Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II. · Plutarch
NOTE ON THE MYTHS IN PLUTARCH
The three ‘myths’ which are found in these Dialogues are all avowedly Platonic; they are introduced and dismissed in Platonic formulae, and much of the imagery is drawn from Plato. Yet the treatment is Plutarch’s own, and the style, though dignified and elevated after his fashion, never suggests an imitation of Plato which could only be parody. New matter is brought in, mostly gleaned from the astronomy of his day. The movements of the heavenly bodies have been an inspiration to later poets of verse and prose: _Minerva breathes on me, Apollo guides, And the nine Muses point me to the Bears._ To Plutarch the subject was rather one of earnest curiosity, as he turns to account the details and their theological application, read by him in the philosophers of, or nearly of, his own age. The purpose of the Platonic myth is to carry the argument beyond and above the region of logic and analysis, into that of poetry and constructive truth, upon matters where strict proof was impossible. The reader may be referred to Bishop Westcott’s Essay on _Religious Thought in the West_, and to Professor J. A. Stewart’s book on _The Myths of Plato_.
(1) It will be convenient to look first into the myth of Thespesius in Plutarch’s Dialogue _On the Instances of Delay in Divine Punishment_ (see pp. 205-13 of this book). The motive is identical with that of the myth of Er in the _Republic_, yet with a difference. Plato gives us an experience from the world beyond death, granted to one who had been taken for dead during several days, in order to carry to a higher plane his argument for the victory here and hereafter of Justice over Injustice. Plutarch, as a moral teacher and ‘physician of souls’, concerned to restore individuals who have fallen, and to keep the falling on their feet, gives us the picture of ‘The Rake Reformed’, taking an extreme instance of a vicious character restored to sanity by glimpses of penalties and of bliss beyond this life, in order to deter and encourage others under temptation. The name Aridaeus, changed to Thespesius, ‘The Divine’, as an earnest of the reformation, reminds us of Ardiaeus the tyrant, in Plato. The language naturally falls into that of the Judgement-myth in the _Gorgias_. It is introduced by a similar form of words: ‘Now listen while I tell you a very beautiful story (λόγος) which you I think will call a myth (μῦθος), for all that I am about to say I wish to be regarded as true’ (Plato).
‘I can tell you a story which I have lately heard, yet I hesitate lest it may appear to you a myth.... Let me first make good the “probability” of my view, then we will start the myth, if myth indeed it be’ (Plutarch). The details in Plutarch are fuller and grimmer, and the language, though solemn, lacks the stately reticence of Plato. We are often reminded of words and thoughts in the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus. The celestial imagery is vague, and does not seem to suggest any special source more modern than Plato. It has a general resemblance to a passage in the _Phaedo_ (c. 58, p. 109 D, E). ‘We, dwelling in a hollow of the Earth, think that we dwell upon the Earth itself; and the air we call Heaven, and think that it is that Heaven wherein are the courses of the stars: whereas, by reason of weakness and sluggishness, we cannot go forth out of the air; but if a man could journey to the edge thereof, or having gotten wings could fly up, it would come to pass that even as fishes here which rise out of the sea do behold the things here, he, looking out, would behold the things there, and if his strength could endure the sight thereof, would see that there are the True Heaven, and the True Light, and the True Earth’ (Tr. J. A. Stewart).
The daemons are only mentioned as Ministers or Ushers in the after-world; there is no threefold division of the man into body, soul, and mind, only one into body and soul; there is one reference to Delphi and its oracle, where a popular belief that Night and Apollo were partners is corrected. An attentive reading will bring out a resemblance of words and phrases to those familiar to us in the Sixth Book of the _Aeneid_, the subject of E. Norden’s fruitful and convincing study. (2) The beautiful story of Timarchus, the young friend of Socrates’ son, who passed into a trance in the cave of Trophonius, and saw things of the unseen world which were to be fully revealed to him three months later, i. e. in actual death, comes into the Dialogue _On the Genius of Socrates_ (pp. 36-40) to explain the special correspondence during life between the God and those gifted souls who possess mind, and become daemons or spirits after death. Here the three-fold division into body, soul, and mind (see p. 303) is maintained. A practical application of the myth is drawn by Theanor, the young Pythagorean visitor.
