _Gorgias_, and much of the imagery recalls the _Phaedo_. The _Timaeus_ is not perhaps so conspicuously before Plutarch’s mind here as it is in other works. While there is so much which can be referred to Plato, there is nothing to suggest that Plutarch set himself to make a patchwork out of the stores of his retentive memory, still less that he sought to imitate the master from whose genius his industrious and curious mind lay poles apart. His honesty and his common-sense forbade any such attempt. It is fortunate that we possess a fragment (redeemed for Plutarch by Wyttenbach) of a Dialogue with the same speakers, and perhaps intended to follow immediately, in which, as though in ‘calculated contrast’, writes M. Gréard (p. 292), to the grim details contained in the Dialogue before us, we have a delightful picture of what awaits the just beyond the grave, the truly ‘initiate’. As all the questions discussed in the main Dialogue are raised in old Greek writers, Homer, Pindar, the Tragedians, supplemented by the philosophers, and the myth, in its stern imagery, is on all fours, for instance, with the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, so the comfortable vision of the initiate in the fragment is anticipated by Greeks who wrote four hundred or five hundred years before. Thus we have the lines of the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes (154 foll., tr. G. Murray): _Then you will find a breath about your ears Of Music, and a light about your eyes Most beautiful—like this—and myrtle groves, And joyous throngs of women and of men, And clapping of glad hands._ And the still more famous picture of Pindar (_Ol._ 2, 68-74, tr. G. Moberly): _But who in Godlike strife Have dared to keep their secret souls from sin, Thrice tried in either life, E’en to old Saturn’s tower their bright way win. There with melodious din Light breezes, East and West, Fan with soft breath the Islets of the Blest; And golden flowerets breathe, Some from the Island-trees, Some floating on the ambient seas, With which their twinèd arms and brows they wreathe._ Perhaps it would hardly be untrue to say that the whole of Plutarch’s daring speculation owes its origin to the words of Heraclitus, with which the fragment closes, as to the surprises which await man after death. There is one distinct note of date, in the Sibylline prophecy quoted in c. 22, that the emperor of that day should die in his bed. Vespasian, who was doubtless meant, died in June, A.D. 79, and the great eruption of Vesuvius (by which, however, Puteoli does not appear to have suffered specially) took place in August of the same year. The Dialogue must have been written later than these events. On the whole, if we may venture a conjecture where all is uncertain, we may perhaps suppose it to have followed the _Symposiacs_ at a comparatively short interval, and to have been an early attempt to apply the method of dialogue to elaborate discussion of great themes. It has characteristics of its own which enable us to understand how Erasmus (_Adagia_)[200] felt doubts as to its genuineness, though we have the confident assurance of Wyttenbach that there is Plutarch’s seal upon it. Readers should consult Mr. Oakesmith’s pages on this work (_The Religion of Plutarch_, pp. 103 foll.), and, on the myth, Bishop Westcott’s Essay on _The Myths of Plato_ (reprinted in _History of Religious Thought in the West_), or Professor J. A. Stewart on _The Myths of Plato_. ON THE INSTANCES OF DELAY IN DIVINE PUNISHMENT A DIALOGUE THE SPEAKERS PATROCLEAS, Plutarch’s son-in-law. PLUTARCH. TIMON, Plutarch’s brother. OLYMPICUS, a friend (see _Sympos._ 3, 6). I. Having spoken to this effect, Quintus, before any one [Sidenote: 548 B] replied—we had just reached the far end of the colonnade—Epicurus took himself off. We stopped our walk for a while, in silent surprise at the oddness of the man, then glanced at one another, turned back, and resumed it. Patrocleas was the first to speak: ‘Which is it to be,’ he said, ‘are you for dropping the inquiry, or shall we answer the argument as though the speaker of it were present, though he is not present?’ Timon interposed: ‘Well, suppose he had thrown a spear and gone away, it would not do quietly to let it lie. Brasidas,[201] we are [Sidenote: C] given to believe, drew the spear out of his wound, and with it struck and slew the thrower. Now perhaps it is no business of ours to punish those who have discharged a monstrous or a false argument at us; enough if we eject it from ourselves before it has taken hold.’ ‘Then what is it’, I asked, ‘which has moved you most, in what he said? for there were a number of things, a disorderly mass, which the man drew from all quarters, to let them off against Divine Providence in his rage and fury.’ II. Then Patrocleas: ‘The slowness and procrastination of Divine Justice in the punishment of wicked men appears to [Sidenote: D] me especially terrible. At the present moment, after what we have just heard, I seem to come “all fresh and new” to this (Epicurean) view; but long ago I used to feel indignant when I heard Euripides[202] telling how _The Gods delay, the Gods are ever slow._ Yet it does not become the God to be slack in anything, least of all in dealing with wicked men; they are never slack or procrastinating in evil-doing, but are borne on by the passions at racing speed into their iniquities. Again, “Vengeance, when [Sidenote: E] it follows most closely upon the wrongs,” to use the words of Thucydides,[203] at once blocks the road against those who are in the fullest enjoyment of successful vice. No debt so surely as the debt of justice, if left unpaid till the morrow, at once depresses the person wronged by enfeebling his hopes, and enhances the boldness and self-trust of the miscreant; whereas the punishments which meet audacious acts promptly are checks against future offences, and have a sovereign virtue to encourage the sufferers. Thus I often feel distressed when I recall the saying [Sidenote: F] of Bias. It appears that he told a certain wicked man that he had no fear of his escaping retribution, he did fear that he himself might not be there to see. What did the Messenians gain by the punishment of Aristocrates, when they had been already slain? He had lost the battle at the Trench[204] by treachery, reigned over the Arcadians for more than twenty years undiscovered, and was at last found out and punished, but the Messenians were no more. What consolation to the Orchomenians, who had lost children, friends, and kinsmen through the treason of Lyciscus, was the disease which fastened upon him long years afterwards, and devoured his body? He had once and again dipped both feet into the river, with prayers and imprecations [Sidenote: 549] as he wetted them, that they might rot away if he had done any wrong or treachery. At Athens, when the corpses of the “Accursed” were thrown out, and set beyond the frontier, it was not possible even for the children’s children of the victims to see it done. Hence it is strange that Euripides[205] should have used such thoughts as these to deter men from wickedness: _Justice shall never strike thee to the heart— Fear not her footfall—no, nor any man That does the wrong; with silent foot and slow, When the day comes, she’ll stalk the sinners down._ [Sidenote: B] The very phrases—are they not?—which bad men might use to give themselves encouragement and assurance to set hand to lawless acts, since they show injustice yielding her harvest ripe and ready, and punishment lagging late and far behind the enjoyment.’ III. When Patrocleas had done, Olympicus spoke next: ‘Take another point, Patrocleas; what a grave absurdity these delays and hesitations on the part of Heaven involve! The slowness takes away all assurance of a Providence; and when misfortune comes to bad men, not on the heels of each wicked [Sidenote: C] deed, but later on, they set it down to mischance, and call it a calamity, not a punishment; they do not profit by it, they are annoyed at the things which befall them, but do not repent of the things which they have done. It is so with a horse; the touch of whip or spur which follows immediately on a stumble or blunder sets him up and brings him to his duty; whereas tugs and checks and ratings later on, after an interval, seem to him to have some purpose which is not education, they irritate, but do not school him. And so with vice; if punishment [Sidenote: D] from switch or rein follow every trip and tumble, vice will have the best chance of becoming thoughtful and lowly, and getting the fear of God, as of a Judge who stands over men in their acts and their passions, and does not wait till the day after to-morrow. Whereas, the Justice which moves calmly, “with a slow foot”, as Euripides put it, and falls upon the wicked “when the day comes”, resembles an automaton rather than a Providence, in her vague, procrastinating, unmethodical procedure. Thus I do not see what use there is in those “mills of the Gods” which [Sidenote: E] “grind slowly”, we are told,[206] for they make the form of Justice dim, and the fears of the wicked evanescent.’ IV. When all this had been said, and while I was deep in thought, Timon said: ‘Shall I intervene and with my own hand add the crowning stone of difficulty to our argument, or shall I allow it first to win through for itself against what we have already heard?’ ‘What need’, I said, ‘to let in the “third wave” and sluice the argument anew, if it prove unable to force aside the first objections and escape them? In the first place, then, we will start from our own ancestral hearth, from the [Sidenote: F] reserve, I mean, which the philosophers of the Academy show in speaking of what is divine; and reverently clear ourself from any claim to speak with knowledge about these matters. It is a graver mistake than for unmusical persons to discuss music, or civilians a campaign, if we mere men are to scrutinize the things which belong to Gods and daemons; the inartistic trying to track the inner thought of the artist, by fanciful and random conjecture. If it is hard for a layman to guess at the reasoning which led a doctor to use the knife later and not sooner, or to apply a lotion to-day and not yesterday, surely it is not easy for a mortal to speak with any certainty about God, more than this—that [Sidenote: 530] he best knows the proper time for the curative treatment of vice, and applies the due punishment, as a medicine, to each man accordingly; for vice admits of no measure common to all, the proper time is not the same for every case. That the medical treatment of the soul which we call “Right” and “Justice” is of all arts the greatest, we have the testimony of thousands of witnesses, Pindar[207] among them. He acclaims the sovereign ruler of all the Gods as “in art most excellent”, because Justice is of his workmanship, and to her it pertains to determine the “when” and the “how” and the degree of punishment for every offender. And Plato[208] tells us that Minos, who is a son of Zeus, has become a learner of this art; showing that it is not possible for one who has not learnt, and acquired [Sidenote: B] the knowledge, to go straight in questions of right, or to apprehend the guiding principle. Even the laws which men frame are not everywhere, and on the face of them, reasonable; some enactments appear simply ludicrous. In Lacedaemon, for instance, the Ephors, when they first enter office, make proclamation that no one is to grow a moustache, and that “men should obey the laws, that the laws may not be hard upon them”. The Romans, when they release slaves “into freedom” give them a tap with a light reed. When they draw a will, they make one set of persons “heirs” and “sell” the property to others, which appears strange. Strangest of all is the enactment [Sidenote: C] of Solon, that the man who takes neither side in a party contest, but stands out, should lose the franchise. One might go on to mention many legal absurdities, where the intention of the lawyers and the reason of the provisions are out of our knowledge. Then, if human codes are so inscrutable, what wonder that, in speaking of the Gods, we cannot lightly lay down the principle upon which they punish some offenders later, some sooner? V. ‘All this is no pretext for evading the issue; but it is a plea for indulgence; that the argument, having its harbour of refuge in sight, may rear itself confidently from the depths to meet the difficulty. Now first consider that, as Plato[209] shows, [Sidenote: D] God sets himself before us for a pattern of all good things, and implants in those who are able to follow God that human virtue which is, in a sort, likeness to himself. For Universal Nature, while yet unorganized, found the beginning of its change to a world of order in assimilation to the idea and excellence of God, and in a measure of participation therein. The same Plato[210] tells us that Nature kindled in us the sense of sight, in order that the soul, by gazing in wonder at the bodies which move through heaven, may become accustomed to welcome what is shapely and well ordered, to abhor ill-regulated and [Sidenote: E] roving passions, and to eschew, as the origin of all vice and naughtiness, whatever is random and fortuitous. For man has no greater natural enjoyment of God than to imitate and pursue all that in him is fair and good, and so to attain to virtue. Therefore is God slow and leisurely in inflicting punishment on the bad, not that he fears mistake on his own part if he punish quickly, or any repentance; rather he is putting away from us all brutish vehemence in the punishments we inflict, and teaching [Sidenote: F] us not to choose the moment of heat and agitation, when _High over reason temper leaps supreme_,[211] to spring upon those who have vexed us, as though glutting a thirst or a hunger; but to copy his own gentleness and long-suffering, to be orderly and staid when we set our hand to punishment, taking Time for a counsellor who will never have Repentance for his consort. For it is a smaller evil, as Socrates [Sidenote: 551] used to say, to drink turbid water in our greediness, when we find it by the way, than with the reason still muddied, full of wrath and frenzy, before it has settled down and run clear, to glut ourselves in the punishment of a body which is of one race and tribe with our own. It is not, as Thucydides would tell us, the retribution following most closely on the injury received, but that most remote from it, which really exacts what is its due. For as temper, according to Melanthius,[212] _Does dreadful deeds, and banishes good sense_, so reason, on the contrary, employs justice and moderation, setting passion and temper afar. So it is that even human examples make men gentle, as when we hear that Plato stood long over his servant with rod uplifted, correcting, as he said [Sidenote: B] himself, his own temper; or, again, as Archytas, informed of some disorderly behaviour of his workmen in the field, and feeling himself unusually irritated and harsh, did nothing, but just said, as he went away, “Well for you that I am feeling angry.” If sayings like these and anecdotes about men drain away what is rough and violent in our anger, much more when we see God, in whom is no fear nor any sort of repentance, yet reserving punishment and abiding his time, may we well become [Sidenote: C] cautious in such matters, and deem the gentleness and lofty patience which he exhibits a god-like part of virtue. By his punishment he corrects a few, by the slowness of his punishment he helps and admonishes many. VI. ‘Let us now turn our attention to a second point, which is this: All kinds of human retribution deal out pain for pain and stop there. “Suffering for the doer”[213] is their principle, and beyond it they do not go. So they follow sin like a howling pack which hunts on the heels of the offences. Whereas God, we may suppose, when he sets his hand to punish a soul that is sick, [Sidenote: D] scrutinizes its passions, if perhaps they may be bent aside, and a way opened to repentance; he fixes a time, in cases where the wickedness seated within is not absolute or inflexible. He knows how large a portion of virtue, proceeding from himself, souls carry with them when they pass to birth, how powerful within the noble principle naturally is, and how ineffaceable; that it may flower into vice contrary to nature, when nurture and company are bad and corrupting, yet is afterwards cured in some persons and recovers its own proper state. And so he [Sidenote: E] does not bring down punishment equally upon all. What is incurable he at once removes out of the life and prunes away, because, happen what may, it is injurious to others, most injurious of all to a man’s self, to consort with wickedness all his time. Where the sinful principle may be supposed to exist through ignorance of the good rather than from deliberate preference for the base, he gives them time for reformation; but if they persist, they, too, receive punishment in full; for he has no fear, we may be sure, lest they escape him at the last. Now consider how many changes take place in human character and life. And this is why that in them which changes is called “tropos” (turning) and “ethos” (_ēthos_), because habit (_ĕthos_) finds its way in so often, and masters them so mightily. I think [Sidenote: F] myself that the ancients called Cecrops “double-shaped”, not, as some say, because from a good king he became a very dragon of a tyrant, but, on the contrary, because he was, to begin with, perverse and terrible, and afterwards became a mild and humane ruler. This instance may be an uncertain one, but we know of Gelon at any rate, and Hiero in Sicily, and Pisistratus son of Hippocrates, how they won power by wickedness, but all used [Sidenote: 552] it virtuously; came to rule through unlawful ways, but turned out fair and patriotic rulers; introduced the reign of law and of careful agriculture, found their subjects men of jest and gossip, and made them sober and industrious. Gelon, moreover, fought nobly at the head of his people, won a great battle against the Carthaginians, and refused them a peace when they sued for one, until he had bound them in a covenant to give up the practice of sacrificing their children to Cronus. Then, in Megalopolis, there was a tyrant Lydiadas, who changed [Sidenote: B] his ways in the actual course of his reign, and in disgust with his own injustice restored to the citizens their laws, and fell gloriously fighting for the country against its enemies. Suppose some one had slain Miltiades while tyrant in the Chersonese, as he first was, or had got a conviction for incest against Cimon, or had robbed Athens of Themistocles by a prosecution for his riotous passage through the market-place, as was done with Alcibiades later on, where would be our Marathons, our Eurymedons, that noble Artemisium, [Sidenote: C] _where Athens’ sons Set firm the shining base of Liberty?_[214] For great natures produce nothing petty; their vehemence and energy cannot rest for very intensity, they toss about on the surge before they settle into their solid and abiding character. As then one ignorant of husbandry would not welcome the prospect of a piece of land full of thick undergrowth and weeds, with many wild creatures on it, and streams of water, and deep mud; whereas, to one who has learned to use his senses and to discriminate, those very things suggest strength and fatness and everything that is good in the soil, so it is with great natures. They break out early into many strange bad growths, [Sidenote: D] out of which we, in our intolerance, think it our duty to cut away and stunt all that is rough and prickly; but the Judge who is better than we and who sees the good and generous crop to come, waits for Time, the fellow-worker with Reason and Virtue, and that ripeness whereby Nature yields the proper fruit. VII. ‘So much for this. Now do you not think that some of the Greeks are right in copying the Egyptian law which enacts that a pregnant woman who has been condemned to death should be kept in custody until she has borne a child?’ ‘Certainly’, they said. I went on: ‘Next, suppose a person not pregnant with children, but able, if time be given, to bring into [Sidenote: E] the light of the sun some secret action or design, either by denouncing a hidden evil, or by becoming the promoter of a salutary policy or the inventor of some needful expedient, is it not the better course to let punishment wait on convenience rather than to inflict it too soon? It seems to me to be so.’ ‘And to us’, said Patrocleas. ‘And rightly,’ said I, ‘for consider that if Dionysius had paid the penalty at the beginning of his reign, no Greek settler would have been left in Sicily, because the Carthaginians would have devastated it. So neither Apollonia, nor Anactorium, nor the Leucadian peninsula would have been occupied by Greeks if Periander had [Sidenote: F] been punished without such a long interval. I think that Cassander also had a respite in order that Thebes might be re-established. Most of the foreigners who helped to seize this temple crossed over with Timoleon into Sicily; and when they had conquered the Carthaginians, and put an end to the tyrannies, met deservedly miserable deaths themselves. Surely Heaven uses some bad men to punish others, like executioners, and afterwards crushes them, and this has been the case, I think, [Sidenote: 553] with most tyrants. For as the gall of the hyaena, the refuse of the seal, and other products of disgusting animals, have their specific use in disease, so there are some who need the sharp tooth of chastisement; on whom the God inflicts a bitter and implacable tyrant, or a harsh rough ruler, and only removes this torment when he has relieved and purged their ailment. Such a medicine was Phalaris to the Agrigentines, and Marius to the Romans. To the Sicyonians the God declared in plain terms that their state needed beadles with whips, because they had taken by force from the men of Cleonae a boy named Teletias, who was to be crowned at the Pythian games, as being their own citizen, and torn him in pieces. The Sicyonians got [Sidenote: B] Orthagoras for a tyrant, and after him Myron and Cleisthenes, who put an end to their bad ways, while the Cleonaeans, who never found such a remedy, have come to nothing. Listen to Homer,[215] who says somewhere _So sprung from meaner sire a nobler son, Skilled in all art and excellence._ Yet that son of Copreus has left us no brilliant or signal achievement, while the posterity of Sisyphus and Autolycus and Phlegyas burst into flower of glory and virtue in the persons of great kings. Pericles at Athens came of a house which was under a curse. Pompey the Great, at Rome, was the son of Strabo, whose corpse the Romans cast out and trampled [Sidenote: C] in their hatred. What is there strange then if God acts like the farmer, who does not cut down the thistle till he has picked the asparagus, or like the Libyans who do not burn the dry stalks before they have collected the gum; who spares to destroy a bad and rough-grown root of a noble race of kings till the due fruit has issued from it? For it were better for the Phocians that Iphitus should lose tens of thousands of cattle and horses, or that even more gold should leave Delphi, and silver too, than that Ulysses should never have been born, or Asclepius, or [Sidenote: D] the other brave men and mighty benefactors who have come of bad and vicious lines. VIII. ‘But do you not all think it better that punishments should fall in the fitting time and manner than hastily and at once? There is the case of Callippus, who was slain by his friends with the very dagger which he had used to slay Dion in the guise of a friend. Again, there is Mitys[216] of Argos, killed in a party quarrel, whose brazen statue in the market-place fell on the murderer during a public performance and killed him. And I think you know all about Bessus the Paeonian, Patrocleas, and Ariston of Oeta, the commander of foreign troops?’ [Sidenote: E] ‘Indeed I do not,’ he replied, ‘but I want to hear.’ ‘Ariston,’ I said, ‘with the consent of the tyrants, took down the ornaments of Eriphyle, deposited here, and carried them off to his wife for a present. Then his son, enraged with his mother for some reason, set fire to the house, and burnt up all who were within it. Bessus, it appears, slew his own father, and for a long time escaped detection. Afterwards, having come to some friends for supper, he put his spear through a swallows’ nest and brought it down, and destroyed the young birds. All present exclaimed, as well they might: “Man, what has [Sidenote: F] possessed you to do such a monstrous thing?” To which he replied: “Have they not been telling lies against me this long time, shrieking that I have killed my father?” Astonished at such a speech, they informed the king, an inquiry was held, and Bessus suffered. IX. ‘So far’, I said, ‘we have been speaking, as was agreed, upon the assumption that some respite is really granted to wicked men. For what remains, you must suppose that you are listening to Hesiod,[217] laying down, not with Plato[218] that punishment is [Sidenote: 554] “suffering which waits on wrongdoing”, but that it is a contemporary growth, springing up with sin, from the same place and the same root, _Bad counsel to the counsellor is worst_, and _Who plots ’gainst others, plots his heart away._ The corn-beetle is said to carry in herself an antidote compounded on a principle of opposites, but wickedness as it grows breeds its own pain and punishment, and suffers the penalty, not by and by, but in the very moment of insolence. In the body, every criminal who is punished[219] carries forth his own [Sidenote: B] cross; but vice fabricates for herself, out of herself, all the instruments of her chastisement; she manufactures a terrible life, piteous and shameful, with terrors and cruel pains, with regrets and troubles unceasing. But there are persons just like children, who see evildoers on the stage crowned and caparisoned, as often happens, in gold and purple, and dancing heartily; and gape and gaze, as though these men were happy indeed; until they are seen goaded and lashed, and fire issuing out of those gay and costly robes. Most bad men are wrapped as in a vesture [Sidenote: C] of great houses, and eminent offices and powers; and so it is unperceived that they are being punished, until, before you can think, they are stabbed or hurled down a rock, which is not to be called punishment, but the end or consummation of punishment. For as Herodicus of Selymbria, who fell into a hopeless decline, and, for the first time in human history, combined gymnastics with medicine, made death, in Plato’s[220] words, “a long affair for himself”, and for similar invalids, so has it been with bad men. They thought to escape the blow at the time; the penalty comes, not after more time, but over more time, and is lengthened, not retarded. They were not punished after they [Sidenote: D] came to old age, but became old under punishment. I speak of length of time in a sense relative to ourselves, since to the Gods any span of human life is as nothing. “Now”, instead of “thirty years ago”, for the torture or hanging of a criminal, is as though we were to speak of “afternoon” not “morning”; the rather that he is confined in life, a prison where is no change of place, no escape, yet many feastings the while, and business affairs, and gifts, and bounties, and amusements, just as men play dice or draughts in jail, with the rope hanging over their heads. X. ‘Yet where are we to stop? Are we to say that prisoners [Sidenote: E] awaiting execution are not under punishment until the axe shall fall? Nor he who has drunk the hemlock, and is walking about while he waits to feel the heaviness in the legs which precedes the chill and stiffness of approaching insensibility? Yet we must say so, if we think that the last moment of the punishment is the punishment, and leave out of account the sufferings of the intervening time, the fears, and forebodings, and movements of [Sidenote: F] remorse, in which every sinner is involved. This would be like saying that a fish when he has swallowed the hook has not been caught until he has been roasted by the cook, or at least sliced up, before our eyes. Every man is in the grasp of Justice when he has done a wrong, he has nibbled away the sweets of Injustice which are the bait; but he has the hook of conscience sticking there and, as it pays him out,[221] _Like spear-struck thunny makes the ocean boil._ For the forwardness and the audacity of vice of which we hear [Sidenote: 555] are strong and ready till the crimes are committed, then passion fails them like a dying breeze, and leaves them weak and abject, a prey to every fear and superstition. Thus the dream of Clytaemnestra in Stesichorus[222] is fashioned true to the reality of what happens. It was like this: _She thought a serpent came on her, his crest Dabbled with gore, and, lo, from out it peered, Child of the race of Pleisthenes, the King._ For phantoms of dreams, and visions of midday, and oracles, and thunderbolts, and whatever has the appearance of being caused by a God, bring storms and terrors upon those who are in such a mood. So it is told that Apollodorus, in his sleep, saw [Sidenote: B] himself being flayed by Scythians and then boiled, and that his heart murmured out of the cauldron the words, “I am the cause of this to thee.” And, again, he saw his daughters all on fire, and running around him with their bodies burning. Then Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus, a little before his death, saw Aphrodite throwing blood at his face out of a sort of bowl. The friends of Ptolemy “Thunderbolt”[223] beheld him called to justice by Seleucus before a jury of vultures and wolves, and [Sidenote: C] dealing out large helpings of flesh to his enemies. Pausanias had wickedly sent for Cleonice at Byzantium, a maiden of free birth, that he might enjoy her person in the night, then, as she approached, he killed her out of some panic or suspicion; and he would often see her in his dreams, saying to him: _To judgement go; man’s lust works woe to man._ When the phantom never ceased to trouble him, he sailed, as it appears, to Heracleia, where is the Place of Summons of Souls, and with soothing rites and libations set himself to call up the soul of the girl; she appeared to him and told him that he “will cease from his troubles when he reaches Lacedaemon”; and, directly he got there, he died.[224] XI. ‘Then, if nothing remains for the soul after death, but [Sidenote: D] death is a limit beyond which is neither grace nor punishment, we should rather say that bad men who are punished quickly, and who die off, are used gently and indulgently by Heaven. For if it could be held that there is no other evil for the bad while life and time last, yet even so, when injustice is tried and proved an unfruitful, thankless business, which yields no return for many and great struggles, the mere sense of these upsets the soul. You will remember the story of Lysimachus, how, under [Sidenote: E] great stress of thirst, he surrendered himself and his power to the Getae, and, when now their prisoner, said as he drank: “Wretch that I am, for so brief a pleasure to have lost so great a kingdom!” And yet to resist the physical compulsion of appetite is very hard. But when a man, by grasping at money, or in envy of political reputation and power, or for the pleasure of some union, has wrought a lawless dreadful deed, and afterwards, when the thirst or frenzy of passion has left him, sees, as [Sidenote: F] time goes on, the disgrace and terror of iniquity becoming permanent, with nothing useful, or necessary, or delightful gained, then is it not natural that he should often reckon up and feel how hollow is the glory, how ignoble and thankless the pleasure, for which he has upset all that is greatest and noblest in human codes of right, and filled his own life with shame and confusion? Simonides[225] used to say in jest that he found the chest of silver always full, but that of gratitude empty; and so bad men, when they look into the wickedness within them, find that, through the pleasure which has a short-lived return, it is [Sidenote: 556] left void of hope, but filled to the brim with fears and pains and joyless memory, with suspicion of the future, and distrust of the present. So Ino on the stage,[226] when she is repenting of what she has done: _Say, maidens, how may I start clear, and dwell Here in the house of Athamas, as though I had done nothing of the deeds I did?_ Such thoughts we may suppose that the soul of every bad man rakes up within itself, while it calculates how it may escape [Sidenote: B] from the memory of its misdoings, and cast out conscience, and become pure, and lead another life as from the beginning. There is no confidence, nothing free from caprice, nothing permanent or solid, in the designs of wickedness, unless, save the mark! we are to call wicked-doers philosophers of a sort! But where love of wealth or pleasure, as of great prizes, and envy undiluted, are lodged by the side of hate and ill-temper, there, if you look deep, you will find superstition seated, and softness to meet toil, and cowardice to meet death, and a rapid shifting of impulses, and a vain-gloriousness which comes of arrogance. They fear those who censure them, and equally fear those who [Sidenote: C] praise, as being victims whom they have deceived, and who are the bitterest enemies of the bad, just because they praise so heartily those whom they take to be good. For hardness in vice, as in bad steel, is unsound, its rigidity is soon broken. Hence more and more, as time goes on, they discover their own condition; they are vexed and discontented, and spurn their own life away. We see that a bad man, when he has restored a pledge, or gone bail for an acquaintance, or given a patriotic subscription or a contribution which brings him glory and credit, is immediately seized with repentance, and grieves at [Sidenote: D] what he has done, so shifty and unsettled is his judgement. We see others when applauded in the theatre at once groaning inwardly, as ambition subsides into greed of money. And did not, think you, those who sacrificed men to get a tyranny, or to advance a conspiracy, as Apollodorus did, or who robbed their friends of money, as Glaucus the son of Epicydes did, repent, and hate themselves, and suffer pain at what had been done? For my own part, if I may be allowed to say so, I think that the doers of unholy deeds need no God nor man to punish them; their own life is sufficient, when ruined by vice, and thrown into all disorder. [Sidenote: E] XII. ‘But keep an eye on the discussion,’ I said, ‘for it may be running out beyond our limits.’ ‘Perhaps it is,’ said Timon, ‘if we look on, and consider the length of what remains to be said. For now I am going to call up the final difficulty, as a champion who has been standing out, since those which came forward first have pretty well had their round out. Turn to the charge so boldly thrown at the Gods by Euripides,[227] _The parents’ trips upon their offspring turned_, and take it that we too who have so far been silent adopt his arraignment. If, on the one hand, the doers paid the penalty [Sidenote: F] themselves, then there is no need to punish those who did no wrong, seeing that justice does not allow even the doers to be punished twice for the same offences. If, on the other, the Gods, out of indolence, have allowed the punishment to drop, as against the wicked, and then exact it late in the day from the guiltless, the set-off of tardiness against injustice is all wrong. You will remember the story of what happened to Aesop in this place; how he came with gold from Croesus, to sacrifice to the God magnificently, and make a distribution among the Delphians, four minae apiece. There was some angry difference, it appears, between him and the brotherhood; so he [Sidenote: 556] performed the sacrifice, but sent the money back to Sardis, judging the men unworthy of the bounty. They worked up a charge of sacrilege against him, thrust him down from the rock called Hyampeia, and killed him. Then, in his wrath at this, the God brought sterility on their land, and every form of strange disease; so that they went round the Assemblies of the Greeks asking by repeated proclamation that any who chose to come forward should punish them on Aesop’s behalf. In the third generation, Iadmon,[228] a Samian, came, no blood relation of Aesop, but a descendant of those who had bought him at Samos; and to him they paid certain penalties, and [Sidenote: B] were set free from their troubles. From that time the punishment of sacrilegious criminals was transferred to Nauplia from Hyampeia. Not even those most devoted to Alexander, among whom we reckon ourselves, commend him for throwing the city of Branchidae into ruins, and putting its inhabitants to the sword, because of the treacherous surrender by their forefathers of the temple at Miletus. Then Agathocles, tyrant of Syracuse, derided with open laughter the Corcyraeans who asked “why he plundered their island?” “Because, of course,” he said, “your fathers sheltered Ulysses.” And, in like manner, when the Ithacans complained of his soldiers taking their sheep, “Why, [Sidenote: C] your king”, he said, “came to us, and blinded the shepherd too!”[229] Now is it not even more monstrous of Apollo to destroy the Pheneatae[230] of the present day, by blocking the pit which took their water, and deluging all their land, because, a thousand years ago, as the story goes, Hercules snatched away the prophetic tripod and brought it to Pheneus? And what of his promise to the Sybarites of release from their troubles when they should have propitiated the wrath of the Leucadian Hera “by three destructions”? Again, it is not long since the [Sidenote: D] Locrians have ceased to send those maidens to Troy, _Who with no trailing robes, feet bared, as slaves, At early dawn must sweep Athene’s fane, No veils, though grievous eld were drawing near_,[231] because of the misbehaviour of Ajax. Where do you find the reasonableness and justice here? Certainly we do not praise the Thracians, because they still brand their own wives to avenge Orpheus, or the Barbarians living about the Eridanus for wearing black, in mourning for Phaethon as they say. It would have been still more ridiculous, I think, if the men living when Phaethon perished thought nothing about it, and then those [Sidenote: E] born five generations or ten generations after the sad occurrence began to change into mourning clothes for him! Yet there is nothing but stupidity in that, nothing terrible or beyond cure; but the angers of the Gods pass underground at the time, like certain rivers, then afterwards breakout to injure quite different persons, and bring the direst ruin at the last. What reason is there in that?’ XIII. At the first check, I, in terror lest he should go back to the beginning and introduce more and greater cases of [Sidenote: F] anomaly, at once proceeded to ask him: ‘Come,’ I said, ‘do you take all these things for true?’ ‘Suppose that they are not all true, but that some are, do you not think that the same perplexity comes in?’ ‘Perhaps’, said I, ‘it is as with persons in a violent fever, who feel the same heat, or nearly the same, whether they are wrapped in one cloak or in many, yet we must give some relief by removing the excess. If you will not allow this, drop the point (though to my thinking, most of the instances look like myths and inventions); but call to mind the recent Theoxenia, and that “fair portion” which is set aside and [Sidenote: 558] assigned by proclamation to the descendants of Pindar, and how impressive that seemed and how pleasant. Who could fail to find pleasure in that graceful honour, so Greek and so frankly of the old world, unless he be one whose _Black heart of adamant Was wrought in chilly fire_, in Pindar’s[232] own words? Then I pass over’, I said, ‘the similar proclamation made at Sparta, in the words, _After the Lesbian bard_,[233] in honoured memory of old Terpander, for the case is the same. But I appeal to you, who claim, as I understand, precedence among the Boeotians as Opheltiadae, and among the Phocians [Sidenote: B] because of Daiphantus; and who stood by me formerly, when, speaking in support of the claim of the Lycormae and Satilaeans through their ancestor to receive the honour and wear the crown due to the Heraclidae, I argued that those sprung of Hercules had the strongest right to be confirmed in the honours and prizes, because their ancestor received no worthy prize or return for his good deeds to the Greeks.’ ‘And a noble contention it was,’ he said, ‘and worthy indeed of Philosophy!’ ‘Then pray drop’, I said, ‘that vehement tone in your arraignment, and do not make it any grievance that some born of bad or vicious ancestors are punished; or else never rejoice or applaud in the other case, when noble birth is honoured. For [Sidenote: C] if the gratitude due to virtue is to be kept active for the benefit of the family, it is logical and right also that the punishment for crimes should never be exhausted or fail, but should run a parallel course, so that payment should follow deserts under either head. Any one who finds pleasure in seeing honour done to the descendants of Cimon at Athens, but makes it a grievance that those of Lachares or Ariston are banished, is too soft and too careless, or, as I would rather say, is quarrelsome and captious in all his attitude to Heaven. He challenges, if the children of an unjust and evil man appear to prosper, and he challenges if the families of the bad are abased or extinguished; he blames [Sidenote: D] the God equally if the children of a good father are in trouble, or of a bad one. XIV. ‘There,’ I said, ‘let all this serve for so many dykes or barriers against those bitter and aggressive assailants! Now, let us go back, and pick up the end of the thread in this dark place with its windings and wanderings; I mean our argument about the God. Let us guide ourselves with quiet caution towards what is likely and reasonable, since certainty and truth are beyond us, even as to our own actions. For instance, why do we order the children of persons who have died of consumption [Sidenote: E] or dropsy to sit with both feet dipped into water until the corpse is consumed? The idea seems to be that, if this is done, the disease does not shift its seat or approach them. Or again, why is it that, if one goat have taken the herb eryngium[234] into her mouth, the whole flock halts until the goatherd comes and takes it out? And there are other occult properties, with ways, whether of contact or of dissemination, by which they pass, with incredible speed and over incredible intervals, through one to another. Yet we find intervals of time wonderful, but [Sidenote: F] not those of place; although it is really more wonderful that a disease which began in Aethiopia[235] infected Athens, where Pericles died and Thucydides took it, than that, when Delphians and Sybarites had been wicked, the punishment circled round to attack their children. There is correspondence of forces from last to first, and there are connecting links, the cause of which, unknown, it may be, to us, produces in silence its proper effect.[236] XV. ‘Not but that the public visitations of cities by the wrath of Heaven can be readily accounted for on the score of [Sidenote: 559] justice. A city is a thing one and continuous, like an animal, which does not cease to be itself in the changes due to growth, nor become, as time goes on, different from what it was; it is always consentaneous and at one with itself, and awaits all the consequences, whether censure or gratitude, of what it does or did, so long as the association, which makes it one and complex, preserves its unity. To divide it, according to time, into many cities, or, rather, into an infinite number of them, is like making many men out of one, because he is now elderly, was formerly younger, and, still further back, was a boy. Or [Sidenote: B] rather, the whole idea is like those tricks of Epicharmus out of which the “Increasing Fallacy” of the Sophists sprang. The man who formerly received the loan does not own it now, for he has become a different person. The man who was asked to dinner yesterday, comes an unbidden guest to-day, for he is some one else. Yet the stages of growth produce greater variations in each one of ourselves than they do in cities as wholes. Any one who had seen Athens thirty years ago would recognize it to-day; manners, movements, amusements, business, popular gratitude, and resentments, all quite as of old. Whereas a man would hardly be recognized in figure by friend or relation who should meet him after an interval, while the changes in character so easily produced by anything—a word, an [Sidenote: C] exertion, a feeling, a law—produce an effect of strangeness and novelty even to one always in his company. Yet he is spoken of as one man from birth to the end; and we insist that a city, which remains the same in exactly the same sense, is liable for the reproaches incurred by ancestors, by the same title as it claims their reputation and power. Otherwise we shall have everything, before we know it, in the river of Heraclitus,[237] which he says a man cannot enter twice, because Nature disturbs and alters all things in her own changes. XVI. ‘But if a city is a thing one and continuous, I take it that a family also depends from a single origin which assures [Sidenote: D] a certain pervading force of association. An offspring is never separated from its begetter, as is a piece of man’s handicraft; it has been made out of him, not by him; thus it has in itself some permanent portion of him, and whether it be punished or honoured, receives what is its due. If it were not that I might seem to trifle, I would say that graver injustice was done to the statue of Cassander when it was melted down by the Athenians, and to the corpse of Dionysius when it was thrust out beyond the frontier by the Syracusans, than to the descendants of those men in the punishments which they received. For there is nothing of the nature of Cassander in the statue, and the soul [Sidenote: E] of Dionysius has quitted the corpse; whereas in Nisaeus, and Apollocrates, and Antipater and Philip, and similarly in the other sons of bad men, the determining part of their parents is inborn in them, and is there; it is not quiescent or inactive, since by it they live and are nourished, are directed, and think. There is nothing strange or remarkable if, being of them, they have what was theirs. In a word, as in Medicine, what is [Sidenote: F] serviceable is also just. It is ridiculous to talk of the injustice of cauterizing the thumb when the pain is in the hip, or scarifying the region of the stomach for a tumour inside the liver, or of oiling the ends of the horns of cattle, if there is softening of the hoofs. So it is with punishments; to think that there is any other justice than what heals the mischief, or to be indignant if the treatment be applied to one set of persons through another set (as in opening a vein to relieve weak eyes) is to see nothing beyond the range of sense, to fail [Sidenote: 560] to remember that a schoolmaster who chastises one boy teaches a lesson to many boys, and that a general who executes one man in ten, brings all to their duty. And thus not only one part through another part, but also soul through soul receives certain dispositions, be they of deterioration or amendment, in a truer sense than body through body. In the case of body, the affection arising must be the same, and the alteration produced must be the same; whereas soul is led by its own imaginings in the way of assurance or fear, and so becomes permanently worse or else better.’ XVII. While I was still speaking, Olympicus broke in: ‘It seems to me’, he said, ‘that your argument relies on a great [Sidenote: B] fundamental assumption—the permanence of the soul.’ ‘Subject to your consent, it does,’ I replied, ‘or rather to your consent already given; for, from the initial supposition that God dispenses to us according to our deserts, the discussion has proceeded to its present stage.’ ‘Then’, he said, ‘you think that, because the Gods survey and administer all our affairs, it follows that our souls are either wholly imperishable, or, permanent for a certain time after death.’ ‘Oh no! good friend,’ I said, ‘but the God is so petty, so important a trifler, that, dealing with men like us, who have nothing in us divine or like him in any way, or persistent, or solid, but who wither away altogether “like leaves”, as Homer[238] said, and [Sidenote: C] perish within a short span, he makes us of so great account! That would be like the gardens of Adonis which women nurse and tend in crockery pots; souls of a day springing up within a pampered flesh wherein no strong living root finds room, and then at once snuffed out on the first pretext. But, if you will, let the other Gods be, and look at our own God here. Knowing that the souls of those who die perish at once, like mists or smoke-wreaths exhaled from the bodies, does he, think you, require men to bring so many propitiations for the departed, [Sidenote: D] and such great honours to the dead, deceiving and tricking his believers? For myself, I will never give up the permanence of the soul, unless some one like Hercules shall come, and remove the tripod of the Pythia, and lay waste the place of the oracles. But in our own time so long as many such prophecies are given as once were delivered to Corax the Naxian, it is nothing less than impious to condemn the soul to death.’ Here Patrocleas asked: ‘But what was the prophecy delivered, and who was this Corax? The fact and the name are equally strange to [Sidenote: E] me.’ ‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘the fault is mine for using a by-name instead of the real one. The man who killed Archilochus in battle was called Calondas, it appears; Corax was a by-name given to him. Turned out, at first, by the Pythia, as having slain a man sacred to the Muses, then, having put in a plea of justification, accompanied by prayers and supplications, he was ordered to go to the “dwelling of Tettix” and propitiate the soul of Archilochus. This place was Taenarus; for thither, they say, Tettix the Cretan went with an expedition, and there he founded a city, and dwelt near the “Place of the [Sidenote: F] Passage of Souls”. So, when the Spartans had been ordered to propitiate the soul of Pausanias, the “Conductors of Souls” were sent for out of Italy, and, after having done sacrifice, ousted the ghost from the temple. XVIII. ‘Thus’, I continued, ‘the argument which assures the Providence of God and also the permanence of the human soul, is one only; it is impossible to remove either and to keep the other. But if the soul exists after death, it becomes more probable that a requital is made to it in full both of honours [Sidenote: 561] and of punishments. Like an athlete, it is engaged in a contest during life; the contest done, it then receives in its own self all its due. However, what rewards or what chastisements it there receives in its own self, are nothing to us that are alive, they are disbelieved or are unmarked. But those which pass through children or family are manifest to those who are here, and turn away many bad men and pull them up short. But to prove that there is no more disgraceful and grievous punishment than for a man to see his own descendants suffering on his account; and that when the soul of an offender against piety or law looks after death, and sees, not the overthrow of statues or [Sidenote: B] memorials effaced, but sons or friends or kinsmen involved in great misfortunes, all because of itself, and paying its penalties, it could not be content, no, not for all the honours which are given to Zeus, to become a second time unjust and profligate, I can tell you a story which I have lately heard; yet I hesitate lest it may appear to you a myth, so I confine myself to showing the probability.’ ‘On no account!’ said Olympicus, ‘give us the whole of that story too.’ As the others made the same petition, ‘Let me make good’, said I, ‘the probability of the view, then we will start the myth, if myth indeed it be. XIX. ‘Now Bion says that it would be more ridiculous [Sidenote: C] if God were to punish the sons of wicked men, than for a doctor to drug a descendant or a son for the disease of a grandfather or a father. But the cases are dissimilar in one respect, though closely alike in another. The treatment of one person does not relieve another from disease; no patient with eye disease or fever was ever the better for seeing an ointment or a plaster applied to another. The punishments of the wicked are exhibited to all, because the effect of the reasonable operation of justice is to restrain some through the punishment of others. But the point of resemblance between the parallel adduced [Sidenote: D] by Bion and our problem he failed to observe; it is this: when a man has fallen into a sickness which is bad but not incurable, and afterwards through intemperance and self-indulgence has surrendered his body to the malady and has died of it, then, if there be a son, not evidently diseased but only with a tendency to the same disease, a physician, or relative, or trainer, or a kind master who has learnt the state of the case, will put him upon a strict diet and remove made dishes and drinks and women, and use regular courses of physic, and harden his body by exercises, and will thus disperse and expel the symptoms, and [Sidenote: E] not allow the little seed of a great trouble to reach any size. Is not that the tone which we adopt, entreating sons of fathers or mothers with a tendency to diseases to pay attention to themselves, and to watch out, and not be careless, but to get rid at once of the first beginnings in the system, taking them in time while they are easy to move and loosely seated?’ ‘It is indeed’, they said. ‘Then we are doing nothing out of place, but a necessary act, one which is useful and not ludicrous, when we introduce the sons of epileptic or bilious or gouty sires to gymnastic exercise, diet, and drugs, not when they are [Sidenote: F] suffering from a disease but in order that they may not take it; for a body which proceeds out of a vitiated body deserves no punishment but rather medical care and watching; if any one in his cowardice and softness chooses to miscall that punishment, because it removes pleasures and applies the sharp prick of pain and trial, we have nothing more to say to him. Now then, does a body, the issue of a faulty body, deserve treatment and care, and yet we must endure to see the likeness of a kinsman’s [Sidenote: 562] vice springing up within a young character, and making its growth there, and to wait until it be spread over his system and manifest itself in his passions, _And show the evil fruit Of mind awry_, as Pindar[239] says? XX. ‘Or is the God in this to be less wise than Hesiod,[240] who exhorts and charges: _Ne’er after gloomy burial, of life Sow thou the seed, but fresh from heavenly feasts_, meaning that the act of generation admits not only of vice and virtue, but also of grief and joy and the rest, and therefore he would bring men cheerful and pleasant and open-hearted to the task? But the other matter does not come out of Hesiod, nor is it the effect of human wisdom, but of the God, [Sidenote: B] to see through likenesses and differences of temperament, before they stand revealed by a plunge through the passions into great crimes. For the cubs of bears while still tiny, and the young of wolves and apes, show at once the character of their kind, there is no disguise or pretence; but the nature of man is plunged at once into customs and rules and laws, and often conceals the bad points and imitates the good, so that the inborn stain of vice is entirely effaced and removed, or else is undetected for a long time; it assumes a sheath or cloke of [Sidenote: C] cleverness, which we fail to see through. We perceive the wickedness with an effort each time that the blow or prick of the several misdoings touches us. In a word, we think that men become unjust when they commit an injustice, become intemperate when they do a violence, become cowardly when they run away. It is as though we should think that the scorpion grows a sting when he strikes, or vipers their venom when they bite, which would be simple indeed! Take any single bad man, he does not become bad when he appears bad; he has the vice from the first, but it comes out as he gets opportunity and power, the thief, of thieving, the born tyrant, of forcing the laws. But God, by his own nature, apprehends [Sidenote: D] soul better than body; and we may be sure that he is neither ignorant of the disposition and nature of each, nor waits to punish violence of the hands, or insolence of the tongue, or profligacy of the body. For he has himself suffered no wrong; is not angry with the robber because he has met with violence, does not hate the profligate because he has been assaulted; but, as a remedial measure, he often chastises the man whose tendency is to adulterous crime, or to greed, or to injustice, thus destroying vice before it has taken hold, as he might an epilepsy. XXI. ‘Yet we were indignant a little while ago, that the wicked are punished so late and so slowly. And now we complain [Sidenote: E] because God sometimes cuts short the habit and disposition before any wrong is done, not knowing that the thing to come is often worse and more alarming than the thing done, what is hidden than what is apparent, and unable to calculate the reasons why it is better to leave some alone even after they have committed an offence, and to be beforehand with others who are still meditating one; exactly as drugs are of no use for certain persons when sick, but are of service to others who are not actually sick, but are in a state still more dangerous. [Sidenote: F] So it is not always a case of _The parents trip upon their offspring turned By Heav’n’s high hand._[241] If a good son be born of a bad sire, as a healthy child of a sickly parent, he is relieved from the penalty of race, saved by adoption out of vice. But the young man who throws back to the likeness of a tainted race ought, surely, to take to the debts on his inheritance, that is, to the punishment due to wickedness. Antigonus was not punished because of Demetrius, nor—to go back to the heroes of old—Phyleus for Augeas, nor Nestor [Sidenote: 563] for Neleus. These all came of bad sires, but were good. But where natural disposition has embraced and adopted the family failing, in those cases Justice pursues and visits to the uttermost the likeness in vice. For as warts and spots and moles of parents disappear in their children, but return on the persons of grandchildren; as again a Greek woman had borne a black child, and when charged with adultery, discovered that she was of Ethiopian parentage in the fourth degree; and as, yet again, out of the sons of Nisibeus, lately dead, who was reported to be related to the “Sown Men” of Thebes, one reproduced [Sidenote: B] the mark of a spear on his body—family likeness re-emerging from the depths, after such long intervals—, even so it is often the case that characteristics and affections of the soul are concealed and submerged in the early generations, but afterwards break out again in later individuals, and Nature restores the familiar type, for vice or for virtue.’ XXII. When I had spoken thus I remained silent. Olympicus laughed quietly, and said: ‘We are not applauding you, lest we should seem to be letting you off the myth, as though the demonstration of your view were sufficient without it; when we have heard it, we will give judgement.’ So I went on to tell them: ‘Thespesius of Soli, a kinsman and friend of that Protogenes who has been with us here, after an early life [Sidenote: C] of great profligacy, quickly ran through his fortune, changed his ways perforce, and took to the pursuit of wealth; when he had the usual experience of the profligates who do not keep their wives when they have them, but cast them away and try wrongfully to get their favours when united to other men. He stopped at nothing disgraceful if it led to enjoyment or gain, and in a short time got together an inconsiderable fortune and a mighty reputation for evil. What hit him hardest was an answer [Sidenote: D] delivered to him by the oracle of Amphilochus. It appears that he had sent to ask the God “whether he will do better the rest of his life?”[242] The answer was that he “will live better when he has died”. And sure enough this, in a way, so fell out not long afterwards. He fell over from a high place, upon his head; there was no wound, but he appeared to die of the mere blow, and on the third day, at the very time of the funeral, revived. He quickly recovered his strength, and came to himself, and the change of life which followed was incredible. For the Cilicians know of no man more fair in all business relations, or more holy in religious duties, so formidable a foe or so faithful a friend. [Sidenote: E] Hence those who were brought into contact with him were very curious to hear the cause of the difference, thinking that a character so completely remodelled must have been the result of no trifling experience. And so it truly was, according to the story related by him to Protogenes, and other equally considerate friends. For, when sentience left his body, he felt affected by a change, as a helmsman might do when first plunged overboard into the depth of the sea; then, recovering a little, he seemed to himself to breathe all over and to look around, while his soul opened like one great eye. But he saw [Sidenote: F] nothing of what he had been seeing before, only stars of vast size, at infinite distances from one another, each emitting a ray of marvellous colour and of a tonic force, so that the soul, riding smoothly on the light, as though over a calm sea, was carried easily and quickly in every direction. Passing over most of the sights he saw, he said that the souls of those who die make a flame-like bubble where the air parts as they rise [Sidenote: 564] from below, then the bubble quickly bursts, and they emerge with human form but light in bulk, with a movement which is not the same for all. Some bound forth with marvellous agility, and dart upwards in a straight line, while others whirl round together like spindles, now with an upward tendency, now a downward, borne on by a mingled confused agitation, which after a very long time, and then with difficulty, is reduced to calm. Most of them he did not recognize, but seeing two or three persons of his acquaintance, he tried to approach them and speak. They would not hear him, and [Sidenote: B] appeared not to be themselves, but to be distraught and scared out of their senses, shunning all sight or touch, while they roamed about, first by themselves; then they would meet and embrace others in like case, and whirl round in random indefinite figures of every sort, uttering unmeaning sounds, like cries of battle mingled with those of lamentation and terror. Others above, on the extremity of the firmament, were cheerful to behold, often drawing near to one another in kindness, and turning away from those other turbid souls; and they would signify, as it seemed, their annoyance by [Sidenote: C] out drawing close together, but joy and affability by opening and dispersing. There he saw, he said, the soul of a kinsman, but not very certainly, for the man had died while he was himself a child. However, the soul drew towards him, and said, “Hail Thespesius!” He was surprised at this, and said that his name was not Thespesius, but Aridaeus. “Formerly so,” was the reply, “but from now Thespesius. For you are not really dead, but, by some appointment of Heaven, have come hither with your sentient part, the rest of your soul is left within the body, as a light anchor. Let this be a sign to you now and hereafter; the souls of the dead make no shadow, and their eyes do not [Sidenote: D] blink.”[243] When Thespesius heard this, he drew himself together in deeper thought, and as he gazed, he saw a sort of dim and shadowy line which wavered as he moved, while the others were transparent within, all set around with brightness, yet not all equally. Some were like the full moon at her purest, and emitted one smooth, continuous, uniform colour; over others there ran scales, so to call them, or slender weals; others were quite dappled and strange to look upon, branded with black spots like those on serpents; others again showed open blunted scars. Then [Sidenote: E] the kinsman of Thespesius (for nothing forbids us to designate the souls in this way by the names of men) began to explain it all to him, as thus: “Adrasteia, daughter of Zeus and Necessity, has been appointed to punish all crimes in the highest place; no criminal has there ever yet been, so small or so great, as to pass unseen or to escape by his might. But there are three modes of punishment, and each mode has its proper guardian minister. Some men are punished, at once in the body and through their body, and these swift Retribution handles; her [Sidenote: F] method is a gentle one, and passes over many crimes which ask for expiation. Those whose cure is a heavier matter are passed after death to Justice by the daemon. The wholly incurable Justice rejects; and these the third, and the fiercest, of the satellites of Adrasteia, whose name is Erinnys, chases, as they wander and try to escape in all directions; and it is pitiful and cruel how she brings them all to nothing and plunges them into the gulf which is beyond speech or sight. As to the [Sidenote: 565] other two modes of justification,” he went on, “that which is wrought by Retribution during life resembles the usage of barbarian countries. For as in Persia they pluck off and scourge the robes and the hats of men under punishment, while their owners implore them to stop, so punishments through money or upon the person get no close grip, they do not fasten on the vice itself, but are mostly for appearance and appeal to the senses. But whoever makes his way here from earth unchastened and unpurged, Justice firmly seizes him, with his soul naked and manifest, having no place into which to skulk, [Sidenote: B] that he may hide and veil his wickedness, but eyed from all sides, and by all, and all over. And first she shows him to good parents, if such he has, or to ancestors, a contemptible and unworthy sight. If these are all bad, he sees them punished and is seen by them, and so is justified during a long time, while each of his passions is dislodged by pains and toils, which as much exceed in greatness and intensity those which are through the flesh, as a day dream may be clearer than that which comes in sleep. Scars and weals left by particular passions[244] are more [Sidenote: C] persistent in some men than in others. And look”, he said, “at those motley colours upon the souls, which come from every source. There is the dusky, dirty red, which is the smear made by meanness and greed; the fiery blood-red of cruelty and harshness. Where you see the bluish grey, there intemperance in pleasures has been rubbed away, and a heavy work it was; malice and envying have been there to inject that violet beneath the skin, as cuttle-fishes their ink. For down on earth vice brings out the colours, while the soul is turned about by the passions and turns the body, but here, when these have been smoothed away, the final result of purgation, and chastisement is this, that the soul becomes radiant all over [Sidenote: D] and of one hue. But as long as the colours are in it, there are certain reversions to passion, with throbbings and a pulsation which in some is faint and easily passes off, in others makes vigorous resistance. Of these souls, some, being chastised again and again, attain their fitting habit and disposition; others are transferred into the bodies of beasts by masterful ignorance and the passionate love of pleasure;[245] for ignorance, through weakness of the reasoning part and inactivity of the speculative, inclines on its practical side towards generation; while the love of pleasure, requiring an instrument for intemperance, [Sidenote: E] craves to unite the desires with their satisfaction, and to have share in corporeal excitement, since here is nothing save a sort of ineffectual shadow, and a dream of pleasure without its fulfilment.” Having said this, he began to lead him on, moving rapidly yet covering, as it seemed, a space of infinite extent with unfaltering ease, borne upwards on the rays of light, as though by wings, until he reached a great chasm which yawned downwards. There he was deserted by the supporting force, and saw the other souls in the same case. Packing together, like birds, and borne down and around, they [Sidenote: F] circled about the chasm, which they did not venture to cross outright. You might see it within, resembling the caves of Bacchus, dressed in wood and greenery, and gay with blossoms of flowers of every sort; and it exhaled a mild and gentle breeze which wafted odours of marvellous delight, and produced such an atmosphere as wine throws off for its votaries; for the souls feasted on the fragrant smells and were relaxed into mutual kindliness. All around a bacchic humour prevailed, and laughter, and every joy which the Muses can give where men sport and are merry. By this way, he said, Dionysus went up to the Gods, and [Sidenote: 566] afterwards brought Semele; it is called “the Place of Lethe”. Here he did not allow Thespesius to linger, even though he would, but kept drawing him away by force, explaining to him as he did so that the sentient mind becomes wasted and sodden by pleasure, while the irrational and corporeal part is watered and pampered and suggests recollection of the body, and, from that recollection, a yearning and desire which makes for generation (genesis), so named because it is a leaning towards earth (Ge-neusis)[246] when the soul is weighed down by moisture. Having travelled another journey as long as the first, he seemed to be gazing into a mighty bowl, with rivers discharging into [Sidenote: B] it, one whiter than foam of the sea, or snowflakes, another with the purple flush of the rainbow, others tinged with different hues. From a distance each showed its proper ray, but as he drew near the rim became invisible, and the colouring was dulled, and the more brilliant hues deserted the bowl, leaving only the whiteness. And there he saw three daemons seated close together in a triangle, mingling the streams in certain measures. Now the soul-conductor of Thespesius told him that thus far Orpheus advanced, when he was questing [Sidenote: C] for the soul of his wife, and, from not rightly remembering, put out an untrue account among men, namely that “there was an oracle at Delphi, held by Apollo and Night in common, whereas Night has nothing in common with Apollo. Really,” he said, “this oracle is shared by Night and the moon, having nowhere an earthly bound, or a single habitation, but roaming over men everywhere in dreams and phantoms. From here it is that dreams, which are mingled, as you see, with what is deceitful and embroidered, get so much simplicity and truth as they scatter abroad. The oracle of Apollo”, he continued, [Sidenote: D] “you have not seen, nor will you ever be able to see it, for the earthly element of the soul does not mount upwards or allow that; it is attached closely to the body and bends downwards.” And as he spoke, he led him on, and he tried to show him the light coming, as he said, from the tripod, resting on Parnassus between the breasts of Themis. Earnestly desiring to see, he saw nothing for the brightness. But he heard, as he passed, a woman’s shrill voice chanting in verse many things, among them the time of his own death. The daemon told him that the voice was that of the Sibyl,[247] who was singing about things to be, as she was carried round on the face of the moon. He [Sidenote: E] desired to hear more, but was thrust off by the whirling of the moon to the opposite side, as though caught in the eddies, and only heard scraps, one of which was about Mount Vesuvius and the future destruction by fire of Dicaearcheia, and a fragment of song about the emperor of that day, how that _so good a man Shall die upon his bed, and end his reign._[248] After that, they turned to the sight of those under punishment. At first they met only with repulsive and piteous spectacles. Afterwards, when Thespesius found friends and relations and intimates, whom he could never have conceived of as punished, enduring sore sufferings and penalties both ignominious and [Sidenote: F] painful, and pitying themselves to him and weeping aloud; and at last saw his own father emerging from a certain pit, all over brands and scars, reaching out his hand towards his son and not permitted to be silent, but compelled by the warders to confess his infamous conduct to some strangers who had come with gold—how he had poisoned them, and had escaped detection there on earth, but had been convicted here, how he had already suffered part, and was now led to suffer the remainder—, then he did not dare to supplicate [Sidenote: 567] or to entreat for his father, so great was his consternation and horror. Wishing to turn about and flee, he saw no longer that gracious and familiar guide, but was thrust forward by others of terrible visage, because it was necessary that he should go through it all. There he beheld the shadows of those who had been notoriously wicked, and who had been punished on the spot, not savagely handled as were the former ones, because[249] their trouble was in the irrational seat of the passions. [Sidenote: B] But those who had passed through life under a veil or cloak of the appearance of virtue, were compelled by others, who stood around, laboriously and painfully to turn their soul inside out, writhing and bending themselves back unnaturally, as the scolopendrae[250] of the sea, when they have gorged the hook, turn themselves inside out. Others they would flay, and fold the skin back, to show how scarred and mottled they were beneath it, because the vice was seated in the rational and directing part. Other souls he said that he saw intertwined like vipers, by twos or threes or more together, gnawing one another out of spite and rancour for what they had suffered [Sidenote: C] in life, or done. And there were lakes lying side by side, one of boiling gold, one of lead, exceeding cold, and one of iron, which was rough. Over these stood daemons, as it might be smiths, with tongs, picking up by turns the souls of those whose wickedness came of greed and grasping, and plunging them in. When they had become all fiery and transparent in the burning gold, they were thrust into the bath of lead; and when frozen till they became hard as hailstones, they were shifted on to the iron, and there they became hideously black, [Sidenote: D] and were broken up and crushed, so hard and brittle were they, and their shapes were changed. Then they were conveyed, just as they were, back to the gold, enduring dire pains in the transition. Most pitiful of all, he said, was the case of those who seemed already quit of Justice and then were seized up anew. These were the souls whose penalty had come round to any descendants or children. For whenever any one of these last came up and met them, he would fall upon them in anger, and shout aloud, and show the marks of his sufferings, reviling and pursuing, while the parent soul sought to flee and hide [Sidenote: E] itself, but could not; for the torturers would run swiftly after and bring them to Justice, and force them through all from the beginning, while they bewailed themselves because they knew the punishment before them. And there were some, he said, to whom a number of their offspring were attached, clinging to them just like bees or bats, and jibbering in wrathful recollection of what they had suffered on account of their parents. Last of all, while he was looking at the souls returning to a second birth—how they were violently bent and transformed into animals of every sort by the executioners of this task, [Sidenote: F] who used certain implements and blows, here squeezing together the limbs entire, here twisting them aside, here planing them away and getting rid of them altogether, to fit into other characters and other lives—, there appeared among these the soul of Nero, already in torment, and pierced with red-hot nails. For it the executioners had prepared the form of a viper, as Pindar describes it, wherein the beast is to be conceived, and live, after having devoured its own mother. And then, he said, there shone out a great light, and from the light came a voice commanding them to shift Nero to some other milder species, and to fashion a beast to sing around marshes and pools, for that he had paid the penalty of his crimes; and moreover some benefit was due to him from the Gods, because he had freed [Sidenote: 568] the best and most God-loving race, that of Hellas. Up to this point, Thespesius had been, he said, a spectator. But as he was about to return, he suffered a horrible fear. For a woman of marvellous form and stature seized hold of him: “Come here, fellow!” she said, “that thou mayest have a better memory of these things.” Then she brought near him a rod, such as painters use, red-hot, but another woman prevented her. He, sucked up by a sudden violent wind, as out of a blow-pipe, fell on to his own body, and just opened his eyes on the edge of the tomb.’ Footnote 199: See p. 313. Footnote 200: On the proverb ‘Post Lesbium Cantorem’. Footnote 201: i. e. in the battle of Amphipolis. See Thuc. 5, 10 and Plut. _Life of Nicias_, c. 9. Footnote 202: _Orestes_, 420. Footnote 203: 3, 38. Footnote 204: See Pausanias, 4, 17. Footnote 205: Fr. 969. Footnote 206: The author of this famous line is unknown. Footnote 207: Fr. 57. Footnote 208: _Minos_, 319 C. Footnote 209: No specific passage can be identified with the words in the text. For the sequel cp. _Timaeus_, 30 A. Footnote 210: Cp. _Rep._ 6, 508 A. Footnote 211: See p. 181 n. 1. Footnote 212: This line is a continuation of the quotation from Melanthius above. Footnote 213: Cp. Aesch. _Cho._ 313, &c. Footnote 214: Quoted several times as from Pindar (see Fr. 77), but perhaps rather Simonides. Footnote 215: _Il._ 15, 641. Footnote 216: Cp. Aristot. _Poet._ c. 9. Footnote 217: _W. and D._ 266, 265. Footnote 218: _Laws_, 5, 728 C. Footnote 219: i.e. under Roman law. See Smith’s _Dict. Ant._, _s.v._ Crux. Footnote 220: _Rep._ 406 B. Footnote 221: See H. Richards in _Class. Rev._ vol. 29, p. 235, and, for the quotation, the _Life of Lucullus_, c. 1. Footnote 222: Fr. 42, and see Jebb’s Introd. to the _Electra_ of Sophocles. Footnote 223: See _Life of Aristides_, c. 6. also Dion Chrys. _Orat._ 64. Footnote 224: See _Life of Cimon_, c. 6. Footnote 225: Again quoted, _De Curiosit._ 520 A. Footnote 226: Eur. _Ino_, Fr. 403. Footnote 227: Fr. 970. Footnote 228: See Herod. 2, 134. Footnote 229: i. e. Polyphemus. See _Od._ 9, 375 foll. Footnote 230: See Herod. 66, 74, and Pausan. 4, 252, and 8, 18. Footnote 231: From an unknown poet; Euphorion and Arctinus are suggested. Footnote 232: Fr. 123. Footnote 233: Hence a proverb applied to what was second-rate. Footnote 234: Arist. _H. A._ 9, 3, 610 b 29. Footnote 235: See Thuc. 2, 48; also _Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art_, by Raymond Crawfurd, M.D., chap. 2 and Appendix. Footnote 236: Cp. Plato, _Laws_, 4, 715 A. Footnote 237: Fr. 41. Footnote 238: _Il._ 6, 146. Footnote 239: Fr. 211. Footnote 240: _W. and D._ 735-6. Footnote 241: Eur. Fr. 970. Footnote 242: I have transposed the verbs as suggested in Wyttenbach’s Commentary. Footnote 243: Cp. Dante, _Purg._ 3, 19 foll. The idea is Pythagorean (see _Quaest. Graec._ 40, p. 300). Footnote 244: Cp. Plato, _Gorg._ 524 D. Footnote 245: See H. Richards in _Class. Rev._, vol. 29, p. 236. Footnote 246: Cp. p. 215, n. 1. Footnote 247: Cp. p. 89. Footnote 248: Probably a Sibylline verse. See Suetonius, _Life of Vespasian_. Footnote 249: Reading ἅτε δή with C. F. Hermann. Footnote 250: Cp. Aristot. _Hist. Anim._ 2, 14, 505 b 13, and 10, 37, 621 a 6. FROM THE DIALOGUE ‘ON THE SOUL’ A FRAGMENT [Preserved by Stobaeus, _Florileg._ 119.[251]] I. When Timon had spoken thus, Patrocleas replied: ‘Your argument is as forcible as it is ancient, yet there are difficulties. For if the doctrine of immortality is so very old, how is it that the fear of death is “oldest of terrors”[252]? Unless, of course, it is this which has engendered all other terrors. For there is nothing “fresh or new” in our mourning for the dead, or in the use of those sad sinister forms of speech, “Poor man!” “Unfortunate man!”’ II. ‘But there’, said Timon, ‘we shall find a confusion of ideas between what perishes and what does not. Now when we speak of the dead as having “passed away” and being “gone”, there is clearly no suggestion of anything actually harsh, only of a change or transition of some sort. Where that change takes place for those who undergo it, and whether it be for worse or better, let us consider by looking into the other words used. Our actual word for death[253], in the first place, does not appear to point to a movement downward, or beneath the earth, but rather to a mounting upward towards God of that which passes. Thus we may reasonably suppose that the soul darts out and runs upward, as though a bent spring had been released, when the body breathes it out, and itself draws an upward vital breath. Next, look at the opposite of death, which is generation; this word, on the contrary, expresses a tendency downward, an inclination to earth[254] of that which at the time of death again speeds upward. Hence, too, we call our natal day by a name which means a beginning of evils and of great troubles.