Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. II. · Plutarch
THE SPEAKERS
XIV. When we passed the chamber of the Acanthians and Brasidas, the guide showed us a place where iron obelisks to Rhodopis the courtesan once used to stand. Diogenianus showed annoyance: ‘So it was left for the same state’, he said, [Sidenote: 401] ‘to find a place for Rhodopis to deposit the tithes of her earnings, and to put Aesop, her fellow servant, to death!’ ‘Bless you, friend,’ said Serapion, ‘why so vexed at that? Carry your eyes upwards, and behold among the generals and kings the golden Mnesarete, which Crates called a standing trophy of the lewdness of the Greeks.’ The young man looked: ‘Was it then about Phryne that Crates said that?’ ‘Yes, it was,’ said Serapion, ‘her name was Mnesarete, but she took on that of Phryne (toad) as a nickname because of her yellow skin. Many names, it would seem, are concealed by these nicknames. There was Polyxena, mother of Alexander, afterwards said to have been called Myrtale and Olympias and Stratonice. Then Eumetis [Sidenote: B] of Rhodes is to this day called by most people Cleobuline, after her father; and Herophile of Erythrae, when she showed a prophetic gift, was addressed as Sibylla. You will hear the grammarians telling us that Leda has been named Mnesinoe, and Orestes Achaeus. But how do you propose’, he went on, looking hard at Theon, ‘to get rid of the charge as to Phryne?’
XV. Theon smiled quietly: ‘In this way:’ he said, ‘by a cross charge against you for raking up the pettiest of the [Sidenote: C] Greek misdoings. For as Socrates,[99] when entertained in the house of Callias, makes war upon the ointment only, but looks on at all the dancing and tumbling and kisses and buffoonery, and holds his tongue, so you, it seems to me, want to exclude from the temple a poor woman who made an unworthy use of her charms; but when you see the God encompassed by first-fruits and tithes of murders, wars, and raids, and his temple loaded with Greek spoils and booty, you show no disgust; you have no pity for the Greeks when you read on the beautiful offerings such deeply disgraceful inscriptions as “Brasidas and the Acanthians from the Athenians”, “Athenians from [Sidenote: D] Corinthians”, “Phocians from Thessalians”, “Orneatans from Sicyonians”, “Amphictyones from Phocians”. So Praxiteles, it seems, was the one person who offended Crates by finding[100] room for his mistress to stand here, whereas Crates ought to have commended him for placing beside those golden kings a golden courtesan, a strong rebuke to wealth as having nothing wonderful or worshipful about it. It would be good if kings [Sidenote: E] and rulers were to set up in the God’s house offerings to Justice Temperance, Magnanimity, not to golden and delicate Abundance, in which the very foulest lives have their share.’
_Whence is drawn for holy washings Water of the Muses bright._ And again, in a rather more elaborate strain, the same poet [Sidenote: D] addressing Clio: _Holy patron of our washings, Goddess sought with many a vow, By no golden robe encumbered, hear thy servants drawing now Water, fragrant and delightful, from ambrosial depths below._ So Eudoxus was wrong in believing those who have made out that this was called ‘Water of Styx’. But they installed the Muses as assessors in prophecy and guardians of the place, by the fountain and the temple of Earth where the oracle used to be, because the responses were given in metre and in lyric strains. And some say further that the heroic metre was heard for the [Sidenote: E] first time here: _Bring in your feathers, ye birds, ye bees, bring wax at his bidding._ The God was in need, and dignity was waived![103]
XVIII. ‘More reasonable, that, Boethus,’ said Serapion, ‘and more in tune with the Muses. For we ought not to fight against the God, nor to remove, along with his prophecy, his Providence and Godhead also, but rather to seek fresh solutions for apparent contradictions, and never to surrender the reverent belief of our fathers.’ ‘Excellent Serapion!’ I said, ‘you are right. We were not abandoning Philosophy, as cleared out of the way and done for, because once upon a time philosophers [Sidenote: F] put out their dogmas and theories in verse, as Orpheus, Hesiod, Parmenides, Empedocles, Thales, whereas later on they gave it up, and have now all given it up—except you! In your hands Poetry is returning home to Philosophy, and clear and noble is the strain in which she rallies our young people. Astronomy again: she was not lowered in the hands of Aristarchus, Timocharis, Aristyllus, Hipparchus, all writing in prose, whereas Eudoxus, [Sidenote: 403] Hesiod, and Thales used metre, if we assume that Thales really wrote the _Astronomy_ attributed to him. Pindar actually expresses surprise at the neglect, in his own day, of a mode of melody....[104] There is nothing out of the way or absurd in seeking out the causes of such changes; but to remove arts and faculties altogether, whenever there is disturbance or variation in their details, is not fair.’
