Chapter X
Conclusions respecting the general character of Plutarch’s Religion—Monotheism and Dæmonology both essential parts of his Theodicy—His strong belief in the personality of God—Metaphysical weakness but Moral strength of his Teaching—Close connexion between his Religion and his Ethics—Plutarch not an “Eclectic,” nor a Neo-Platonist—Contrast between Plutarch’s Religion and Philosophy and the Religion and Philosophy of the Neo-Platonists—Christianity and Neo-Platonism—The struggle between them and its probable effect on later religious history—Conclusion.
We have endeavoured in the preceding pages to ascertain, from Plutarch’s own account of his views, the principles, the method and the character of his Religion; to learn in what manner he conceives the supernatural world and its relation to the human mind and to human interests; to discover and illustrate the processes by which these results are attained; to note their philosophic bearing and tendency; and to exemplify their application in the sphere of practical ethics. We have seen how clearly he recognizes the existence, and demonstrates the attributes, of a Supreme Being, and have observed how he raises the humility of mankind nearer to the Majesty of the Highest by admitting the activities of an intermediate and mediatory race of supernatural beings, whose mingled nature allies them equally to God and Man, and forms a channel of communication between human wants and divine benevolence. These are the two fundamental truths of the religion of Plutarch. The whole of his exegesis, in whatsoever direction operating, whether examining the doctrines of Philosophy, the legends of popular Myth, or the traditions embodied in ceremonial observances, is involved with a recognition of this twofold conception as the essential characteristic of a religious attitude of mind. Those, indeed, who have emphasized too exclusively that element in Plutarch’s Religion which he owes to Philosophy, have concluded that his religious beliefs were purely Monotheistic: just as a misunderstanding of his Dæmonology has resulted in the assertion that he was trammelled in the meshes of a superstitious Polytheism.372 It could, if necessary, be plausibly argued, against those who have maintained this latter view, that the elaboration of the belief in Dæmons, and the multiplication of the functions of these lesser divine beings, are factors which tend to emphasize the unity and purity of the Supreme God; and that Plutarch’s Monotheism is no more destroyed by the recognition of a Dæmonic Race than is the Catholic Trinity overthrown by the Church’s acceptance of the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius “the Areopagite,” with its thrice-repeated triplets of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim; Powers, Dominions, Mights; Angels, Archangels, Principalities. But, in the first place, Plutarch does not keep his Religion and his Philosophy in separate mental compartments: they are fused into one operation in his thought; and we should adopt a false method of interpretation were we to separate the result as expounded in his writings. Further, we should obtain a totally misleading view of Plutarch’s teaching were we to insist that he was fully conscious of all the conclusions that by a strict use of logic could conceivably be deduced from his tenets. An examination of the opinions and beliefs which he states that he actually maintained leads inevitably to the conviction that his Dæmonology was as sincere as his Theology. There can, we think, be no doubt that his reverence for the national tradition gave him as real a belief in the polytheistic activities of the Dæmons as his love of Philosophy gave him in the Unity, Perfection and Eternity of the Deity. The strength of this belief was increased by his recognition of the important part it might play, in one direction by solving perplexities and removing stumbling-blocks from the national tradition, in another by responding to that eternal craving of humanity for a god-man, a mediator, which had already begun to receive a purer, a simpler, and a more perfect satisfaction. The conscious expression, therefore, which Plutarch gives in his writings to the belief in Dæmons, we are bound to accept as corresponding with a conviction actually existing in his mind, quite as much as we admit the sincerity of his reiterated belief in a Supreme and Universal Deity.