[255] Perhaps we shall see the same thing even more clearly from another set of words. A man when he dies is said to be “released”, and death called a “release”—if you ask the question “from what?”, a release from body[256]—for body is called dĕmas, because the soul is kept in bondage in it, contrary to nature, nothing being forcibly detained in a place which is natural to it. A further play upon this “bondage” and “force” gives the word “life”, as Homer,[257] I think, uses Hesperus for the feminine “evening”, and so, in contrast to “life”, the dead is said to come to his rest, released from a great and unnatural stress. So with the change and reconstitution of the soul into the Whole; we say that it has perished when it has made its way thither; while here it does not know this unless at the actual approach of death, when it undergoes such an experience as those do who are initiated into great mysteries. Thus death and initiation closely correspond, word to word,[258] and thing to thing. At first there are wanderings, and laborious circuits, and journeyings through the dark, full of misgivings where there is no consummation; then, before the very end, come terrors of every kind, shivers, and trembling, and sweat, and amazement. After this, a wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted into pure meadow lands, where are voices, and dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions. Here the newly initiate, all rites completed, is at large; he walks at large like the dedicated victim with a crown on his head, and joins in high revelry; he converses with pure and holy men, and surveys the uninitiate unpurified crowd here below in the dirt and darkness, trampled by its own feet and packed together; through fear of death remaining in its ills, because it does not believe in the blessings which are beyond. For that the conjunction of soul with body, and its imprisonment, are against nature, you may clearly see from this.’ III. ‘From what?’ said Patrocleas. ‘From the fact that of all our experiences sleep is the most agreeable. First, it always extinguishes any perception of pain, because its pleasure is mingled with so much that is familiar, secondly, it overpowers all other appetites, even the most vehement. For even those who are devoted to the body become disinclined for pleasure when sleep comes on, and when they slumber reject loving embraces. Why dwell on this? When sleep takes possession, it excludes even the pleasure which comes from learning, and discussion, and philosophic thought, as though a smooth deep stream swept the soul along. All pleasure, perhaps, is by its essence and nature a respite from pain, but of sleep this is absolutely true. For, though nothing exciting or delightful should approach from without, yet we feel pleasure in a sound sleep; sleep seems to remove a condition of toil and hardness. And that condition is no other than that which binds soul to body. In sleep the soul is separated, and speeds upward, and is gathered unto itself after having been strained to fit the body, and dispersed among the senses. Yet some assert that, on the contrary, sleep immingles soul with body. They are wrong. The body bears its witness the other way, by its lack of sensation, its coldness, and heaviness, and pallor proving that the soul leaves it in death, and shifts its quarters in sleep. This produces the pleasure; it is a release and respite for the soul, as though it laid down a burthen which it must again resume and shoulder. For when it dies it runs away from the body for good; when it is asleep, it plays truant. Therefore death is sometimes accompanied by pains, sleep always by pleasure; in the former case the bond is snapped altogether, in the latter it gives, and is slackened, and becomes easier, as the senses are loosened like parting knots, and the strain which ties soul to body is gone.’ IV. ‘Then how is it’, said Patrocleas, ‘that we do not feel discomfort or pain from being awake?’ ‘How is it’, said Timon, ‘that when the hair is cut, the head feels lightness and relief, yet there was no sense of oppression at all while the hair was long? Or that men released from bonds feel pleasure, yet there is no pain when the chains are on? Or why is there a stir of applause when light is brought suddenly into a banquet, yet its absence did not appear to cause pain or trouble to the eye? There is one cause, my friend, in all these cases; that gradual habituation made the unnatural familiar to the sense, so that it felt absolutely no distress then, but felt pleasure when there was release and a restoration to nature. The strangeness is seen at once when the proper condition comes, the presence of what pained and pressed by contrast with the pleasure. It is exactly so with the soul: during its association with mortal passions, and parts, and organs, that which is unnatural and strange produces no apparent pressure because of that long familiarity; yet when discharged from the activities of the body, it feels ease, and relief, and pleasure. By them it is distressed, and about these it toils, and from these it craves leisure and rest. For all that concerns its own natural activities—observation, reasoning, memory, speculation—it is unwearied and insatiable. Satiety is nothing but a weariness of pleasure, when soul feels with body. To its own pleasures soul never cries “Enough”; but while it is involved in body, it is in the plight of Ulysses.[259] As he clung to the fig-tree, and hugged it, not from love of the tree, but fearing Charybdis down below, so soul clings to body and embraces it, from no goodwill to it or gratitude, but in horror of the uncertainty of death, _For life the gods conceal from mortal men_, says the wise Hesiod.[260] They have not strained soul to body by fleshy bonds, one bond they have contrived and one encompassing device, the uncertainty of what comes after death, and our slowness to believe; since, “if the soul were persuaded”, as Heraclitus[261] says, “of all the things which await men when they have died, no force would keep it back.”’ Footnote 251: Where it is ascribed to Themistius. It was reclaimed for Plutarch by Wyttenbach in the Preface to his edition of the _De Sera Numinum Vindicta_—Leiden 1772. Footnote 252: In the Dialogue (_Ne suaviter quidem_, c. 26) in which the Epicureans are attacked, the ‘hope of eternal existence’ or ‘desire to be’, is spoken of as the ‘oldest and greatest of loves’. Footnote 253: θάνατος—ἀναθεῖν εἰς θεόν. Footnote 254: γένεσις—γῆ, νεῦσις. Cp. p. 210, l. 6. Footnote 255: γενέθλιον—γένεσις ἄθλων. Footnote 256: Reading ἂν δὲ ἔρῃ, καὶ σώματος for ἂν δὲ ἔρημαι σώματος. See the Lex.-Plat. _s.v._ ἔρομαι. Footnote 257: e.g. _Od._ 1, 423. Footnote 258: τελευτᾶν—τελεῖσθαι. Footnote 259: _Od._ 12, 432 foll. Footnote 260: _W. and D._ 42. Footnote 261: Fr. 122. ON SUPERSTITION INTRODUCTION The drift of Plutarch’s remarkable Treatise on Superstition is well given in the opening words of Bacon’s famous Essay: ‘It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him. For the one is unbelief, the other is contumely, and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.’ The word—the same which, in its adjective, St. Paul applies, almost in a good sense, to the Athenians of his day[262]—is correctly defined by Theophrastus, in his ‘character’ of the superstitious man, as timidity with regard to the supernatural, and this timidity at once passes into cowardice. There is in this treatise a fighting spirit and a directness of attack unusual in Plutarch, who mostly speaks with academic balance about conflicting schools of thought. Thus it has been suggested that one or other of his writings against the Epicureans may be intended to supply the required study ‘On Atheism’. There are many passages in the _Lives_ and also in the _Moralia_ where the author is seen to mediate between credulity and scepticism, superstition and atheism; usually showing a tendency to ‘the more benign extreme’; there is more to be lost by an undue hardening of the intellect than by a wise hospitality to beliefs and ideas which lie beyond strict proof. Here the attack is one-sided and uncompromising. At the end of the treatise true piety is exhibited as a middle path between superstition and atheism. This is not to be understood of a quantitative excess or defect. Piety in excess may induce a habit which deserves the name of superstition, such as has been the fair butt of satirists in all ages, and of humorists like Theophrastus. But Plutarch is thinking not of excess, but of perversion, a piety directed to wrong powers, or to powers conceived of in the wrong way. There is a striking instance in the _Life of Pelopidas_ (c. 21), when some of the prophets invited that great soldier to obey the warning of a dream by slaying his daughter, for which there were ancient precedents. ‘But some on the other side urged, that such a barbarous and impious oblation could not be pleasing to any superior beings; that Typhons and Giants did not preside over the world, but the general father of Gods and men; that it was absurd to imagine any Divinities or powers delighted in slaughter or sacrifices of men; or, if there were any such, they were to be neglected, as weak and unable to assist; such unreasonable and cruel desires could only proceed from, and live in, weak and depraved minds.’ The situation is saved by the good sense of the augur Theocritus, the same who plays a quaint and gallant part in the enterprise described in _The Genius of Socrates_; and a chestnut colt takes the place of the daughter. And there is no doubt on which side of the argument Plutarch’s sympathies lie. An admirable running commentary on Plutarch’s treatise is supplied by the _Discourse on Superstition_ of John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist (1618-52), here printed as an Appendix to it. Like Bacon, John Smith has written also a _Discourse on Atheism_, from which it may be sufficient for the present purpose to quote the words of the Son of Sirach appended as his conclusion: ‘O Lord, Father and God of my life, give me not a proud look, but turn away from thy servants a Giant-like minde’ (Ecclus. 23, 4). See, for this whole treatise, Dr. Oakesmith’s Chapter IX, pp. 179 foll. ON SUPERSTITION [Sidenote: 164 E] The stream of ignorance and of misconception about the Gods passed, from the very first, into two channels; one branch flowed, as it were, over stony places, and has produced atheism in hard characters, the other over moist ground, and this has produced superstition in the tender ones. Now any error of judgement, especially on such matters, is a vicious thing, but if passion be added it is more vicious. For all passion is ‘deceit accompanied by inflammation’; and as dislocations are more [Sidenote: F] serious when there is also a wound, so are distortions of the soul when there is passion. A man thinks that atoms and a void are the first principles of the universe; the conception is a false one, but does not produce ulceration or spasm, or tormenting pain. Another conceives of wealth as the greatest [Sidenote: 165] good; this falsity has poison in it, preys on his soul, deranges it, allows him no sleep, fills him with stinging torments, thrusts him down steep places, strangles him, takes away all confidence of speech. Again, some think that virtue is a corporeal thing, and vice also; this is a gross piece of ignorance perhaps, but not worthy of lament or groans. But where there are such judgements and conceptions as these: _Alas, poor Virtue! so thou art but words, And as a thing I was pursuing thee_[263]— dropping, he means, the injustice which makes money, and the intemperance which is parent of all pleasure—, these it is worth our while to pity and to resent also, because their presence [Sidenote: B] in the soul breeds diseases and passions in numbers, very worms and vermin. II. And so it is with the subjects of our present discourse. Atheism, which is a faulty judgement that there is nothing blessed or imperishable, seems to work round through disbelief in the Divine to actual apathy; its object in not acknowledging Gods is that it may not fear them. Superstition is shown by its very name to be a state of opinion charged with emotion and productive of such fear as debases and crushes the man; he thinks that there are Gods, but that they are [Sidenote: C] grievous and hurtful. The atheist appears to be unmoved at the mention of the Divine; the superstitious is moved, but in a wrong and perverted sense. Ignorance has produced in the one disbelief of the power which is helping him, in the other a superadded idea that it is hurting. Hence atheism is theory gone wrong, superstition is ingrained feeling, the outcome of false theory. III. Now all diseases and affections of the soul are discreditable, but there is in some of them a gaiety, a loftiness, a distinction, which come of a light heart; we may say that none of these is wanting in a strong active impulse. Only there is this common charge to be laid against every such affection, that by stress of the active impulse it forces and [Sidenote: D] constrains the reason. Fear alone, as deficient in daring as it is in reason, keeps the irrational part inoperative, without resource or shift. Hence it has been called by two names, ‘Deima’ and ‘Tarbos’,[264] because it at once constricts and vexes the soul. But of all fears that which comes of superstition is most inoperative, and most resourceless. The man who never sails fears not the sea, nor the non-combatant, war; the home-keeping man fears no robbers, the poor no informers, the plain citizen no envy, the dweller among the Gauls[265] no earthquake, among the Ethiopians no thunder. The man who fears the Gods fears everything, land, sea; air, sky; darkness, light; sound, silence; to dream, to wake. Slaves forget [Sidenote: E] their masters while they sleep, sleep eases the prisoner’s chain; angry wounds, ulcers that raven and prey upon the flesh, and agonizing pains, all stand aloof from men that sleep: _Dear soothing sleep, that com’st to succour pains, How sweet is thy approach in this my need._[266] Superstition does not allow a man to say this; she alone has no truce with sleep, and suffers not the soul to breathe awhile, and [Sidenote: F] take courage, and thrust away its bitter heavy thoughts about the God. The sleep of the superstitious is a land of the ungodly, where blood-curdling visions, and monstrous whirling phantoms, and sure penalties are awake; the unhappy soul is hunted by dreams out of every spell of sleep it has, lashed and punished by itself, as though by some other, and receives injunctions horrible and revolting. Then when they have risen out of sleep, they do not scorn it all, or laugh it down, or perceive that none of the things which vexed them was real, but, escaped from the shadow of an illusion with no harm in it, they fall upon a vision of the day and deceive themselves outright, and spend [Sidenote: 166] money to vex their souls, meeting with quacks and charlatans who tell them: _If nightly vision fright thy sleep, Or hags their hellish revel keep_,[267] call in the wise woman, and take a dip into the sea, then sit on the ground, and remain so a whole day. _Ah! Greeks, what ills outlandish have ye found_,[268] namely, by superstition—dabbling in mud, plunges into filth, keepings of Sabbaths, falling on the face, foul attitudes, weird prostrations. Those who were concerned to keep music regular used to enjoin on singers to the harp to sing ‘with [Sidenote: B] mouth aright’. But we require that men should pray to the gods with mouth aright and just; not to consider whether the tongue of the victim be clean and correct, while they distort their own and foul it with absurd outlandish words and phrases, and transgress against the divine rule of piety as our fathers knew it. The man in the comedy has a passage which puts it happily to those who plate their bedsteads with gold and silver: _The one free gift of gods to mortals, sleep, Why make it for thyself a costly boon?_[269] [Sidenote: C] So we may say to the superstitious man, that the Gods gave sleep for oblivion of troubles and a respite from them; why make it for thyself a cell of punishment, a chamber of abiding torment, whence the miserable soul cannot run away unto any other sleep? Heraclitus[270] says that ‘waking men have one world common to all, but in sleep each betakes him to a world of his own.’ The superstitious has no world, no, not a common world, since neither while he is awake does he enjoy his reason, nor when he sleeps is he set free from his tormentor; reason ever drowses, and fear is ever awake; there is no escape, nor change of place. IV. Polycrates was a terrible tyrant in Samos, Periander [Sidenote: D] at Corinth, yet no one continued to fear them when he had removed to a free and democratic state. But when a man fears the sovereignty of the Gods as a grim inexorable tyranny, whither shall he migrate, where find exile, what sort of land can he find where no Gods are, or of sea? Into what portion of the world wilt thou creep and hide thyself, and believe, thou miserable creature, that thou hast escaped from God? There is a law which allows even slaves, if they have despaired of liberty, to petition to be sold, and so change to a milder master. Superstition allows no exchange of Gods, nor is it possible to find a God who shall not be terrible to him who fears those of his country and his clan, who shivers at the ‘Preservers’ and trembles in alarm before the beneficent beings from whom we ask wealth, plenty, peace, concord, a successful [Sidenote: E] issue for our best of words and works. And then these men reckon slavery a misfortune, and say: _A dire mishap it is, for man or maid, To pass to service of some ill-starred lord._[271] Yet how much more dire is it, think you, for them to pass to lords from whom is no flight, or running away, no shifting. The slave has an altar to flee unto, even for robbers many temples are inviolable, and fugitives in war, if they lay hold of shrine or temple, take courage. The superstitious shudders in alarm at those very things beyond all others, wherein those who fear the worst find hope. Never drag the superstitious man from temples; within them is punishment and retribution [Sidenote: F] for him. Why more words? ‘Death is the limit of life to all mankind.’[272] Yes, but even death is no limit to superstition; superstition crosses the boundaries to the other side, and makes fear endure longer than life. It attaches to death the apprehension of undying ills, and when it ceases from troubles, it [Sidenote: 167] thinks to enter upon troubles which never cease. Gates are opened for it into a very depth of Hades, rivers of fire and streams which flow out of Styx mingle their floods; darkness itself is spread with phantoms manifold, obtruding cruel visions and pitiful voices; there are judges and tormentors, and chasms and abysses which teem with myriad evil things. Thus has superstition, that God-banned fear of Gods, made that inevitable to itself by anticipation, of which it had escaped the suffering in act.[273] V. None of these horrors attaches to atheism. Yet its ignorance is distressing; it is a great misfortune to a soul [Sidenote: B] to see so wrong and grope so blindly about such great matters, because the light is extinguished of the brightest and most availing out of many eyes when the perception of God is lost. But to the opinion now before us there does attach from the very first, as we have already said, an emotional element, cankering, perturbing, and slavish. Plato[274] says that music, whose work it is to make men’s lives harmonious and rhythmical, was given to them by Gods, not for wanton tickling of the ears, but to clear the revolutions and harmonies of the soul from the disturbing impulses which rove within the body, such as most often run riot, where the Muse is not or the Grace, [Sidenote: C] and do violence and mar the tune; to bring them to order, to roll them smooth, to lead them aright, and settle them. _But they whom Zeus not loves_ (says Pindar)[275] _Turn to the sound a dim disdainful ear What time the Muses’ voice they hear._ Yes, they grow savage and rebellious, as the tigers, they say, are maddened and troubled at the sound of the drum, and at last tear themselves to pieces. A lesser evil then it is for those who, through deafness and a dulled ear, are apathetic and insensible to music. Tiresias was unfortunate that he could not see his children and familiar friends, but far worse was the [Sidenote: D] case of Athamas and of Agave, who saw them as lions and stags. Better, I think, it was for Hercules in his madness not to see his sons, or feel their presence, than to treat his dearest ones as enemies. VI. What then? Comparing the feeling of the atheists with that of the superstitious, do we not find a similar difference? The former see no Gods at all, the latter think that they exist as evil beings. The former neglect them, the latter imagine that to be terrible which is kind, that tyrannical which is fatherly, loving care to be injury, the ‘unapproachable’[276] to be savage and brutal. Then, trusting to coppersmiths, or marble workers, or modellers in wax, they fashion the forms of the Gods in human shape, and these they mould and frame and worship; while [Sidenote: E] they despise philosophers and men who know life, if they point them to the majesty of God consisting with goodness, and magnanimity, and patience, and solicitude. Thus in the former the result is insensibility and want of belief in all that is fair and helpful, in the latter confusion and fear in the presence of help. In a word, atheism is an apathy for the Divine which fails to perceive the good, superstition is an excess of feeling which suspects that the good is evil. They fear the Gods, and they flee to the Gods for refuge; they flatter and they revile them; they invoke and they censure them. It is man’s common lot not to succeed always or in all. [Sidenote: F] _They, from sickness free and age, Quit of toils, the deep-voiced rage Of Acheron for ay have left behind_, as Pindar[277] says; but human sufferings and doings flow in a mingled stream of vicissitude, now this way, now that. VII. Now look with me at the atheist, first when things cross his wishes, and consider his attitude. If he is a decent, quiet person, he takes what comes in silence, and provides his own means of succour and consolation. If he be impatient and querulous, he directs all his complainings against Fortune, and [Sidenote: 168] the way things happen; he cries out that nothing goes by justice or as Providence ordains, all is confused and jumbled up; the tangled web of human life is unpicked. Not so the superstitious: if the ill which has befallen him be the veriest trifle, still he sits down and builds on to his annoyance a pile of troubles, grievous and great and inextricable, heaping up for himself fears, dreads, suspicions, worries, a victim to every sort of groaning and lamentation; for he blames not man, nor fortune, nor [Sidenote: B] occasion, nor himself, but for all the God. From that quarter comes pouring upon him, he says, a Heaven-sent stream of woe; he is punished thus by the Gods not because he is unfortunate, but because he is specially hated by them, all that he suffers is his own proper deserts. Then the atheist, when he is sick, reckons up his own surfeitings, carouses, irregularities in diet, or over-fatigues, or unaccustomed changes of climate or place. Or, again, if he have met with political reverses, become unpopular or discredited in high quarters, he seeks for the cause in himself or his party. _Where my transgression? or what have I done? what duty omitted?_[278] But to the superstitious every infirmity of his body, every [Sidenote: C] loss of money, any death of a child, foul weather and failures in politics, are reckoned for blows from the God and assaults of the fiend. Hence he does not even take courage to help himself, to get rid of the trouble, or to remedy it, or make resistance, lest he should seem to be fighting the Gods, and resisting when punished. So the doctor is thrust out of the sick man’s chamber, and the mourner’s door is closed against the sage who comes to comfort and advise. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘let me take my punishment, as the miscreant that I am, an accursed [Sidenote: D] object of hate to Gods and daemons.’ It is open to a man who has no conviction that there are Gods, when suffering from some great grief and trouble, to wipe away a tear, to cut his hair, to put off his mourning. How are you going to address the superstitious in like case, wherein to bring him help? He sits outside, clothed in sackcloth, or with filthy rags hanging about him, as often as not rolling naked in the mud, while he recites errors and misdoings of his own, how he ate this, or drank that, or walked on a road which the spirit did not allow. At the very best, if he have taken superstition in a mild form, he sits in the house fumigating and purifying himself. The old women ‘make a peg of him’, as Bion says, and on it they hang—whatever [Sidenote: E] they choose to bring! VIII. They say that Tiribazus, when arrested by the Persians, drew his scimitar, being a powerful man, and fought for his life; then, when they loudly protested that the arrest was by the king’s orders, at once dropped his point, and held out his hands to be tied. Is not this just what happens in the case before us? Other men make a fight against mischances and thrust all aside, that they may devise ways of escape and evade what is unwelcome to themselves. But the superstitious man listens to nobody, and addresses himself thus: ‘Poor wretch, [Sidenote: F] thy sufferings come from Providence, and by the order of the God.’ So he flings away all hope, gives himself up, flies, obstructs those who try to help him. Many tolerable troubles are made deadly by various superstitions. Midas[279] of old, as we are to believe, dispirited and distressed by certain dreams, was so miserable that he sought a voluntary death by drinking bulls’ blood. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, when dogs were howling like wolves, and rye grass sprouting around his ancestral hearth, in utter despair at the extinction of all his hopes, cut his own throat. Perhaps it would have been better for Nicias[280], the Athenian [Sidenote: 169] general, to find the same release from superstition as Midas or Aristodemus, and not, in his terror of the shadow when the moon was eclipsed, to sit still under blockade, and afterwards, when forty thousand had been slaughtered or taken alive, to be taken prisoner and die ingloriously. For there is nothing so terrible when the earth blocks the way, or when its shadow meets the moon in due cycle of revolutions; what is terrible is that a man should plunge[281] into the darkness of superstition, [Sidenote: B] and that its dark shadow should confound a man’s reason and make it blind in matters where reason is most needed. _Glaucus, see! the waves already from the depth of ocean stirred, And a cloud is piling upwards, right above the Gyrean point, Certain presage of foul weather._[282] When the helmsman sees this, he prays that he may escape out of the peril, and calls on the Gods that save; but, while he prays, his hand is on the tiller, and he lowers the yard-arm, _Furls his mainsail, and from billows black as Erebus he flees._[283] Hesiod[284] tells the farmer to pray to Zeus below the earth and holy Artemis before he ploughs or sows, but to hold on to [Sidenote: C] the plough-handle as he prays. Homer[285] tells us that Ajax, before meeting Hector in single combat, commanded the Greeks to pray for him to the Gods; then, while they were praying, he was arming. Agamemnon, when he had given orders to the fighters: _Let each his spear set, and prepare his shield_, then begs of Zeus: _Grant that this hand make Priam’s halls a heap._[286] For God is the hope of valour, not the subterfuge of cowardice. The Jews, on the other hand, because it was a sabbath, sat on in uncleansed clothes, while their enemies planted their ladders and took the walls, never rising to their feet, as though entangled in the one vast draw-net of their superstition.[287] IX. Such then is superstition in disagreeable matters and on [Sidenote: D] what we call critical occasions, but it has no advantage, even in what is more pleasant, over atheism. Nothing is more pleasant to men than feasts, temple banquets, initiations, orgies, prayers to the Gods, and solemn supplications. See the atheist there, laughing in a wild sardonic peal at the proceedings, probably with a quiet aside to his intimates, that those who think this all done for the Gods are crazed and possessed; but that is the worst that can be said of him. The superstitious man wants to be cheerful and enjoy himself, but he cannot. _Rife too the city is with heavy reek Of victims slain, and rife with divers cries, The wail for healing and the moan for death._[288] [Sidenote: E] So is the soul of the superstitious. With the crown on his head he grows pale; while he sacrifices he shudders; he prays with a quivering voice and offers incense with hands that shake; he shows all through that Pythagoras[289] talks nonsense when he says: ‘We reach our best when we draw near to the Gods.’ For it is then that the superstitious are at their miserable worst; the halls and temples of the Gods which they approach are for them dens of bears, lairs of serpents, caverns of monsters of the sea! X. Hence it comes upon me as a surprise when men say that [Sidenote: F] atheism is impiety, but that superstition is not. Yet Anaxagoras had to answer a charge of impiety for saying that the sun is a stone, whereas no one has called the Cimmerians impious for thinking that there is no sun at all. What do you say? Is the man who recognizes no Gods a profane person, and does not he, who takes them for such beings as the superstitious think, hold a far more profane creed? I know that I would rather men said about me that there is not, and never has come [Sidenote: 170] into existence, a Plutarch, than that there is a man Plutarch unstable, shifty, readily provoked, revengeful over accidents, aggrieved at trifles; who, if you leave him out of your supper party, if you are busy and do not come to the door, if you pass him without a greeting, will cling to your flesh like a leech and gnaw it, or will catch your child, and thrash him to pieces, or will turn some beast, if he keep one, into your crops, and ruin the harvest. When Timotheus was singing of Artemis at Athens in the words: _Wanderer, frenzied one, wild and inebriate!_ [Sidenote: B] Cinesias the composer rose from his place with ‘Such a daughter be thine!’ Yet the like of this, and worse things too, do the superstitious hold about Artemis: _She would burn a hanging woman, She a mother in her pangs; She would bring pollution to you From the chamber of a corpse. In the crossways swoop upon you, Fix on you a murderer’s shame._[290] Nor will their views about Apollo, or Hera, or Aphrodite be a whit more decent, they fear and tremble at them all. Yet what was there in Niobe’s blasphemy about Latona, compared to what [Sidenote: C] superstition has persuaded fools to believe about that goddess, how she felt herself insulted and actually shot down the poor woman’s _Six daughters, beauteous all, six blooming sons_,[291] so greedy of calamities for another woman, so implacable! For if the Goddess had really been full of wrath and resentment of wickedness, and felt aggrieved at insults to herself, disposed to resent, rather than to smile at human folly and ignorance, why then she ought to have shot down those who lyingly imputed to her such savage bitterness, in speech or books. Certainly we denounce the bitterness of Hecuba as savage and beastly: [Sidenote: D] _In whose mid-liver I my teeth would set, And cling and gnaw._[292] But of the Syrian Goddess superstitious men believe that if one eats sprats or anchovies, she munches his shins, fills his body with sores, and rots his liver.[293] XI. How then? Is it impious to say bad things about the Gods, but not impious to think them? Or is it the thought of the blasphemer which makes his voice amiss? We men scout abusive language as the outward sign of ill-feeling. We reckon for enemies those who speak ill of us because we think that they also think ill. Now you see the sort of things which the superstitious think about the Gods; they take them to be capricious, [Sidenote: E] faithless, shifty, revengeful, cruel, vexed about trifles, all reasons why the superstitious must perforce hate and fear the Gods. Of course he does, when he thinks that they have been, and will be again, authors of his greatest ills. But if he hates and fears the Gods, he is their enemy. Yet he worships, and sacrifices, and sits before their shrines. And no wonder; men salute tyrants also, and court them, and set up their figures in gold. But ‘in silence’ they hate them, ‘wagging the head’.[294] Hermolaus remained Alexander’s courtier, Pausanias served on Philip’s [Sidenote: F] bodyguard, Chaereas on that of Caligula; but each of them would say while he attended on his master _Sure thou shouldst rue it if my arm were strong._[295] The atheist thinks there are no Gods, the superstitious wishes that there were none; he believes against his will, for he fears to disbelieve. And yet, as Tantalus would gladly slip from beneath the stone swinging over his head, so is it with the superstitious and his fear, a pressure no less sore. He would reckon the atheist’s mood a blessed one, for there is freedom in it. As things are, the atheist is quite clear of superstition; the superstitious is at heart an atheist, only too weak to believe what he wishes to believe about the Gods. [Sidenote: 171] XII. Again, the atheist is in no sense responsible for superstition, whereas superstition provides atheism with a principle which brings it into being, and then an apology for its existence which is neither true nor honest, but is in a sense colourable. For it is not because they find anything to blame in sky, or stars, or seasons, or cycles of the moon, or movements of the sun around the earth, ‘those artificers of day and night’,[296] or espy confusion and disorder in the breeding of animals or the increase of fruits, that they condemn the universe to godlessness. No! Superstition and its ridiculous doings and emotions, words, [Sidenote: B] gestures, juggleries, sorceries, coursings around and beatings of cymbals, purifications which are impure, and cleansings which are filthy, weird illegal punishments and degradations at temples—these give certain persons a pretext for saying that better no Gods than Gods, if Gods accept such things and take pleasure in them, Gods so violent, so petty, so sore about trifles. XIII. Were it not better then for those Gauls[297] and Scythians to have had no notion at all about Gods, neither imagination nor record of them, than to think that there are Gods who take [Sidenote: C] pleasure in the blood of slaughtered men and who accept that as the supreme form of solemn sacrifice? What? Were it not an advantage to the Carthaginians to have had a Critias or a Diagoras for their first lawgiver and to recognize neither God nor daemon, than to offer such sacrifices as they did offer to Cronus?[298] It was not the case which Empedocles puts against those who sacrifice animals: _Father, uplifting his son, not marking the change of the body, Prays as he takes the dear life, poor fool._ Knowing and recognizing their own children, they used to sacrifice them—nay, the childless would buy children from poor parents and cut their throats as though they were lambs or chickens—, and the mother would stand by dry-eyed and with [Sidenote: D] never a groan. If she should groan or weep, she would have to lose the merit, and the child was sacrificed all the same, while the whole space in front of the shrine was filled with the rattle of drums and the din of fifes, in order that the sound of the wailing might be drowned. Suppose that Typhons, say, or Giants, had turned out the Gods and were our rulers, in what sacrifices but these would they delight, or what other solemnities would they require? Amestris,[299] wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men alive, as her own offering to Hades, who, as Plato[300] tells us, is [Sidenote: E] kind and wise and detains souls by persuasion and reason, and so has been named ‘Hades’. Xenophanes,[301] the natural philosopher, when he saw the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their feasts, gave them a home lesson: ‘If these are Gods, do not mourn them; if men, why sacrifice to them? XIV. There is no sort of disease so capricious and so varied in emotions, such a medley of opposite, or rather conflicting, opinions, as is that of superstition. We must flee from it then, but as safety and advantage point, not like men who run for their lives from robbers or beasts or fire, never looking round or using their heads, and plunge into pathless wastes with pits and [Sidenote: F] precipices. For that is how some flee from superstition and plunge into a rough and flinty atheism, overleaping Piety seated in the middle space. Footnote 262: Polybius (6, 56) points to ‘Deisidaimonia’ as the force which has held the Roman Commonwealth together, and kept the Romans honest. Footnote 263: See Nauck, p. 910 (Hercules speaks). Footnote 264: δεῖμα—δέω: τάρβος—ταράσσω. Footnote 265: Cf. Aristot. _Eth. Nic._ 3, 7. Footnote 266: Eur. _Or._ 211-12. Footnote 267: Nauck, p. 910, Fragm. 375 (probably from Aeschylus). Footnote 268: Eur. _Tro._ 759. Footnote 269: Meineke 4, p. 670. Footnote 270: Fr. 95. Footnote 271: Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 376. Footnote 272: Dem. _de Cor._, s. 97. Footnote 273: A difficult passage. I follow W.’s suggested restoration. Footnote 274: _Tim._ 47 C, &c. Footnote 275: _Pyth._ 1, 25. Footnote 276: Or perhaps ‘that which knows no wrath’. Footnote 277: Fr. 143, quoted twice elsewhere by Plutarch. Footnote 278: Pythag. _Carm. Aur._ 42. Footnote 279: See _Life of T. Q. Flamin._ c. 20. Footnote 280: _Life of Nicias_, c. 23. Thuc. 7, 50, 86. Footnote 281: i.e. as the moon plunges into the shadow of the earth. See p. 269. Footnote 282: Archilochus, Fr. 54, Bergk. Footnote 283: Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 377. Footnote 284: _W. and D._ 465 foll. Footnote 285: _Il._ 7, 193 foll. Footnote 286: _Il._ 2, 382, 414. Footnote 287: 1 Maccab. 2, 32 foll. Footnote 288: Soph. _O. T._ 4. Footnote 289: See p. 123. Footnote 290: In the main from Wyttenbach’s reconstruction of this desperate passage. Footnote 291: _Il._ 24, 604. Footnote 292: _Il._ 24, 212. Footnote 293: Cp. Menander, Fragm. of _Demiurgus_, Meineke 4, p. 102. Footnote 294: Soph. _Ant._ 291. Footnote 295: _Il._ 22, 20. Footnote 296: Plat. _Tim._ 40 E. Footnote 297: See Strabo, 4, c. 4. Footnote 298: Cp. p. 183. Footnote 299: Herod. 