Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II. · Plutarch
ON SUPERSTITION
IV. Polycrates was a terrible tyrant in Samos, Periander [Sidenote: D] at Corinth, yet no one continued to fear them when he had removed to a free and democratic state. But when a man fears the sovereignty of the Gods as a grim inexorable tyranny, whither shall he migrate, where find exile, what sort of land can he find where no Gods are, or of sea? Into what portion of the world wilt thou creep and hide thyself, and believe, thou miserable creature, that thou hast escaped from God? There is a law which allows even slaves, if they have despaired of liberty, to petition to be sold, and so change to a milder master. Superstition allows no exchange of Gods, nor is it possible to find a God who shall not be terrible to him who fears those of his country and his clan, who shivers at the ‘Preservers’ and trembles in alarm before the beneficent beings from whom we ask wealth, plenty, peace, concord, a successful [Sidenote: E] issue for our best of words and works. And then these men reckon slavery a misfortune, and say: _A dire mishap it is, for man or maid, To pass to service of some ill-starred lord._[271]
Yet how much more dire is it, think you, for them to pass to lords from whom is no flight, or running away, no shifting. The slave has an altar to flee unto, even for robbers many temples are inviolable, and fugitives in war, if they lay hold of shrine or temple, take courage. The superstitious shudders in alarm at those very things beyond all others, wherein those who fear the worst find hope. Never drag the superstitious man from temples; within them is punishment and retribution [Sidenote: F] for him. Why more words? ‘Death is the limit of life to all mankind.’[272] Yes, but even death is no limit to superstition; superstition crosses the boundaries to the other side, and makes fear endure longer than life. It attaches to death the apprehension of undying ills, and when it ceases from troubles, it [Sidenote: 167] thinks to enter upon troubles which never cease. Gates are opened for it into a very depth of Hades, rivers of fire and streams which flow out of Styx mingle their floods; darkness itself is spread with phantoms manifold, obtruding cruel visions and pitiful voices; there are judges and tormentors, and chasms and abysses which teem with myriad evil things. Thus has superstition, that God-banned fear of Gods, made that inevitable to itself by anticipation, of which it had escaped the suffering in act.[273]
V. None of these horrors attaches to atheism. Yet its ignorance is distressing; it is a great misfortune to a soul [Sidenote: B] to see so wrong and grope so blindly about such great matters, because the light is extinguished of the brightest and most availing out of many eyes when the perception of God is lost. But to the opinion now before us there does attach from the very first, as we have already said, an emotional element, cankering, perturbing, and slavish. Plato[274] says that music, whose work it is to make men’s lives harmonious and rhythmical, was given to them by Gods, not for wanton tickling of the ears, but to clear the revolutions and harmonies of the soul from the disturbing impulses which rove within the body, such as most often run riot, where the Muse is not or the Grace, [Sidenote: C] and do violence and mar the tune; to bring them to order, to roll them smooth, to lead them aright, and settle them. _But they whom Zeus not loves_ (says Pindar)[275] _Turn to the sound a dim disdainful ear What time the Muses’ voice they hear._ Yes, they grow savage and rebellious, as the tigers, they say, are maddened and troubled at the sound of the drum, and at last tear themselves to pieces. A lesser evil then it is for those who, through deafness and a dulled ear, are apathetic and insensible to music. Tiresias was unfortunate that he could not see his children and familiar friends, but far worse was the [Sidenote: D] case of Athamas and of Agave, who saw them as lions and stags. Better, I think, it was for Hercules in his madness not to see his sons, or feel their presence, than to treat his dearest ones as enemies.
_They, from sickness free and age, Quit of toils, the deep-voiced rage Of Acheron for ay have left behind_, as Pindar[277] says; but human sufferings and doings flow in a mingled stream of vicissitude, now this way, now that. VII. Now look with me at the atheist, first when things cross his wishes, and consider his attitude. If he is a decent, quiet person, he takes what comes in silence, and provides his own means of succour and consolation. If he be impatient and querulous, he directs all his complainings against Fortune, and [Sidenote: 168] the way things happen; he cries out that nothing goes by justice or as Providence ordains, all is confused and jumbled up; the tangled web of human life is unpicked. Not so the superstitious: if the ill which has befallen him be the veriest trifle, still he sits down and builds on to his annoyance a pile of troubles, grievous and great and inextricable, heaping up for himself fears, dreads, suspicions, worries, a victim to every sort of groaning and lamentation; for he blames not man, nor fortune, nor [Sidenote: B] occasion, nor himself, but for all the God. From that quarter comes pouring upon him, he says, a Heaven-sent stream of woe; he is punished thus by the Gods not because he is unfortunate, but because he is specially hated by them, all that he suffers is his own proper deserts. Then the atheist, when he is sick, reckons up his own surfeitings, carouses, irregularities in diet, or over-fatigues, or unaccustomed changes of climate or place. Or, again, if he have met with political reverses, become unpopular or discredited in high quarters, he seeks for the cause in himself or his party.
