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 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 86: Fr. 7.
Footnote 87: In a lost ‘Hymn’, Fr. 32.
Footnote 88: Footnote 89: Reading Ἑλλήνων as Ed. Teub. fr. Stegmann.
Footnote 91: Puteoli.
Footnote 92: 218).
Footnote 93: Quoted by Menander, Fr. 243 (Meineke).
Footnote 99: 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 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 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: Footnote 116: In the _Stheneboea_.
Footnote 118: Fr. 16 (Nauck).
Footnote 120: Fr. 707.
Footnote 121: So Cobet (for Cinesons).
Footnote 123: See Herod. 4, 155 foll. and Pind. _Pyth._ 4. There is something amiss with Plutarch’s text here.
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 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 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