Chapter 10

Whence is drawn for holy washingsWater of the Muses bright.

Whence is drawn for holy washings

Water of the Muses bright.

And again, in a rather more elaborate strain, the same poet|D|addressing Clio:

Holy patron of our washings, Goddess sought with many a vow,By no golden robe encumbered, hear thy servants drawing nowWater, fragrant and delightful, from ambrosial depths below.

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|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|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,|403|Hesiod, and Thales used metre, if we assume that Thales really wrote theAstronomyattributed 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|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 abouttheir 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|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|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.|E|Now comes the strongest instance: the statutes by which Lycurgus regulated the Lacedaemonian constitution were givento 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|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|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|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 inquiryat 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|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|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|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|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|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|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,|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|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,|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 andconvenient 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|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 makesA poet of a stranger to the Muse,

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 graceThe vocal shafts of love and joy.

Scatters with easy grace

The vocal shafts of love and joy.

|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|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|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,

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;|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|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”,|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.

Unto the wise a riddling prophet aye,

To silly souls a teacher plain and brief.

|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|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 tripin 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,|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,|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.

Phoebus, none but he,

May give men prophecies.

|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 thehands 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|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|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 sheeplandBetter than I that have been, then wonderful wise is thy wisdom.

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|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|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|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 aboutthings 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]

|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|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|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|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 wayThe 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 stayWithin, that day.[127]

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|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|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.’

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