As the supposed Dialogue takes place in B. C. 378, we do not expect to find in it the astronomy of Plutarch’s day, though he would not have shrunk from any anachronism. The general imagery is again that of the _Phaedo_, but there is a sea on which circular bodies, the stars which are men’s souls, float. The current which bears them is circular, yet not completely circular, not ending in the point where it started, but describing a continuous spiral (just as the moon does with reference to the earth’s path). This sea is inclined to the middle and highest point of the firmament by ‘a little less than eight-ninths of the whole’. This is puzzling; it may suggest the inclination of the ecliptic to the equator, or, again, that of the Milky Way to the ecliptic. Doubtless some explanation will be forthcoming. An interesting detail is ‘Styx, a way to Hades’, clearly the shadow in a lunar eclipse, since the moon ‘only avoids Styx by a slight elevation, and is caught once in one hundred and seventy-seven secondary measures’, the exact number of periods of twenty-four hours contained in six lunar months, the normal interval between two eclipses (see p. 286). ‘Secondary measures’ is a curious expression, since Plutarch elsewhere (Plat. Quaest. 3, p. 1006 E) calls periods of a day and a night ‘the primary measures’. It seems not impossible that δευτέροις here has replaced some word which the scribe could not make out, such as νυχθημέροις. We have the four principles of birth and death, as in the _Face in the Moon_; only there Clotho takes the moon for her sphere of office, and Lachesis the earth, here Lachesis takes the moon, Clotho the sun, Atropus the ‘unseen’. Neither list agrees with the assignment of functions by Xenocrates (see the end of Dr. M. Adler’s Dissertation mentioned below).
(3) Sylla’s tale in the _Face in the Moon_ (pp. 299-308), a traveller’s story picked up in Carthage from one of those curious characters found on the outer margin of the Greek world in whom Plutarch delighted, is brought in with admirable dramatic fitness, shown in Sylla’s eagerness to produce it at the very outset, in the preparation for it by the skirmish between Theon and Lamprias, and in the vivacity of the narrative. It is dismissed with a Platonic formula: ‘Such is the story which I heard the stranger relate.... But you and your friends, Lamprias, may take the story in what way you will.’ Compare: ‘I am persuaded, O Callicles, that these things that are told are true.... Perchance this shall seem to you an old wife’s fable, and thou wilt despise it: well mightest thou despise it, if by searching we could find out aught better and truer’ (_Gorgias_, 526 D, 527 A). The astronomy of the myth is in the main that of the preceding Dialogue, and Sylla shows considerable familiarity with Plato and also with Xenocrates. It is perhaps noticeable how little interest Plutarch shows in geographical detail, contenting himself with such vague and antiquated views as sufficed for a setting to the story. He appears not to name Pytheas at all in the _Lives_, and only once (on a question of the tides) in the _Moralia_.
The whole Dialogue has been the subject of a careful study by Dr. Max Adler of Vienna (_Dissertationes Vindobonenses_, 1910). Without entering into his general view of the structure, we may observe that Dr. Adler seems to be very successful in establishing the close connexion between it and the Dialogue _On the Cessation of the Oracles_, which he is probably right—though he reserves the proofs—in regarding as based upon it, and later in date. This comes out especially in the passages about the captivity of Cronus (cp. p. 301 with pp. 135-6), and the argument about ‘the Middle’ (cp. p. 270 with p. 144). He produces a happy quotation from Maximus Tyrius to establish beyond doubt that the source of an important passage about mind (pp. 271-2) was in Posidonius. His general conclusion as to the myth, is that it too is in the main from Posidonius, and that when Plutarch draws upon Xenocrates, it is through Posidonius. The latter appears to have been a writer of great industry and encyclopaedic learning, quoted as an authority on matters of history, physical geography, and what we should now call anthropology; not an original force in Philosophy, but successful in reconciling systems and making them available for human needs; one the aim of whose life-work was, in the words of one of his most recent exponents, _to make men at home in the universe_ (_Stoics and Sceptics_, by Edwyn Bevan, p. 98).
Any one who will read Sylla’s myth, with a good map of the moon’s surface before him, will be able to locate for himself the ‘Gulf of Hecate’, and the long valleys leading to the Elysian plains, which, on her side remote from earth, enjoy diffused sunlight. There need be no idea of shafts or tunnels driven through the solid body of the moon. Cicero’s _Dream of Scipio_, written more than a century before Plutarch’s Dialogue, and also drawn from Posidonius, will be found an admirable companion piece, enforcing, in language of singular beauty and elevation, those duties to country and ancestors which find inadequate expression in the Greek thought of the first century of our era. NOTE ON THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS AND THE FIVE REGULAR SOLIDS The opinion that our World, or universe, is not the only one in the Whole, is attributed, in general terms, to many of the early Greek philosophers, notably to Anaximander. The exact meaning of a ‘Cosmos’, in this connexion, is perhaps not easy to fix. Aristotle is clear that the circle of the fixed stars is one and constant, but the author of the Stoical treatise on the Cosmos, found among his works, takes stars to be a part of the (one) Cosmos. An earth, such as ours with her atmosphere and moon, is essential, and a sun, or access to sunlight, and perhaps some planets. In the _Dream of Scipio_ our solar system, with the earth in its centre, is described with great distinctness as a unit in space. The planets are always regarded as luminous points, stars somewhat out of place (see p. 268), possessing no definite magnitude or solid substance.