But it is one of the most interesting suspects of Plutarch’s Theology—not the less interesting, perhaps, because it has a certain inconsistency with other parts of his Religion—that, even were we to confine our investigations to the philosophic elements of his idea of the Divine Nature: even if we could totally exclude from consideration all the functions which he ascribes to the Dæmonic character: we should still find ourselves face to face with a God different, in one of the qualities now regarded as essential to a complete conception of Deity, from any of the theological representations current in the schools of Greek Philosophy. The essential basis of all these representations is the God of Plato, partly regarded as the creative Demiurgus of the “Timæus;” partly as the World-Soul, that “blessed god” produced by the operation of the Creator’s “Intelligence”; and partly as that ultimate ideal Unity, the final abstraction reached by a supreme effort of dialectic subtlety. The last of these three conceptions is essentially and truly that of Plato; it is the native and unalloyed product of Dialectic, owing naught of its existence to the illustrative or ironical use of Myth, out of which the other two conceptions spring. The element of personality is totally absent from this conception,373 nor did the Stoics introduce this element into their adoption of the Soul of the Universe as Deity.374 But Plutarch’s God is a personal God. The God of the “De Sera Numinis Vindicta” approaches nearer to the Christian conception of God as a Father than the Deity as conceived by any Faith which has not been permeated by Christian feeling, and the God of the “De Superstitione” presents the same characteristics as the God of the “De Sera Numinis Vindicta.” Plutarch’s feeling of the intimate relation existing between the Divine Knowledge and the secret weaknesses and sins, and the feeble strivings after virtue in the human heart, does not require an elaborate and contentious process of ratiocination before we can discern its presence. It is the basis of his finest arguments, and the inspiration of his most earnest and fruitful teachings. This weakness of Plutarch on the side of Metaphysics, this revolt of his nature against the coldness and distance of the Deity of the Platonic Dialectic, constitutes his strength as a religious and moral teacher. This inconsistency makes him the type of certain modern theologians who will expound to a formal Congregation the Eternity, Self-Existence, Necessity, and Unity of God the First Cause, while in their private devotions their hearts and their lips turn naturally to the simple and touching petitions of “Our Father, which art in Heaven;” or, while composing a sermon in which the particular attributes of the Persons of the Trinity and their mutual relationships are defined and enumerated with more than scholastic precision, will turn and teach their children to pray to God as the “gentle Jesus.” In a similar manner, there is the Plutarch of the “De Ε apud Delphos,” the Plutarch of the “De Sera Numinis Vindicta,” and the Plutarch of the Dæmonology. He contributes his share to the discussions of philosophic theologians; he depicts God in direct spiritual relationship with his human children; and he describes the Dæmons as aiding mankind in their internal struggles towards perfection of moral character. He will allow neither Reason nor Emotion to run away with him; he is as far removed from the dialectic severities of Plato, as he is from the superstitious beliefs and practices of the later Platonists. He has no special and peculiar message either to the theologian in the pulpit, or to the child at its mother’s knee. He appeals to humanity at large; to the people who have work to do, and who want to get it done with honesty and dignity; to students, teachers, politicians, members of a busy society; to people who are liable to all the temptations, and capable of all the virtues, which naturally arise in the ordinary life of highly civilized communities. He analyses and illustrates such common vices as anger, avarice, envy, hate, flattery;375 he penetrates and exposes such ordinary failings as garrulity, gaucherie, personal extravagance, and interfering curiosity.376 His sympathetic pen, as of one who knows the value of such things, depicts with rare charm the loveliness of friendship, and of affection for brother, child, and wife; while he applies a more religious consolation to those who are suffering under the bitterness of exile, the sadness of bereavement by death.377 To connect Plutarch’s Religion with his Ethics at all these points of contact would carry us beyond the natural limits of our present aim.378 As an illustration of his method as operating in this direction, we may recall how intimately Plutarch’s conception of the Divine Nature is interwoven with his ethical aim in face of so serious a moral evil as Superstition. We may also add that he is consistent with himself in constructing no scientifically accurate system of Ethics any more than he maintains a dialectically impeccable scheme of Theology. He criticizes the ethical results attained by various Schools of Philosophy, and selects from this one and that one such elements as promise to give greater clearness and strength to his own convictions.379 He quotes Plato and Aristotle to show that Reason and Passion are both necessary elements in the production of practical virtue. Superior power as Reason is in the constitution of man, she cannot act by herself towards the accomplishment of her own virtuous aims. Although he refuses to agree with Aristotle that all Virtue is a mean between two extremes, since the virtue of Intelligence as employed, for example, in the contemplation of a mathematical problem, being an activity of the pure and dispassionate part of the soul, needs no admixture of the unreasoning element to make it effective; he yet insists that the virtues of practical life demand for their realization the instrumental agency of the passions, and are thus, in effect, a mean, correcting excess or defect of either of the co-operating agencies.380 Referring to a favourite illustration, he maintains that the passions are not to be uprooted and destroyed as Lycurgus uprooted and destroyed the vineyards of Thracia, but are to be treated with the fostering gentleness of a god who would prune the wild, trim the rank, and carefully cultivate the healthy and productive portions of the plant.381 If we wish to avoid drunkenness we need not throw our wine away; we must temper it with water. In like manner, Reason will not act “by harsh and obstinate methods, but by gentle means, which convey persuasion and secure submission more effectively than any sort of compulsion.”382 It is quite in harmony with this essentially practical view of life that he holds that Virtue can be taught, and that it is through the persuasion, and by the guidance, of Reason and Philosophy that a happy life can be secured, inasmuch as their efforts are directed at counterbalancing the exaggerated picture which passion draws of all the circumstances of life, whether they are fortunate or the reverse.383 It is this principle which he applies to the discussion of topics of practical morality, as he applies it to the discussion of questions of Religion. The practice of the virtues based upon this principle is most vividly exhibited in his “Symposiacs,” a work which is of considerable value for the light it throws upon the family and private habits of the Græco-Roman empire of that age, but which is chiefly interesting because it shows to what an extent the simple and humane moralities of Epicureanism had permeated Society, and brought a calm and gentle happiness in their train.