XIX. ‘And yet’, interposed Theon, ‘those instances have involved really great variations and novelties, whereas of the [Sidenote: B] oracles given here we know of many in prose even in old days, and those on no trifling matters. When the Lacedaemonians, as Thucydides[105] has told us in his history, consulted the God about their war with the Athenians, he promised them victory and mastery, and that “he himself will help them, invited or uninvited.” And again, that, if they did not restore Pleistoanax[106], they shall plough with a silver share.[107] When the Athenians consulted him about their expedition in Sicily, he directed them to bring the priestess of Erythrae to Athens; now the woman’s name was Peace. When Deinomenes the Siceliot inquired about his sons, the answer was that all three should [Sidenote: C] reign as tyrants. “And the worse for them, O Master Apollo”, rejoined Deinomenes. “That too”, added the God, “to form part of the answer.” You know that Gelo had the dropsy and Hiero the stone, while they reigned; Thrasybulus, the third, was involved in revolutions and wars and soon lost his throne.
Then Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus, after putting many others to death in cruel and unlawful ways, at last killed Timarchus, who had come to him from Athens with money, after receiving him with hospitality and kindness; he thrust his body into a crate and flung it out to sea. This he did by the hands of Cleander of Aegina, no one else knew. Afterwards, when [Sidenote: D] himself in trouble, he sent his brother Cleotimus, to consult the oracle secretly about his own exile and retirement. The God answered that he granted exile to Procles, and retirement either to the place where he had ordered his Aeginetan friend to lodge the crate, or where the stag sheds his horn. The tyrant understood the God to bid him fling himself into the sea, or bury himself underground (for the stag buries his horn deep out of sight, when it falls off). He waited a short time, then, when his affairs became desperate, went into exile. But the friends of Timarchus caught and slew him, and cast out the corpse into the sea. [Sidenote: E] Now comes the strongest instance: the statutes by which Lycurgus regulated the Lacedaemonian constitution were given to him in prose. So Alyrius, Herodotus, Philochorus, and Ister, the men who most zealously set about collecting metrical prophecies, have written down oracular responses which were not in metre, and Theopompus, who was exceptionally interested [Sidenote: F] about the oracle, has administered a vigorous rebuke to those who do not hold that the Pythia prophesied in metre in those days; yet, when he wanted to prove the point, he has found an exceedingly small number of such answers, which shows that the others, even at that early time, were put forth in prose.
XX. ‘Some oracles, however, still run into metres, one of which has made “necessary business”[108] a household word. There is in Phocis a temple of “Hercules Woman-Hater”, where the practice is for the consecrated priest not to associate with a woman during his year. So they appoint comparatively old men to the priesthood. However, not very long ago, a young man of good character, but ambitious, who was in love with [Sidenote: 404] a girl, accepted the office. At first he put constraint on himself and avoided her; but one day, when he was resting after wine and dancing, she burst in, and he yielded. Then, in his fear and confusion, he fled to the oracle, and proceeded to ask the God about his offence, and whether it admitted of excuse or expiation. He received this reply: _All needful business doth the God allow._ All the same, if it be granted that nothing is prophesied in our own day, otherwise than in metre, the difficulty will be so much greater about the ancients, who sometimes employed metre for the responses, sometimes not. There is nothing strange, my [Sidenote: B] young friend, in either one or the other, so long as we hold sound, pure views about the God, and do not suppose that it is himself who formerly used to compose the verses, or who now suggests the answers to the Pythia, speaking as it were from under a mask.
XXI. ‘However, it is worth our while to pursue this inquiry at greater length another time. For the present, let us remember our results, which are briefly these: Body uses many instruments, soul uses body and its parts, soul has been brought into being as the instrument of God. The excellence of an instrument is to imitate most closely the power which uses it, with all its [Sidenote: C] own natural power, and to reproduce the effect of his essential thought, but to exhibit it, not pure and passionless and free from error, as it was in the creative artist, but with a large admixture of foreign element. For in itself it is invisible to us, but appearing “other” and through another medium it is saturated with the nature of that medium. I pass over wax and gold and silver and copper, and all other varieties of moulded substance, which take on one common form of impressed likeness, but add to the copy, each its own distinct speciality. I pass over the myriad distortions of images and reflections from a single form in [Sidenote: D] mirrors, plane, hollow, or convex. For nothing seems better to reproduce the type, no instrument more obediently to use its own nature, than the moon.
Yet taking from the sun his bright and fiery rays, she does not transmit them so to us; mingled with herself they change colour and also take on a different power; the heat has wholly disappeared, and the light fails from weakness before it reaches us. I think you know the saying found in Heraclitus, that “The King whose seat is at [Sidenote: E] Delphi, speaks not, nor conceals, but signifies.”[109] Take and add then to what is here so well said, the conception that the God of this place employs the Pythia for the hearing as the sun employs the moon for the seeing. He shows and reveals his own thoughts, but shows them mingled in their passage through a mortal body, and a soul which cannot remain at rest or present itself to the exciting power unexcited and inwardly composed, but which boils and surges and is involved in the stirrings and troublesome passions from within.