_Where my transgression? or what have I done? what duty omitted?_[278] But to the superstitious every infirmity of his body, every [Sidenote: C] loss of money, any death of a child, foul weather and failures in politics, are reckoned for blows from the God and assaults of the fiend. Hence he does not even take courage to help himself, to get rid of the trouble, or to remedy it, or make resistance, lest he should seem to be fighting the Gods, and resisting when punished. So the doctor is thrust out of the sick man’s chamber, and the mourner’s door is closed against the sage who comes to comfort and advise. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘let me take my punishment, as the miscreant that I am, an accursed [Sidenote: D] object of hate to Gods and daemons.’ It is open to a man who has no conviction that there are Gods, when suffering from some great grief and trouble, to wipe away a tear, to cut his hair, to put off his mourning. How are you going to address the superstitious in like case, wherein to bring him help? He sits outside, clothed in sackcloth, or with filthy rags hanging about him, as often as not rolling naked in the mud, while he recites errors and misdoings of his own, how he ate this, or drank that, or walked on a road which the spirit did not allow. At the very best, if he have taken superstition in a mild form, he sits in the house fumigating and purifying himself. The old women ‘make a peg of him’, as Bion says, and on it they hang—whatever [Sidenote: E] they choose to bring!
VIII. They say that Tiribazus, when arrested by the Persians, drew his scimitar, being a powerful man, and fought for his life; then, when they loudly protested that the arrest was by the king’s orders, at once dropped his point, and held out his hands to be tied. Is not this just what happens in the case before us? Other men make a fight against mischances and thrust all aside, that they may devise ways of escape and evade what is unwelcome to themselves. But the superstitious man listens to nobody, and addresses himself thus: ‘Poor wretch, [Sidenote: F] thy sufferings come from Providence, and by the order of the God.’ So he flings away all hope, gives himself up, flies, obstructs those who try to help him. Many tolerable troubles are made deadly by various superstitions. Midas[279] of old, as we are to believe, dispirited and distressed by certain dreams, was so miserable that he sought a voluntary death by drinking bulls’ blood. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, during the war with the Lacedaemonians, when dogs were howling like wolves, and rye grass sprouting around his ancestral hearth, in utter despair at the extinction of all his hopes, cut his own throat. Perhaps it would have been better for Nicias[280], the Athenian [Sidenote: 169] general, to find the same release from superstition as Midas or Aristodemus, and not, in his terror of the shadow when the moon was eclipsed, to sit still under blockade, and afterwards, when forty thousand had been slaughtered or taken alive, to be taken prisoner and die ingloriously. For there is nothing so terrible when the earth blocks the way, or when its shadow meets the moon in due cycle of revolutions; what is terrible is that a man should plunge[281] into the darkness of superstition, [Sidenote: B] and that its dark shadow should confound a man’s reason and make it blind in matters where reason is most needed.
_Glaucus, see! the waves already from the depth of ocean stirred, And a cloud is piling upwards, right above the Gyrean point, Certain presage of foul weather._[282] When the helmsman sees this, he prays that he may escape out of the peril, and calls on the Gods that save; but, while he prays, his hand is on the tiller, and he lowers the yard-arm, _Furls his mainsail, and from billows black as Erebus he flees._[283] Hesiod[284] tells the farmer to pray to Zeus below the earth and holy Artemis before he ploughs or sows, but to hold on to [Sidenote: C] the plough-handle as he prays. Homer[285] tells us that Ajax, before meeting Hector in single combat, commanded the Greeks to pray for him to the Gods; then, while they were praying, he was arming. Agamemnon, when he had given orders to the fighters: _Let each his spear set, and prepare his shield_, then begs of Zeus: _Grant that this hand make Priam’s halls a heap._[286] For God is the hope of valour, not the subterfuge of cowardice. The Jews, on the other hand, because it was a sabbath, sat on in uncleansed clothes, while their enemies planted their ladders and took the walls, never rising to their feet, as though entangled in the one vast draw-net of their superstition.[287]
IX. Such then is superstition in disagreeable matters and on [Sidenote: D] what we call critical occasions, but it has no advantage, even in what is more pleasant, over atheism. Nothing is more pleasant to men than feasts, temple banquets, initiations, orgies, prayers to the Gods, and solemn supplications. See the atheist there, laughing in a wild sardonic peal at the proceedings, probably with a quiet aside to his intimates, that those who think this all done for the Gods are crazed and possessed; but that is the worst that can be said of him. The superstitious man wants to be cheerful and enjoy himself, but he cannot. _Rife too the city is with heavy reek Of victims slain, and rife with divers cries, The wail for healing and the moan for death._[288] [Sidenote: E] So is the soul of the superstitious. With the crown on his head he grows pale; while he sacrifices he shudders; he prays with a quivering voice and offers incense with hands that shake; he shows all through that Pythagoras[289] talks nonsense when he says: ‘We reach our best when we draw near to the Gods.’ For it is then that the superstitious are at their miserable worst; the halls and temples of the Gods which they approach are for them dens of bears, lairs of serpents, caverns of monsters of the sea!
