Plutarch

“ We see others when applauded in the theatre at once groaning inwardly, as ambition subsides into greed of money. And did not, think you, those who sacrificed men to get a tyranny, or to advance a conspiracy, as Apollodorus did, or who robbed their friends of money, as Glaucus the son of Epicydes did, repent, and hate themselves, and suffer pain at what had been done? For my own part, if I may be allowed to say so, I think that the doers of unholy deeds need no God nor man to punish them; their own life is sufficient, when ruined by vice, and thrown into all disorder. ”

“ When sleep takes possession, it excludes even the pleasure which comes from learning, and discussion, and philosophic thought, as though a smooth deep stream swept the soul along. All pleasure, perhaps, is by its essence and nature a respite from pain, but of sleep this is absolutely true. For, though nothing exciting or delightful should approach from without, yet we feel pleasure in a sound sleep; sleep seems to remove a condition of toil and hardness. And that condition is no other than that which binds soul to body. ”

“ For the Whole is infinite; now the Infinite has neither beginning nor limit, so it ought not to have a middle; for a middle is in a sense itself a limit, but infinity is a negation of limits. It is amusing to hear a man labour to prove that the earth is the middle of the universe, not of the Whole, forgetting that the universe itself lies under the same difficulties ”

“ Now, people who see the moon assume so many hues as she passes through the shadow do wrong in fastening upon one, the cinder-like, which may be called the one most foreign to her, being rather an admixture and remnant of light which shines round her through the shadows, than her own peculiar complexion, which is black and earth-like. ”

“ Passing over most of the sights he saw, he said that the souls of those who die make a flame-like bubble where the air parts as they rise |564| from below, then the bubble quickly bursts, and they emerge with human form but light in bulk, with a movement which is not the same for all. Some bound forth with marvellous agility, and dart upwards in a straight line, while others whirl round together like spindles, now with an upward tendency, now a downward, borne on by a mingled confused agitation, which after a very long time, and then with difficulty, is reduced to calm. ”

“ It is exactly so with the soul: during its association with mortal passions, and parts, and organs, that which is unnatural and strange produces no apparent pressure because of that long familiarity; yet when discharged from the activities of the body, it feels ease, and relief, and pleasure. By them it is distressed, and about these it toils, and from these it craves leisure and rest. For all that concerns its own natural activities—observation, reasoning, memory, speculation—it is unwearied and insatiable. ”

“ The strain is not the God’s, but the woman’s, and so with the voice and the phrasing and the metre; he only provides the fantasies, and puts light into her soul to illuminate the future; for that is what inspiration is. ”

“ For they suppose that mind is in some sense a part of soul, which is as great a mistake as to think that soul is a part of body; mind is as much better a thing and more divine than soul, as soul is than body. Now the union of soul with body makes up the passion or emotion, the further union with mind produces reason; the former is the origin of pleasure and pain, the latter of virtue and vice. When these three principles have been compacted, the earth contributes body to the birth of man, the moon soul, the sun reason, just as he contributes her light to the moon. ”

“ Behind the horseplay of the Stoics and Academics, on the subject of the centre of the universe and the laws which light and heavy bodies obey, there seems to lie some real groping after a general cosmic law, such as gravitation. Thus the earth and the moon draw bodies, each from its own surface to its own centre, and if the earth draws the moon, it is as a part of herself, once ejected and now reclaimed. ”

“ Some, when they are of a mind to sail away, are actually prevented by the God, who manifests himself to them as to familiars and friends, not in dreams only or by signs, for many meet with shapes and voices of spirits, openly seen and heard. Cronus himself sleeps within a deep cave resting on rock which looks like gold, this sleep being devised for him by Zeus in place of chains. Birds fly in at the topmost part of the rock, and bear him ambrosia, and the whole island is pervaded by the fragrance shed from the rock as out of a well. ”

“ If such a theory strike out Providence |C| altogether, and if it be God’s own attribute to order and discriminate things, what marvel is it that Nature has been so disposed and partitioned that fire is here and stars there, and again that earth is planted where it is and the moon above, each held by a firmer bond than that of Nature, the bond of Reason? ”

“ 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. ”

“ In sleep the soul is separated, and speeds upward, and is gathered unto itself after having been strained to fit the body, and dispersed among the senses. Yet some assert that, on the contrary, sleep immingles soul with body. They are wrong. The body bears its witness the other way, by its lack of sensation, its coldness, and heaviness, and pallor proving that the soul leaves it in death, and shifts its quarters in sleep. This produces the pleasure; it is a release and respite for the soul, as though it laid down a burthen which it must again resume and shoulder. ”

“ Let us not then suppose that it is otherwise with the parts of the universe; that earth lies here where it has fallen of its own weight, that the sun, as Metrodorus of Chios used to think, has been pressed out into the upper region because of his lightness, like a bladder, or that the other stars have reached the places which they now hold as if they had been weighed in a balance and kicked the beam. ”

“ IV. Polycrates was a terrible tyrant in Samos, Periander |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? ”