7, 114. Footnote 300: _Crat._ 403 A, 404 B. Footnote 301: Cp. Arist. _Rhet._ 2, 23, 27, 1400 b 5, where the Eleatae are named. APPENDIX A SHORT DISCOURSE OF SUPERSTITION By JOHN SMITH THE CONTENTS OF THE ENSUING DISCOURSE _The true Notion_ of Superstition _well express’d by_ Δεισιδαιμονία, i.e. _an over-timorous and dreadful apprehension of the Deity._ _A false opinion of the Deity the true cause and rise of_ Superstition. Superstition _is most incident to such as Converse not with the Goodness of God, or are conscious to themselves of their own unlikeness to him._ _Right apprehensions of God beget in man a Nobleness and Freedome of Soul._ Superstition, _though it looks upon God as an angry Deity, yet it counts him easily pleas’d with flattering Worship._ _Apprehensions of a Deity and Guilt meeting together are apt to excite Fear._ _Hypocrites to spare their Sins seek out waies to compound with God._ _Servile and Superstitious Fear is encreased by Ignorance of the certain Causes of Terrible Effects in Nature, &c., as also by frightful Apparitions of Ghosts and Spectres._ _A further Consideration of_ Superstition _as a Composition of Fear and Flattery._ _A fuller Definition of_ Superstition, _according to the Sense of the Ancients._ Superstition _doth not alwaies appear in the same Form, but passes from one Form to another, and sometimes shrouds it self under Forms seemingly Spiritual and more refined._ Of Superstition Having now done with what we propounded as a _Preface_ to our following _Discourses_, we should now come to treat of the _main Heads and Principles of Religion_. But before we doe that, perhaps it may not be amiss to enquire into some of those _Anti-Deities_ that are set up against it, the chief whereof are ATHEISM and SUPERSTITION; which indeed may seeme to comprehend in them all kind of Apostasy and Praevarication from Religion. We shall not be over-curious to pry into such foule and rotten carkasses as these are too narrowly, or to make any subtile anatomy of them; but rather enquire a litle into the Original and Immediate Causes of them; because it may be they may be nearer of kin then we ordinarily are aware of, while we see their Complexions to be so vastly different the one from the other. And first of all for SUPERSTITION (to lay aside our Vulgar notion of it which much mistakes it) it is the same with that Temper of Mind which the Greeks call Δεισιδαιμονία, (for so Tully frequently translates that word, though not so fitly and emphatically as he hath done some others:) It imports _an overtimorous and dreadfull apprehension of the Deity_; and therefore with _Hesychius_ Δεισιδαιμονία and Φοβοθεΐα are all one, and Δεισιδαίμων is by him expounded ὁ εἰδωλολάτρης, ὁ εὐσεβής, καὶ δειλὸς παρὰ θεοῖς, _an Idolater, and also one that is very prompt to worship the Gods, but withall fearfull of them_. And therefore _the true Cause and Rise of Superstition_ is indeed nothing else but _a false opinion_ of the Deity, that renders him dreadfull and terrible, as being rigorous and imperious; that which represents him as austere and apt to be angry, but yet impotent, and easy to be appeased again by some _flattering devotions_, especially if performed with sanctimonious shewes and a solemn sadness of Mind. And I wish that that Picture of God which some Christians have drawn of him, wherein Sowreness and Arbitrariness appear so much, doth not too much resemble it. According to this sense, Plutarch hath well defined it in his book περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας in this manner, δόξαν ἐμπαθῆ καὶ δέους ποιητικὴν ὑπόληψιν οὖσαν ἐκταπεινοῦντος καὶ συντρίβοντος τὸν ἄνθρωπον, οἰόμενον τε εἶναι θεοὺς εἶναι δὲ λυπηροὺς καὶ βλαβερούς, _a strong passionate Opinion, and such a Supposition as is productive of a fear debasing and terrifying a man with the representation of the Gods as grievous and hurtfull to Mankind_. Such men as these converse not with the _Goodness_ of God, and therefore they are apt to attribute their impotent passions and peevishness of Spirit to him. Or it may be because some secret advertisements of their Consciences tell them how _unlike_ they themselves are _to God_, and how they have provoked him; they are apt to be as much displeased with him as too troublesome to them, as they think he is displeased with them. They are apt to count this Divine Supremacy as but a piece of tyranny that by its Soveraign Will makes too great encroachments upon their Liberties, and that which will eat up all their Right and Property; and therefore are lavishly afraid of him, τὴν τῶν θεῶν ἀρχὴν ὡς τυραννίδα φοβούμενοι σκυθρωπὴν καὶ ἀπαραίτητον, _fearing Heaven’s Monarchy as a severe and churlish Tyranny from which they cannot absolve themselves_, as the same Author speaks: and therefore he thus discloseth the private whisperings of their minds, ᾅδου τινες ἀνοίγονται πύλαι βαθείαι, καὶ ποταμοῖ πυρὸς ὁμοῦ καὶ στυγὸς ἀπορρῶγες ἀναπετάννυνται, &c., _the broad gates of hell are opened, the rivers of fire and Stygian inundations run down as a swelling flood, there is thick darkness crowded together, dreadfull and gastly Sights of Ghosts screeching and howling, Judges and tormentors, deep gulfes and Abysses full of infinite miseries_. Thus he. The Prophet _Esay_ gives us this Epitome of their thoughts, chap. 33: _The Sinners in Zion_ are afraid, fearfulness hath surprized the hypocrites: who shall dwell with the devouring fire? who shall dwell with everlasting burnings? Though I should not dislike these dreadful and astonishing thoughts of future torment, which I doubt even good men may have cause to press home upon their own spirits, while they find Ingenuity less active, the more to restrain sinne; yet I think it little commends God, and as little benefits us, to fetch all this horror and astonishment from the Contemplations of a Deity, which should alwayes be the most serene and lovely: our apprehensions of the Deity should be such as might _ennoble_ our Spirits, and not _debase_ them. A right knowledge of God would beget a _freedome_ and _Liberty_ of Soul within us, and not _servility_; ἀρετῆς γὰρ ἐλπὶς ὁ Θεός εστιν οὐ δουλείας πρόφασις, as Plutarch hath well observ’d; our thoughts of a Deity should breed in us hopes of Vertue, and not gender to a spirit of bondage. But that we may pass on. Because this unnaturall resemblance of God as an angry Deity in impure minds, should it blaze too furiously, like the Basilisk would kill with its looks; therefore these Painters use their best arts a little to sweeten it, and render it less unpleasing. And those that fancy God to be most hasty and apt to be displeased, yet are ready also to imagine him so impotently mutable, that his favour may be won again with their uncouth devotions, that he will be taken with their formall praises, and being thirsty after glory and praise and solemn addresses, may, by their pompous furnishing out all these for him, be won to a good liking of them: and thus they represent him to themselves as Lucian, in his _De Sacrificiis_ [c. I] speaks too truly, though it may be too profanely, ὡς κολακευόμενον ἥδεσθαι, καὶ ἀγανακτεῖν ἀμελούμενον. And therefore _Superstition_ will alwaies abound in these things whereby this Deity of their own, made after the similitude of men, may be most gratified, slavishly crouching to it. We will take a view of it in the words of _Plutarch_, though what refers to the JEWS, if it respects more their rites than their Manners, may seem to contain too hasty a censure of them. _Superstition_ brings in πηλώσεις, καταβορβορώσεις, σαββατισμούς, ῥίψεις ἐπὶ πρόσωπον, αἰσχρὰς προκαθίσεις, ἀλλοκότους προσκυνήσεις, _wallowings in the dust, tumblings in the mire, observations of Sabbaths, prosternations, uncouth gestures, and strange rites of worship_. Superstition is very apt to think that Heaven may be bribed with such false-hearted devotions; as Porphyrie, _Lib._ 2, περὶ ἀποχῆς, hath well explained it by this, that it is ὑπόληψις τοῦ δεκάζειν δύνασθαι τὸ θεῖον, _an apprehension that a man may corrupt and bribe the Deity_; which (as he there observes) was the Cause of all those bloudy sacrifices and of some inhumane ones among the Heathen men, imagining διὰ τῶν θυσιῶν ἐξωνεῖσθαι τὴν ἁμαρτίαν like him in the Prophet that thought by the fruit of his body and the firstlings of his flock to expiate the sinne of his Soul. _Micah_ 6. But it may be we may seeme all this while to have made too Tragicall a Description of _Superstition_; and indeed one Author whom we have all this while had recourse to, seemes to have set it forth, as anciently Painters were wont to doe those pieces in which they would demonstrate most their own skill; they would not content themselves with the shape of one Body onely, but borrowed severall parts from severall Bodies as might most fit their design and fill up the picture of that they desired chiefly to represent. _Superstition_ it may be looks not so foul and deformed in every Soul that is dyed with it, as he hath there set it forth, nor doth it every where spread it self alike: this πάθος that shrowds it self under the name of _Religion_, wil _variously_ discover it self as it is seated in Minds of a _various_ temper, and meets with _variety of matter_ to exercise it self about. We shall therefore a little further inquire into it, and what the Judgments of the soberest men anciently were of it; the rather that a learned Author of our own seems unwilling to own that Notion of it which we have hitherto out of _Plutarch_ and others contended for; who though he have freed it from that gloss which the late Ages have put upon it, yet he may seem to have too strictly confined it to a Cowardly Worship of the ancient Gentile Daemons, as if _Superstition and Polytheism_ were indeed the same thing, whereas _Polytheism_ or _Daemon-worship_ is but one branch of it, which was partly observed by the learned _Casaubon_ in his Notes upon that Chapter of _Theophrastus_ περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας, when it is described to be δειλία πρὸς τὸ δαιμόνιον, which he thus interprets, Theophrastus _voce_ δαιμόνιον _et Deos et Daemones complexus est, et quicquid divinitatis esse particeps malesana putavit antiquitas_. And in this sense it was truly observed by _Petronius Arbiter_, _Primus in orbe Deos fecit Timor_— The whole progeny of the ancient Daemons, at least in the Minds of the Vulgar, sprung out of _Fear_, and were supported by it: though notwithstanding, this Fear, when in a Being void of all true sense of Divine goodness, hath not escaped the censure of _Superstition_ in _Varro’s_ judgment, whose Maxim it was, as S. _Austin_ tells us, _Deum a religioso vereri, a superstitioso timeri_: which distinction _Servius_ seems to have made use of in his Comment upon _Virgil_, _Aeneid_ 6, where the Poet describing the torments of the wicked in hell, he runs out into an Allegoricall exposition of all, it may be too much in favour of _Lucretius_, whom he there magnifies. His words are these, _Ipse etiam Lucretius dicit per eos super quos jamjam casurus imminet lapis_, Superstitiosos _significare, qui inaniter semper verentur, et de Diis et Cœlo et locis superioribus male opinantur; nam_ Religiosi _sunt qui per reverentiam timent_. But that we may the more fully unfold the _Nature_ of this πάθος, and the effects of it, which are not alwaies of one sort, we shall first premise something concerning the Rise of it. The _Common Notions_ of a Deity, strongly rooted in Mens Souls, and meeting with the Apprehensions of _Guiltiness_, are very apt to excite the _Servile_ fear: and when men love their own filthy lusts, that they may spare them, they are presently apt to contrive some other waies of appeasing the Deity and compounding with it. Unhallowed minds, that have no inward foundation of true Holiness to fix themselves upon, are easily shaken and tossed from all inward peace and tranquillity; and as the thoughts of some Supreme power above them seize upon them, so they are struck with the lightning thereof into inward affrightments, which are further encreas’d by a vulgar observation of those strange, stupendious, and terrifying Effects in Nature, whereof they can give no certain reason, as Earthquakes, Thundrings, and Lightnings, blazing Comets and other Meteors of a like Nature, which are apt to terrifie those especially who are already unsetled and Chased with an inward sense of guilt, and, as Seneca speaks, _inevitabilem metum ut supra nos aliquid timeremus incutiunt_. _Petronius Arbiter_ hath well described this business for us, _Primus in orbe Deos fecit Timor, ardua cœlo Fulmina cum caderent, discussaque moenia flammis, Atque ictus flagraret Athos_— From hence it was that the _Libri fulgurales_ of the _Romanes_, and other such volumes of _Superstition_, swelled so much, and that the _pulvinaria Deorum_ were so often frequented, as will easily appear to any one a little conversant in _Livy_, who everywhere sets forth this Devotion so largely, as if he himself had been too passionately in love with it. And though as the _Events_ in Nature began sometimes to be found out better by a discovery of their immediate Natural Causes, so some particular pieces of Superstitious Customs were antiquated and grown out of date (as is well observ’d concerning those _Charms_ and _Februations_ anciently in use upon the appearing of an Eclipse, and some others) yet often affrights and horrours were not so easily abated, while they were unacquainted with the Deity, and with the other mysterious events in Nature, which begot those Furies and unlucky Empusas ἀλάστορας καὶ παλαμναίους δαίμονας, in the weak minds of men. To all which we may adde the frequent _Spectres_ and frightfull _Apparitions_ of Ghosts and _Mormos_: all which extorted such a kind of Worship from them as was most correspondent to such Causes of it. And those Rites and Ceremonies which were begotten by Superstition, were again the unhappy Nurses of it, such as are well described by _Plutarch_ in his _De defect. Oracul._, Ἑορταὶ καὶ θυσίαι, ὥσπερ ἡμέραι ἀποφράδες, καὶ σκυθρωπαί, ἐν αἷς ὠμοφαγίας, &c. _Feasts and Sacrifices, as likewise observations of unlucky and fatall dayes, celebrated with eating of raw things, lacerations, fastings, and howlings, and many times filthy Speeches in their sacred rites_, and frantick behaviour. But as we insinuated before, This Root of _Superstition_ diversely branched forth it self, sometimes into _Magick_ and _Exorcismes_, other times into Pædanticall Rites and idle observations of _Things_ and _Times_, as _Theophrastus_ hath largely set them forth in his Tract περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας: in others it displayed itself in inventing as many _new Deities_ as there were severall Causes from whence their affrights proceeded, and finding out many φρικτὰ μυστήρια appropriate to them, as supposing they ought to be worshipt _cum sacro horrore_. And hence it is that we hear of those inhumane and Diabolicall sacrifices called ἀνθρωποθυσίαι, frequent among the old Heathens (as among many others _Porphyry_ in his _De abstinentia_ hath abundantly related) and of those dead mens bones which our Ecclesiastick writers tell us were found in their Temples at the demolishing of them. Sometimes it would express itself in a prodigall way of sacrificing, for which _Ammianus Marcellinus_ (an heathen Writer, but yet one who seems to have been well pleased with the simplicity and integrity of Christian Religion) taxeth _Julian_ the Emperor for Superstition. _Iulianus, Superstitiosus magis quam legitimus sacrorum observator, innumeras sine parsimonia pecudes mactans, ut æstimaretur, si revertisset de Parthis, boves iam defuturos_: like that Marcus Caesar, of whom he relates this common proverb, οἱ λευκοὶ βέες Μάρκῳω τῷ Καίσαρι, ἄν συ νικήσῃς, ἡμεῖς ἀπωλόμεθα. Besides many other ways might be named wherein _Superstition_ might occasionally shew it self. All which may best be understood, if we consider it a little in that Composition of _Fear_ and _Flattery_ which before we intimated: and indeed _Flattery_ is most incident to _base_ and _slavish_ minds; and when the fear and jealousy of a Deity disquiet a wanton dalliance with sin, and disturb the filthy pleasure of Vice, then this fawning and crouching disposition will find out devices to quiet an angry conscience within, and an offended God without, (though as men grow more expert in this cunning, these fears may in some degree abate). This the ancient Philosophy hath well taken notice of, and therefore well defin’d δεισιδαιμονία by κολακεία, and useth these terms promiscuously. Thus we find Max. Tyrius in his Dissert. 4 concerning the difference between a _Friend_ and a _Flatterer_. ὁ μὲν εὐσεβής, φίλος θεῷ, ὁ δὲ δεισιδαίμων, κόλαξ θεοῦ· καὶ μακάριος ὁ εὐσεβής, ὁ φίλος θεοῦ, δυστυχὴς δὲ ὁ δεισιδαίμων. ὁ μὲν θαρσῶν τῇ ἀρετῇ, πρόσεισι τοῖς θεοῖς ἄνευ δέους· ὁ δὲ ταπεινὸς διὰ μοχθηρίαν, μετὰ πολλοῦ δέους, δύσελπις, καὶ δεδιὼς τοὺς θεοὺς ὥσπερ τοὺς τυράννους. The sense whereof is this, _The Pious man is God’s friend, the Superstitious is a flatterer of God: and indeed most happy and blest is the condition of the Pious man, God’s friend, but right miserable and sad is the state of the Superstitious. The Pious man, emboldened by a good Conscience and encouraged by the sense of his integrity, comes to God without fear and dread: but the Superstitious being sunk and deprest through the sense of his own wickedness, comes not without much fear, being void of all hope and confidence, and dreading the Gods as so many Tyrants._ Thus _Plato_ also sets forth this _Superstitious_ temper, though he mentions it not under that name, but we may know it by a property he gives of it, viz.: _to colloque with Heaven_, Lib. 10, _de Legibus_, where he distinguisheth of Three kinds of Tempers in reference to the Deity, which he then calls πάθη, which are, _Totall Atheism_, which he saies never abides with any man till his Old age; and _Partial Atheism_, which is a Negation of Providence; and a Third, which is a perswasion concerning the Gods ὅτι εὐπαράμυθοί εἰσι θύμασι καὶ εὐχαῖς, _that they are easily won by sacrifices and prayers_, which he after explaines thus, ὅτι παραιτητοί εἰσι τοῖσιν ἀδικοῦσιν, δεχόμενοι δῶρα, &c., _that with gifts unjust men may find acceptance with them_. And this Discourse of _Plato’s_ upon these three kinds of Irreligious πάθη _Simplicius_ seems to have respect to in his comment upon _Epictetus_, cap. 38, which treats about _Right Opinions_ in Religion; and there having pursued the two former of them, he thus states the latter, which he calls ἀθεΐας λόγον as well as the other two, as a conceit θεοὺς παρατρέπεσθαι δώροις, καὶ ἀναθήμασι, καὶ κερματίου διαδόσεσιν, _quod muneribus et donariis et stirpis distributione a sententia deducuntur_, such men making account by their devotions to draw the Deity to themselves, and winning the favour of Heaven, to procure such an indulgence to their lusts as no sober man on earth would give them; they in the meanwhile not considering ὡς μεταμέλειαι, καὶ ἱκετεῖαι, καὶ εὐχαί, καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα, ἀναλογοῦσι τῷ κάλῳ, that _Repentance, Supplications, and Prayers, &c., ought to draw us nearer to God, not God nearer to us; as in a ship, by fastning a Cable to a firm Rock, we intend not to draw the Rock to the Ship, but the Ship to the Rock_. Which last passage of his is therefore the more worthy to be taken notice of, as holding out so large an Extent that this Irreligious temper is of, and of how subtil a Nature. This fond and gross dealing with the Deity was that which made the scoffing _Lucian_ so much sport, who in his Treatise _De Sacrificiis_ tells a number of stories how the Daemons loved to be feasted, and when and how they were entertained, with such devotions which are rather used Magically as Charms and Spells for such as use them, to defend themselves against those Evils which their own Fears are apt perpetually to muster up, and to endeavour by bribery to purchase Heaven’s favour and indulgence, as _Juvenal_ speaks of the Superstitious Aegyptian, _Illius lacrimae mentitaque munera præstant Ut veniam culpae non abnuat, ansere magno Scilicet et tenui popano corruptus Osiris._ Though all this while I would not be understood to condemn too severely all servile fear of God, if it tend to make men avoid true wickedness, but that which settles upon these lees of Formality. To conclude, Were I to define _Superstition_ more generally according to the ancient sense of it, I would call it _Such an apprehension of God in the thoughts of men, as renders him grievous and burdensome to them, and so destroys all free and cheerfull converse with him; begetting in the stead thereof a forc’d and jejune devotion, void of inward Life and Love._ It is that which discovers itself _Pædantically_ in the worship of the Deity, in anything that makes up but onely the _Body_ or _outward Vesture_ of Religion; though then it may make a mighty bluster; and because it comprehends not the true Divine good that ariseth to the Souls of men from an _internall frame_ of Religion, it is therefore apt to think that all its _insipid devotions_ are as so many _Presents_ offered to the Deity and _gratifications_ of him. How _variously_ Superstition can discover and manifest itself, we have intimated before: To which I shall only adde this, That we are not so well rid of _Superstition_, as some imagine when they have expell’d it out of their Churches, expunged it out of their Books and Writings, or cast it out of their Tongues, by making Innovations in names (wherein they sometimes imitate those old _Caunii_ that _Herodotus_ speaks of, who that they might banish all the forrein Gods that had stollen in among them, took their procession through all their Country, beating and scourging the Aire along as they went;) No, for all this, _Superstition_ may enter into our chambers, and creep into our closets, it may twine about our secret Devotions, and actuate our Formes of belief and Orthodox opinions, when it hath no place else to shroud itself or hide its head in; we may think to flatter the Deity by these, and to bribe it with them, when we are grown weary of more pompous solemnities: nay it may mix it self with a seeming Faith in Christ; as I doubt it doth now in too many, who laying aside all sober and serious care of true Piety, think it sufficient to offer up their Saviour, his Active and Passive Righteousness, to a severe and rigid Justice, to make expiation for those sins they can be willing to allow themselves in. ON THE FACE WHICH APPEARS ON THE ORB OF THE MOON A DIALOGUE INTRODUCTION Plutarch’s Dialogue on _The Face in the Moon_ is not a scientific treatise, and its author would have disclaimed any intention of writing to advance science. It is discussion for the sake of discussion, the ‘good talk’ of which Plutarch wished that Athens should have no monopoly, any more than she had when the Boeotian Simmias and Cebes were among the trusted friends of Socrates, or, later, when ‘plain living and high thinking’ could be exhibited in lofty perfection in the Theban home of Epaminondas. A mixed company, which includes an astronomer, another mathematician, a literary man, and professed philosophers (there is no Epicurean here), with Lamprias, Plutarch’s brother, for president, discusses the movements and physical nature of the moon, from many points of view. Reference is made throughout to a previous discussion at which Lamprias, and Lucius, another of the speakers, had been present, when a person called ‘Our Comrade’ had dealt faithfully with the Peripatetic view, endorsed by the Stoics, that the moon is not of substance like our earth, but is a fiery or starlike body. This discussion had wandered into mystical theories as to the moon’s office in the birth and death of human souls, and her connexion with ‘daemons’. Sylla has joined the present company with a myth to relate bearing on these deep subjects, which had come to him at Carthage as a traveller’s tale. Its production is delayed until the end of the Dialogue, which it closes after the manner of a Platonic myth; the phrases with which it is opened and dismissed may be compared with those of the _Gorgias_. This double device, of referring part of the matter to a former conversation (as the _E at Delphi_ is a recollection of an old discourse by Ammonius), and part to a new and strange tale, skilfully relieves this elaborate Dialogue. Some difficulty is caused by the imperfect, or doubtful, condition of the text of the opening chapter, as no complete explanation seems to be given as to the place or time of the former discussion. Probably this abruptness is intentional, but the text requires careful attention. Perhaps this Dialogue throws more light on the views about the solar system accepted or under discussion in the first century of our era than a scientific treatise could have done. No reference is made to the great astronomical work of Ptolemy, which belongs to the second century, and closed most questions until the sixteenth. The estimate, e.g. of the moon’s distance (56 earth’s radii) is not Ptolemy’s (59). Some of the geographical details, as that of the Caspian Sea, seem to show that Ptolemy’s geographical work was not known to the Author. It may be useful to enumerate some of the simpler of the accepted views about the heavens : (1) That the earth is a Sphere was known to Pythagoras and allowed by Plato (_Phaedo_ 110 B), and affirmed by Aristotle, _De Caelo_, 2, 14, 297 b 18. The moon, and, according to Aristotle, the stars, are also spherical. (2) That the moon derived her light from the sun was a discovery due to Anaxagoras (fifth century B.C.). (3) The true cause of eclipses was known to the Pythagoreans, and is stated by Aristotle, and, with more precision, by Posidonius. (4) The inclination of the equator to the sun’s path is stated by Oenopides of Chios (a little after Anaxagoras). (5) That the moon revolves round the earth at a moderate distance is stated by Empedocles. (6) The other planets (including the sun) revolve round the earth at a distance vastly less than that of the fixed stars. (No actual estimate of the distances or sizes is given even by Ptolemy, who is not able to state a parallax for any, or an angular diameter.) (7) That the planets share in the (apparent) daily motion of the stars, and also have an (apparent) motion of their own in the reverse direction was held by Pythagoras. All these refer to physical facts and can be stated without the use of mathematical language, though many of the discoverers were expert mathematicians. Gradually, and certainly from the time of the great astronomer Hipparchus (about 130 B.C.), attention came to be fixed upon the accurate mathematical interpretation of observed _apparent_ facts; in a favourite phrase, the object was ‘to save the phenomena’, irrespective of physical and actual fact. In the case of the moon, the two lines of inquiry are less sharply divided than in that of other bodies. Very correct statements as to her size and distance from the earth may be gathered from Plutarch’s Dialogue. A guess is even hazarded that she is lighter than the earth, bulk for bulk, because of the action of fire in the past. The mathematical account of the movements of the moon has its history. As we have seen, it was early realized that she revolved round and near the earth in a circular orbit. Soon it appeared that there were irregularities in this movement. The ‘First Anomaly’, a difference of speed observed at different parts of the orbit, was well understood by Hipparchus. It could be expressed, so as to ‘save the phenomena’, by either of two methods, both resting on the assumption that no curve except a circle was admissible, and both superseding the ingenious but cumbrous arrangement of ‘concentric Spheres’ known to Aristotle. One was that of ‘movable eccentrics’, where the orbit of the planet was round a point outside the earth, itself shifting. The other, which prevailed, and was finally adopted by Ptolemy, was that of epicycles, circles described round points in the primary orbit, by means of which the planet’s motion could be retarded or quickened at will, and its position modified. By this device, the visible _movement_ could be, and was, recorded with great accuracy, but sometimes at the expense of physical truth. Thus the epicyclic arrangement for the moon’s orbit involved, if closely looked into, the consequence that her distance from us at nearest must be half that at the farthest, and her angular diameter double! Kepler, after the work of a lifetime (1571-1630), discovered the cause of this ‘anomaly’ in the shape of the orbit, which is elliptical, not circular, and substituted ‘eccentricity’ for ‘anomaly’ as the key-word. Newton (1642-1727) proved that a body revolving round another _must_ move in an ellipse, with the larger body at one focus. Thus the wheel had come full circle, and physical and mathematical inquiry met after two thousand years of separation. The ‘Second Anomaly’ due to the action of the sun (the ‘Evection’) was indicated by Hipparchus, worked out as a phenomenon by Ptolemy, and its physical cause explained by Newton. The inclination of the moon’s path to the sun’s was known to Hipparchus as 5°, and the recession of her nodes was familiar to him. A third anomaly now known as ‘Variation’ is instructive because its discovery has been claimed for an Arabian astronomer of about A.D. 1000. After an exhaustive discussion during the last century (1836-71), it seems to be proved that the claim rested upon a mistake, and that the sole credit is due to Tycho Brahe (see Dreyer, p. 252). In fact, whatever in astronomy does not belong to modern science is Greek, after allowing for what the Greeks may have learnt in early ages from Chaldaeans or Egyptians. The Romans contributed nothing, the Indians learnt much from scientific men who accompanied Alexander, and used it skilfully, but did not advance it. And the modern makes a really continuous whole with the ancient Greeks, for it is not only astronomy which should be considered, but the essential preliminaries, such as the study of the Conic Sections, which, in its geometrical form, is purely Greek. One authority to whom Plutarch twice refers by name requires special mention. This was Aristarchus of Samos, who belongs to the middle or later part of the third century B.C. He is the author of a work on ‘The Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon’ which is extant. It was well edited by Wallis for the Oxford Press in 1688, and more recently (1913) and in a modern form, by Sir Thomas Heath, F.R.S., who has prefixed an invaluable history of astronomy prior to Aristarchus. The book is rigorously mathematical, and contains six ‘hypotheses’, and eighteen propositions deduced from them. The second of the hypotheses, ‘That the earth is in the relation of a point and centre to the sphere in which the moon moves’, is quoted by Plutarch, apparently as being accepted by Hipparchus. The sixth, ‘That the moon subtends one-fifteenth part of a sign of the Zodiac (i. e. 2°)‘, raises a curious point which is fully considered by Sir T. Heath. That Aristarchus should at any time have thus exaggerated (multiplied by four) a measurement which seems open to some sort of simple observation, and have based good work upon it, seems very strange, firstly, because he must have considered the matter, (since he is aware that the same figure may stand for sun and moon); and, secondly, because Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), whose knowledge and good faith are beyond question, says that ‘Aristarchus discovered that the sun appeared to be about one seven hundred and twentieth part of the circle of the Zodiac (30´)‘, which is roughly correct.[302] The fourth hypothesis runs: ‘That when the moon appears to us halved, its distance from the sun is then less than a quadrant by one-thirtieth of a quadrant (i.e. is 87°).’ From this is directly deduced (Hypothesis 6 is not here used) Prop. 7, an elaborate proof that ‘the distance of the sun from the earth is greater than eighteen times, but less than twenty times, the distance of the moon from the earth’, quoted by Plutarch in c. 10. The fact assumed does not appear to be open to observation; perhaps Aristarchus, or a predecessor, arrived at it by comparing the average times taken by the moon over the first and second quarters of her orbit. The true (theoretical) figure is 89° 50´. The sequel is very interesting. Hipparchus, a century later, adopted the result in calculating the parallax of the sun, which he found to be 3´ of arc (more than twenty times too much). This was adopted by Ptolemy in the second century A.D., and remained the official estimate until nearly A.D. 1700, though both Hipparchus and Kepler had protested, the latter stating as his opinion that the parallax could not be greater than one minute of arc, or the distance less than twelve millions of miles. Shortly before A.D. 1700 improved knowledge of the orbit and distances of Mars enabled the sun’s parallax to be reduced to 9-1/2 seconds of arc, and his distance stated at eighty-seven millions of miles, which is not very inadequate. It was a great achievement of Aristarchus, though he led the world into error, to state a reasoned figure at all, and to think in such mighty units. His cosmical speculation is even more daring. It is known to us from this Dialogue (c. 6) and also from Archimedes, who records it in his (extant) _Arenarius_ without comment. Aristarchus proposed to ‘disturb the hearth of the universe’ by his hypothesis that the heaven of the stars is fixed, while the earth has a daily motion on her axis and an annual motion round the sun. It was a brilliant intuition, possible in an age of comparatively simple knowledge, which could not easily have been advanced when the complexity of the several orbits was increasingly realized (see Dreyer, pp. 147-8). Dr. Dreyer (p. 145) makes the interesting suggestion that Aristarchus took the idea from some early form of the system of ‘movable eccentrics’, and, further (p. 157), that if that system had prevailed against that of epicycles, it must have flashed, sooner or later, upon some bright mind, that there was one eccentric point, namely, one in the sun, central to the orbits of all the planets. It is to be observed that ‘Heraclides of Pontus’ (at one time a pupil of Plato’s) discovered the movement of the two inner planets round the sun. It is possible (as contended by Sciaparelli) that he believed all the planets to move round the sun, and the sun round the earth, in fact anticipated Tycho Brahe. Further, there is a statement that he anticipated Aristarchus as to the movement of the earth; but Sir T. Heath, who examines the evidence very fully, concludes that the evidence has been misread. Aristarchus certainly contended for the diurnal rotation of the earth, but this was rejected by Hipparchus and passed out of account for many centuries. The history of the emergence of the heliocentric theory has a curiously close counterpart in that of the circulation of the blood. Harvey communicated his discovery to the College of Physicians on April 17, 1616, but he had kept it back for twelve years out of deference to the great and deserved authority of Galen, which it was dangerous to dispute, as Copernicus held back his ‘Treatise of Revolutions’ for thirty years, because it was very dangerous, even for the nephew of a Bishop, himself the Canon of a cathedral far north of the Alps, to question the findings of Ptolemy. ‘Yet for years the profession had been in latent possession of a knowledge of the circulation. Indeed a good case has been made out for Hippocrates, in whose works occur some remarkably suggestive sentences’ (see _The Growth of Truth_, the Harveian Oration of 1906, by Sir William Osler, M.D., F.R.S.). Bacon, who ‘writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor’—i.e. seeks to eliminate error from facts stated, and then to apply the law (see De Morgan, _Bundle of Paradoxes_, p. 50)—, would have none of the Copernican hypothesis. Nor would Sir Thomas Browne, though he preferred Dr. Harvey’s discovery ‘to that of America’. But truth will out, at her own time and through the ministers of her choice. Behind the horseplay of the Stoics and Academics, on the subject of the centre of the universe and the laws which light and heavy bodies obey, there seems to lie some real groping after a general cosmic law, such as gravitation. Thus the earth and the moon draw bodies, each from its own surface to its own centre, and if the earth draws the moon, it is as a part of herself, once ejected and now reclaimed. There is no direct evidence of the time or place when this Dialogue is supposed to take place, nor of the date of its composition. Much of the matter is common to it with the Dialogue _On the cessation of the Oracles_, one passage of which has been thought (by Adler) to be an extract from it. Lamprias takes the principal place in both, and Plutarch is not present, at least under his own name. The solar eclipse mentioned in c. 19 as recent would give a clue if it could be identified. Ginzel (_Spezieller Kanon_) has selected three for special consideration, viz., those of April 30, A.D. 59, March 20, A.D. 71, and January 5, A.D. 75. By the kindness of J. K. Fotheringham, Esq., D.Litt., Fellow of Magdalen College, who has made the laborious computation, I am able to state the respective magnitude of these eclipses at Chaeroneia as 11·08, 11·82, 10·38 (totality = 12). Thus Ginzel’s preference for No. 2 is confirmed; it was there a large partial eclipse, and the time of greatest phase was 11 hours 4·1 minutes local solar time. Several stars would become visible, 66/67 of the sun’s diameter being obscured; a few might be visible during No. 1, none during No. 3. PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE 1. SEXTIUS SYLLA, the Carthaginian, mentioned in the _Life of Romulus_ (c. 15) as ‘a man wanting neither learning nor ingenuity’, who had supplied Plutarch with a piece of archaeological information. Elsewhere (_De cohib. ira_, c. 1) he is addressed as ‘O most eager Sylla!’ In another Dialogue he declines to be led into a discussion on all cosmology by answering the question ‘whether the egg or the bird comes first?’ (_Sympos._ 2, 3). He has a story, or myth, to tell about the moon, which he is impatient to begin. This story, which he had heard from a friend in Carthage, is mainly geographical in interest. The details remind us of those quoted from Pytheas about his journeys to Britain and the Northern Seas. The whole conception of the globe is clearly earlier than that of Ptolemy (see especially as to the Caspian Sea, c. 26). The myth also introduces us to the worship of Cronus as practised at Carthage, and connects it with the wonders of the moon, and her place in the heavenly system. In c. 17 SYLLA raises a good point, about the half-moon, which was being passed over. 2. LAMPRIAS, a brother, probably an elder brother, of Plutarch directs the course of the conversation, and himself expounds the Academic view, referring to Lucius for his recollections of a recent discussion at which both had been present, when the Stoic doctrines on physics had been criticized. In some of the Symposiacs and other dialogues Lamprias takes a similar place; in others both brothers take part. Lamprias probably died early. ‘Evidently a character, a good trencherman, as became a Boeotian, one who on occasion could dance the Pyrrhic war dance, who loved well a scoff and a jest ... and who, if he thrust himself somewhat brusquely into discussions which are going forward, was quite able to justify the intrusion.’—Archbishop Trench. 3. APOLLONIDES, astronomer and geometrician; perhaps the latter would be the more correct designation. In another Dialogue (_Sympos._ 3, 4) a ‘tactician’ of the name appears. As Apollonius, the great mathematician (living about 200 B.C.) was also a geometrician who contributed to astronomical theory, not himself an astronomer, it seems likely that the name Apollonides has been coined by Plutarch for ‘one of the clan of Apollonius’, i. e. a young professor of geometry. Apollondes is treated rather brusquely by Lamprias, certainly with less respect than Menelaus. He seems to have cast in his lot with the Stoics in their physical opinions. 4. ARISTOTLE, a Peripatetic. Perhaps the name was given to him to mark the School to which he belonged. In the Dialogue _On the Delays in Divine Punishment_ an ‘Epicurus’ is a representative Epicurean. 5. PHARNACES, a Stoic, who sturdily supports his physical creed against all comers. 6. LUCIUS, an Etruscan pupil of Moderatus the Pythagorean, spoken of in one place (_Sympos._ 8, 7 and 8) as ‘Lucius our comrade’. He is elsewhere reticent as to the inner Pythagorean teaching, but is courteous and ready to discuss ‘what is probable and reasonable’. Kepler is inclined to complain of his professorial tone and longwindedness in the present Dialogue. This is hardly fair, as he is for the most part reporting a set discourse heard elsewhere, and that by request. Lamprias has to give him time to remember the points (c. 7). In c. 5 he asks that justice may be done to the Stoics. He associates himself with the Academics on physical matters. 7. THEON (see Preface, p. xii), represents literature (as he does in other Dialogues, notably in that on the _E at Delphi_). He is a welcome foil to the more severe disputants. In c. 24 he interrupts by moving the previous question—‘Why a moon at all?’ and is congratulated on the cheerful turn which he has given to the discussion. Theon may sometimes recall to readers of Jules Verne’s pleasant _Voyage autour de la lune_ the sallies of Michel Ardan the poet. 8. MENELAUS, a distinguished astronomer who lived and observed at Alexandria. Observations of his, which include some taken in the first year of Trajan, A.D. 98, are recorded by Ptolemy (_Magna Syntaxis_, 7, 3, p. 170) and other writers. ANALYSIS [The opening chapters are lost. There must have been an introduction of the speakers, with some explanation as to time and place, a reference to a set discussion at which some of the speakers had been present, and a promise of Sylla to narrate a myth, bearing upon the moon and her markings, which he had heard in Carthage. This conversation had taken a turn, prematurely as SYLLA thinks, towards the mythical or supernatural aspects of the moon.] But see note (1) on p. 309. c. 1. It is agreed that the current scientific or quasi-scientific views on the markings of the moon’s face shall be first considered, then the supernatural. cc. 2-4. LAMPRIAS mentions (i) The view that the markings are due to weakness of human eyesight. This is easily refuted. (ii) The view of Clearchus, the Peripatetic, that they are caused by reflexion of the ocean on the moon’s face. But ocean is continuous, the markings are broken; they are seen from all parts of the earth, including ocean itself (and the earth is not a mere point in space, but has dimensions of its own); and, thirdly, they are not seen on any other heavenly body. c. 3. The mention of Clearchus brings up the view, adopted from him by the Stoics, that the moon is not a solid or earth-like body, but is fire or air, like the stars. This view had been severely handled in the former conference. c. 6. PHARNACES complains that the Academics always criticize, never submit to be criticized. Let them first answer for their own paradox in confusing ‘up’ and ‘down’, if they place a heavy body, such as the moon is now said to be, above. LUCIUS retorts: ‘Why not the moon as well as the earth, a larger body, yet poised in space?’ PHARNACES is unconvinced. cc. 7-15. To give Lucius time to remember his points, LAMPRIAS reviews the absurd consequences from the Stoic tenet that all weights converge towards the centre of our earth. Why should not every heavy body, not earth only, attract its parts towards its own centre? Again, if the moon is a light fiery body, how do we find her placed near the earth and immeasurably far from the sun, planets, and stars? How can we assume that earth is the middle point of the Whole, that is, of Infinity? Lastly, allow that the Moon, if a heavy body, is out of her natural place. Yet why not? She may have been removed by force from the place naturally assigned to her to one which was better. Here the tone of the speaker rises as he lays down, often following the thought and the words of Plato’s _Timaeus_, the theory of creative ‘Necessity’ and ‘The Better’. c. 16. LUCIUS is now ready to speak, but ARISTOTLE intervenes with a reference to the view, held by his namesake, that the stars are composed of something essentially different from the four elements, and that their motion is naturally circular, not up or down. LUCIUS points out that it is degrading to the moon to call her a star, being inferior to the stars in lustre and speed, and deriving her light from the sun. For this, the view of Anaxagoras and of Empedocles, is the only one consistent with her phases as we see them (not that quoted from Posidonius the Stoic). cc. 17, 18. To an inquiry from SYLLA whether the difficulty of the half-moon (i. e. how does reflexion, being at equal angles, then carry sunlight to the earth, and not off into space beyond us?) had been met, Lucius answers that it had. The answer given was: (i) Reflexion at equal angles is not a law universally admitted or true; (ii) there may be cross lights and a complex illumination; (iii) it may be shown by a diagram, though this could not be done at the time (such a diagram is supplied by Kepler), that some rays would reach the earth; (iv) the difficulty arises at other phases also. He repeats the argument drawn from the phases as we see them; and ends with an analogy: Sunlight acts on the moon as it does on the earth, not as on the air; therefore the moon resembles earth rather than air. c. 19. This is well received, and LUCIUS refers (a second analogy) to solar eclipses, and in particular to a recent one, to show that the moon, like the earth, can intercept the sun’s light, and is therefore, like it, a solid body. The fact that the track of the shadow is narrow in a solar eclipse is explained. c. 20. LUCIUS continues his report, and describes in detail what happens in a lunar eclipse. If the moon, he concludes, were fiery and luminous, we should only see her at eclipse times, i. e. at intervals, normally of six months, occasionally of five. c. 21. PHARNACES and APOLLONIDES both rise to speak. APOLLONIDES raises a verbal point about the word ‘shadow’; PHARNACES observes that the moon does show a blurred and fiery appearance during an eclipse, to which LAMPRIAS replies by enumerating the successive colours of the moon’s face during eclipse, that proper to herself being dark and earth-like, not fiery. He concludes that the moon is like our earth, with a surface broken into heights and gullies, which are the cause of the markings. c. 22. APOLLONIDES objects that there can be no clefts on the moon with sides high enough to cast such shadows. LAMPRIAS replies that it is the distance and position of the light which matter, not the size of objects which break it; c. 23. And goes on himself to supply a stronger objection—that we do not see the sun’s image in the moon—and the answer. This is twofold: (_a_) general, the two cases differ in all details; (_b_) personal to those who, like himself, believe the moon to be an earth, and to have a rough surface. Why should we see the sun mirrored in the moon, and not terrestrial objects or stars? c. 24. Sylla’s myth is now called for, and the company sits down to hear it. But THEON interposes: Can the moon have inhabitants or support any life, animal or vegetable? If not, how is she ‘an earth’, and what is her use? c. 25. Theon’s sally is taken in good part, and gravely answered at some length by LAMPRIAS. c. 26. The mention of life on the moon calls up SYLLA, who again feels that he has been anticipated. He begins his myth, heard from a stranger met in Carthage, who had himself made the northward voyage and returned. Once in every thirty years (or year of the planet Saturn) an expedition is sent out from Carthage to certain islands in the Northern Atlantic where Cronus (Saturn) reigns in banishment. The stranger had charged Sylla to pay special honour to the moon, cc. 27-29. instructing him as to the functions of Persephone in bringing about the second death—the separation of mind from soul—which takes place on the moon, and the genesis of ‘daemons’, c. 30. to whom are assigned certain functions on earth. SYLLA commends the myth to his hearers. OF THE FACE WHICH APPEARS ON THE ORB OF THE MOON I. Here Sylla said:[303] ‘All this belongs to my story, and comes [Sidenote: 920 B] out of it. But I should like to ask in the first place whether you really backed on to those views about the moon’s face which are in every one’s hand and on every one’s lips.’ ‘Of course we did,’ I answered, ‘it was just the difficulty which we found in these which thrust us off upon the others. In chronic diseases, patients grow weary of the common remedies and plans of treatment, and turn to rites and charms and dreams. Just so in obscure and perplexing enquiries, when the common, received, familiar accounts are not convincing, [Sidenote: C] we cannot but try those which lie further afield; we must not despise them, but simply repeat to ourselves the spells which the old people used, and use all means to elicit the truth. II. ‘To begin, you see the absurdity of calling the figure which appears in the moon an affection of our eyesight, too weak to resist the brightness, or, as we say, dazzled; and of not observing that this ought rather to happen when we look at the sun, who meets us with his fierce strong strokes. Empedocles has a pretty line giving the difference between the two: _The sun’s keen shafts, and moon with kindly beams._ Thus he describes the attractive, cheerful, painless quality of her light. Further, the reason is given why men of dim and weak eyesight do not see any distinct figure in the moon; [Sidenote: D] her orb shines full and smooth to them, whereas strong-sighted persons get more details, and distinguish the features impressed there with clearer sense of contrast. Surely the reverse should happen if it were a weakness and affection of the eye which produced the image; the weaker the organ the clearer should be the appearance. The very irregularity of the surface is sufficient to refute this theory; this image is not one of continuous and confluent shadow, but is well sketched in the words of Agesianax: [Sidenote: E] _All round as fire she shines, but in her midst, Bluer than cyanus, lo, a maiden’s eye, Her tender brow, her face in counterpart._ For the shadowy parts really pass beneath the bright ones which they encircle, and in turn press and are cut off by them; thus light and shade are interwoven throughout, and the face-form [Sidenote: F] is delineated to the life. The argument was thought to meet your Clearchus also, Aristotle, no less unanswerably; for yours he is, and an intimate of your namesake of old, although he perverted many doctrines of the Path.’ III. Here Apollonides interposed to ask what the view of Clearchus was. ‘No man’, I said, ‘has less good right than you to ignorance of a doctrine which starts from geometry, [Sidenote: 921] as from its native hearth. Clearchus says that the face, as we call it, is made up of images of the great ocean mirrored in the moon. For our sight[304] being reflected back from many points, is able to touch objects which are not in its direct line; and the full moon is of all mirrors the most beautiful and the purest in uniformity and lustre. As then you geometers think that the rainbow is seen in the cloud when it has acquired a moist and smooth consistence, because our vision is reflected on to the sun,[305] so Clearchus held that the outer ocean is seen [Sidenote: B] in the moon, not where it really is, but in the place from which reflexion carried our sight into contact with it and its dazzle. Agesianax has another passage: _Or ocean’s wave that foams right opposite, Be mirrored like a sheet of fire and flame._’ IV. This pleased Apollonides. ‘What a fresh way of putting a view; that was a bold man, and there was poetry in him. But how did the refutation proceed on your side?’ ‘In this way’, I answered. ‘First, the outer ocean is uniform, a sea with one continuous stream, whereas the appearance of the dark places in the moon is not uniform; there are isthmuses, so to call them, where the brightness parts and [Sidenote: C] defines the shadow; each region is marked off and has its proper boundary, and so the places where light and shade meet assume the appearance of height and depth, and represent very naturally human eyes and lips. Either, therefore, we must assume that there are more oceans than one, parted by real isthmuses and mainlands, which is absurd and untrue; or, if there is only one, it is impossible to believe that its image could appear thus broken up. Now comes a question which it is safer to ask in your presence than it is to state an answer. Given that the habitable world is “equal in breadth and length”,[306] is it possible that the view of the sea as a whole, thus reflected from the moon, [Sidenote: D] should reach those sailing upon the great sea itself, yes, or living on it as the Britons do, and this even if the earth does, as you said that it does, occupy a point central to the sphere in which the moon moves?[307] This’, I continued, ‘is a matter for you to consider, but the reflexion of vision from the moon is a further question which it is not for you to decide, nor yet for Hipparchus. I know, my dear friend [that Hipparchus is a very great astronomer], but many people do not accept his view on the physical nature of vision, since it is probably a sympathetic [Sidenote: E] blending and commixture, rather than a succession of strokes and recoils such as Epicurus devised for his atoms. Nor will you find Clearchus ready to assume with you that the moon is a weighty and solid body. Yet “an ethereal and luminous star”, to use your words, ought to break and divert the vision, so there is no question of reflexion. Lastly, if any one requires us to do so, we will put the question, how is it that only one face is seen, the sea mirrored on the moon, and none in any of all [Sidenote: F] the other stars? Yet reason demands that our vision should be thus affected in the case of all or of none. But now,’ I said, turning to Lucius, ‘remind us which of our points was mentioned first.’ V. ‘No;’ said Lucius, ‘to avoid the appearance of merely insulting Pharnaces, if we pass over the Stoic view without a word of greeting, do give some answer to Clearchus, and his assumption that the moon is a mere mixture of air and mild fire, that the air grows dark on its surface, as a ripple courses over a calm sea, and so the appearance of a face is produced.’ ‘It is kind of you, Lucius,’ I said, ‘to clothe this absurdity in sounding terms. That is not how our comrade dealt with it. He said the truth, that it is a slap in the face to the moon when they fill her with smuts and blacks, addressing her in one breath [Sidenote: 922] as Artemis and Athena,[308] and in the very same describing a caked compound of murky air and charcoal fire, with no kindling or light of its own, a nondescript body smoking and charred like those thunderbolts which poets[309] address as “lightless” and “sooty”. That a charcoal fire, such as this school makes out the moon to be, has no stability or consistence at all, unless [Sidenote: B] it find solid fuel at once to support and to feed it, is a point not so clearly seen by some philosophers as it is by those who tell us in jest that Hephaestus has been called lame because fire progresses no better without wood than lame people without a stick! If then the moon is fire, whence has it all this air inside it? For this upper region, always in circular motion, belongs not to air but to some nobler substance, which has the property of refining and kindling all things. If air has been generated, how is it that it has not been vaporized by the fire and passed away into some other form, but is preserved near fire all this time, like a nail fitted into the same place and wedged there for ever? If it is rare and diffused, [Sidenote: C] it should not remain stable, but be displaced. On the other hand, it cannot subsist in a solidified form, because it is mingled with fire, and has neither moisture with it nor earth, the only agents by which air can be compacted. Again, rapid motion fires the air which is contained in stones, and even in cold lead, much more then that which is in fire, when whirled round with such velocity. For they are displeased with Empedocles, when he describes the moon as a mass of air frozen like hail and enclosed within her globe of fire. Yet they themselves hold that the moon is a globe of fire which encloses air variously distributed, and this though they do not allow that she has [Sidenote: D] clefts in herself, or depths and hollows (for which those who make her an earth-like body find room), but clearly suppose that the air lies upon her convex surface. That it should do so is absurd in point of stability, and impossible in view of what we see at full moon; for we ought not to be able to distinguish black parts and shadow then; either all should be dull and shrouded, or all should shine out together when the moon is caught by the sun. For look at our earth; the air which lies in her depths and hollows, where no ray penetrates, remains in shadow unilluminated; that which is outside, diffused over the earth, has light and brilliant colouring, because from its rarity it easily mingles, and takes up any quality or influence. [Sidenote: E] By light, in particular, if merely touched, or, in your words, grazed, it is changed all through and illumined. This is at once an excellent ally to those who thrust the air into depths and gullies on the moon, and also quite disposes of you, who strangely compound her globe of air and fire. For it is impossible [Sidenote: F] that shadow should be left on her surface when the sun touches with his light all that part of the moon which is framed within our own field of vision.’ VI. Here Pharnaces, while I was still speaking, broke in: ‘Round it goes again, the old scene-shifter of the Academy brought out against us; they amuse themselves with arguing against other people, but in no case submit to be examined on their own views, they treat their opponents as apologists, not accusers. I can speak for myself at any rate; you are not going to draw me on to-day to answer your charges against the Stoics, unless we first get an account of your conduct in turning the universe upside down.’ Lucius smiled: ‘Yes, my friend,’ he said, ‘only do not threaten us with the writ of heresy, such as Cleanthes used to think that the Greeks should have [Sidenote: 923] had served upon Aristarchus of Samos, for shifting the hearth of the universe, because that great man attempted “to save phenomena” with his hypothesis that the heavens are stationary, while our earth moves round in an oblique orbit, at the same time whirling about her own axis. We Academics have no view of our own finding, but do tell me this—why are those, who assume that the moon is an earth, turning things upside down, any more than you, who fix the earth where she is, suspended in mid air, a body considerably larger than the moon? [Sidenote: B] At least mathematicians tell us so, calculating the magnitude of the obscuring body from what takes place in eclipses, and from the passages of the moon through the shadow. For the shadow of the earth is less as it extends, because the illuminating body is greater, and its upper extremity is fine and narrow, as even Homer,[310] they say, did not fail to notice. He called night “pointed” because of the sharpness of the shadow. Such, at any rate, is the body by which the moon is caught in her eclipses, and yet she barely gets clear by a passage equal to three of her own diameters. Just consider how many moons go to make an earth, if the earth cast a shadow as broad, at its shortest, as three moons. Yet you have fears for the moon lest she should tumble, while as for our earth, Aeschylus[311] has perhaps satisfied you that Atlas [Sidenote: C] _Stands, and the pillar which parts Heaven and Earth His shoulders prop, no load for arms t’ embrace._ Then, you think that under the moon there runs light air, quite inadequate to support a solid mass, while the earth, in Pindar’s[312] words, is compassed “by pillars set on adamant”. And this is why Pharnaces has no fear on his own account of the earth’s falling, but pities those who lie under the orbit of the moon, Ethiopians, say, or Taprobanes, on whom so great a weight might fall! Yet the moon has that which helps her against falling, in her very speed and the swing of her passage round, as objects placed in slings are hindered from falling by the [Sidenote: D] whirl of the rotation. For everything is borne on in its own natural direction unless this is changed by some other force. Therefore the moon is not drawn down by her weight, since that tendency is counteracted by her circular movement. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to wonder if she were entirely at rest as the earth is, and unmoved. As things are, the moon has a powerful cause to prevent her from being borne down upon us; but the earth, being destitute of any other movement, might naturally be moved[313] by its own weight; being heavier than the moon not merely in proportion to its greater bulk, [Sidenote: E] but because the moon has been rendered lighter by heat and conflagration. It would actually seem that the moon, if she is a fire, is in need of earth, a solid substance whereon she moves and to which she clings, so feeding and keeping up the force of her flame. For it is impossible to conceive fire as maintained without fuel. But you Stoics say that our earth stands firm without foundation or root.’ ‘Of course,’ said Pharnaces, ‘it keeps its proper and natural place, namely the essential middle point, that place around which all weights press and [Sidenote: F] bear, converging towards it from all sides. But all the upper region, even if it receive any earth-like body thrown up with force, immediately thrusts it out hitherward, or rather lets it go, to be borne down by its own momentum.’ VII. At this point, wishing Lucius to have time to refresh his memory, I called on Theon: ‘Theon, which of the tragic poets has said that physicians _Purge bitter bile with bitter remedies?_’ Theon answered that it was Sophocles.[314] ‘And physicians must be allowed to do so,’ I said, ‘we cannot help it. But philosophers must not be listened to, if they choose to meet paradoxes with paradoxes, and, when contending against strange views, to invent views which are more strange and wonderful still. [Sidenote: 924] Here are these Stoics with their “tendency towards the middle”! Is there any paradox which is not implicit there? That our earth, with all those depths and heights and inequalities, is a Sphere? That there are people at our antipodes who live like timber-worms or lizards, their lower limbs turned upper-most as they plant them on earth? That we ourselves do not keep perpendicular as we move, but remain on the slant, swerving like drunkards? That masses of a thousand talents’ weight, borne through the depth of the earth, stop when they reach the middle point, though nothing meets or resists them; or, if mere momentum carry them down beyond the middle point, they wheel round and turn back of themselves? That [Sidenote: B] segments of beams[315] sawn off at the surface of the earth on either side, do not move downwards all the way, but as they fall upon the surface receive equal thrusts from the outside inwards and are jammed around the middle? That water rushing violently downwards, if it should reach this middle point—an incorporeal point as they say—would stand balanced around it for a pivot, swinging with an oscillation which never stops and never can be stopped? Some of these a man could not force himself [Sidenote: C] to present to his intellect as possible, even if untrue! This is to make _Up down, down up, where Topsy-Turvy reigns_,[316] all from us to the centre down, and all below the centre becoming up in its turn! So that if a man, by the “sympathy” of earth, were to stand with the central point of his own body touching the centre, he would have his head up and his feet up too! And if he were to dig into the space beyond, the down part of his body would bend upwards, and the soil would be dug out from above to below; and if another man could be conceived meeting him, the feet of both would be said to be up, and would really become so! VIII. ‘Such are the monstrous paradoxes which they shoulder and trail along, no mere wallet, Heaven help us! but [Sidenote: D] a conjurer’s stock-in-trade and show-booth; and then they call other men triflers, because they place the moon, being an earth, up above, and not where the middle point is. And yet if every weighty body converges to the same point with all its parts, the earth will claim the heavy objects, not so much because she is middle of the whole, as because they are parts of herself; and the inclination of falling bodies will testify, [Sidenote: E] not to any property of earth[317], as middle of the universe, but rather to a community and fellowship between earth and her own parts, once ejected, now borne back to her. For as the sun draws into himself the parts of which he has been composed, so earth receives the stone as belonging to her, and drawn down towards herself; and thus each of such objects becomes united with her in time and grows into herself. If there is any body neither assigned originally to the earth, nor torn away from it, [Sidenote: F] but having somehow a substance and nature of its own, such as they would describe the moon to be, what is there to prevent its existing separately, self-centred, pressed together and compacted by its own parts? For it is not proved that earth is the middle of the universe, and, further, the way in which bodies here are collected and drawn together towards the earth suggests the manner in which bodies which have fallen together on to the moon may reasonably be supposed to keep their place with reference to her. Why the man who forces all earth-like and heavy objects into one place, and makes them parts of one body, does not apply the same law of coercion to light bodies, I cannot see, instead of allowing all those fiery structures to exist apart; nor why he does not collect all the stars into the same place, and hold distinctly that there must be a body common to all upward-borne and fiery units. [Sidenote: 925] IX. ‘But you and your friends, dear Apollonides, say that the sun is countless millions of stades distant from the highest circle, and that Phosphor next to him, and Stilbon, and the other planets, move in a region below the fixed stars and at great intervals from one another; and yet you think that the universe provides within itself no interval in space for heavy and earth-like bodies. You see that it is ridiculous to call the moon no earth because she stands apart from the region below, and then to call her a star while we see her thrust so many [Sidenote: B] myriads of stades away from the upper circle as though sunk into an abyss. She is lower than the stars by a distance which we cannot state in words, since numbers fail you mathematicians when you try to reckon it, but she touches the earth in a sense and revolves close to it, _Like to the nave of a wagon, she glances_, says Empedocles,[318] _which near the mid axle...._ For she often fails to clear even the shadow of earth, rising but little,[319] because the illuminating body is so vast. But so nearly does she seem to graze the earth and to be almost in its embrace as she circles round, that she is shut off from the sun by it unless [Sidenote: C] she rises enough to clear that shaded, terrestrial region, dark as night, which is the appanage of earth. Therefore I think we may say with confidence that the moon is within the precincts of earth when we see her blocked by earth’s extremities. X. ‘Now leave the other fixed stars and planets, and consider the conclusion proved by Aristarchus in his _Magnitudes and Distances_;[320] that the distance of the sun is to the distance of the moon from us in a ratio greater than eighteen to one, [Sidenote: D] less than twenty to one. Yet the highest estimate of the distance of the moon from us makes it fifty-six times the earth’s radius, and that is, even on a moderate measurement, forty thousand stades. Upon this basis, the distance of the sun from the moon works out to more than forty million three hundred thousand stades. So far has she been settled from the sun because of her weight, and so nearly has she approached the earth, that, if we are to distribute estates according to localities, the “portion and inheritance of the earth” invites the moon to join her, and the moon has a next claim to chattels and persons [Sidenote: E] on earth, in right of kinship and vicinity. And I think that we are not doing wrong in this, that while we assign so great and profound an interval to what we call the upper bodies, we also leave to bodies below as much room for circulation as the breadth from earth to moon. For he who confines the word “upper” to the extreme circumference of heaven, and calls all the rest “lower”, goes too far, and on the other hand he who circumscribes “below” to earth, or rather to her centre, is preposterous. On this side and on that the necessary interval must be granted,[321] since the vastness of the universe permits. Against the claim that everything after we leave the earth is “up” and poised on high, sounds the counterclaim that everything [Sidenote: F] after we leave the circle of the fixed stars is “down”! XI. ‘Look at the question broadly. In what sense is the earth “middle”, and middle of what? For the Whole is infinite; now the Infinite has neither beginning nor limit, so it ought not to have a middle; for a middle is in a sense itself a limit, but infinity is a negation of limits. It is amusing to hear a man labour to prove that the earth is the middle of the universe, not of the Whole, forgetting that the universe itself lies under the same difficulties; for the Whole, in its [Sidenote: 926] turn, left no middle for the universe. “Hearthless and homeless”[322] it is borne over an infinite void towards nothing which it can call its own; or, if it find some other cause for remaining, it stands still, not because of the nature of the place. Much the same can be conjectured about the earth and the moon; if one stands here unshaken while the other moves, it is in virtue of a difference of soul rather than of place and of nature. Apart from all this, has not one important point escaped them? If anything, however great, which is outside the centre of the earth is “up”, then no part of the universe is “down”. Earth is “up”, and so are the things on the earth, absolutely [Sidenote: B] every body lying or standing about the earth becomes “up”; one thing alone is “down”, that incorporeal point which has of necessity to resist the pressure of the whole universe, if “down” is naturally opposed to “up”. Nor is this absurdity the only one. Weights lose the cause of their downward tendency and motion here, since there is no body below towards which they move. That the incorporeal should have so great a force as to direct all things towards itself, or hold them together about itself, is not probable, nor do they mean this. No! it is found on all grounds[323] to be irrational, and against the facts, that “up” should be the whole universe, and “down” nothing but an incorporeal and indivisible limit. The other view is reasonable, which we state thus, that a large space, possessing breadth, is apportioned both to “the above” and to “the below”. XII. ‘However, let us assume, if you choose, that it is [Sidenote: C] contrary to nature that earth-like bodies should have their motions in heaven; and now let us look quietly, with no heroics, at the inference, which is this, not that the moon is not an earth, but that she is an earth not in its natural place. So the fire of Aetna is fire underground, which is contrary to nature, yet is fire; and air enclosed in bladders is light and volatile by nature, but has come perforce into a place unnatural to it. And the soul, the soul itself,’ I went on, ‘has it not been imprisoned in the body contrary to nature, a swift, and, as you hold, a fiery soul in a slow, cold body, the invisible within the sensible? Are we therefore to say that soul in body is nothing, and not rather that Reason, that divine thing, has been made subject to weight and density, that one which ranges all heaven [Sidenote: D] and earth and sea in a moment’s flight has passed into flesh and sinews, marrow and humours, wherein is the origin of countless passions?[324] Your Lord Zeus, is he not, so long as he preserves his own nature, one great continuous fire? Yet we see him brought down, and bent, and fashioned, assuming, and ready to assume, any and every complexion of change. Look well to it, my friend, whether when you shift all things [Sidenote: E] about, and remove each to its “natural” place, you are not devising a system to dissolve the universe and introducing Empedoclean strife, or rather stirring up the old Titans against Nature, in your eagerness to see once more the dreadful disorder and dissonance of the myth? All that is heavy in a place by itself, and all that is light in another, _Where neither sun’s bright face is separate seen, Nor earth’s rough brood, nor ocean any more_, [Sidenote: F] as Empedocles says! Earth had nothing to do with heat, water with wind; nothing heavy was found above, nothing light below; without commixture, without affection were the principles of all things, mere units, each desiring no intercourse with each or partnership, performing their separate scornful motions in mutual flight and aversion, a state of things which must always be, as Plato[325] teaches, where God is absent, the state of bodies deserted by intelligence and soul. So it was until the day when Providence brought Desire into Nature, and [Sidenote: 927] Friendship was engendered there, and Aphrodite, and Eros, as Empedocles tells us and Parmenides too and Hesiod,[326] so that things might change their places, and receive faculties from one another in turn, and, from being bound under stress, and forced, some to be in motion some to rest, might all begin to give in to the Better, instead of the Natural, and shift their places and so produce harmony and communion of the Whole. XIII. ‘For if it be true that no other part of the universe departed from Nature, but that each rests in its natural place, not needing any transposition or rearrangement, and never from the first having needed any, I am at a loss to know what there is for Providence to do, or of what Zeus, “in art most excellent”,[327] is the maker and the artist-father. There would [Sidenote: B] be no need of tactics in an army if each soldier knew of himself how to take and keep place and post at the proper time; nor of gardeners or builders if the water of its own nature is to flow over the parts which need it, and moisten them, or if bricks and beams should of themselves adopt the movements and inclinations which are natural, and arrange themselves in their fitting places. If such a theory strike out Providence [Sidenote: C] altogether, and if it be God’s own attribute to order and discriminate things, what marvel is it that Nature has been so disposed and partitioned that fire is here and stars there, and again that earth is planted where it is and the moon above, each held by a firmer bond than that of Nature, the bond of Reason? Since, if all things are to observe natural tendencies, and to move each according to its nature, let the sun no longer go round in a circle, nor Phosphorus, nor any of the other stars, because it is the nature of light and fiery bodies to move upwards, not in a circle! But if Nature admits of such local variation as that fire, here seen to ascend, yet when it reaches heaven, joins in the general rotation, what marvel if heavy [Sidenote: D] and earthlike bodies too, when placed there, assume another kind of motion, mastered by the circumambient element? For it is not according to Nature that light things lose their upward tendency in heaven, and yet heaven cannot prevail over those which are heavy and incline downwards. No, heaven at some time had power to rearrange both these and those, and turned the nature of each to what was better. XIV. ‘However, if we are at last to have done with notions enslaved to usage,[328] and to state fearlessly what appears to be true, it is probable that no part of a whole has any order, or position, or movement of its own which can be described in absolute terms as natural. But when each body places itself at the disposal of that on account of which it has come into being, [Sidenote: E] and in relation to which it naturally exists or has been created, to move as is useful and convenient to it, actively and passively and in all its own states conforming to the conservation, beauty, or power of that other, then, I hold, its place, movements and disposition are according to Nature. In man certainly, who has, if anything has, come into being according to Nature, [Sidenote: F] the heavy and earth-like parts are found above, mostly about the head, the hot and fiery in the middle regions; of the teeth one set grows from above, the other from below, yet neither contrary to Nature; nor can it be said of the fire in him that when it is above and flashes in his eyes it is natural, but when it is in stomach or heart, unnatural; each has been arranged as is proper and convenient. _Mark well the tortoise and the trumpet-shell_, says Empedocles, and, we may add, the nature of every shell-fish, and _Earth uppermost, flesh under thou shalt see._ Yet the stony substance does not squeeze or crush the growth[329] [Sidenote: 928] within, nor again does the heat fly off and be lost because of its lightness; they are mingled and co-ordinated according to the nature of each. XV. ‘And so it is probably with the universe, if it be indeed a living structure; in many places it contains earth, in many others fire, water, and wind, which are not forced out under stress, but arranged on a rational system. Take the eye; it is not where it is in the body owing to pressure acting on its light substance, nor has the heart fallen or slipped down [Sidenote: B] into the region of the chest because of its weight; each is arranged where it is because it was better so. Let us not then suppose that it is otherwise with the parts of the universe; that earth lies here where it has fallen of its own weight, that the sun, as Metrodorus of Chios used to think, has been pressed out into the upper region because of his lightness, like a bladder, or that the other stars have reached the places which they now hold as if they had been weighed in a balance and kicked the beam. No, the rational principle prevailed; and some, like eyes to give light, are inserted into the face of the Whole and revolve; the sun acts as a heart, and sheds and distributes out of himself heat and light, as it were blood and breath. [Sidenote: C] Earth and sea are to the universe, according to Nature, what stomach and bladder are to the animal. The moon, lying between sun and earth, as the liver or some other soft organ between heart and stomach, distributes here the gentle warmth from above, while she returns to us, digested, purified, and refined in her own sphere, the exhalations of earth. Whether her earth-like solid substance contributes to any other useful purposes, we cannot say. We do know that universally the Better prevails over the law of Stress. How can the view of the Stoics lead us to any probable result? That view is, that the luminous and subtle part of the atmosphere has by its rarity formed the [Sidenote: D] sky, the dense and consolidated part stars, and that, of the stars, the moon is the dullest and the grossest. However, we may see with our eyes that the moon is not entirely separated from the atmosphere, but moves within a great belt of it, having beneath itself a wind-swept region, where bodies are whirled, and amongst them comets. Thus these bodies have not been placed in the scales according to the weight or lightness of each, but have been arranged upon a different system.’ XVI. This said, as I was passing the turn to Lucius, the [Sidenote: E] argument now reaching the stage of demonstration, Aristotle said with a smile: ‘I protest that you have addressed your whole reply to those who assume that the moon herself is half fire, and who say of all bodies in common that they have an inclination of their own, some an upward one, some a downward. If there is a single person who holds that the stars move in a circle according to Nature, and are of a substance widely [Sidenote: F] different from the four elements, it has not occurred to our memory, even by accident; so that I am out of the discussion, and you also, Lucius.’ ‘No, no, good friend’, said Lucius. ‘As to the other stars, and the heaven in general, when your school asserts that they have a nature which is pure and transparent, and removed from all changes caused by passion, and when they introduce a circle of eternal[330] and never-ending revolution, perhaps no one would contradict you, at least for the present, although there are countless difficulties. But when the theory comes down and touches the moon, it no longer retains in her case the “freedom from passion” and the beauty of form of that body. Leaving out of account her other irregularities and points of difference, this very face which appears upon her has come there either from some passion proper to herself or by admixture of some other substance. [Sidenote: 929] Indeed, mixture implies some passion, since there is a loss of its own purity when a body is forcibly filled with what is inferior to itself. Consider her own torpor and dullness of speed, and her heat, so faint and ineffectual, wherein, as Ion[331] says— _The black grape ripens not_; to what are we to assign this, but to weakness in herself and passion, if passion can have place in an eternal and Olympian body? It comes to this, dear Aristotle; look on her as earth, and she appears a very beautiful object, venerable and highly adorned; but as star, or light, or any divine or heavenly body, I fear she may be found wanting in shapeliness and grace, and do no credit to her beautiful name, if out of all the multitude in heaven she alone goes round begging light of others, as Parmenides says, [Sidenote: B] _For ever peering toward the sun’s bright rays._ Now when our comrade, in his dissertation, was expounding the proposition of Anaxagoras, that “the sun places the brightness in the moon”, he was highly applauded. But I am not going to speak of things which I learned from you or with you, I will gladly pass on to the remaining points. It is then probable that the moon is illuminated not as glass or crystal by the sunlight shining in and through her, nor yet by way of accumulation of light and rays, as torches when they multiply their light. For then we should have full moon at the beginning of the month just as much as at the middle, if she does not conceal or block the sun, but allows him[332] to pass through [Sidenote: C] because of her rarity, or if he, by way of commixture, shines upon the light around her and helps to kindle it with his own. For it is not possible to allege any bending or swerving aside on her part at the time of her conjunction, as we can when she is at the half, or is gibbous or crescent. Being then “plumb opposite”, as Democritus puts it, to her illuminant, she receives and admits the sun, so that we should expect to see her shining herself and also allowing him to shine through her. Now she is very far from doing this; she is herself invisible at those times, and she often hides him out of our sight. _So from above for men_, as Empedocles says, [Sidenote: D] _She quenched his beams, shrouding a slice of earth Wide as the compass of the glancing moon_; as though his light had fallen, not upon another star, but upon night and darkness. ‘The view of Posidonius, that it is because of the depth of the moon’s body that the light of the sun is not passed through to us, is wrong on the face of it. For the air, which is unlimited, and has a depth many times that of the moon, is filled throughout with sunlight and brightness. There is left then that of Empedocles, that the illumination which we get from the moon [Sidenote: E] arises in some way from the reflexion of the sun as he falls upon her. Hence her light reaches us without heat or lustre, whereas we should expect both if there were a kindling by him or a commixture of lights. But as voices return an echo weaker than the original sound, and missiles which glance off strike with weaker impact, _E’en so the ray which smote the moon’s white orb_ reaches us in a feeble and exhausted stream, because the force is dispersed in the reflexion.’ XVII. Here Sylla broke in: ‘All these things no doubt [Sidenote: F] have their probabilities; but the strongest point on the other side was either explained away or it escaped our comrade’s attention; which was it?’ ‘What do you mean?’ said Lucius. ‘The problem of the half-moon, I suppose?’ ‘Precisely,’ said Sylla, ‘for as all reflexion takes place at equal angles, there is some reason in saying that when the moon is in mid-heaven at half-moon, the light is not carried from her on to the earth, but glances off beyond it; for the sun, being [Sidenote: 930] on the horizon, touches the moon with his rays, which will therefore, being reflected at equal angles, fall on the further side and beyond us, and will not send the light here; or else there will be a great distortion and variation in the angle, which is impossible.’ ‘I assure you’, said Lucius, ‘that point was mentioned also;’ and here he glanced at Menelaus the mathematician, as he went on: ‘I am ashamed, dear Menelaus,’ he said, ‘in your presence to upset a mathematical assumption which is laid down as fundamental in all the Optics of Mirrors. But I feel obliged to say’, he continued, ‘that the law which requires reflexion in all cases to be at equal angles is neither self-evident [Sidenote: B] nor admitted. It is impugned in the instance of convex mirrors, when magnified images are reflected to the one point of sight. It is impugned also in that of double mirrors, when they are inclined towards one another so that there is an angle between them, and each surface returns a double image from one face, four images in all, two on the right, two on the left, two from the outer parts of the surfaces, two dimmer ones deep within the mirrors.[333] Plato[334] gives the cause why this takes place. He has told [Sidenote: C] us that if the mirrors be raised on either side, there is a gradual shifting of the visual reflexion as it passes from one side to the other. If then some images proceed directly to us, while others glance to the opposite side of the mirrors, and are returned thence to us, it is impossible that reflexion in all cases takes place at equal angles. They observe[335] that these images meet in one point, and further claim that the law of equal angles is disproved by the streams of light which actually proceed from the moon to the earth, holding the fact to be [Sidenote: D] far more convincing than the law. However, if we are so far to indulge the beloved geometry as to make her a present of this law, in the first place it may be expected to hold of mirrors which have been made accurately smooth. But the moon has many irregularities and rough parts, so that the rays proceeding from a large body, when they fall on considerable eminences, are exposed to counter-illuminations and reciprocal dispersion; the cross-light is reflected, involved, and accumulated as though it reached us from a number of mirrors. In the next place, even if we allow that the reflexions are produced at equal [Sidenote: E] angles upon the actual surface of the moon, yet, when the distance is so great, it is not impossible that the rays may be broken in their passage, or glance around, so that the light reaches us in one composite stream. Some go further, and show by a figure that many lights discharge their rays along a line inclined to the hypothenuse; but it was not possible to construct the diagram while speaking, especially before a large audience.[336] XVIII. ‘Upon the whole question,’ he went on, ‘I am at a loss to see how they bring up the half-moon against us; the point fails equally upon her gibbous and crescent phases. For if the moon were a mass of air or fire which the sun illuminated, [Sidenote: F] he would not have left half her sphere always in shadow and darkness as seen by us; but even if he touched her in his circuit only in a small point, the proper consequence would follow, she would be affected all through, and her entire substance changed by the light penetrating everywhere with ease. When wine touches water on its extreme surface, or a drop of blood falls into liquid, the whole is discoloured at once, and turned to crimson. But the air itself, we are told, is not filled with sunshine by emanations or beams actually mingling with it, but by a change and alteration caused by something like a prick or touch. Now, how can they suppose that when star touches star or light light, it does not mingle with or alter the substance throughout, but only illuminates [Sidenote: 931] those points which it touches superficially? The circular orbit of the sun as he passes about the moon, which sometimes coincides with the line dividing her visible and invisible parts, and at other times rises to right angles with that line so as to cut those parts in two, and in turn be cut by her, produces her gibbous and crescent phases by the varying inclination and position of the bright part relatively to that in shadow. This proves beyond all question that the illumination is contact not commixture, not accumulation of light but its circumfusion. But the fact that she is not only illuminated herself but also sends [Sidenote: B] on the image of her brightness to us, allows us to insist the more confidently on our theory of her substance. For reflexions do not take place on a rarefied body, or one formed of subtle particles, nor is it easy to conceive light rebounding from light, or fire from fire; the body which is to produce recoil and reflexion must be heavy and dense, that there may be impact upon it and resilience from it. To the sun himself the air certainly allows a passage, offering no obstructions or resistance; whereas if timber, stones, or woven stuffs be placed to meet his light many cross rays are caused, and there is illumination all [Sidenote: C] round them. We see the same thing in the way his light reaches the earth. The earth does not pass his ray into a depth as water does, nor yet throughout her whole substance as air does. Just as his orbit passes round the moon, gradually cutting off a certain portion of her, so a similar orbit passes round the earth, illuminating a similar part of it and leaving another unilluminated, for the part of either body which receives light appears to be a little larger than a hemisphere. Allow me to speak geometrically in terms of proportion. Here are three bodies approached by the sun’s light, earth, moon, air; we see that the moon is illuminated like the earth, not like the air; but bodies naturally affected in the same way by the same must be themselves similar.’ XIX. When all had applauded Lucius, ‘Bravo!’ said I, [Sidenote: D] ‘a beautiful proportion fitted to a beautiful theory; for you must not be defrauded of your own.’ ‘In that case,’ he said, with a smile, ‘I must employ proportion a second time, in order that we may prove the moon like the earth, not only as being affected in the same way by the same body, but also as producing the same effect on the same. Grant me that no one of the phenomena relating to the sun is so like another as an eclipse to a sunset, remembering that recent concurrence[337] of sun and moon, which, beginning just after noon, showed us [Sidenote: E] plainly many stars in all parts of the heavens, and produced a chill in the temperature like that of twilight. If you have forgotten it, Theon here will bring up Mimnermus and Cydias, and Archilochus, and Stesichorus and Pindar[338] besides, all bewailing at eclipse time “the brightest star stolen from the sky” [Sidenote: F] and “night with us at midday”, speaking of the ray of the sun as “a track of darkness” and, besides all these, Homer[339] saying that the faces of men are “bound in night and gloom” and “the sun is perished out of the heaven”, i.e. around the moon, and how this occurs according to Nature, “when one moon perishes and one is born”. The remaining points have been reduced, I think, by the accuracy of mathematical methods to the one[340] certain principle that night is the shadow of earth, whereas an eclipse of the sun is the shadow of the moon when it falls within our vision. When the sun sets he is blocked from our sight by the earth; when he is eclipsed, by the moon. [Sidenote: 932] In both cases there is overshadowing; in his setting it is caused by the earth, in his eclipses by the moon, her shadow intercepting our vision. From all this it is easy to draw out a theory as to what happens. If the effect is similar, the agents are similar; for the same effects upon the same body must be due to the same agents. If the darkness of eclipses is not so profound, and does not affect the atmosphere so forcibly, let us not be surprised; the bodies which cause respectively night and eclipse are similar in nature, but unequal in size. The Egyptians, I believe, say that the moon’s bulk is one two-and-seventieth part of the earth’s, Anaxagoras made her as large as Peloponnesus; but [Sidenote: B] Aristarchus[341] proves that the diameter of the earth bears to that of the moon a ratio which is less than sixty to nineteen, and greater than a hundred and eight to forty-three. Hence the earth because of its size removes the sun entirely from our sight, the obstruction is great and lasts all night; whereas if the moon sometimes hides the sun entirely, yet the eclipse does not last long and has no breadth; but a certain brightness is apparent around the rim, which does not allow the shadow to be deep and absolute. Aristotle,[342] I mean the ancient philosopher, after giving other reasons why the moon is more [Sidenote: C] often visibly eclipsed than the sun, adds this further one, that the sun is eclipsed by the interposition of the moon,[343] [the moon by that of the earth and of other bodies also.] But Posidonius gives this definition of what occurs: an eclipse of the sun is a concurrence of the shadow of the moon with our vision[344] ... for there is no eclipse, except to those whose view of the sun can be intercepted by the shadow of the moon. In allowing that the shadow of the moon reaches to us, I do not know what he has left himself to say. There can be no shadow of a star; shadow means absence of light, and it is the nature of light to remove shadow, not to cause it. XX. ‘But tell me’, he went on, ‘what proof was mentioned [Sidenote: D] next?’ ‘That the moon was eclipsed in the same way’, I said. ‘Thank you for reminding me’, he said. ‘But now am I to turn at once to the argument, assuming that you are satisfied, and allow that the moon is eclipsed when she is caught in the shadow, or do you wish me to set out a studied proof, with all the steps in order?’ ‘By all means,’ said Theon, ‘let us have the proof in full. For my own part, I still somehow need to be convinced; [Sidenote: E] I have only heard it put thus, that when the three bodies, earth, sun, and moon, come into one straight line eclipses occur, the earth removing the sun from the moon, or the moon the sun from the earth; that is, the sun is eclipsed when the moon, the moon when the earth, is in the middle of the three, the first case happening at her conjunction, the second at the half-month.’ Lucius replied: ‘These are perhaps the most important points mentioned; but first, if you will, take the additional argument drawn from the shape of the shadow. This is a cone, such as is caused by a large spherical body of fire or light overlapping a smaller body also spherical. Hence in eclipses the lines which mark off the dark portions of the moon from the bright give circular sections. For when one round body approaches [Sidenote: F] another, the lines of mutual intersection are invariably circular like the bodies themselves. In the second place, I think you are aware that the first parts of the moon to be eclipsed are those towards the East, of the sun those towards the West, [Sidenote: 933] and the shadow of the earth moves from East to West, that of[345] the moon on the contrary to the East. This is made clear to the senses by the phenomena, which may be explained quite shortly. They go to confirm our view of the cause of the eclipse. For since the sun is eclipsed by being overtaken, the moon by meeting the body which causes the eclipse,[346] it is likely, or rather it is necessary, that the sun should be overtaken from behind, the moon from the front, the obstruction beginning from the first point of contact with the obstructing body. The moon comes up with the sun from the West as she races against him, the earth from the East because it is moving from the opposite direction. As a third point, I will ask you to [Sidenote: B] notice the duration and the magnitude of her eclipses. If she is eclipsed when high up and far from the earth, she is hidden for a short time; if near the earth and low down when the same thing happens to her, she is firmly held and emerges slowly out of the shadow; and yet when she is low her speed is greatest, when high it is least. The cause of the difference lies in the shadow; for being broadest about the base, like all cones, and tapering gradually, it ends in a sharp, fine head. Hence, if the moon be low when she meets the shadow, she is caught in the largest circles of the cone, and crosses its most profound and darkest part; if high, she dips as into a shallow pond, because the shadow is thin, and quickly makes her way out. [Sidenote: C] I omit the points of detail mentioned as to bases and permeations, which can also be rationally explained as far as the subject-matter allows. I go back to the theory put before us founded on our senses. We see that fire shines through more visibly and more brightly out of a place in shadow, whether because of the density of the darkened air, which does not allow it to stream off and be dispersed, but holds its substance compressed where it is, or whether this is an affection of our senses; as hot things are hotter when contrasted with cold, and pleasures are more intense by contrast with pains, so bright things stand out more clearly by the side of dark, setting the imagination on the alert by the contrast. The former cause appears the more [Sidenote: D] probable, for in the light of the sun everything in the nature of fire not only loses its brightness, but is outmatched and becomes inactive and blunted, since the sun’s heat scatters and dissipates its power. If then the moon possess a faint, feeble fire, being a star of somewhat turbid substance, as the Stoics themselves say, none of the effects which she now exhibits ought to follow, but the opposite in all respects; she ought to appear when she is now hidden, and be hidden when she now appears; be hidden, that is, all the time while she is dimmed by the surrounding [Sidenote: E] atmosphere, but shine brightly out at intervals of six months, or occasionally at intervals of five, when she passes under the shadow of the earth. (For of the 465 full moons at eclipse intervals, 404 give periods of six months, the remainder periods of five.) At such intervals then the moon ought to appear shining brightly in the shadow. But, as a fact, she is eclipsed and loses her light in the shadow, and recovers it when she has cleared the shadow; also she is often seen by day, which shows that she is anything but a fiery or starlike body.’ [Sidenote: F] XXI. When Lucius had said this, Pharnaces and Apollonides sprang forward together to oppose. Apollonides made way to Pharnaces, who observed that this is a very strong proof that the moon is a star or fire; for she does not disappear entirely in eclipses, but shows through with a grim ashy hue peculiar to herself. Apollonides objected to the word ‘shadow’, a term always applied by mathematicians to a region which is not [Sidenote: 934] lighted, whereas the heavens admit of no shadow. ‘This objection’, I said, ‘is contentious, and addressed to the name, not to the thing in any physical or mathematical sense. If any one should prefer to call the region blocked by the earth not “shadow”, but “an unlighted place”, it is still necessarily true that the moon when it reaches that region is darkened. It is merely childish’, I went on, ‘not to allow that the shadow of the earth reaches it, since we know that the shadow of the moon, falling upon the sight and reaching to the earth, causes an [Sidenote: B] eclipse of the sun. I will now turn to you, Pharnaces. That ashy charred colour in the moon, which you say is peculiar to her, belongs to a body which has density and depth. For no remnant or trace of flame will remain in rarefied bodies, nor can burning matter come into existence, without a substantial body, deep enough to allow of ignition and to maintain it, as Homer[347] has somewhere said: _When fire’s red flower was flown, and spent the flames, Which smoothed the embers._ For burning matter is evidently not fire but a body submitted to fire, and altered by it, which fire is attached to a solid stable mass and is permanent there, whereas flames are the kindling [Sidenote: C] and streaming away of rarefied fuel which is quickly dissolved because it is weak. ‘Thus no such clear proof could exist that the moon is earth-like and dense, as this cinder-like colour, if it really were her own proper colour. But it is not so, dear Pharnaces; in the course of an eclipse she goes through many changes of complexion, and scientific men divide these accordingly by time and hour. If she is eclipsed at early evening, she appears strangely black till three and a half hours have elapsed; if at midnight, she emits that red and flame-like hue over her surface which we know; after seven and a half hours the redness begins to be removed, and at last towards dawn she takes a bluish or light-grey hue, [Sidenote: D] which is the real reason why poets and Empedocles invoke her as “grey-eyed”. Now, people who see the moon assume so many hues as she passes through the shadow do wrong in fastening upon one, the cinder-like, which may be called the one most foreign to her, being rather an admixture and remnant of light which shines round her through the shadows, than her own peculiar complexion, which is black and earth-like. But whereas we see on our earth that places in shadow which are near purple or scarlet cloths, or near lakes, or rivers open to the sun, partake in the brilliance of these colours and offer many varied splendours because of the reflexions, what wonder [Sidenote: E] if a great stream of shadow, falling upon a celestial sea of light, not stable or calm but agitated by myriads of stars and admitting of combinations and changes of every kind, presents to us different colours at different times impressed on it by the moon? For a star or a fire could not show when in shadow as black or grey or blue. But our hills and plains and seas are coursed over by many-coloured shapes coming from the sun and [Sidenote: F] by shadows also and mists, resembling the hues produced by white light over a painter’s pigments. For those seen on the sea Homer has endeavoured to find such names as he could, as “violet” for the sea, and “wine-dark” and again “purple wave”, and elsewhere “grey sea” and “white calm”. But the varying colours which appear on land at different times he has passed over as being infinite in number. Now, it is not likely that the moon has one surface as the sea has, but rather that she resembles in substance the earth, of which Socrates[348] [Sidenote: 935] of old used to tell the legend, whether he hinted at the moon, or meant some other body. For it is nothing incredible or wonderful if, having nothing corrupt or muddy in her, but enjoying light from heaven, and being stored with a heat not burning or furious, but mild and harmless and natural, she possesses regions of marvellous beauty, hills clear as flame, and belts of purple, her gold and silver not dispersed within her depths, but flowering forth on the plains in plenty, or set [Sidenote: B] around smooth eminences. Now, if a varying view of these reaches us from time to time through the shadow, owing to some change and shifting of the surrounding air, surely the moon does not lose her honour or her fame, nor yet her Divinity, when she is held by men to be holy earth of a sort and not, as the Stoics say, fire which is turbid, mere dregs of fire. Fire is honoured in barbarous fashions by the Medes and Assyrians, who fear what injures them, and pay observance or rites of propitiation to that, rather than to what they revere. But the name of earth, we know, is dear and honourable to every Greek, we reverence her as our fathers did, like any other God. But, being men, we are very far from thinking of the moon, that [Sidenote: C] Olympian earth, as a body without soul or mind, having no share in things which we duly offer as first-fruits to the Gods, taught by usage to pay them a return for the goods they give us, and by Nature to reverence that which is above ourselves in virtue and power and honour. Let us not then think that we offend in holding that she is an earth, and that this her visible face, just like our earth with its great gulfs, is folded back into great depths and clefts containing water or murky air, which the light of the sun fails to penetrate or touch, but is obscured, and sends back its reflexion here in shattered fragments.’ XXII. Here Apollonides broke in: ‘Then in the name of [Sidenote: D] the moon herself,’ he said, ‘do you think it possible that shadows are thrown there by any clefts or gullies, and from thence reach our sight, or do you not calculate what follows, and am I to tell you? Pray hear me out, though you know it all. The diameter of the moon shows an apparent breadth of twelve fingers at her mean distance from us. Now, each of those black shadowy objects appears larger than half a finger, and is therefore more than a twenty-fourth part of the diameter. [Sidenote: E] Very well; if we were to assume the circumference of the moon to be only thirty thousand stades, and the diameter ten thousand, on that assumption each of these shadowy objects on her would be not less than five hundred stades. Now, consider first whether it be possible for the moon to have depths and eminences sufficient to cause a shadow of that size. Next, if they are so large, how is it that we do not see them?’ At this, I smiled on him and said, ‘Well done, Apollonides, to have found out such a demonstration! By it you will prove that you and I too are greater than the Aloades[349] of old, not [Sidenote: F] at any time of day, however, but in early morning for choice, and late afternoon; when the sun makes our shadows prodigious, and thereby presents to our sense the splendid inference, that if the shadow thrown be great, the object which throws it is enormous. Neither of us, I am sure, has ever been in Lemnos, but we have both heard the familiar line,[350] _Athos the Lemnian heifer’s flank shall shade._ For the shadow of the cliff falls, it seems, on a certain brazen [Sidenote: 936] heifer over a stretch of sea of not less than seven hundred stades. Will you think then that the height which casts the shadow is the cause, forgetting that distance of the light from objects makes their shadows many times longer? Now consider the sun at his greatest distance from the moon, when she is at the full, and shows the features of the face most expressly because of the depth of the shadow; it is the mere distance of the light which has made the shadow large, not the size of the several [Sidenote: B] irregularities on the moon. Again, in full day the extreme brightness of the sun’s rays does not allow the tops of mountains to be seen, but deep and hollow places appear from a long distance, as also do those in shadow. There is nothing strange then if it is not possible to see precisely how the moon too is caught by the light, and illuminated, and yet if we do see by contrast where the parts in shadow lie near the bright parts. XXIII. ‘But here’, said I, ‘is a better point to disprove the alleged reflexion from the moon; it is found that those who stand in reflected rays, not only see the illuminated but also the illuminating body. For instance, when light from water [Sidenote: C] leaps on to a wall, and the eye is placed in the spot so illuminated by reflexion, it sees the three objects, the reflected rays, the water which caused the reflexion, and the sun himself, from whom proceeds the light so falling on the water and reflected. All this being granted and apparent, people require those who contend that the earth receives the moon’s light by reflexion, to point out the sun appearing in the moon at night, as he appears in the water by day when he is reflected off it. Then, as he does not so appear, they suppose that the illumination is caused by some process other than reflexion, and that, failing reflexion, [Sidenote: D] the moon is no earth.’ ‘What answer then is to be given to them?’ said Apollonides, ‘for the difficulty about reflexion seems to apply equally to us.’ ‘Equally no doubt in one sense,’ I answered, ‘but in another sense not at all so. First look at the details of the simile, how “topsy turvy”[351] it is, rivers flowing up stream! The water is below and on earth, the moon is above the earth and poised aloft. So the angles of reflexion are differently formed; in the one case the apex is above in the moon, in the other below on the earth. They should not then require that mirrors should produce every image and like reflexions at any distance, since [Sidenote: E] they are fighting against clear fact. But from those like ourselves who seek to show that the moon is not a fine smooth substance like water, but heavy and earth-like, it is strange to ask for a visible appearance of the sun in her. Why, milk does not return such mirrored images, nor produce optical reflexion, the reason being the unevenness and roughness of its parts. How can the moon possibly send back the vision off [Sidenote: F] herself as the smoother mirrors do? We know that even in these, if any scratch or speck or roughness is found at the point from which the vision is naturally reflected it is obscured; the blemishes are seen, but they do not return the light. A man who requires that she should either turn our vision back to the sun, or else not reflect the sun from herself to us, is a humorist; he wants our eye to be the sun, the image light, man heaven! That the reflexion of the sun’s light conveyed to the moon with the impact of his intense brilliance should be borne back to us is reasonable enough, whereas our sight is weak and slight and merely fractional. What wonder if it deliver a stroke which has no resilience, or, if it does rebound, no continuity, but is broken up and fails, having no store of light to make up for dispersion about the rough and uneven [Sidenote: 937] places. For it is not impossible that the reflexion should rebound to the sun from water and other mirrors, being still strong and near its point of origin; whereas from the moon, even if there are glancings of a sort, yet they will be weak and dim, and will fail by the way because of the long distance. Another point: concave mirrors return the reflected light in greater strength than the original, and thus often produce [Sidenote: B] flames; convex and spherical mirrors one which is weak and dim, because the pressure is not returned from all parts of the surface. You have seen, no doubt, how when two rainbows appear, one cloud enfolding another, the enveloping bow shows the colours dim and indistinct, for the outer cloud lying further from the eye does not return the reflexion in strength or intensity. But enough! Whereas the light of the sun reflected from the moon loses its heat entirely, and only a scanty and ineffectual remnant of its brilliance reaches us, do you really think it possible that when sight has the double course to travel, [Sidenote: C] any remnant whatever should reach the sun from the moon? No! say I. Look for yourselves’, I went on. ‘If the effects of the water and of the moon on our sight were the same, the full moon ought to show us images of earth and plants and men and stars, as other mirrors do. If, on the other hand, our vision is never carried back on to these objects, whether because of its own feebleness or of the roughness of the moon’s surface, then let us never demand that it should be carried by reflexion on to the sun. XXIV. ‘We have now’, I said, ‘reported all that was said then, and has not escaped our memory. It is time to call on Sylla, or rather to claim his story, as he was allowed to be a listener on terms. So, if it meet your approval, let us cease our walk, and take our places on the benches and give him a seated [Sidenote: D] audience.’ This was at once agreed, and we had taken our seats, when Theon said: ‘I want as much as any of you, Lamprias, to hear what is now to be said, but first I should like to hear about the alleged dwellers in the moon, not whether there are any such, I mean, but whether there can be; for if the thing is impossible, then it is also absurd that the moon should be an earth; it will appear that she has been created for no end or use, if she bears no fruit, offers no abode to human beings, no existence, no livelihood, the very things for which we say that she has been created, in Plato’s[352] words, “our nurse, and of [Sidenote: E] day and night the unswerving guardian and maker”. You see that many things are said about this, some in jest, some seriously. For instance, that the moon hangs poised over the heads of those who dwell beneath her, as if they were so many Tantali; while as for those who dwell on her, they are lashed on like Ixions by the tremendous speed. Yet hers is not a single motion, but, as [Sidenote: F] it is somewhere put, she is a Goddess of the Three Ways. She moves in longitude over the Zodiac, in latitude, and in depth; one movement is revolution, another a spiral, the third is strangely named “Anomaly” by scientific men, although there is nothing irregular or confused to be seen in her returns to her stations. Therefore it is no wonder if a lion[353] did once fall on to Peloponnesus, owing to the velocity; the wonder is that we do not see every day _Fallings of men, lives trampled to the dust_,[354] men tumbling off through the air and turning somersaults. Yet [Sidenote: 938] it is ridiculous to raise a discussion about their remaining there, if they can neither come into being nor subsist at all. When we see Egyptians and Troglodytes, over whose heads the sun stands for the space of one brief day at the solstice and then passes on, all but shrivelled up by the dryness of the air around them, is it likely, I ask you, that people in the moon can endure twelve summers in each year, the sun standing plumb straight above them at every full moon? Then as to winds and clouds and [Sidenote: B] showers, without which plants can neither receive nor maintain existence, it is out of the question to conceive of their being formed, because the surrounding atmosphere is too hot and too rare. For even here the highest mountain tops do not get our fierce and conflicting storms, the air being already in turmoil from its lightness escapes any such condensation. Or are we really to say that, as Athena dropped a little nectar and ambrosia into Achilles’ mouth when he was refusing nourishment, even so the moon, who is called and who is Athena,[355] feeds man by sending up ambrosia day by day, in which form old Pherecydes [Sidenote: C] thinks that the Gods take food! For as to that Indian root, of which Megasthenes tells us that men, who neither eat nor drink but are without mouths,[356] burn a little, and make a smoke, and are nourished by the smells, how is it to be found growing there if there is no rain on the moon?’ XXV. When Theon had finished: ‘Well and kindly done,’ I said, ‘to unbend our brows by your witty argument; it makes us bold in reply, since we have no very harsh or severe criticism to expect. It is a true saying that there is little to choose between those who are vehemently convinced in such matters and those who are vehemently offended at them and incredulous, and will not look quietly into the possibilities. To begin, supposing that men do not inhabit the moon, it does not follow [Sidenote: D] that she has come into being just for nothing. Why, our earth, as we see, is not in active use or inhabited in her whole extent; but a small part of her only, mere promontories or peninsulas which emerge from the abyss, is fertile in animals and plants; of the other parts, some are desert and unfruitful owing to storms and droughts, while most are sunk under the ocean. But you, lover and admirer of Aristarchus that you are, do not attend to Crates and his reading: _Ocean, the birth and being of us all, Both men and Gods, covers the most of earth._[357] ‘However, this is a long way from saying that all has been brought into being for nothing. The sea sends up soft exhalations, [Sidenote: E] and delightful breezes in midsummer heat; from the uninhabited and icebound land snows quietly melt which open and fertilize all; earth stands in the midst, in Plato’s[358] words, “unswerving guardian and maker of day and night”. Nothing then prevents the moon too, though barren of animal life, from allowing the light around her to be reflected and to stream [Sidenote: F] about, and the rays of the stars to flow together and to be united within her; thus she combines and digests the vapours proceeding from earth, and at the same time gets rid of what is scorching and violent in the sun’s heat. And here we will make bold to yield a point to ancient legend, and to say that she has been held to be Artemis, a maiden and no mother, but in other ways helpful and serviceable. For, surely, nothing which has been said, dear Theon, proves it to be impossible that she is inhabited in the way alleged. For her revolution is one very gentle and calm; which smoothes the air, and duly [Sidenote: 939] blends and distributes it, so that there is no fear of those who have lived there falling or slipping off her. If not this, neither are the changes and variety of her orbit due to anomaly or confusion, but astronomers make us see a marvellous order and progress in it all, as they confine her within circles which roll around other circles, according to some not herself stirring, according to others moving gently and evenly and with uniform speeds. For these circles and revolutions, and their relations to one another, and to us, work out with very great accuracy the phenomena of her varying height and depth and her [Sidenote: B] passages in latitude as well as in longitude. As to the great heat and continuous charring caused by the sun, you will no longer fear these if you will set against the [eleven][359] summer conjunctions the full-moons, and the continuity of the change, which does not allow extremes to last long, tempering both extremes, and producing a convenient temperature, while between the two the inhabitants enjoy a climate nearly resembling our spring. In the next place, the sun sends down to us, and drives home through her thick and resisting atmosphere, heat fed [Sidenote: C] by exhalations; but there a fine and transparent air scatters and distributes the stream of light, which has no body or fuel beneath it. As to woods and crops, here where we live they are nourished by rains, but in other places, as far up as round your Thebes and Syene, the earth drinks water which comes out of herself, not from rain; it enjoys winds and dews, and would not, I think, thank us for comparing it in fruitfulness with our own, even where the rainfall is heaviest. With us, plants of the same order, if severely pinched by winter frosts, [Sidenote: D] bring forth much excellent fruit, while in Libya, and with you in Egypt, they bear cold very badly and shrink from the winters. Again, while Gedrosia, and Troglodytis which reaches down to ocean, are unproductive and treeless in all parts because of the drought, yet, in the adjacent and surrounding sea, plants grow to a marvellous size and luxuriate in its depths; some of these called “olive-trees”, some “laurels”, some “hair of Isis”. But the “love-come-back” as it is called, if taken out of the earth, not only lives when hung up for as long as you please, but also sprouts. Some are sown close on [Sidenote: E] to winter, some in the height of summer, sesame or millet for instance; thyme or centaury, if sown in a good rich soil and watered, changes its qualities and strength; both rejoice in drought and reach their proper growth in it. But if, as is said, like most Arabian plants, they do not endure even dews, but fade and perish when moistened, what wonder, I ask, if roots and seeds and trees grow on the moon which need no rains or snows, but are fitted by Nature for a light and summer-like atmosphere? Why, again, may it not be probable that breezes ascend warmed by the moon and by the whirl of her revolution, and that she is accompanied by quiet breezes, which shed dews and moisture around, and when [Sidenote: F] distributed suffice for the grown plants, her own climate being neither fiery nor dried up, but mild and engendering moisture. For no touch of dryness reaches us from her, but many effects of moisture and fertility, as increase of plants, putrefaction of flesh, turning of wine to flatness, softening of wood, easy delivery to women. I am afraid of stirring Pharnaces to the fray [Sidenote: 940] again, now that he is quiet, if I enumerate as cases of restoring moisture the tides of the ocean (as his own school describes them), and the fillings of gulfs when their flood is augmented by the moon. So I will rather turn to you, dear Theon, for you told us in explaining these words of Alcman,[360] _Dew feeds them, born of Zeus and Lady Moon_, that here he calls the atmosphere Zeus, and says that it is liquefied and turned into dew by the moon. Probably, my friend, her nature is opposite to the sun’s, since not only does he naturally consolidate and dry things which she softens and [Sidenote: B] disperses, but she also liquefies and cools his heat, as it falls upon her from him, and mingles with herself. Certainly they are in error who hold that the moon is a fiery and charred body; and those who require for animals there all the things which they have here, seem to lack eyes for the inequalities of Nature, since it is possible to find greater and more numerous divergencies and dissimilarities between animals and animals than between them and the inanimate world. And grant that men without mouths and nourished on smells are not to be found—I do not [Sidenote: C] think they are—, but the potency which Ammonius himself used to expound to us has been hinted at by Hesiod[361] in the line _Nor yet in mallow and in asphodel How great the virtue._ But Epimenides made it plain in actual experience, teaching that Nature always keeps the fire of life in the animal with but little fuel, for if it get as much as the size of an olive, it needs no more sustenance. Now men in the moon, if men there be, are compactly framed, we may believe, and capable of being nourished on what they get; for the moon herself they say, [Sidenote: D] like the sun who is a fiery body many times larger than the earth, is nourished on the humours coming from the earth, as are the other stars too in their infinite numbers. Light, like them, and simple in their needs, may we conceive those animals to be which the upper region produces. We do not see such animals, nor yet do we see that they require a different region, nature, climate. Supposing that we were unable to approach the sea or touch it, but merely caught views of it in the distance, [Sidenote: E] and were told that its water is bitter and undrinkable and briny, and then some one said that it supports in its depths many great animals with all sorts of shapes, and is full of monsters, to all of whom water is as air to us, he would seem to be making up a parcel of fairy tales; just so is it with us, it seems, and such is our attitude towards the moon, when we refuse to believe that she has men dwelling on her. Her inhabitants, I think, must wonder still more greatly at this earth, a sort of sediment and slime of the universe appearing through damps, and mists, and clouds, a place unlighted, low, motionless; and must ask whether it breeds and supports animals with motion, respiration [Sidenote: F] and warmth. And if they should anyhow have a chance of hearing those lines of Homer:[362] _Grim mouldy regions which e’en Gods abhor_, and— _‘Neath hell so far as earth below high heaven_,[363] they will say they are written about a place exactly such as this, and that Hades is a colony planted here, and Tartarus, and that there is only one earth—the moon—being midway between the upper regions and these lower ones.’ XXVI. I had scarcely finished speaking when Sylla broke in: ‘Stop, Lamprias, and shut the door on your oratory, lest you run my myth aground before you know it, and make confusion of my drama, which requires another stage and a different setting. Now, I am only its actor, but I will first, if you see no objection, name the poet, beginning in Homer’s[364] words: [Sidenote: 941] _Far o’er the brine an isle Ogygian lies_, distant from Britain five days’ sail to the West. There are three other islands equidistant from Britain and from one another, in the general direction of the sun’s summer setting. The natives have a story that in one of these Cronus has been [Sidenote: B] confined by Zeus, but that he, having a son for gaoler,[365] has been settled beyond those islands and the sea, which they call the Gulf of Cronus. To the great continent by which the ocean is fringed is a voyage of about five thousand stades, made in row-boats, from Ogygia, of less from the other islands, the sea being slow of passage and full of mud because of the number of streams which the great mainland discharges, forming alluvial tracts and making the sea heavy like land, whence an opinion prevailed that it was actually frozen. The coasts of the mainland are inhabited by Greeks living around a bay as large as the Maeotic, with its mouth nearly opposite that of the Caspian [Sidenote: C] Sea. These Greeks speak of themselves as continental, and of those who inhabit our land as islanders, because it is washed all round by the sea. They think that those who came with Hercules and were left behind by him, mingled later on with the subjects of Cronus, and rekindled, so to speak, the Hellenic life which was becoming extinguished and overborne by barbarian languages, laws, and ways of life, and so it again became strong and vigorous. Thus the first honours are paid to Hercules, the second to Cronus. When the star of Cronus, called by us the Shining One, by them, as he told us, the Night Watcher, has reached Taurus again after an interval of thirty years, having for a long time before made preparation for [Sidenote: D] the sacrifice and the voyage, they send forth men chosen by lot in as many ships as are required, putting on board all the supplies and stuff for the great rowing voyage before them, and for a long sojourn in a strange land. They put out, and naturally do not all fare alike; but those who come safely out of the perils of the sea land first on the outlying islands, which are inhabited by Greeks, and day after day, for thirty days, see the sun hidden for less than one hour. This is the night, with a darkness which is slight and of a twilight hue, and has a light over it from the West. There they spend ninety days, [Sidenote: E] meeting with honourable and kindly treatment, and being addressed as holy persons, after which they pass on, now with help from the winds. There are no inhabitants except themselves, and those who have been sent before them. For those who have joined in the service of the God for thirty years are allowed to sail back home, but most prefer to settle quietly in the place where they are, some because they have grown used to it, some because all things are there in plenty without pain or trouble, while their life is passed in sacrifices and festivals, or given to literature or Philosophy. For the natural beauty [Sidenote: F] of the isle is wonderful, and the mildness of the environing air. Some, when they are of a mind to sail away, are actually prevented by the God, who manifests himself to them as to familiars and friends, not in dreams only or by signs, for many meet with shapes and voices of spirits, openly seen and heard. Cronus himself sleeps within a deep cave resting on rock which looks like gold, this sleep being devised for him by Zeus in place of chains. Birds fly in at the topmost part of the rock, and bear him ambrosia, and the whole island is pervaded by the fragrance shed from the rock as out of a well. The spirits of whom we hear serve and care for Cronus, having been his comrades in [Sidenote: 942] the time when he was really king over Gods and men. Many are the utterances which they give forth of their own prophetic power, but the greatest and most important they announce when they come down as dreams of Cronus; for the things which Zeus premeditates, Cronus dreams, when sleep has stayed[366] the Titanic motions and stirrings of the soul within him, and that which is royal and divine alone remains, pure and unalloyed. [Sidenote: B] ‘Now the stranger, having been received here, as he told us, and serving the God at his leisure, attained as much skill in astronomy as is attainable by the most advanced geometry; of other Philosophy he applied himself to the physical branches. Then, having a strange desire and yearning to see “the Great Island” (for so it appears they call our world), when the thirty years were passed, and the relief parties arrived from home, he said farewell to his friends and sailed forth, carrying a complete equipment of all kinds, and abundant store of provision for the way in golden beakers. All the adventures which befell him, and all the men whose lands he visited, how he met with [Sidenote: C] holy writings and was initiated into all the mysteries, it would take more than one day to enumerate as he did, well and carefully and with all details. Listen now to those which concern our present discussion. He spent a very long time in Carthage.[367]... He there discovered certain sacred parchments which had been secretly withdrawn when the older city was destroyed, and had lain a long time in the earth unnoticed; and he said that of all the Gods who appear to us we ought specially to honour the moon with all our substance (and so he charged me to do), because she was most potent in our life. XXVII. ‘When I marvelled at this, and asked for clearer [Sidenote: D] statements, he went on: “Many tales, Sylla, are told among the Greeks about the Gods, but not all are well told. For instance, about Demeter and Cora, they are right in their names, but wrong in supposing that they both belong to the same region; for the latter is on earth, and has power over earthly things, the former is in the moon and is concerned with things of the moon. The moon has been called both Cora and Persephone, Persephone because she gives light, Cora because we also use the same Greek word for the pupil of the eye, in which the image of the beholder flashes back, as the sunbeam is seen in the moon. In the stories told about [Sidenote: E] their wanderings and the search there is an element of truth. They yearn for one another when parted, and often embrace in shadow. And what is told of Cora, that she is sometimes in heaven and in light, and again in night and darkness, is no untruth, only time has brought error into the numbers; for it is not during six months, but at intervals of six months, [Sidenote: F] that we see her received by the earth, as by a mother, in the shadow, and more rarely at intervals of five months; for to leave Hades is impossible to her, who is herself a ‘bound of Hades’, as Homer[368] well hints in the words, _Now to Elysian plains, earth’s utmost bound._ For where the shadow of the earth rests in its passage, there Homer placed the limit and boundary of earth. To that limit comes no man that is bad or impure, but the good after death are conveyed thither, and pass a most easy life, not, however, one blessed or divine until the second death.”‘ XXVIII. ‘But what is that, Sylla?’ ‘Ask me not of these things, for I am going to tell you fully myself. The common [Sidenote: 943] view that man is a composite creature is correct, but it is not correct that he is composed of two parts only. For they suppose that mind is in some sense a part of soul, which is as great a mistake as to think that soul is a part of body; mind is as much better a thing and more divine than soul, as soul is than body. Now the union of soul with body makes up the passion or emotion, the further union with mind produces reason; the former is the origin of pleasure and pain, the latter of virtue and vice. When these three principles have been compacted, the earth contributes body to the birth of man, the moon soul, the sun reason, just as he contributes her light to the moon. The death which we die is of two kinds; the one [Sidenote: B] makes man two out of three, the other makes him one out of two; the one takes place in the earth which is the realm of Demeter, and is initiation unto her,[369] so that the Athenians used in ancient times to call the dead “Demetrians”, the other is in the moon, and is of Persephone; Hermes is the associate on earth of the one, of the other in heaven. Demeter parts soul from body quickly and with force; Persephone parts mind from soul gently and very slowly, and therefore has been called[370] “Of the Birth to Unity”, for the best part of man is left in oneness, when separated by her. Each process happens according to [Sidenote: C] Nature, as thus: It is appointed that every soul, irrational or rational, when it has quitted the body, should wander in the region between earth and moon, but not all for an equal time; unjust and unchaste souls pay penalties for their wrongdoings; but the good must for a certain appointed time, sufficient to purge away and blow to the winds, as noxious exhalations, defilements from the body, which is their vicious cause, be in that mildest part of the air which they call “The Meadows of Hades”; then they return as from long and distant exile back to their country, they taste [Sidenote: D] such joy as men feel here who are initiated, joy mingled with much amazement and trouble, yet also with a hope which is each man’s own. For many who are already grasping at the moon she pushes off and washes away, and some even of those souls which are already there and are turning round to look below are seen to be plunged again into the abyss. But those which have passed above, and have found firm footing, first go round like victors wreathed with crowns of feathers called “crowns of constancy”, because they kept the irrational part of the soul obedient to the curb of reason, and well ordered in life. Then with countenance like a sunbeam, and soul borne lightly upwards by fire, as here, namely that of the air about [Sidenote: E] the moon, they receive tone and force from it, as iron takes an edge in its bath; for that which is still volatile and diffuse is strengthened and becomes firm and transparent, so that they are nourished by such vapour as meets them, and well did Heraclitus[371] say that “Souls feed on smell in Hades.” XXIX. First they look on the moon herself, her size, her beauty, and her nature, which is not single or unmixed, but as it were a composition of earth and star. For as the earth has become soft by being mixed with air and moisture, and as the blood infused into the flesh produces sensibility, so the moon, they say, being mingled with air through all her depth, is endowed with soul and with fertility, and at the same time [Sidenote: F] receives a balance, lightness set against weight. Even so the universe itself, duly framed together of things having some an upward tendency, some a downward, is freed from all movement of place. This Xenocrates apprehended, it would seem, by some divine reasoning, having received the suggestion from Plato. For it is Plato[372] who showed that every star has been compounded of earth and fire by means of intermediate natures given in proportion, since nothing reaches the senses into which earth and light do not enter. But Xenocrates says that the stars and the sun are compounded out of fire and the [Sidenote: 944] first density, the moon out of the second density and her own air, and earth out of water, fire, and the third density; and that as an universal law, neither the dense alone nor the rarefied alone is capable of receiving soul. So much then for the substance of the moon. But her breadth and bulk are not what geometricians say, but many times greater. The reason why she but seldom measures the shadow of the earth with [three of] her own diameters, is not its smallness, but her heat, whereby she increases her speed that she may swiftly pass through and beyond the dark region, bearing from out it the souls of the good, as they hasten and cry aloud, for being in the shadow they no longer hear the harmony of heaven. At the same [Sidenote: B] time there are borne up from below through the shadow the souls of those who are to be punished, with wailing and loud cries. Hence comes the widespread custom of clanking vessels of brass during eclipses, with a din and a clatter to reach the souls. Also the face, as we call it, terrifies them, when they are near, so grim and weird is it to their sight. Really it is nothing of the kind; but as our earth has gulfs deep and great, one here which streams inwards towards us from the Pillars of Hercules, [Sidenote: C] outwards the Caspian, and those about the Red Sea, even such are those depths and hollows of the moon. The largest of them they call the Gulf of Hecate, where the souls endure and exact retribution for all the things which they have suffered or done ever since they became spirits; two of them are long, through which the souls pass, now to the parts of the moon which are turned toward heaven, now back to the side next to earth. The parts of the moon toward heaven are called “the Elysian plain”, those toward earth “the plain of Persephone Antichthon”. XXX. ‘However, the spirits do not pass all their time upon her, they come down here to superintend oracles, take part [Sidenote: D] in the highest rites of initiation and mysteries, become guardian avengers of wrongdoing, and shine forth as saving lights in war and on the sea. In these functions, whatever they do in a way which is not right, from anger or to win unrighteous favour, or in jealousy, they suffer for it, being thrust down to earth again and imprisoned in human bodies. From the better of them, the attendants of Cronus said that they are themselves sprung, as in earlier times the Dactyli of Ida, the Corybantes [Sidenote: E] in Phrygia, the Trophoniades in Udora of Boeotia, and countless others in many parts of the inhabited world; whose temples and houses and appellations remain to this day. Some there are whose powers are failing because they have passed to another place by an honourable exchange. This happens to some sooner, to others later, when mind has been separated from soul; the separation comes by love for the image which is in the sun; through it there shines upon them that desirable, beautiful, divine, and blessed presence for which all Nature yearns, yet in different ways. For it is through love of the sun that the moon [Sidenote: F] herself makes her circuit, and has her meetings with him to receive from him all fertility. That Nature which is the soul remains on the moon, preserving traces and dreams of the former life, and of it you may take it that it has been rightly said: _Winged as a dream the soul takes flight away._[373] Not at the first, and not when it is quit of the body does this happen to it, but afterwards when it becomes deserted and solitary, set free from mind. Of all that Homer has told us I think that there is nothing more divine than where he speaks of those in Hades: _Next was I ware of mighty Hercules, His ghost—himself among the immortals dwells._[374] For the self of each of us is not courage, nor fear, nor desire, any more than it is a parcel of flesh and of humours; it is that whereby we understand and think. The soul being shaped by [Sidenote: 945] the mind and itself shaping the body and encompassing it upon all sides, stamps its form upon it, so that even if it is separated from both for a long time, yet it possesses the likeness and the stamp, and is rightly called an image. Of these, the moon, as has been said, is the element, for they are resolved into her just as are the bodies of the dead into earth; the temperate speedily, those who embraced a life of quiet and Philosophy; for, having been set free by mind, and having no further use for the passions, they wither away. But of the ambitious, [Sidenote: B] and active, and sensuous, and passionate, some are distracted as though in sleep, dreaming out their memories of life, as the soul of Endymion; but when their restless and susceptible nature starts them out of the moon and draws them to another birth, she does not suffer it, but draws them back and soothes them. For no trifling matter is it, nor quiet, nor conventional, when in the absence of mind, they get them a body by passionate endeavour; Tityi and Typhones, and that Typhon who seized Delphi and confounded the oracle there by insolence and force, came of such souls as these, deserted by reason, and left to the [Sidenote: C] wild wanderings of their emotional part. But in course of time the moon receives even these unto herself and brings them to order; then, when the sun again sows mind, she receives it with vital power and makes new souls, and, thirdly, earth provides a body; for earth gives nothing after death of what she received for birth; the sun receives nothing, save that he receives back the mind which he gives, but the moon both receives and gives, and compounds, and distributes in diverse functions; she who compounds has Ilithyia for her name, she who distributes, Artemis. And of the three Fates Atropus has her station about the sun and gives the first impulse of generation; Clotho moving about the moon combines and mingles, lastly Lachesis, upon the earth, lends her hand, and she has most to do with Fortune; for that which is without soul is powerless in itself and is affected by others, mind is free from affection and sovereign; soul a compound and a middle [Sidenote: D] term, has, like the moon, been formed by the God, a blend and mixture of things above and things below, and thus bears the same relation to the sun which the earth does to the moon.’ ‘Such’, said Sylla, ‘is the story which I heard the stranger relate, but he had it from the chamberlains and ministers of Cronus, as he himself used to say. But you and your friends, Lamprias, may take the story in what way you will.’ NOTES (1) c. 1, 920 B. The opening of the Dialogue is abrupt; compare that of ‘On the Instances of Delay in Divine Punishment’. Many of the Symposiacs open as abruptly, and there a former conversation is sometimes resumed by the same speakers. It seems not impossible that there had been a previous Dialogue on the Face in the Moon, and, again, that the περὶ ψυχῆς preceded the _De Sera numinum Vindicta_. Wyttenbach reads τῷ γ᾽ ἐμῷ for the MSS. τῷ γὰρ ἐμῷ, but suggests τῷ παρ᾽ ἐμοί, which seems better. Sylla is not the author, but the depository, of the myth. For εἰ δεῖ τι ... προσανακρούσασθαι he reads εἰ δή τι ... προσανεκρούσασθε. The past indicative is required by the τί δὲ οὐκ ἐμέλλομεν which follows, the reference being to the previous discussion (see Introduction). The combination εἰ δή or εἰ δή τι is a frequent one. If δή was altered to δεῖ, the further alteration of the verb would follow. Sylla’s language is nautical, as in c. 26, ‘Did you really stop rowing, and back-water on to the received views?’ (2) c. 3. 921 A. _For our sight._ ὄψις is an old correction for ἴτυς of the MSS., and is required by the context. (3) c. 4. 921 C. _Equal in breadth and length._ Empedocles (Fr. 17, 20) has a line καὶ Φιλότης ἐν τοῖσιν, ἴση μῆκός τε πλάτος τε. This poetical quotation is introduced to indicate that the world is not a mere point, but has sensible dimensions. In literal truth, the habitable world was held to be twice as long as it was wide (i. e. N. to S.). The words as to the earth occupying ‘a point central to the sphere (i. e. orbit) of the moon’ are quoted from the Second Hypothesis of Aristarchus (see Introduction). It has been proposed (by Dr. Max Adler) to substitute the name of Clearchus for that of Hipparchus. But the quarrel of Lamprias is not with philosophers but with astronomers and mathematicians, represented by Apollonides and Menelaus. The greatest of them is of absolute authority as to angles of reflexion, &c., not so when he propounds a physical theory of vision, which many find unsatisfactory. For the theory itself see the quasi-Plutarchean _De Placitis_, 4, 13. For the words καίτοι γε φίλε πρίαμ᾽ (omitted in the translation), Turnebus proposed καίτοι γε φίλε Λαμπρία, which is very attractive as to the letters, but impossible, unless the text be wholly reconstructed, because Lamprias is himself the speaker. For discrepancies between the mathematically correct theory of reflexion and its physical application see chapters 17 and 23. (4) c. 7, 924 B. _That segments of beams...._ The sense intended by the translation is this: A beam is sawn into two segments on the earth’s surface. The two segments, which at first are separated by a short interval, move simultaneously towards the earth’s centre, but in converging, not parallel, lines, and jam each other long before they reach it. (This is suggested by Aristotle, _de Caelo_, 2, 14, 296 b 18.) For ἀποκρίπτεσθαι Dr. Purser suggests ἀποθρύπτεσθαι, which I have rendered; ἀποκύπτεσθαι (Aristoph. Lysis. 1003), ‘to crouch aside’, seems possible. (5) c. 9, 925 B. Perhaps the line of Empedocles may run ἅρματος ὡσπερανεὶ (L. C. P.) χνόη ᾄσσεται. (6) c. 10, 925 E. The MSS. have ἀλλὰ καὶ κινητικὸ ταύτῃ διάστημα τὸ δέον, for which Madvig (_Adv. Crit._, vol. i, p. 665) makes the admirable correction: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐκείνῃ καὶ ταύτῃ δυίστημα δοτέον. (7) c. 14, 927 F. _The growth within._ I read αὔξησιν, which is sometimes confused with ἕξιν. Cp. Ar. _Eth. N._ 3, 14, 149 b 4. (8) c. 19, 932 C. [_the moon ... bodies also_]. The words in brackets have been supplied from the substance of the passage of Aristotle mentioned in the footnote. (9) c. 19, 932 C. Posidonius’ definition is introduced because it contains an admission that the moon casts a shadow, and is therefore an earthlike, not a starlike, body. It has been proposed to alter σκιᾶς into σκιᾷ, and the construction with σύνοδος could be justified by Platonic examples (see R. Kunze in _Rhein. Mus._ vol. 64, p. 635), but the assumed corruption is improbable. E appears[375] to read οἷς not ἧς; the clause introduced by the relative seems to contain a limitation of the phenomenon to ‘those who experience the obscuration’, i.e. those in the track of the shadow over the earth’s surface. In this case, the words may either have come from a marginal gloss on τόδε τὸ πάθος, or should be transposed with those words, as suggested by Dr. Purser. This will be consistent with the account of a solar eclipse given by Cleomedes (2, 3, p. 172), doubtless after Posidonius; it is not αὐτοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ πάθος ἀλλὰ τῆς ἡμετέρας ὄψεως, whereas an eclipse of the moon is αὐτῆς τῆς θεοῦ πάθος, irrespective of the place of the terrestrial observer. (10) c. 24, 937 F. _A lion._ Kepler suggests that there was an old confusion between λῖς, a lion, and λᾶς, a stone. (11) c. 24, 938 C. _without mouths._ The MSS. have εὐστόμους, but ἀστόμους is an old correction adopted by W. Pliny, _N. H._ 7, 2, 25, quotes Megasthenes for a mouthless people living near the sources of the Ganges. See also Müller, _Fragm. Hist. Graec._ 2, 427 (Adler). For the notion of living by smell cp. Heraclitus (Fr. 38). (12) c. 26, 941 A. This interesting passage should be read by the side of _De Defectu Oraculorum_, c. 18, p. 19 F (p. 135 above), which has a close verbal resemblance, and is perhaps extracted from it (Adler). Briareus may have been named in the full text here, as the son of Cronus. In Hesiod, _Theogon._ 147, he is the son of Uranus, and so Eustathius on Hom. _Il._ 1, 403, but a little later on Eustathius mentions Cronus as his father on the authority of Arrian. παρακάτω κεῖσθαι of the MSS. is difficult. Adler would read Βριάρεων δὲ τὸν υἱὸν ὡς ἔχοντα φρουρὰν τῶν τε νήσων ἐκείνων καὶ τῆς θαλάττης, ἣν Κρόνιον πέλαγος ὀνομάζουσιν, παρακατῳκίσθαι. Dr. Purser points out that the Straits of Gibraltar were first called the Pillars of Cronus, afterwards the Pillars of Briareus, and lastly the Pillars of Hercules (_Schol. ad Dionys. Perieg._ 64 in Müller’s _Fragm. Hist. Gr._ 3, 640). I have followed the reading of Emperius πέραν κατῳκίσθαι, but without much confidence. Cronus could not well, as Dr. Purser points out, have been _in_ one of the islands, and also _beyond_ it. (13) c. 26, 942 C. I venture to suggest that the text may have run something as follows: Πλεῖστον γὰρ ἐν Καρχηδόνι χρόνον διέτριψεν ἅτε δὴ παρ᾽ ἡμῖν μέταλλα ἔχων, ὃς καί τινας, ὅθ᾽ ἡ προτέρα πόλις ἀπώλλυτο, κτλ. The long sojourn of the stranger in Carthage would be explained if he owned mines there. In the sequel φαινομένων may perhaps stand for Φοινικικῶν and χρῆναι for χρηστήρια εἶναι. 408 F (p. 110, l. 19). πρὸς δὲ πίστιν ἐπισφαλὴς καὶ ὑπεύθυνος. If ἐπισφαλής stands, it should rather mean ‘liable to take good faith (like an infection)‘, a very common use of the adjective and its adverb in Plutarch. See e. g. 661 B, 631 C. This seems rather a forced oxymoron here. Wyttenbach doubted, and Madvig proposed ἀνεπισφαλής, a word said to be found in Themistius. On the passage see J. H. W. Strijd in _Class. Rev._, xxviii, p. 219. Supplemental Notes 1918 418 A (p. 132, above). ... πυθυμένου (Φιλίππου) τίσιν ἀντιμαρτυρεῖν θεοῖς οἴεται τοὺς ἀνταγωνιζομένους, Τούτοις, ἔφη, τοῖς περὶ τὸ χρηστήριον, οἷς ἄρτι τοὺς ἔξω Πυλῶν πάντας Ἕλληνας ἡ πόλις κατοργιάζουσα μέχρι Τεμπῶν ἐλήλακεν. I have followed Amyot, whose version is perhaps more intelligible than the Latin, but involves the change of θεοῖς to θείοις (Turnebus) and the transposition of Tempe and Thermopylae. If θεοῖς can be retained, the reference will be to Dionysus and Apollo, the two gods connected with the sanctuary (pp. 67, 138, &c.) and the purgation of the latter at Tempe, commemorated by periodical rites. θείοις appears to correspond more closely to ἱεροῖς above. 926 C-D (pp. 271-2). διὰ τοῦτο οὖν σώματι ψυχὴν μὴ λέγομεν εἶναι μηδέν, οὐ χρῆμα θεῖον ὑπὸ βρίθους ἢ πάχους, οὐρανόν τε πάντα καὶ γῆν καὶ θάλασσαν ἐν ταὐτῷ περιπολοῦντα, καὶ διιστάμενον εἰς σάρκας ἥκειν καὶ νεῦρα, καὶ μυελούς, καὶ παθέων μυρίων μεθ᾽ ὑγρότητος. For διιστάμενον W. proposes διιπτάμενον. I have, with great hesitation, followed Herwerden’s μηδὲ νοῦν (Emperius μηδὲ νοῦ χρῆμα), as the substantive agrees with the participle, but the whole passage is difficult. ὑπὸ βρίθους ἢ πάχους seems to be out of place (can ὑπό stand for something equivalent to ἄνευ or to Madvig’s ἀθῷον ὑπό)? In the paper mentioned on p. 54 Dr. Max Adler adduces an interesting passage from Maximus Tyrius (diss. 22, 6) closely parallel to this, as proving that Plutarch was drawing upon Posidonius. The participle διιπταμένη occurs. Footnote 302: In c. 22 Apollonides is made to state the angular diameter of the moon at 12 ‘fingers’, i. e. one degree. Footnote 303: See Note (1), p. 309. Footnote 304: See Note (2), p. 309. Footnote 305: Arist. _Probl._ 12, 3. Footnote 306: See Note (3), p. 309. Footnote 307: See Aristarchus, _Magnitudes and Distances_, Hypothesis 2. Footnote 308: See the Homeric _Hymn to Hermes_, 99-100, where the moon is the daughter of Pallas (‘the Pallantean orb sublime’, Shelley), cp. p. 294. Footnote 309: As Homer, _Od._ 23, 330; 24, 539; Hesiod, _Theog._ 515. Footnote 310: e. g. _Il._ 10, 394. Cp. Heraclides Ponticus, 15. Footnote 311: _P. V._ 349. Footnote 312: Fr. 88. Footnote 313: W. reads μένειν (E has κινεῖν), but renders by ‘cieri’. Footnote 314: Fr. 733. Footnote 315: See note (4), p. 310. Footnote 316: Professor Henry Jackson has pointed out that the words form a hexameter line. For the Greek word see p. 291. Its introduction here is due to M. Bernardakis. Footnote 317: Reading τῇ γῇ, with Madvig. Footnote 318: See note (5), p. 310. Footnote 319: αἰρομένη MSS. Footnote 320: Prop. 7. Footnote 321: See note (6), p. 310. Footnote 322: Cf. _Il._ 9, 63. Footnote 323: Reading ὅλως (Emperius, ap. Ed. Teub.), for ὅμως. Footnote 324: See additional note, p. 312. Footnote 325: See e. g. _Tim._ 32 C. Footnote 326: _Theog._ 120, 195. Footnote 327: Pindar, Fr. 57: see p. 179. Footnote 328: Reading ἕξει, with Emperius. Footnote 329: See note (7), p. 310. Footnote 330: Reading ᾀἱδίου, with Emperius. Footnote 331: Ion Chius, Fr. 57 (Nauck). Footnote 332: Reading διίησιν, with Madvig. Footnote 333: I have followed the paraphrase of the Greek words suggested by Wyttenbach. For the physical facts see Ganot’s _Physics_, 516. Footnote 334: _Timaeus_, 46 A-C (Plato does not discuss plane folding mirrors). Footnote 335: Reading χωρεῖν for χωροῦντες. Footnote 336: Kepler has supplied such a diagram (in his translation, p. 131). Footnote 337: See p. 253. Footnote 338: Pindar, Fr. 107. Paean 9 (see _Oxy. Pap._ 1908, 841). Footnote 339: _Od._ 20, 352 and 357; 14, 162; 19, 307. Footnote 340: Reading τὸ ἕν for τόν. Footnote 341: Prop. 17. Footnote 342: _De Caelo_, 2, 13, 293 b 20. Footnote 343: See note (8), p. 310. Footnote 344: See note (9), p. 310. Footnote 345: Reading ἡ δὲ τῆς Σελήνης with Mr. W. R. Paton, see _Class. Rev._ vol. 26, p. 269. Footnote 346: Strictly speaking, both cases are of ‘overtaking’, but the results follow as stated. Footnote 347: _Il._ 9, 212. Footnote 348: See Plato, _Phaedo_, 110 B-C. Footnote 349: _Od._ 311. Footnote 350: Soph. (_Lemnians_), Fr. 348. Footnote 351: τραπέμπαλιν is due here to Meineke, ap. Ed. Teub., see p. 267. Footnote 352: _Tim._ 40 B. Footnote 353: See note (10), p. 311. Footnote 354: Aesch. _Suppl._ 937. Footnote 355: See p. 262 and note. Footnote 356: See n. (11), p. 311. Footnote 357: _Il._ 14, 246. The second line appears to have been added by Crates and is not in our texts. Footnote 358: _Tim._ 40 C. Footnote 359: Kepler would read ‘twelve’. Footnote 360: Fr. 48. Footnote 361: _W. and D._ 41. Footnote 362: _Il._ 20, 64. Footnote 363: _Il._ 8, 16. Footnote 364: _Od._ 7, 244. Footnote 365: See n. (13), p. 311. Footnote 366: Reading ἐπειδὰν παύσῃ, with Madvig. Footnote 367: See n. (14), p. 312. Footnote 368: _Od._ 9, 563. Footnote 369: i. e. the words τελεῖν, τελευτᾶν are allied, see p. 215. Footnote 370: Plato, _Tim._ 31 B and end. Footnote 371: Fr. 38. Footnote 372: _Tim._ 31 B. Footnote 373: _Od._ 11, 222. Footnote 374: _Od._ 11, 600. Footnote 375: From a note made in 1910, which cannot at present (1916) be verified. NOTE ON THE MYTHS IN PLUTARCH The three ‘myths’ which are found in these Dialogues are all avowedly Platonic; they are introduced and dismissed in Platonic formulae, and much of the imagery is drawn from Plato. Yet the treatment is Plutarch’s own, and the style, though dignified and elevated after his fashion, never suggests an imitation of Plato which could only be parody. New matter is brought in, mostly gleaned from the astronomy of his day. The movements of the heavenly bodies have been an inspiration to later poets of verse and prose: _Minerva breathes on me, Apollo guides, And the nine Muses point me to the Bears._ To Plutarch the subject was rather one of earnest curiosity, as he turns to account the details and their theological application, read by him in the philosophers of, or nearly of, his own age. The purpose of the Platonic myth is to carry the argument beyond and above the region of logic and analysis, into that of poetry and constructive truth, upon matters where strict proof was impossible. The reader may be referred to Bishop Westcott’s Essay on _Religious Thought in the West_, and to Professor J. A. Stewart’s book on _The Myths of Plato_. (1) It will be convenient to look first into the myth of Thespesius in Plutarch’s Dialogue _On the Instances of Delay in Divine Punishment_ (see pp. 205-13 of this book). The motive is identical with that of the myth of Er in the _Republic_, yet with a difference. Plato gives us an experience from the world beyond death, granted to one who had been taken for dead during several days, in order to carry to a higher plane his argument for the victory here and hereafter of Justice over Injustice. Plutarch, as a moral teacher and ‘physician of souls’, concerned to restore individuals who have fallen, and to keep the falling on their feet, gives us the picture of ‘The Rake Reformed’, taking an extreme instance of a vicious character restored to sanity by glimpses of penalties and of bliss beyond this life, in order to deter and encourage others under temptation. The name Aridaeus, changed to Thespesius, ‘The Divine’, as an earnest of the reformation, reminds us of Ardiaeus the tyrant, in Plato. The language naturally falls into that of the Judgement-myth in the _Gorgias_. It is introduced by a similar form of words: ‘Now listen while I tell you a very beautiful story (λόγος) which you I think will call a myth (μῦθος), for all that I am about to say I wish to be regarded as true’ (Plato). ‘I can tell you a story which I have lately heard, yet I hesitate lest it may appear to you a myth.... Let me first make good the “probability” of my view, then we will start the myth, if myth indeed it be’ (Plutarch). The details in Plutarch are fuller and grimmer, and the language, though solemn, lacks the stately reticence of Plato. We are often reminded of words and thoughts in the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus. The celestial imagery is vague, and does not seem to suggest any special source more modern than Plato. It has a general resemblance to a passage in the _Phaedo_ (c. 58, p. 109 D, E). ‘We, dwelling in a hollow of the Earth, think that we dwell upon the Earth itself; and the air we call Heaven, and think that it is that Heaven wherein are the courses of the stars: whereas, by reason of weakness and sluggishness, we cannot go forth out of the air; but if a man could journey to the edge thereof, or having gotten wings could fly up, it would come to pass that even as fishes here which rise out of the sea do behold the things here, he, looking out, would behold the things there, and if his strength could endure the sight thereof, would see that there are the True Heaven, and the True Light, and the True Earth’ (Tr. J. A. Stewart). The daemons are only mentioned as Ministers or Ushers in the after-world; there is no threefold division of the man into body, soul, and mind, only one into body and soul; there is one reference to Delphi and its oracle, where a popular belief that Night and Apollo were partners is corrected. An attentive reading will bring out a resemblance of words and phrases to those familiar to us in the Sixth Book of the _Aeneid_, the subject of E. Norden’s fruitful and convincing study. (2) The beautiful story of Timarchus, the young friend of Socrates’ son, who passed into a trance in the cave of Trophonius, and saw things of the unseen world which were to be fully revealed to him three months later, i. e. in actual death, comes into the Dialogue _On the Genius of Socrates_ (pp. 36-40) to explain the special correspondence during life between the God and those gifted souls who possess mind, and become daemons or spirits after death. Here the three-fold division into body, soul, and mind (see p. 303) is maintained. A practical application of the myth is drawn by Theanor, the young Pythagorean visitor. As the supposed Dialogue takes place in B. C. 378, we do not expect to find in it the astronomy of Plutarch’s day, though he would not have shrunk from any anachronism. The general imagery is again that of the _Phaedo_, but there is a sea on which circular bodies, the stars which are men’s souls, float. The current which bears them is circular, yet not completely circular, not ending in the point where it started, but describing a continuous spiral (just as the moon does with reference to the earth’s path). This sea is inclined to the middle and highest point of the firmament by ‘a little less than eight-ninths of the whole’. This is puzzling; it may suggest the inclination of the ecliptic to the equator, or, again, that of the Milky Way to the ecliptic. Doubtless some explanation will be forthcoming. An interesting detail is ‘Styx, a way to Hades’, clearly the shadow in a lunar eclipse, since the moon ‘only avoids Styx by a slight elevation, and is caught once in one hundred and seventy-seven secondary measures’, the exact number of periods of twenty-four hours contained in six lunar months, the normal interval between two eclipses (see p. 286). ‘Secondary measures’ is a curious expression, since Plutarch elsewhere (Plat. Quaest. 3, p. 1006 E) calls periods of a day and a night ‘the primary measures’. It seems not impossible that δευτέροις here has replaced some word which the scribe could not make out, such as νυχθημέροις. We have the four principles of birth and death, as in the _Face in the Moon_; only there Clotho takes the moon for her sphere of office, and Lachesis the earth, here Lachesis takes the moon, Clotho the sun, Atropus the ‘unseen’. Neither list agrees with the assignment of functions by Xenocrates (see the end of Dr. M. Adler’s Dissertation mentioned below). (3) Sylla’s tale in the _Face in the Moon_ (pp. 299-308), a traveller’s story picked up in Carthage from one of those curious characters found on the outer margin of the Greek world in whom Plutarch delighted, is brought in with admirable dramatic fitness, shown in Sylla’s eagerness to produce it at the very outset, in the preparation for it by the skirmish between Theon and Lamprias, and in the vivacity of the narrative. It is dismissed with a Platonic formula: ‘Such is the story which I heard the stranger relate.... But you and your friends, Lamprias, may take the story in what way you will.’ Compare: ‘I am persuaded, O Callicles, that these things that are told are true.... Perchance this shall seem to you an old wife’s fable, and thou wilt despise it: well mightest thou despise it, if by searching we could find out aught better and truer’ (_Gorgias_, 526 D, 527 A). The astronomy of the myth is in the main that of the preceding Dialogue, and Sylla shows considerable familiarity with Plato and also with Xenocrates. It is perhaps noticeable how little interest Plutarch shows in geographical detail, contenting himself with such vague and antiquated views as sufficed for a setting to the story. He appears not to name Pytheas at all in the _Lives_, and only once (on a question of the tides) in the _Moralia_. The whole Dialogue has been the subject of a careful study by Dr. Max Adler of Vienna (_Dissertationes Vindobonenses_, 1910). Without entering into his general view of the structure, we may observe that Dr. Adler seems to be very successful in establishing the close connexion between it and the Dialogue _On the Cessation of the Oracles_, which he is probably right—though he reserves the proofs—in regarding as based upon it, and later in date. This comes out especially in the passages about the captivity of Cronus (cp. p. 301 with pp. 135-6), and the argument about ‘the Middle’ (cp. p. 270 with p. 144). He produces a happy quotation from Maximus Tyrius to establish beyond doubt that the source of an important passage about mind (pp. 271-2) was in Posidonius. His general conclusion as to the myth, is that it too is in the main from Posidonius, and that when Plutarch draws upon Xenocrates, it is through Posidonius. The latter appears to have been a writer of great industry and encyclopaedic learning, quoted as an authority on matters of history, physical geography, and what we should now call anthropology; not an original force in Philosophy, but successful in reconciling systems and making them available for human needs; one the aim of whose life-work was, in the words of one of his most recent exponents, _to make men at home in the universe_ (_Stoics and Sceptics_, by Edwyn Bevan, p. 98). Any one who will read Sylla’s myth, with a good map of the moon’s surface before him, will be able to locate for himself the ‘Gulf of Hecate’, and the long valleys leading to the Elysian plains, which, on her side remote from earth, enjoy diffused sunlight. There need be no idea of shafts or tunnels driven through the solid body of the moon. Cicero’s _Dream of Scipio_, written more than a century before Plutarch’s Dialogue, and also drawn from Posidonius, will be found an admirable companion piece, enforcing, in language of singular beauty and elevation, those duties to country and ancestors which find inadequate expression in the Greek thought of the first century of our era. NOTE ON THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS AND THE FIVE REGULAR SOLIDS The opinion that our World, or universe, is not the only one in the Whole, is attributed, in general terms, to many of the early Greek philosophers, notably to Anaximander. The exact meaning of a ‘Cosmos’, in this connexion, is perhaps not easy to fix. Aristotle is clear that the circle of the fixed stars is one and constant, but the author of the Stoical treatise on the Cosmos, found among his works, takes stars to be a part of the (one) Cosmos. An earth, such as ours with her atmosphere and moon, is essential, and a sun, or access to sunlight, and perhaps some planets. In the _Dream of Scipio_ our solar system, with the earth in its centre, is described with great distinctness as a unit in space. The planets are always regarded as luminous points, stars somewhat out of place (see p. 268), possessing no definite magnitude or solid substance. In theory the number of Cosmi might be infinite, but a shrinking from the vague ‘Infinity’, in later times associated with the Epicureans, led Plato, for instance, to restrict the number to a possible five. That he based this number upon that of the five regular solids may seem fanciful, but the solid angles and forms observed in crystals might reasonably suggest the hypothesis that the ultimate constituents of the crust of the earth would be found in the most perfect solid structures known to theory. In theory there is much that is attractive in these five solids. To one coming fresh from a study of Plane Polygonal Figures, which exist in infinite number, and, when regular, approximate more and more closely to the Plane Circle, it comes as a surprise to find that, in the next higher degree, the number of solid bodies so approximating to the Sphere is five only. Again, it seems almost a paradox that, of these five, the nearest approximation to the Sphere is attained, not by the body with twenty fine faces, but by that which shews only twelve, and those comparatively blunted and unshapely (pentagons). It was perhaps from such considerations that the Dodecahedron was held of special importance by the Pythagoreans. Plato’s study of the several faces of these solids, as available for construction or reconstruction of a world, leaves nothing to be desired, assuming that a solid body can be built out of plane figures, an assumption which appears to belong to the same habit of thought as that which makes the point the square of unity, and the lineal measure corresponding to the number two the first rectangle. As the pentagon defies the analysis available for the equilateral triangle or for the square, the Dodecahedron remains over, a model or pattern of a stitch-work world, as viewed from outside (_Phaedo_ 110 B and _Timaeus_ 55 C; see also Burnet’s _Early Greek Philosophy_, p. 341 foll.). It may not be amiss to be reminded that Kepler, mathematician as well as astronomer, spent many toilsome years in the endeavour to arrange the members of our solar system upon a plan based on the five solids. ‘If Kepler went out “to seek his father’s asses”, he found a kingdom, for it was in the course of these speculations, and through them, that he discovered not only his own “Third Law”, but also the truth, overlooked by Copernicus, that the orbit of each planet lies in a plane which passes through the centre of the sun.’ (Dreyer, _Planetary Systems_, p. 410.) The discussion of the plurality of worlds, in the modern sense, begins with the very attractive work of Fontenelle, brought out, in its original form, in 1686, a year before Newton’s _Principia_, being a series of conversations between the Author and a witty and accomplished Marquise, as to the habitability of the several members of the solar system. The argument which followed is distinguished by many great names, those of Newton himself, Bentley, Huyghens, the Herschels, Dr. Chalmers, till it was brought to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century by Dr. Whewell and Sir David Brewster, writing respectively against and for the hypothesis. The subject was then one (as readers of Anthony Trollope will remember) upon which any one might be called upon to take a side in a London drawing-room. In more recent times interest has been concentrated upon Mars, who now possesses the distinction of having two satellites. We are only concerned to invite the reader to compare the religious argument addressed to the Stoics by Plutarch (p. 142 foll.) with the religious argument drawn by Dr. Chalmers and Sir David Brewster from the enrichment of the providential scheme for man upon our earth which would follow the conception of other earths tenanted by other beings perhaps of a higher order. But it is natural that any such speculation should begin with the moon, and in fact we find the question of her habitability discussed by Theon and by Lamprias (pp. 293-9). With the later treatises on this subject, beginning with Lucian’s witty flight of fancy, we are not concerned. But an exception must be made for the very able works of Savinien de Cyrano, known to us as Cyrano de Bergerac, whose _Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Lune_ appeared, probably, in 1650, and was followed by a similar work about the sun. Cyrano appears to be familiar with Plutarch: thus he meets in the moon the ‘daemon of Socrates’, who has also been the tutelary spirit of Epaminondas, of Cato of Utica, and of Brutus. The idea (due in the first place to Heraclitus) of being fed on smells, is worked out with much vivacity. But with so original and daring a writer, it is not quite easy to settle how much is due to any hint from others and how much to himself. A modern reader will not need to be reminded that Cyrano was not a person of whom it was wise to give an outspoken opinion in his lifetime. But I had wished to speak with nothing but respect of a man of real learning and genius, who, from whatever cause, did not bring to perfection any work worthy of himself. See, on the general subject, an Essay by the late Professor Henry J. S. Smith in _Oxford Essays_, 1855. INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES MENTIONED BY PLUTARCH IN THESE DIALOGUES ¶ In this Index the Greek spelling of ei (Lat. ī) has been usually retained. All dates are B. C. unless otherwise stated. The dates are often approximate and conventional. Other numerals refer to pages of this volume. For the speakers in each Dialogue see that Dialogue _passim_ and the Introductions. (The ‘Three Pythian Dialogues’ are quoted under that designation See p. 52.) A. Academy, Academic, the School founded by Plato in ‘the most beautiful suburb of Athens’ (Thuc. ii. 34), 65, 104, 178, 264. Acanthus, Acanthian, a town of the Chalcidice, 94, 95. Achaeans, 102. Achaeus, 95. Achĕron, a river of the lower world, 227. Achilles, 294. Admētus, king of Pherae in Thessaly, and husband of Alcestis, 132. Adōnis (‘Gardens of Adonis’ were cut flowers planted in pots), 199. Adrasteia, a name for Nemesis, ‘the unescapable’, 207. Aegīna, an island in the Saronic Gulf, opposite to Athens, 99. Aegon, 85. Aegos Potami, a river, and in later times a town, in the Chersonese, famous for the sea-battle of 405, in which Lysander defeated the Athenian fleet, 88. Aemiliānus, a rhetorician, 134, 135. Aeolian, 121. Aeolĭdae, 132. Aeschylus, tragic poet of Athens, (525-456), 67, 132, 162, 265. Aesop of Samos, writer of fables (fl. 570), a freedman of Iadmon of Samos, 94, 192. Aetna, Mount, in Sicily, 271. Aetolians, 92. Agamemnon, 125, 230. Agathŏclēs, 193. Agāvē, daughter of Cadmus, and mother of Pentheus, 226. Agenorĭdas, 13. Agesianax (or Hegesianax), a poet, probably of Alexandria, third century, 260, 261. Agesilaüs II, the lame king of Sparta, reigned 398-361 (see his _Life_) 11, 13, 91. Aglaonīcē, 130. Aglaŏphon, 166. Agrigentum (Acragas), a town on the south coast of Sicily, 184. Aïdoneus (Hades), 77. Ajax, 193, 230. Alcaeus, of Lesbos, lyric poet (fl. 600), 118. Alcibiădes 450-404, Athenian politician, 19, 183. Alcman, lyric poet of Sparta (fl. 630), 297. Alcmēna, wife of Amphitryon and mother of Hercules; (on her sanctuary, in a grove near Thebes, see Pausan. ix. 16. 4), 11, 12, 13. Alĕüs, 12. Alexander, the Great, 95, 192, 233. Alexis, of Thurii, poet of the so-called ‘Middle Attic Comedy’, fourth century, 137. Aloădes, Otus and Ephialtes, giant sons of Iphimedeia, wife of Aloeus (_Od._ xi. 307 foll., and _Il._ v. 385), 289. Alopĕcus, 109. Alphēüs, a river of Arcadia and Elis, 160. Alyattes, king of Lydia and father of Croesus (d. 560), 96. Alyrius, 100. Amēstris, 235. Ammon, the temple of Zeus Ammon in an oasis of the Libyan Desert to the N.W. of Egypt, 117, 120. Ammonius, an Athenian philosopher of the first century A. D., the instructor of Plutarch. A speaker in the First and Third Pythian Dialogues. _See also_ 298, and cp. Sympos. 3, 1, 2; 8, 3; 9, 1, 2, 5, 14; and _Life of Themistocles_, end. Amphiaraüs of Argos, prince and seer, who accompanied the Seven Chieftains against Thebes, and was swallowed up by the earth there, 121. Amphictyons, ‘Dwellers around’, whose council met at Thermopylae and at Pylaea, a suburb of Delphi, 95, 110. Amphilŏchus, son of Amphiaraüs, worshipped at Malli in Cilicia, 163, 205. Amphīon, the district of Thebes between the rivers Strophia and Ismenus (Pausan. ix. 16 and 17), 10. Amphipolis, a town of Macedon on the Strymon, taken by Brasidas in 424, 175 _n._ Amphitheüs, a Theban patriot, imprisoned by the Polemarchs, 11, 29, 43, 50. Amphitryon, father of Hercules, 13. Anactorium, a town and promontory of Acarnania, 184. Anaxagoras, 499-427, a philosopher of Clazomenae in Ionia, 71, 165, 231, 277, 283. Andocĭdes, 16. Androcleidas, a Theban patriot, assassinated when a refugee in Athens, 46. Antichthon, 306. Antigŏnus, younger son of Demetrius Sotēr, king of Syria (d. 125), 204. Antipater, son of Cassander, king of Macedon, succeeded his brother Philip, and was himself murdered, 198. Antiphon, 18. Aphroditē, goddess of love, 189, 232, 272. Apollo, 59, 62, 67, 68, 73, 76, 77, 78, 88, 93, 94, 96, 99, 121, 132, 146, 160, 161, 170, 193, 210, 232. Apollocrates, son of Dionysius the younger, of Syracuse (d. 354), 198. Apollodōrus, tyrant of Cassandria (Potidaea) from 379, 189, 191. Apollonia, a town in Illyria founded from Corinth, 184. Apollonia, a town in Pisidia, 96. Apollonides, a speaker in the _Face in the Moon_. ὁ τακτικός (_Sympos._ 3, 4). Arabia, 297. Arcadia, Arcadians, 176. Arcĕsus, Lacedaemonian Harmost, 29, 51. Arcĕsus, of Sicily, 22. Archelaüs, king of Macedon, 413-399, friend and host of Euripides, 59. Archias, of Athens, the priest, 47. Archias, of Thebes. A member of the oligarchical party, and made a Polemarch by Sparta, 8, 10, 29, 32, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50. Archidāmus, an Athenian, 6, 7, 8, 44, 45, 47. Archilŏchus, 714-676, of Paros, lyric and iambic poet, 63, 199, 230, 282. Archīnus, 7. Archȳtas of Tarentum, mathematician and statesman, fl. 300 (see _Life of Marcellus_, c. 14), 14 _n._, 181. Argos, Argive, 85, 186. Aridaeus, 206. Aristarchus of Samos, astronomer and physicist (310-230), 98, 264, 269, 283. Aristarchus, critic, of Samothrace and Alexandria (fl. 156), 295. Aristocrătes, king of Arcadia (stoned to death 668), 176. Aristodēmus, king of Messenia (d. 723), 229, 230. Ariston, 186, 195. Aristonīca, 104. Aristotle, 384-322, founder of the Peripatetic School at Athens, 69, 84, 88, 143, 162, 283, 318. Aristotle (see p. 255), a Peripatetic, who takes part in the Dialogue on the _Face in the Moon_. Aristyllus, an astronomer (fl. 233), 98. Arnē, a town in Thessaly, 158. Arsălus, 138, 139. Artĕmis, 146, 230, 232, 262, 295, 308. Artemisium, on the north coast of Euboea, where the Greek fleet defeated that of Xerxes in 480, 183. Asclepius (Aesculapius), 185. Assyrians, 288. Asterium, 92. Athămas, 190, 226. Athena (Pallas Athene), 16, 50, 102, 139, 193, 262, 294. Athens, Athenian, 7, 8, 17, 18, 19, 23, 40, 47, 49, 62, 65, 88, 95, 96, 99, 177, 183, 185, 195, 196, 197, 229, 303. Atlas, a giant son of Iapĕtus and brother of Prometheus, identified with a mountain in NW. Africa, 65, 265. Atrŏpus, 37, 308, 315. Attĭca, 162. Augeas, king of the Epeans; slain for bad faith by Hercules, and succeeded by Phyleus, 204. Ausonius, a Latin poet of Bordeaux (A.D. 310-90), 127 _n._ Autolycus, son of Hermes, and grandfather of Ulysses, famed for his cunning, 185. B. Bacchus, 209. Bacchylĭdas, 20. Bacis, an ancient Boeotian seer, connected in story with the Corycian cave, 90. Bakerwoman, the, 96. Basilocles, a speaker in the introductory part of the Second Pythian Dialogue. Battus, of Thera, founder of Cyrene (see Herod. 4, 150 foll.), 103, 108. Bessus, 186. Bias, sixth century; of Priēnē in Ionia; one of the Seven Wise Men, 61. Bion, a Scythian philosopher and wit of the third century, 86, 201, 229. Boeotia, 7, 9, 50, 65, 120, 194, 306. Boēthus, a young geometrician and Epicurean (probably an Athenian), a speaker in the Second Pythian Dialogue (cp. _Sympos._ 5, 1 and 8, 3). Branchĭdae, 193. Brasĭdas, the Spartan general (d. 422), 94, 95, 175. Briăreus, 135, cf. 299. Britain, Briton, 117, 133, 261, 299. Byzantium, 189. C. Cabirĭchus, 48. Cadmeia, the citadel of Thebes, 8, 10, 12, 30, 51. Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, 87. Caesar, the Emperor Augustus (63-A.D. 14), 62. Caligŭla, 233. Callias, a rich Athenian, see the _Symposium_ of Xenophon and the _Protagoras_ of Plato, 95. Callippus, 185. Callistrătus, of Athens, 49. Callistratus, archon of Delphi, 117. Calondas, 199. Capheisias, of Thebes, son of Polymnis and brother of Epaminondas; the chief speaker in the First Pythian Dialogue. Caria, 13. Carthage, Carthaginian, 91, 183, 184, 302, 316. Carystus, on the S. coast of Euboea, noted for its marble and asbestos, 162. Caspian Sea, supposed until Ptolemy to be an inlet of Ocean, though Herodotus describes it as an inland water (1, 202-3), 300, 305. Cassander, 354-297, king of Macedon, began the restoration of Thebes in 315: 184, 197. Cĕbēs, of Thebes, a companion of Socrates (see the _Critias_ and _Phaedo_ of Plato), 17, 35. Cecrops, 182. Cephisodōrus, 45, 47, 49. Chaereas, 233. Chaerēmon, an Athenian tragic poet (fl. 380), 104. Chaeroneia, in Boeotia, on the borders of Phocis; Plutarch’s native town, 35, 121. Chaldaeans, 62. Charillus, 17. Charon, a Theban patriot, 8, 9, 28, 29, 30, 32, 44, 45, 47. Charybdis, 218. Cheiron, the Centaur, instructor of Achilles, 65. Chersonese, the Thracian, 183. Chilon, one of the Seven Wise Men, 61. Chios, 275. Chius, 108. Chlidon, 31, 44. Cleanthes, a Stoic philosopher, b. 300, at Assos in the Troad, 264. Clearchus, a Peripatetic philosopher of Soli, pupil of Aristotle, 260, 262. Chonūphis, 13. Chrysippus (280-207), the Stoic philosopher, born at Soli in Cilicia, 134, 146, 147. Cilicia, 163, 205. Cimmerians, 231. Cimon, 183, 195. Cinaethon, 107. Cinēsias, dithyrambic poet of Athens (fl. 400), 232. Cithaeron, the mountain range between Attica and Boeotia, 8, 43. Clazomĕnae, a city in Ionia, 39. Cleander, of Aegina, 99. Cleisthĕnes, of Sicyon, 185. Cleobulīnē, 95. Cleobūlus, tyrant of Lindus in Rhodes, sixth century. One of the Seven Wise Men, 61. Cleombrŏtus, of Lacedaemon, a speaker in the Third Pythian Dialogue. Cleon, of Daulia, 169. Cleōnae, a city in the Peloponnesus, 94, 185. Cleonīcē, 189. Cleotīmus, 99. Clio, the Muse of History, 97. Clotho, one of the Fates, 37, 308, 315. Clytaemnēstra, 188. Cnidus, a city of Caria, 14, 88, 122. Conon, 7. Copreus, 185. Cora (Persephone), daughter of Demeter, 302. Corax, 199. Corcȳra, Corcyrean, 193. Corētas, 161, 165. Corinth, 51, 61, 83, 92, 94, 95, 224. Corōnē (Crow), 122. Corybantes, priests of Cybele, 306. Corycium, the Corycian cave, on the slopes of Parnassus, 7-1/2 miles NE. of Delphi, and 3,500 feet above it (Pausanias x. 32, 2), 82. Cosmos, i. e. Apollo, 67. Crates, a Cynic philosopher (fl. 328), 94, 95. Crates, a critic, of Pergamos (born at Mallus in Cilicia, fl. 155), 295. _Cratylus_, a Dialogue of Plato, on etymology, 71. Crete, 131, 200. Cretīnus, 108. Critias, of Carthage, 234. Croesus, king of Lydia, d. 540 (see Herod. 1-3), 96, 192. Crŏnus (Saturn), father of Zeus, 135, 138, 183, 235, 299, 300, 301, 306, 308. Crotōna, a Greek colony in southern Italy, 21. _Cyclops_, a satyric play of Euripides, 164; and see 193. Cydias, an early poet, 282. Cydnus, a river of Cilicia, 160. Cylon, Cylonians, 21, 22. Cymé (Cumae), a city on the coast of Campania, 90. Cypsĕlus, of Corinth, tyrant 655-625, father of Periander, 94. Cyzĭcus, a city of Mysia, 14. D. Dactyli, workers in iron, &c., of Mt. Ida in Phrygia, 306. Daïphantus, 194. Damocleidas, 43, 47. Daulia, a town of Phocis, 169. Deinomĕnes, of Syracuse, 99. Delium in Boeotia, battle of, 424 (see _Life of Alcibiades_, c. 7, and Plato, _Apol._ 28, and _Sympos._ 221 A). Dēlos, an island in the Aegean, sacred to Apollo, 13, 14, 60, 63, 77, 121. Delphi, 60, 62, 67, 85, 94, 101, 110, 117, 121, 132, 138, 161, 165, 185, 192, 196, 210, 307. Dēmētēr, 29, 302, 303. Demetrius, a speaker in the Third Pythian Dialogue. Demetrius, king of Macedon 294-287 (Poliorcētēs), 204. Democrĭtus, a philosopher, of Abdēra in Thrace (460-361), 134, 277. Diagŏras, of Melos, a disciple of Democritus (fl. 420), 234. Diës (plural of Zeus), 146. Dicaearcheia, the old name of Puteŏli, a city on the coast of Campania, 90, 211. Dicaearchus, a Peripatetic philosopher and writer on questions of literary history, contemporary with Aristotle, 59. Didymus, a Cynic philosopher (nicknamed Planetiădes), takes part in the opening of the Third Pythian Dialogue. Diogenianus, a speaker in the Second Pythian Dialogue. For his father, of the same name, cp. _Sympos._ 7, 7 and 8, 1, 2, 9. Diŏmede, 102. Dion of Syracuse (d. 356), see his _Life_, by Plutarch, 186. Dionysius, the Elder, 430-367, tyrant of Syracuse, 184, 197. Dionȳsus (or Bacchus), the wine-god, born at Thebes, 67, 68, 138, 139, 209. Diotŏnus, 45. Dircē, daughter of Helios, wife of Lycus, whose sons by Antiope, Amphion and Zethus, slew her and threw her body into a well at Thebes. The Fountain of Dirce was near the Crenaean Gate, 12. R. Dirce was the westernmost of the three Theban streams. Dolon, 132. Dorian, Doric, 138, 140. Dryus, 138. E. Earth (temple of, at Delphi), 97. Echecrătēs, a ‘prophet’ of Tegyra, 121. Echinădĕs, islands off the coast of Acarnania, 134. Egypt, Egyptian, 11, 13, 14, 93, 117, 126, 140, 154, 184, 235, 283, 293, 296. Elis, Elean, a state of the Peloponnesus, 94. Ellopion, 13. Elysian, 302, 306, 317. Empedocles of Agrigentum, philosopher and poet (fl. 444), 16, 93, 98, 133, 134, 137, 235, 259, 263, 269, 272, 274, 278, 287. Endymion, 307. Epameinondas, son of Polymnis, brother of Capheisias, and friend of Pelopidas (fell at Mantineia 362), 1, 6, 9, 14, 15, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 32, 40, 43, 50. Epicharmus, of Cos and Syracuse, writer of philosophical comedies (540-450), 196. Epicūrus, of Samos, 342-270, philosopher and founder of the School of ‘The Garden’ at Athens, and Epicureans, 86, 87, 89, 92, 136, 137, 146, 163, 262. A modern ‘Epicurus’ is introduced into the Dialogue on the _Delays in Divine Punishment_, but leaves before its beginning. Epicȳdēs, 191. Epidaurus, a town and state next to Argolis, 99. Epimenĭdes, of Phaestus in Crete, a poet and prophet (fl. 600), 117, 298. Epitherses, 134. Erĕbus, 230. Erĕsus, a city of Lesbos, 140. Eretria, a city on the west coast of Euboea, 96. Erianthes, 29. Eridănus, the river Po, 193. Erinnys, the, 207. Eriphȳlē, 186. Erōs (Love), 272. Erythrae, an Ionian city, 95, 99. Ethiopia, 196, 204, 222, 265. Euboea, 162. Eudoxus, of Cnidus, 408-355, astronomer and mathematician, and founder of the School of Cyzicus, 14, 97, 98. Eumētis, 95. Eumolpĭdas, 10. Euripides, 485 (or 480)-405, the Athenian tragedian, 59, 70, 78, 104, 107, 129, 156, 159, 160, 164, 176, 177, 178, 192. Eurycleis, 126. Eurymĕdon, a river in Pamphylia; in 469 Cimon defeated the Persians on its banks, 183. Eustrŏphus, a speaker in the First Pythian Dialogue. Euthyphron, a disciple of Socrates (see the Dialogue of Plato which bears his name), 16, 17. F. Fates, the, 37, 61, 308. Fortune, 89, 90. G. Galaxidōrus, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 32, 43. Galaxius, in Boeotia, 110. Gauls, 222, 234. Gedrosia, a district on the Indus and Indian Ocean (SE. part of Beloochistan), 296. Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse (d. 478), 99, 182. Getae, 190. Giants, 235. Glaucé, 87. Glaucus, 191, 230. Gorgias, of Leontini, 480-398, teacher of rhetoric (see the _Gorgias_ of Plato), 22, 137. Gorgĭdas, 8, 12, 43, 50. Great Mother, the (Cybele), 107. Great Year, the, 138. Guides, the, of the temple and treasures of Delphi, apparently two in number, 83, 85, 88, 94, 96. Cp. _Sympos._ 5, 3, and 8, 4. Gullies, the (cp. Rhetiste), 19. Gyrean, cape, 230. H. Hādēs, 37, 38, 225, 235, 299, 302, 304, 307. Haliartus, a town of Boeotia on Lake Copaïs, 15 miles NW. of Thebes, 11, 12, 109. Hamadryads, 127. Hecăte, 130, 305, 317. Hector, 230. Hecŭba, 130, 233. Hegētor, 130. Helĕnus, son of Priam, a prophet, 41. Helĭcon, of Cyzicus, mathematician and astronomer, mentioned in Plutarch’s _Life of Dion_, as having foretold a solar eclipse, 14. Helĭcon, a mountain (5,000 ft.) in Boeotia, 89. Hellas (Greece), 124, 125, 300. Hephaestus, the lame god of fire (see _Il._ 1. 590), 263. Hēra, 193, 232. Heracleia, probably a town in Phrygia, 189. Heracleidae, 195. Heracleitus, philosopher of Ephesus (end of sixth century), 73, 74, 87, 101, 127, 197, 218, 224, 304. Heraea, the, a festival at Thebes, 31. Heraea, a town of Arcadia, 169. Heracleon, of Megara, a speaker in the Third Pythian Dialogue. Hercules (Heraclēs), 13, 51, 65, 94, 100, 123, 131, 185, 193, 195, 199, 226, 300, 307. Hercŭlēs, Pillars of, 305. Herippĭdas, 29, 51. Hermes, 135, 139, 303. Hermodōrus, 39. Hermolaüs, 233. Herodĭcus, 187. Herodŏtus, the historian, of Halicarnassus (484-408), 100, 131, 166. Herophĭlé, 95. Hesiod, the ancient Boeotian poet, eighth century, 42, 86, 98, 123, 126, 127, 128, 130, 156, 157, 161, 186, 202, 218, 230, 272, 298. Hesperus (the Evening Star, or planet Venus), 154, 215, 268, 273. Hiĕro, of Syracuse, brother of Gelon (d. 467). A munificent benefactor of Delphi, 88, 99, 182. Hiĕro, the Lacedaemonian (killed in the battle of Leuctra 371), 88. Himĕra, a town of Sicily, 140. Hipparchus, the astronomer, of Rhodes and Alexandria, native of Nicaea in Bithynia (fl. from 160), 98, 261. Hipparchus (son of Pisistratus), 189. Hippocrătes, 182. Hippostheneidas, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 44, 51. Hippys, of Rhegium, an early Greek historian, 140. Homer, 41, 63, 70, 76, 77, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 102, 126, 141, 148, 166, 199, 215, 230, 265, 282, 286, 288, 299, 302, 303, 307. Hoplītes, river in Boeotia, 109. Hyampeia, one of two cliffs above Thebes, 192. Hypătes, 47, 49. Hypatodōrus, 29. I. Iadmōn, 192. Ida, Mt., in Phrygia, 306. Iêïus, ‘invoked with the cry iē! (or iē paion!),‘ i. e. Apollo, 76. Ilithyia, 308. Ilium (Troy), 166. Indian, 140. Ino, daughter of Cadmus and wife of Athamas, a tragic heroine, 190. Ion Chius, a writer of plays, and anecdotist (fl. 450), 276. Iphĭtus, killed by Hercules, who had stolen the oxen of his father Eurytus, 185. Isis, 296. Ismenian, a name of Apollo, 60. Ismenias, a Theban of the popular party and Polemarch, arrested by Leontides, tried by a commission appointed by Sparta, on a charge of ‘medizing’, and executed (see _Life of Pelopidas_), 8. Ismenidōrus, 20. Ismēnus, the principal (most easterly) river of Thebes, 15. Isodaités, ‘equal divider,’ a name of Dionysus, 67. Ister, a Greek historian, or antiquarian, 100. Ister, the Danube, 148. Isthmus (of Corinth), Isthmian, 94. Italy, 15, 21, 27, 88, 200. Ithaca, 193· Ixīon, 293. J. Jason, Tagus of Thessaly (d. 370), known as ‘Prometheus’; (see Plutarch _On getting advantage from enemies_, c. 6, p. 89 C, and Xenophon, _Hellenica_, 2, 3, 18) 23. Jews, 231. L. Lacedaemon, 51, 98, 99, 117, 179, 189, 229. Lachărēs, an Athenian demagogue (fl. 296), 195. Lachēs, Athenian general; fell at Mantineia, 418. A Dialogue of Plato bears his name, 19. Lachĕsis, one of the Fates, 37, 308, 315. Lamia, 89. Lamprias, Plutarch’s brother (also the name of his grandfather); a speaker in the First and Third Pythian Dialogues and in the _Face in the Moon_. Cp. _Sympos._ 2, 2; 4, 5; 9, 15. Lamprocles, 35. Latōna, 232. Law Courts, the, 17. Lebadeia, near the western frontier of Boeotia, the seat of the oracle of Trophonius, 120, 157. Lēda, daughter of Thestius, and mother of Helen and Clytaemnēstra, Castor, and Polydeuces, 95. Lemnos, 290. Leontĭdes, one of the polemarchs at Thebes, 8, 10, 11, 12, 47, 49. Leontīni, a city of Sicily, 22. Lesbos, 194. Leschenorian, 60. Lēthē (‘Oblivion’), 209. Leucas, Leucadia, 184, 193. Leuctra, a village of Boeotia, between Thespiae and Plataea (famous for the battle between the Spartans and Thebans in 371), 88. Libya (Africa), 103, 108, 185, 296. Lindos, a town on the eastern coast of Rhodes, 61. Livia, the empress, wife of Augustus, and mother, by her first marriage, of Tiberius (d. A. D. 29), 62. Locris, 193. Lucania, 22. Lucius, a speaker in the Dialogue on the _Face in the Moon_. Lycians, 138, 139. Lyciscus, 177. Lycormae, 195. Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, ninth century, 99. Lycuria (an ancient name for the summit of Parnassus), a village near the Corycian cave, 82. Lydia, 121. Lydiădas, 183. Lysander, the Spartan naval commander who finished the Peloponnesian war. He fell in battle against the Thebans, 395, at Haliartus (see his _Life_, c. 29): 109. Lysanorĭdas, 8, 10, 12, 43, 51. Lysimăchus, 189. Lysis, a Pythagorean teacher, driven from Italy to Thebes, where he died, 7, 13, 15, 21, 24, 27. Lysitheides, 7. Lysitheüs, 48. M. Maeotic Bay (Sea of Azov), 300. Magi, the, 126. Magnesia, district of Thessaly, 96. Malis, 89. Marăthon, on the east coast of Attica (famous for the battle of 490), 183. Mardonius, the Persian general (defeated and killed at Plataea, 479), 121. Marius, 184. Medes, 288. Megalopŏlis, the chief town of Arcadia, 183. Megăra, a city on the Saronic gulf, 18, 96, 122, 124. Megasthĕnēs, a Greek writer on India (fl. 300), 294. Melanthius, an Athenian tragic poet (fl. 420), 181. Melētus, one of the three accusers of Socrates, a poet, 16. Melissus, 20. Mĕlon, 8, 30, 47, 48. Melos, an island in the Aegean, 166. Memphis, a city of Egypt, on the Nile, 13. Menaechmus, 14 _n._ Menelaüs, a speaker in the Dialogue on the _Face in the Moon_. Mercury (the planet), 154, cp. 268. Meriŏnēs, 131. Messenians, 176, 229. Metapontium (Metapontum), a Greek city in Southern Italy, 21, 88. Mētrodōrus, of Chios, a disciple of Democritus (fl. 330), 137, 275. Midas, a mythical king of Phrygia, 229. Milētus, a city of Caria, 23, 193. Miltiădes, son of Cimon, the victor of Marathon, 183. Mimnermus, elegiac poet, of Smyrna and Colophon (fl. 600), 282. Minos, son of Zeus, king of Crete, and afterwards a judge in Hades, 179. Mitys, of Argos, 186. Mnesarĕtē (Phryne), 94, 95. Mnesinoē, 95. Molionĭdae, the sons of Actor, by Molione, 94. Molus, 131. Mopsus, founder of Mallos in Cilicia, where he had an oracle, 163. Muses, the, 35, 86, 97, 98, 199, 226. Myrĭna, an Aeolian town on the west coast of Mysia, 96. Myron, 185. Myrtălē, 95. Mys, a Carian, employed by Mardonius to consult the oracles in Greece, 121. N. Nāïd, the, 127. Nauplia, the port of Argos, 192. Navel, the, at Delphi, 117. Naxos, an island in the Aegean, 199. Neleus, father of Nestor, 204. Neobūlē, 63. Neochōrus, 109. Neoptolĕmus, son of Achilles, 45. Nero, A. D. 37-68. The Roman Emperor. He visited Greece (the province of Achaia) in A. D. 67, and proclaimed its freedom at the Isthmian games: 60, 213. Nesĭchus, 108. Nestor, 204. Nicander, a priest of the temple at Delphi, 62, 63, 72, 170. Nicias, the Athenian general (d. 414 at Syracuse, see his _Life_), 23, 229. Night, 210. Night-watcher (Nycturus), the, an early name for the planet Cronus (Saturn), 300. Niŏbē, 232. Nisaeus, 197. Nisibeüs, 204. Nyctelius, ‘nightly’; used as a name of Dionysus, 67. O. Odysseus (Ulysses), 16, 102. Oechalia, a town in Euboea (according to the story followed by Sophocles) taken by Hercules, 131. Oeta, a mountain range in Thessaly, 186. Ogygia, the name given by Homer to the island of Calypso (_Od._ 1, 50, &c.), 299. Olympia, in Elis, 160. Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, 95. Olympicus, a speaker in the Dialogue on the _Delays in Divine Punishment_. Olympus, a mountain (9,754 ft.) between Thessaly and Macedon, the seat of Zeus, 70, 93. Olynthus, a town in the Chalcidice (taken by Sparta 379), 8. Onomacrĭtus, an Athenian poet and antiquarian (520-485), 107. Opheltiădae, 194. Opus, Opuntian, a Locrian town, 96. Orchalĭdes, 109. Orchomĕnus, a city of Boeotia, 163, 176. Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnēstra, 95. Orneae, a town in Argolis, 95. Orpheus, of Thrace, a minstrel, 98, 126, 193, 210. Orphic, 72. Orthagŏras, 185. Osīris, an Egyptian deity, 138. P. Paeonia, a district of Thrace, 186. Pallas (Athene); her image at Athens (Palladium) was believed to have been brought from Troy by Diomede. Another Palladium stood on the Acropolis (Pausanias i. 28-9): 88. Palōdĕs, the, 134, 135. Pan, 134, 135. Pandărus, a Lycian archer, 102. Parmenĭdes, of Elea in Italy, a philosopher (b. 513), 98, 272, 277. Parnassus, the mountain (8,000 ft.) above Delphi, the highest point of a range of the same name, 210. Parnēs, a mountain range near the northern frontier of Attica, 19. Path, the, the Peripatetic School, 260. Patrocleas; Plutarch’s son-in-law, a speaker in the Dialogues on the _Delays in Divine Punishment_ and on _The Soul_. Cp. _Sympos._ 2, 9; 5, 7; 7, 2. Pausanias, (1) Spartan statesman and general (d. 470), 99 _n._, 189, 200; (2) the slayer of Philip of Macedon, 233. Pauson, a Greek painter of the fourth century. Aristotle (_Poet._ c. 2) speaks of his style as that of caricature: 86. Paxi, two islands south of Corcyra, 134. Peace (a woman’s name), 99. Peisistrătus, tyrant of Athens, (d. 527), 182, 189. Pelopĭdas, Theban general and friend of Epaminondas; fell at Cynoscephalae 364 (see his _Life_), 8, 43, 45, 47, 49. Peloponnesus, 121, 283, 293. Penelope, 135. Peparēthus, an island in the Aegean, off Thessaly, 13. Periander, tyrant of Corinth from 625; one of the Seven Wise Men, 61, 184, 224. Pericles, Athenian statesman (d. 429), 185, 196. Persephŏnē, 37, 303, 306. Persia, 96, 121, 208, 229. Petraeus, of Delphi, 111. Petron, 140. Phaestus, in Crete, 117. Phaĕthon, a son of the Sun, 193. Phalanthus, a Lacedaemonian, founder of Tarentum (about 708), 108. Phalăris, tyrant of Agrigentum from 570: 184. Phanaean, 60, 77. Phanias, of Erĕsus in Lesbos, a Peripatetic philosopher, and pupil of Aristotle, who wrote also on history, 140. Pharnăces (see p. 255), a Stoic, speaker in the Dialogue on the _Face in the Moon_. Pharsalia, 88. Pheidolaüs, of Haliartus, 11, 12, 13, 19, 32, 35. Pheneātae, 193. Phenĕüs, a town in Arcadia, 193. Pherecȳdēs, a learned man of Syros (fl. 544), 294. Pherenīcus, 8, 10. Philēbus, a late Dialogue of Plato, on _Pleasure_, 71. Philīnus, a speaker in the Second Pythian Dialogue. Cp. _Sympos._ 1, 6; 4, 1; 5, 10; 8, 7. Philip of Macedon (d. 336), 233. Philip, son of Cassander, king of Macedon (d. 296), 198. Philip V, 237-179, king of Macedon, 91, 92. Philippus, historian (of Prusa?), a speaker in the Third Pythian Dialogue. Cp. _Sympos._ 7, 8. Philippus, of Thebes, 43, 44, 48, 50. Philochŏrus of Athens, antiquarian and writer on legend (d. 260), 100. Philolaüs, an early Pythagorean, 22. Philomēlus, 88. Phlĕgyas, of Orchomenus, a mythical hero, slain for impiety, 185. Phocis, Phocians, 88, 95, 96, 100, 185, 194. Phoebĭdas, a Spartan general, who treacherously seized the Cadmeia in 382: 8. Phoebus, ‘The Bright’, an appellation of Apollo, 67, 76, 107, 138. _Phoenissae_, a play of Euripides, 107 n. Phosphor, Phosphorus (the planet Venus), 154, 268, 273. Phrygia, 126, 306. Phrynē, 95. Phyleus, 204. Phyllĭdas, 10, 11, 28, 29, 32, 43, 48, 50. Pillars of Hercules (on the Straits of Gibraltar), 305. Pindar, the Theban lyric poet (518-438), 7, 72 _n._, 77, 87, 98, 102 _n._, 104, 105, 108 _n._, 123, 127, 131 _n._, 179, 194, 202, 226, 227, 265, 273, 282. Pisa, a town in, or adjoining, Elis, 94. Pittăcus (652-569), patriot, and sole-ruler (‘aesymnete’) of Mytilēnē, one of the Seven Wise Men, 61. Planetiădes (see Didymus). Plataea, a city of Boeotia on the Asopus, near the frontier of Attica, 124. Plato, of Athens, 430-347, founder of the Academy, 13, 14, 63, 72, 104, 126, 129, 134, 137, 156, 181, 318, 319; _Cratylus_, 71, 130, 235; _Laws_, 186; _Minos_, 179; _Phaedo_, 165; _Republic_, 167, 187; _Sophistes_, 151; _Symposium_, 130; _Timaeus_, 69, 128, 139, 141, 149, 154, 155, 180, 226, 272, 279, 293, 295, 305. Plato, of Thebes, 12. Pleisthĕnes, son of Atreus and father of Agamemnon (but there are variations in the story), 188. Pleistoănax, a king of Sparta (d. 408), 99. Plutarch, introduced only into the Dialogues on the _‘E’ at Delphi_ (First Pythian Dialogue) and on the _Delays in Divine Punishment_, 232. Pluto, 77. Polycrătes, of Delphi, 111. Polycrătes, of Samos, 224. Polygnōtus, of Thasos, painter, chiefly of Homeric subjects at Athens and Delphi (fl. 450), 166. Polymnis, of Thebes, father of Epaminondas and Capheisias, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 27. Polystyle (e mute), the, 50. Polyxĕna, 95. Pompey the Great (d. 48), 185. Porch, the, the Stoic School at Athens, 93. Poseidon, 89, 146. Poseidonius, of Apamea in Syria, a Stoic philosopher who taught Cicero, 278, 283, 316, 317. Praxitĕles, the Athenian sculptor (fl. 364), 95. Priam, 41, 230. Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus and father-in-law of Periander, seventh century, 99. Promētheus, son of the Titan Iapĕtus, 65. Prōteus, a mythical king of Egypt (Herod. 2, 112), 13. Protogĕnes, 205. Prytaneum, the, 72. Ptolemaeus (‘Ceraunus’, the Thunderbolt), king of Macedon (d. 280), 189. Ptōüm, a mountain on the eastern side of the Copaïc lake, with a sanctuary of Apollo, 121, 124. Punic, 91. Pylaea, a suburb of Delphi, 110. Pyrilampēs, a kinsman of Plato, 18. Pythagoras, of Samos, sixth century, philosopher and traveller, 14, 16, 21, 27, 66, 123, 228 _n._, 231. Pythia, the, 72, 86, 100, 101, 103, 106, 110, 121, 164, 165, 169, 170, 199. Pythian, 59, 60, 64, 117, 122, 123, 185. Python, the serpent slain by Apollo, 138. Pythōnĕs (ventriloquists), 126. Q. Quintus, the friend to whom the Dialogue on the _Delays in Divine Punishment_ is inscribed, also that on _Love between Brothers_, 175. R. Red Sea (Mare Erythraeum). Before Ptolemy, the term was used loosely to include the Persian Gulf, &c.: 117, 138, 305. Rhea, 154. Rhegium, a Greek town in South Italy, 140. Rhetiste (cp. the _Gullies_), 19. Rhodes, 95. Rhodōpis (see Herodotus ii. 134-5), 94. Rome, 91, 92, 135, 179, 184, 185. S. Samĭdas, 49. Samos, an island in the Aegean, 192, 224. Sappho, the great woman lyric poet, a Lesbian, of the seventh century, 87, 104. Sardis, the capital of Lydia, 192. Satilaeans, 194. Scythians, 189, 234. Scythīnus, of Teos, an iambic poet of unknown date, 96. Seleucus, king of Syria, assassinated by Ptolemy Ceraunus in 280: 189. Selīnus, a Greek colony on the S.W. coast of Sicily, 92. Selymbria, a town of Thrace, on the Propontis, 187. Semĕlē, the mother of Dionysus (Bacchus), 209. Serapion, or Sarapion, an Athenian poet, to whom the First Pythian Dialogue is inscribed, and a speaker in the Second. Serāpis, an Egyptian deity, 107. Shining-One, the, a name for the planet Cronus (Saturn), 300. Sibylla, the Sibyl, the name of an early prophetess of Delphi; in later times an official title, also applied to other prophetic women, localized in various countries, 87, 89, 90, 95, 104, 211. Siceliot, of the Greek colonies in Sicily, 99. Sicily, 18, 99, 140, 184. Sicyon, on the south shore of the Corinthian gulf, 95, 184. Simmias, a Theban, a companion of Socrates, and (with Cebes) present at his death (see the _Crito_ and _Phaedo_ of Plato), 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 27, 32, 41, 42, 43. Simonĭdēs of Ceos, a lyric poet (556-467), 97, 190. Sisyphus, a knavish king of Corinth; some accounts make him father of Odysseus: 185. Skotios, ‘of darkness’, i. e. Hades (Pluto), 77. Socrates, of Athens (d. 399), 7, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 32, 35, 40, 95, 104, 180, 288. Soli, a city of Cilicia, 149, 205. Solon, 638-558, the Athenian law-giver; one of the ‘Seven Wise Men’, 61, 179. Solymi, a people of Lycia, 138. _Sophistés_, a Dialogue of Plato’s later period, 71. Sophists, the, 196. Sophocles, 495-405, tragic poet of Athens, 78, 103 _n._, 106, 125, 132, 266, 290 _n._ Sōphrōn (latter part of fifth century), a mime-writer of Syracuse, 63. Sparta, 11, 29, 88, 91, 106, 194, 200. Sparti, the, ‘sown men’, the armed men who sprang up out of the ground at Thebes, when Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth, 82. Spinthărus, 40. Sporădes, the, a group of islands, off Britain, 135. Statuaries, street of the, 17. Stesichŏrus (Tisias), 632-560, lyric poet of Himera in Sicily, 78, 188, 282. _Stheneboea_, a play of Euripides, 104 _n._ Stilbon (the planet Mercury), 154, 268. Stoics, the, 136, 146, 147, 264, 266, 285. Strabo, cognomen of the father of Pompey the Great, 185. Stratonīcē, 95. Styx, 37, 38, 97, 225. Suitors, the, i.e. of Penelope, 140. Sybaris, a Greek town of Lucania in South Italy, 193, 196. Syēnē (Assouan), taken by Eratosthenes to be directly under the sun at the summer solstice, 119, 296. Sylla, a speaker in the Dialogue on the _Face in the Moon_. Symbŏlum, the, 16. Syracuse, 88, 193, 197. Syrian goddess (Cybele?), 233. T. Taenărus, a cape and town in the south of Laconia, 199. Tantălus, 234, 293. Taprobăne (Ceylon), 265. Tarentum, a town in S. Italy, 40. Tarsus, in Cilicia, 117, 160. Tartărus, the penal region of the lower world, 40, 299. Tegyra, a village of Boeotia, near Orchomenus, 121, 122, 124. Teiresias, a blind prophet, of Thebes, 163, 226. Teletias, 185. Tempē, the gorge between Olympus and Ossa in Thessaly, through which the river Penēus flows, 132, 138. Tenĕdos, an island off the coast of the Troad, 92. Terentius Priscus, the friend to whom the Third Pythian Dialogue is inscribed, 117. Terpander, of Lesbos, the father of Greek music (fl. 700), 194. Terpsion, of Megara, a disciple of Socrates (see the _Theaetetus_ of Plato), 18. Tettix, 199, 200. Thalēs, of Miletus (seventh and sixth centuries), an early philosopher, one of the Seven Wise Men, 12, 61, 98. Thamus, 134, 135. Thasos, an island in the Aegean off Thrace, 166. Theānōr, a young Pythagorean, who came to Thebes from Crotona, as a deputation, 21, 24, 27, 28, 40, 43, 315. Thebes, the Boeotian, 7, 8, 12, 22, 29, 30, 43, 44, 47, 48, 184. Thebes, the Egyptian, 296. Thĕmis, the goddess of Justice, for some time in charge of the oracle at Delphi, 138, 211. Themistocles, Athenian statesman (514-449), 183. Theocrĭtus, of Thebes, ‘the prophet’, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 20, 28, 30, 32, 35, 40, 43, 44, 49; see _Life of Pelopidas_, c. 22. Theodōrus, of Soli, in Cilicia, a mathematician, 149, 150. Theognis, of Megara, elegiac and gnomic poet (570-490), 84. Theon, of Hyampolis, a family friend of Plutarch, a speaker in the First and Second Pythian Dialogues, and in the _Face in the Moon_. Cp. _Sympos._ 1, 4; 4, 3; 8, 6, and the Dialogue _Non posse suaviter_, where the Epicureans are attacked. Theophrastus, born at Erĕsus, a philosopher of Athens, Aristotle’s successor, 136. Theopompus, a Theban patriot, 43, 48. Theopompus, of Chios, historian (d. 305), 100. Theōrius, a designation of Apollo, 77. Theoxenia, the, 194. Thera, Therasia, islands off Crete, 91. Thermopylae, the coast pass between Thessaly and Locris, famous for the defence of Leonidas in 480: 132. Thespesius (Aridaeus), 205, 206, 209, 210, 211, 213, 313, 314. Thespiae, a town of Boeotia, 29. Thessaly, 23, 24, 93, 95, 130, 158. Thrace, 126, 148, 193. Thrasybūlus, of Athens, 7. Thrasybūlus, tyrant of Syracuse after Hiero (467), 99. Thrasymēdēs, 169. Thucydides, the Athenian historian (d. 401), 98, 158 _n._, 176, 181, 196. Thunderbolt (Ceraunus), Ptolemy, king of Macedon (d. 280), 189. Thymĕlē, the altar of Dionysus in the theatre, 103. Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar, B. C. 42-37 A. D. (Emperor from A. D. 14), 135. Timarchus, of Athens, 99. Timarchus, of Chaeroneia, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 172, 314. Timochăris, 98. Timoleon, ruler of Syracuse (d. 357), 184: see his _Life_. Timon, Plutarch’s brother, a speaker in the Dialogues on the _Delays in Divine Punishment_ and on the _Soul_. Cp. _Sympos._ 1, 2, and 2, 5; and _On Love between Brothers_, c. 16. Timotheüs, an Athenian, 7. Timotheüs, of Miletus, musician and poet (446-357), 232. Tiribazus, satrap of western Armenia (d. 385), 229. Titans, giant sons of Uranus, 138, 272, 301. Tityus, a giant of Euboea, 307. Trench, battle at, 176. Troglodytes, cave-dwellers, about the Red Sea, &c., 117, 293, 296. Trophoniădes, 306. Trophonius, tutelary hero of Lebadeia and its oracle, 35, 40, 315. Trosobius, 138. Troy, 91, 102, 148. Trunkmakers’ street, 17. Tyndarĭdae, Castor and Polydeucēs (Pollux), 147. Typhons, 138, 235, 307. U. Udōra, 306. Ulysses (Odysseus), 16, 140, 185, 193, 217. Urănus (‘Heaven’), the father of Cronus, 138. V. Venus (the planet), 154, 268. Vespasian, 211 _n._ Vesuvius, 211. W. Wise Men of Greece, the (see the _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_ by Plutarch, translated by Professor Tucker in this series), 6, 110. X. Xenocrătes, of Chalcēdon, 396-314, a philosopher, associate of Plato, 129, 134, 305, 315, 316. Xenophănēs, philosopher of Colophon, fourth century, 235. Xenophon, Athenian general and historian (d. about 359), 103. Xerxes, 235. Z. Zagreus, a name of the mystic Dionysus, 67. Zēnĕs (plural of Zeus), 146. Zeus, 96, 127, 139, 147, 148, 167, 179, 200, 226, 230, 272, 273, 297, 299, 301. Zeus Agoraios, 35. Zodiac, the, 293. Zones, the, 154. Zoroaster, Persian sage, of uncertain date, 126. Printed in England at the Oxford University Press ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). ○ Text that was in bold face is enclosed by equals signs (=bold=). ○ Page references printed in the margin of the book have been moved into the paragraphs near where they appear, contained in square brackets, and begun with the word “Sidenote”. ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the chapters in which they are referenced. 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