_She would burn a hanging woman, She a mother in her pangs; She would bring pollution to you From the chamber of a corpse. In the crossways swoop upon you, Fix on you a murderer’s shame._[290] Nor will their views about Apollo, or Hera, or Aphrodite be a whit more decent, they fear and tremble at them all. Yet what was there in Niobe’s blasphemy about Latona, compared to what [Sidenote: C] superstition has persuaded fools to believe about that goddess, how she felt herself insulted and actually shot down the poor woman’s _Six daughters, beauteous all, six blooming sons_,[291] so greedy of calamities for another woman, so implacable! For if the Goddess had really been full of wrath and resentment of wickedness, and felt aggrieved at insults to herself, disposed to resent, rather than to smile at human folly and ignorance, why then she ought to have shot down those who lyingly imputed to her such savage bitterness, in speech or books. Certainly we denounce the bitterness of Hecuba as savage and beastly: [Sidenote: D] _In whose mid-liver I my teeth would set, And cling and gnaw._[292] But of the Syrian Goddess superstitious men believe that if one eats sprats or anchovies, she munches his shins, fills his body with sores, and rots his liver.[293]
XI. How then? Is it impious to say bad things about the Gods, but not impious to think them? Or is it the thought of the blasphemer which makes his voice amiss? We men scout abusive language as the outward sign of ill-feeling. We reckon for enemies those who speak ill of us because we think that they also think ill. Now you see the sort of things which the superstitious think about the Gods; they take them to be capricious, [Sidenote: E] faithless, shifty, revengeful, cruel, vexed about trifles, all reasons why the superstitious must perforce hate and fear the Gods. Of course he does, when he thinks that they have been, and will be again, authors of his greatest ills. But if he hates and fears the Gods, he is their enemy. Yet he worships, and sacrifices, and sits before their shrines. And no wonder; men salute tyrants also, and court them, and set up their figures in gold. But ‘in silence’ they hate them, ‘wagging the head’.[294] Hermolaus remained Alexander’s courtier, Pausanias served on Philip’s [Sidenote: F] bodyguard, Chaereas on that of Caligula; but each of them would say while he attended on his master _Sure thou shouldst rue it if my arm were strong._[295] The atheist thinks there are no Gods, the superstitious wishes that there were none; he believes against his will, for he fears to disbelieve. And yet, as Tantalus would gladly slip from beneath the stone swinging over his head, so is it with the superstitious and his fear, a pressure no less sore. He would reckon the atheist’s mood a blessed one, for there is freedom in it. As things are, the atheist is quite clear of superstition; the superstitious is at heart an atheist, only too weak to believe what he wishes to believe about the Gods.
_Father, uplifting his son, not marking the change of the body, Prays as he takes the dear life, poor fool._ Knowing and recognizing their own children, they used to sacrifice them—nay, the childless would buy children from poor parents and cut their throats as though they were lambs or chickens—, and the mother would stand by dry-eyed and with [Sidenote: D] never a groan. If she should groan or weep, she would have to lose the merit, and the child was sacrificed all the same, while the whole space in front of the shrine was filled with the rattle of drums and the din of fifes, in order that the sound of the wailing might be drowned. Suppose that Typhons, say, or Giants, had turned out the Gods and were our rulers, in what sacrifices but these would they delight, or what other solemnities would they require? Amestris,[299] wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men alive, as her own offering to Hades, who, as Plato[300] tells us, is [Sidenote: E] kind and wise and detains souls by persuasion and reason, and so has been named ‘Hades’. Xenophanes,[301] the natural philosopher, when he saw the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their feasts, gave them a home lesson: ‘If these are Gods, do not mourn them; if men, why sacrifice to them?
XIV. There is no sort of disease so capricious and so varied in emotions, such a medley of opposite, or rather conflicting, opinions, as is that of superstition. We must flee from it then, but as safety and advantage point, not like men who run for their lives from robbers or beasts or fire, never looking round or using their heads, and plunge into pathless wastes with pits and [Sidenote: F] precipices. For that is how some flee from superstition and plunge into a rough and flinty atheism, overleaping Piety seated in the middle space. Footnote 262: Polybius (6, 56) points to ‘Deisidaimonia’ as the force which has held the Roman Commonwealth together, and kept the Romans honest. Footnote 263: See Nauck, p. 910 (Hercules speaks). Footnote 264: δεῖμα—δέω: τάρβος—ταράσσω. Footnote 265: Cf. Aristot. _Eth. Nic._ 3, 7. Footnote 266: Eur. _Or._ 211-12. Footnote 267: Nauck, p. 910, Fragm. 375 (probably from Aeschylus). Footnote 268: Eur. _Tro._ 759. Footnote 269: Meineke 4, p. 670. Footnote 270: Fr. 95. Footnote 271: Nauck, Fragm. adespota, 376. Footnote 272: Dem. _de Cor._, s. 97. Footnote 273: A difficult passage. I follow W.’s suggested restoration. Footnote 274: _Tim._ 47 C, &c. Footnote 275: _Pyth._ 1, 25. Footnote 276: Or perhaps ‘that which knows no wrath’. Footnote 277: Fr. 143, quoted twice elsewhere by Plutarch.
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