In theory the number of Cosmi might be infinite, but a shrinking from the vague ‘Infinity’, in later times associated with the Epicureans, led Plato, for instance, to restrict the number to a possible five. That he based this number upon that of the five regular solids may seem fanciful, but the solid angles and forms observed in crystals might reasonably suggest the hypothesis that the ultimate constituents of the crust of the earth would be found in the most perfect solid structures known to theory. In theory there is much that is attractive in these five solids. To one coming fresh from a study of Plane Polygonal Figures, which exist in infinite number, and, when regular, approximate more and more closely to the Plane Circle, it comes as a surprise to find that, in the next higher degree, the number of solid bodies so approximating to the Sphere is five only. Again, it seems almost a paradox that, of these five, the nearest approximation to the Sphere is attained, not by the body with twenty fine faces, but by that which shews only twelve, and those comparatively blunted and unshapely (pentagons). It was perhaps from such considerations that the Dodecahedron was held of special importance by the Pythagoreans.
Plato’s study of the several faces of these solids, as available for construction or reconstruction of a world, leaves nothing to be desired, assuming that a solid body can be built out of plane figures, an assumption which appears to belong to the same habit of thought as that which makes the point the square of unity, and the lineal measure corresponding to the number two the first rectangle. As the pentagon defies the analysis available for the equilateral triangle or for the square, the Dodecahedron remains over, a model or pattern of a stitch-work world, as viewed from outside (_Phaedo_ 110 B and _Timaeus_ 55 C; see also Burnet’s _Early Greek Philosophy_, p. 341 foll.). It may not be amiss to be reminded that Kepler, mathematician as well as astronomer, spent many toilsome years in the endeavour to arrange the members of our solar system upon a plan based on the five solids. ‘If Kepler went out “to seek his father’s asses”, he found a kingdom, for it was in the course of these speculations, and through them, that he discovered not only his own “Third Law”, but also the truth, overlooked by Copernicus, that the orbit of each planet lies in a plane which passes through the centre of the sun.’ (Dreyer, _Planetary Systems_, p. 410.)
The discussion of the plurality of worlds, in the modern sense, begins with the very attractive work of Fontenelle, brought out, in its original form, in 1686, a year before Newton’s _Principia_, being a series of conversations between the Author and a witty and accomplished Marquise, as to the habitability of the several members of the solar system. The argument which followed is distinguished by many great names, those of Newton himself, Bentley, Huyghens, the Herschels, Dr. Chalmers, till it was brought to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century by Dr. Whewell and Sir David Brewster, writing respectively against and for the hypothesis. The subject was then one (as readers of Anthony Trollope will remember) upon which any one might be called upon to take a side in a London drawing-room. In more recent times interest has been concentrated upon Mars, who now possesses the distinction of having two satellites. We are only concerned to invite the reader to compare the religious argument addressed to the Stoics by Plutarch (p. 142 foll.) with the religious argument drawn by Dr. Chalmers and Sir David Brewster from the enrichment of the providential scheme for man upon our earth which would follow the conception of other earths tenanted by other beings perhaps of a higher order.
But it is natural that any such speculation should begin with the moon, and in fact we find the question of her habitability discussed by Theon and by Lamprias (pp. 293-9). With the later treatises on this subject, beginning with Lucian’s witty flight of fancy, we are not concerned. But an exception must be made for the very able works of Savinien de Cyrano, known to us as Cyrano de Bergerac, whose _Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Lune_ appeared, probably, in 1650, and was followed by a similar work about the sun. Cyrano appears to be familiar with Plutarch: thus he meets in the moon the ‘daemon of Socrates’, who has also been the tutelary spirit of Epaminondas, of Cato of Utica, and of Brutus. The idea (due in the first place to Heraclitus) of being fed on smells, is worked out with much vivacity. But with so original and daring a writer, it is not quite easy to settle how much is due to any hint from others and how much to himself. A modern reader will not need to be reminded that Cyrano was not a person of whom it was wise to give an outspoken opinion in his lifetime. But I had wished to speak with nothing but respect of a man of real learning and genius, who, from whatever cause, did not bring to perfection any work worthy of himself.
See, on the general subject, an Essay by the late Professor Henry J. S. Smith in _Oxford Essays_, 1855. INDEX OF PERSONS AND PLACES MENTIONED BY PLUTARCH IN THESE DIALOGUES ¶ In this Index the Greek spelling of ei (Lat. ī) has been usually retained. All dates are B. C. unless otherwise stated. The dates are often approximate and conventional. Other numerals refer to pages of this volume. For the speakers in each Dialogue see that Dialogue _passim_ and the Introductions. (The ‘Three Pythian Dialogues’ are quoted under that designation See p. 52.)
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