Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II. · Plutarch
INTRODUCTION
The Dialogue on _Delay in Divine Punishment_ stands somewhat apart from the others. It deals gravely with grave matters, the ways of Providence with man, and the ‘last things’. The method is ingenious and satisfactory. An Epicurean, after scoffing at Providence in a manner which deeply offends the company, leaves them abruptly. We are reminded of the departure of the Cynic Didymus at Delphi (p. 124), and of the immortal episode of Thrasymachus in the First Book of the _Republic_ of Plato. The small family party which remains, Plutarch, his brother Timon, his son-in-law Patrocleas, and an intimate friend Olympicus, take up the points suggested by the attack, not contentiously, or in the language of the Schools, but with a view to ascertain whether there is anything in them which concerns reasonable men. The friends successively raise these points: the slowness of the Gods in punishing, and their purposes in the delay; the justice of visiting the sins of parents upon children, or of a city upon a new generation of citizens; the persistence of the soul after physical death here. In all cases it is Plutarch who supplies the answer, whereas, in the other long Dialogues, there is some distribution of parts and an interplay of character. In the tone of the dissertations, which is sustained, and little relieved by humour, the piece most nearly resembles the essay _On Superstition_. Plutarch’s argument is marked by truly academic caution, and an admission of man’s ignorance and limitations, which might have come from the pen of Bishop Butler.
When Plutarch has sufficiently established ‘to demonstration’ the ‘probability’ of his position, he adds, at the urgent desire of the company, a myth, which he had already offered to produce. The ‘myth’ is a device of which Plato has many examples, intended to give symmetry to the Dialogue, ‘that it may not go about without a head’. But it is more than a literary device; it is a satisfaction of the desire for something poetical and constructive which mere Dialectic can never feed. The myth about Thespesius here must be compared with that of Timarchus in the _Genius of Socrates_ and with the traveller’s tale of the Island of Cronus in the _Face in the Moon_.[199] Of Platonic myths, we are first reminded of that of Er, which closes the _Republic_, and raises to a higher plane the question whether the just man or the unjust has the best of it. There are necessarily strong points of resemblance to the magnificent judgement myth of the _Gorgias_, and much of the imagery recalls the _Phaedo_. The _Timaeus_ is not perhaps so conspicuously before Plutarch’s mind here as it is in other works. While there is so much which can be referred to Plato, there is nothing to suggest that Plutarch set himself to make a patchwork out of the stores of his retentive memory, still less that he sought to imitate the master from whose genius his industrious and curious mind lay poles apart. His honesty and his common-sense forbade any such attempt.
It is fortunate that we possess a fragment (redeemed for Plutarch by Wyttenbach) of a Dialogue with the same speakers, and perhaps intended to follow immediately, in which, as though in ‘calculated contrast’, writes M. Gréard (p. 292), to the grim details contained in the Dialogue before us, we have a delightful picture of what awaits the just beyond the grave, the truly ‘initiate’. As all the questions discussed in the main Dialogue are raised in old Greek writers, Homer, Pindar, the Tragedians, supplemented by the philosophers, and the myth, in its stern imagery, is on all fours, for instance, with the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, so the comfortable vision of the initiate in the fragment is anticipated by Greeks who wrote four hundred or five hundred years before. Thus we have the lines of the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes (154 foll., tr. G. Murray): _Then you will find a breath about your ears Of Music, and a light about your eyes Most beautiful—like this—and myrtle groves, And joyous throngs of women and of men, And clapping of glad hands._ And the still more famous picture of Pindar (_Ol._ 2, 68-74, tr. G. Moberly): _But who in Godlike strife Have dared to keep their secret souls from sin, Thrice tried in either life, E’en to old Saturn’s tower their bright way win. There with melodious din Light breezes, East and West, Fan with soft breath the Islets of the Blest; And golden flowerets breathe, Some from the Island-trees, Some floating on the ambient seas, With which their twinèd arms and brows they wreathe._
Perhaps it would hardly be untrue to say that the whole of Plutarch’s daring speculation owes its origin to the words of Heraclitus, with which the fragment closes, as to the surprises which await man after death. There is one distinct note of date, in the Sibylline prophecy quoted in c. 22, that the emperor of that day should die in his bed. Vespasian, who was doubtless meant, died in June, A.D. 79, and the great eruption of Vesuvius (by which, however, Puteoli does not appear to have suffered specially) took place in August of the same year. The Dialogue must have been written later than these events. On the whole, if we may venture a conjecture where all is uncertain, we may perhaps suppose it to have followed the _Symposiacs_ at a comparatively short interval, and to have been an early attempt to apply the method of dialogue to elaborate discussion of great themes. It has characteristics of its own which enable us to understand how Erasmus (_Adagia_)[200] felt doubts as to its genuineness, though we have the confident assurance of Wyttenbach that there is Plutarch’s seal upon it. Readers should consult Mr. Oakesmith’s pages on this work (_The Religion of Plutarch_, pp. 103 foll.), and, on the myth, Bishop Westcott’s Essay on _The Myths of Plato_ (reprinted in _History of Religious Thought in the West_), or Professor J. A. Stewart on _The Myths of Plato_.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.