“ It is no time for you to keep quiet; offer to the God a first-fruits of your dear Mathematics, if you think that “E” rises above |F| the other letters, not in its own right by power or shape, or by its meaning as a word, but as the honoured symbol of an absolutely great and sovereign number, the “Pempad”, from which the Wise Men took their verb “to count”.’ Eustrophus was not jesting when he said this to us; he said it because I was at the time passionately devoted to Mathematics, though soon to find the value of the maxim, ‘NOTHING TOO MUCH‘, having joined the Academy. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Thucydides, as is pointed out by Grote in the masterly pages which end his fifty-sixth chapter, has brought the cynical injustice of the Athenians towards Melos into glaring prominence in order to prepare his readers for the disastrous sequel.
The problem of the true nature of the ‘Divine Sign’ of Socrates is one of great interest and some mystery. The Latin word ‘Genius’, the attendant spirit who makes each of us what he is, in fact, his self, is familiar to us from Horace:
The Genius, guardian of each child of earth,
Born when we’re born and dying when we die. ”

“ But whereas we see on our earth that places in shadow which are near purple or scarlet cloths, or near lakes, or rivers open to the sun, partake in the brilliance of these colours and offer many varied splendours because of the reflexions, what wonder |E| if a great stream of shadow, falling upon a celestial sea of light, not stable or calm but agitated by myriads of stars and admitting of combinations and changes of every kind, presents to us different colours at different times impressed on it by the moon? For a star or a fire could not show when in shadow as black or grey or blue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A city is a thing one and continuous, like an animal, which does not cease to be itself in the changes due to growth, nor become, as time goes on, different from what it was; it is always consentaneous and at one with itself, and awaits all the consequences, whether censure or gratitude, of what it does or did, so long as the association, which makes it one and complex, preserves its unity. ”

“ Now, if a varying view of these reaches us from time to time through the shadow, owing to some change and shifting of the surrounding air, surely the moon does not lose her honour or her fame, nor yet her Divinity, when she is held by men to be holy earth of a sort and not, as the Stoics say, fire which is turbid, mere dregs of fire. Fire is honoured in barbarous fashions by the Medes and Assyrians, who fear what injures them, and pay observance or rites of propitiation to that, rather than to what they revere. ”

“ That line of Euripides [186] is not true:
The best of prophets he who guesses well. No, the prophet is the sensible man, he who follows the rational part of his soul in the road where it leads him with probability. Divination, like a scroll with no writing or method, in itself |D| indeterminate, but capable of receiving fancies and presentiments by the feelings, gets touch with the future, yet not by inference, when it passes most completely outside the present. It passes out through such a temperament and disposition of the body as produce a change called by us inspiration. ”

“ However, we may see with our eyes that the moon is not entirely separated from the atmosphere, but moves within a great belt of it, having beneath itself a wind-swept region, where bodies are whirled, and amongst them comets. ”

“ Loves there are and many of them, and they master men; but when they associate with souls which have no natural turn for music, they drop the flute and the lyre, yet are vocal still and fiery through and through, as much as of old. It is an unhallowed thing to say, and an unfair, that the Academy was loveless, or the choir of Socrates and Plato ”

“ It is thus: every soul partakes of mind, there is none irrational or mindless; but so much of soul as is mingled with flesh and with affections is altered and turned towards the irrational by its sense of pleasures and pains. But the mode of mingling is not the same for every soul. Some are merged entirely into body, and are disturbed by passions throughout their whole being during life. ”

“ Why make it for thyself a costly boon? [269] |C| So we may say to the superstitious man, that the Gods gave sleep for oblivion of troubles and a respite from them; why make it for thyself a cell of punishment, a chamber of abiding torment, whence the miserable soul cannot run away unto any other sleep? Heraclitus [270] says that ‘waking men have one world common to all, but in sleep each betakes him to a world of his own.’ The superstitious has no world, no, not a common world, since neither while he is awake does he enjoy his reason, nor when he sleeps is he set free from his tormentor ”

“ But Posidonius gives this definition of what occurs: an eclipse of the sun is a concurrence of the shadow of the moon with our vision [344] ... for there is no eclipse, except to those whose view of the sun can be intercepted by the shadow of the moon. In allowing that the shadow of the moon reaches to us, I do not know what he has left himself to say. There can be no shadow of a star; shadow means absence of light, and it is the nature of light to remove shadow, not to cause it. ”

“ But, if you will, let the other Gods be, and look at our own God here. Knowing that the souls of those who die perish at once, like mists or smoke-wreaths exhaled from the bodies, does he, think you, require men to bring so many propitiations for the departed, |D| and such great honours to the dead, deceiving and tricking his believers? For myself, I will never give up the permanence of the soul, unless some one like Hercules shall come, and remove the tripod of the Pythia, and lay waste the place of the oracles. ”

“ Any one can see that the number four carries Nature up to this point, that is, to the formation of a complete body, which may be touched, weighed, or struck; there it has left her, wanting in what is greatest. |E| For that which has no soul is, in plain terms, orphaned and incomplete and fit for nothing, unless it be employed by soul. But the movement or disposition which sets soul therein—a change introducing a fifth factor—restores to Nature her completeness, its rational basis is as much more commanding than that of the Tetrad as the animal is above the inanimate. ”

“ The air is impressed with articulate sounds, it becomes all word and voice, and brings the meaning home to the soul of the hearer. Therefore we need not wonder if, in regard to this special mode of thought also, the air is sensitive to the touch of higher beings, and is so modified as to convey to the mind of godlike and extraordinary men the thought of him who thought it. ”