IIION 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.

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, perhapsA. D.83-4.

1 and 2.Cleombrotusmentions the undying lamp flame at Ammon, said to require less oil each year, a proof that the years are growing shorter.

3.Demetriusthinks the cause inadequate andCleombrotusmentions other instances of important phenomena due to insignificant causes.

4.Ammoniuspoints 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.Lampriasinvites Cleombrotus to tell the company about the oracle of Ammon.Demetriussuggests, 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, whereHeracleonand our other friends werewaiting for us, in silence. On a request fromDemetriusthey agree to join in our discussion.

7.Didymusthe Cynic (‘Planetiades’) makes an angry protest: the wonder being that Providence itself had not deserted this bad world long ago. Heracleon andLampriashumour him, and he leaves the place quietly.

8.Ammoniusaddresses 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.Cleombrotusagreed, 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?’ interruptedDemetrius; ‘Hesiod was leading up to the Stoic “Conflagration”!’

12.Cleombrotusrefuses 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 (Philippusshows surprise) and the flight of Apollo.

16.Heracleon(first addressingPhilippus) 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.Demetriusconfirms this from his experiences in and about Britain.

19.Cleombrotuscompares the Stoic view of Gods who are perishable with the Epicurean ‘Infinity’.

20.Ammoniusdefends 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?’ askedHeracleon. ‘Because’, repliedCleombrotus, ‘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!’ saysLamprias; ‘that view is purely Greek, and was put into a book by one Petron of Himera long ago.’HeracleonandDemetriusexchange remarks about Plato’s views on a plurality of worlds, and agree to refer the matter toLamprias, 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.Lampriasloq.: It isa priorilikely 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. (Philippusasks 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,

(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 themselvesad 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.Ammoniuscriticizes; he points out that the difficulty about the figure (d) has been ignored.

34.Lampriasdrops the subject for the present, and turns to the five categories of being in theSophistesandPhilebus. 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.Lampriasis invited to return to the original question, as to the oracles and the migration of daemons.

39.Lampriasresumes:

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.Demetriushas 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.AmmoniusandPhilippushave points to raise. That of the latter is as to the identity of the sun with Apollo, and is allowed to stand over.Ammoniusprotests against the ascription of all prophecy to material causes, but wishes to hear the view ofLamprias.

47.Lampriasobserves that Plato had made a similar protest against Anaxagoras.Bothsets 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.

I. There is a story, Terentius Priscus, that certain eagles|409|or swans, in flight from the extremities of earth to its middle|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.

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.|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|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 toldus 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|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|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]

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|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 doesa 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|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|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|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|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|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.’

|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|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|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|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|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 toTegyrae about the oracle. These strangers, on leaving, addressed the woman in saying farewell as Corone (Crow). Then they|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|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”,|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|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 muchwickedness 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,|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|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|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, whomyou 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|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|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|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 storygoes; but this is to invert the facts of its lying idle; the|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|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,|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|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|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|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|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 outa 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|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 primeLives the hoarse crow, four crows the stag outlives,Three stags the ancient raven, ravens nineThe phoenix, but the phoenix, ten times told,We fair-haired nymphs, daughters of Zeus most dread.[140]

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]

|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|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. Thosewho 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|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 haveBy river sources and in grassy meads.‘[146]

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|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]

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,|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|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|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:|E|

In all his bloom, like to a falling starHis light was quenched, his spirit passed, to air.

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 waningsand 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|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,|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|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,

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