As whirlpools do not keep [Sidenote: F] a steady hold on bodies borne round and round and also downwards, since an outer force carries them round, but they sink down of their own nature, so that there is a compound spiral movement, of a confused and distorted kind, even so what we call inspiration seems to be a mixture of two impulses, and the soul is stirred by two forces, one of which it is a passive recipient, one from its own nature. We see that inanimate and stationary bodies cannot be used or forced contrary to their own nature, that a cylinder cannot be moved as if it were a sphere or a cube, that a lyre cannot be played like a flute or a trumpet like a harp, but that the artistic use of a thing is no other than the natural use. Is it possible then that the animate and self-moving, which has both impulse and reason, can be treated in any other way than is agreeable to the habit, force, or natural condition which [Sidenote: 405] is already existent within it? Can an unmusical mind be excited like a musical, an unlettered mind by literature, a mind untrained in reasoning, whether speculative or disciplinary, by logic? It is not to be spoken of.
XXII. ‘Again, Homer is my witness: he assumes[110] that nothing, so to speak, is brought about without a God; he does not, however, describe the God as using all things for all ends, but according to the art or faculty which each possesses. For do you not see, dear Diogenianus, that Athena, when she wants to persuade the Achaeans, calls in Odysseus;[111] when to wreck the truce, she looks for Pandarus;[112] when to rout the Trojans, she [Sidenote: B] approaches Diomede?[113] Why? because Diomede is a sturdy man and a fighter, Pandarus an archer and a fool, Odysseus a clever speaker and a sensible man. For Homer was not of the same mind as Pindar[114], if Pindar it was who wrote _Sail on a crate, if God so choose ‘twill swim._
He knew that different faculties and natural gifts are appointed for different ends; each is moved in its own way, even if the moving force be one for all. As then the force cannot move that which walks so as to make it fly, nor that which lisps to speak clearly, nor the thin voice to be melodious—why, Battus himself was sent as colonist of Libya to get his voice, because he was a lisper, with a thin voice, but withal a kingly, statesman-like, [Sidenote: C] prudent man—, even so it is impossible for one who has no letters and knows no verse to talk like a poet. And so she who now serves the God has been born as respectably as any man here, and has lived as good and orderly a life; but having been reared in the house of small farmer folk, she brings nothing with her from art or from any practice or faculty whatsoever, as she goes down into the sanctuary. As Xenophon[115] thinks that the bride should step into her husband’s home having seen as little as may be, and heard as little, so she, ignorant and untried in almost all things, and a true virgin in soul, is associated with [Sidenote: D] the God. Yet we, who think that the God, when he “signifies”, uses the cries of herons and wrens and ravens, and never ask that they, as the messengers and heralds of the God, should put things into clear rational phrases, do nevertheless ask that the Pythia should use a voice and style as though from the Thymele, not unembellished and plain, but with metre and elevation, and trills, and verbal metaphors, and a flute accompaniment!
XXV. ‘For it should be clearly understood that the God is, in the words of Sophocles,[120] _Unto the wise a riddling prophet aye, To silly souls a teacher plain and brief._ [Sidenote: 407] The same turn of things which brought clearness brought also a new standard of belief; it shared the general change. Whereas of old that which was not familiar or common, but, in plain words, contorted and over-phrased, was ascribed by the many to an implied Divinity, and received with awe and reverence; in later times men were content to learn things clearly and easily with no pomp or artifice; they began to find fault with the poetical setting of the oracles, not only as a hindrance to the perception of truth, because it mingled indistinctness and [Sidenote: B] shadow with the meaning, but also because by this time they were getting to mistrust metaphors, riddles, and ambiguities, as so many holes or hiding-places provided for him who should trip in his prophecy, that he might step into them and secure his retreat. You might have heard it told by many, how certain persons with a turn for poetry still sit about the place of oracles, waiting to catch the utterances, and then weaving verses, metres, rhythms, according to occasion, as a sort of vehicle. As to your Onomacrituses, and Herodotuses, and Cinaethons,[121] and the censures which they brought upon the oracles, by importing tragedy and pomp where they were out of place, I let the charge pass, and do not admit it. Most, [Sidenote: C] however, of the discredit which attached so copiously to poetry came from the gang of soothsayers and scamps who strolled around the ceremonies of the Great Mother and of Serapis, with their mummeries and tricks, turning verses out of their own heads, or taking them at random from handbooks, for servant boys and silly girls, such as are best attracted by metre and a poetic cast of words; from all which causes poetry seemed to put herself at the service of cheats, and jugglers, and lying prophets, and was lost to truth and to the tripod.
XXVI. ‘Thus I should not be surprised to find that the old people sometimes required a certain ambiguity, circumlocution, [Sidenote: D] indistinctness. For it was not then a case of “A” approaching the oracle 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.
_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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.