It may be admitted that the positive additions made by Plutarch to the intellectual and moral wealth of his age were small and unimportant. He made no great discoveries in any of the great branches of philosophical activity which had so long been the special pride and prerogative of the Hellenic Race. There was not a tendency of Greek Philosophy with whose history and results he was not familiarly acquainted; there was not a School from which he did not borrow something for introduction into the texture of his own thought. It is in this sense that he is, as he has been called, an Eclectic; but his teaching surrounds his appropriated thoughts with none of the weakness so often attaching to great and original utterances when torn out of the systems in which they were originally embodied. Nor was his Eclecticism that spurious Eclecticism of the later Platonists, which imagined it had harmonized discordant systems when it had tied them together with the withes of an artificial classification. Plutarch’s Eclecticism was unified by the Ethical aim which constantly inspired his choice, and gave to old sayings of philosophers, old lines of verse, old notions of the people, a new and richer significance in his application of them to the uses of practical life. Thus, if Plutarch did not add to the gathered wealth of Hellas, he taught his countrymen new ways of passing their ancient acquisitions into the currency. There are periods in the intellectual and moral progress of humanity when the world is exhausted with the accumulation of its riches; when its appetite for acquisition is satiated; when it needs to find what its possessions are, and how best they can be put to their legitimate uses. At these periods the cultivation of a mental attitude is of greater service to humanity than the accumulation of mental stores. Plutarch came at such a period in the history of the Hellenic race; and we, who are once again beginning to recognize that the end of education should not be the mere accumulation of facts, but rather the strengthening of the intellect and the formation of the character, can properly estimate the value of the work accomplished by one who, on the side of intellect, inculcated the necessity of sympathetically watching for signs of a rational basis in beliefs however primâ facie strange and abhorrent, and on the side of character, that a man could become virtuous by learning what his faults were, and endeavouring to check them by practice and habit. In him Religion and Philosophy went hand in hand, operating on the same body of truth, and directing their energies to the realization of the same end. That rational influence which we saw working in the sphere of early Roman Religion: which subsequently gave Roman Morality a source of inspiration in Greek Philosophy: which associated Greek Religion and Greek Philosophy as factors in Ethics, until the latter became the predominating power: this influence had its final classical expression in Plutarch and in the other thinkers and workers of his epoch and that immediately succeeding, in Seneca, in Dion, in Marcus Aurelius. These men avoided extravagance in Religion, as they avoided it in their philosophical studies and in the practical affairs of life. They are the last legitimate outcome of the Greek spirit in Pagan times. Plutarch collected the wisdom, and fixed the emotions, of Antiquity, in a manner which the best men of many Christian ages have found efficacious for goodness. In his own more immediate age his spirit predominated for a century, and was then absorbed to form a thin vein of common sense in that mingled mass of Oriental mystery and Hellenic metaphysics which was known as Neo-Platonism.384
Neo-Platonism, which claimed to represent the perfect harmony of Religion and Philosophy, substantiated its claim by annihilating the historic foundations of both, and by thus compelling Christianity to dispense with the accumulated wisdom of ages in its reorganization of human relationships with the eternal. In Plutarch’s teaching, each element of the combination was at once assisted and restrained by the other, and the fusion was natural and effective. In Neo-Platonism, Reason, the principle of Philosophy, and Emotion, the inspiration of Religion, were each carried to an impossible extent of extravagance; and it was only the existence of the two elements in the minds of a few strenuous and original characters, who were assisted in their attempts at unity by the refinements of an ultra-Platonic Dialectic, which secured even the appearance of harmony between the discrepant conceptions which they borrowed from various differing and even mutually hostile schools. Even in Plato the conspicuousness of the Ethical element compensates to some extent for the abstractness of his conception of the Deity. But Neo-Platonism forced the idealism of Plato to a more extravagant metaphysic; and, although upon Dialectics the rational part of their doctrine was nominally based, the abstractness of its processes lent itself to mysticism as effectively as the purely religious element which lost itself in the vagaries of Oriental rapture, and debased itself by its miraculous methods of intercourse with the spiritual world. Reason, in the pursuit of the One, was attenuated to Mathematics. Mathematics, having arrived at the conception of the One, and finding it without any qualities, gave way to the raptures of the “perfect vision.”
How far this twofold extravagance was due to the personality of the founders of the new System, and how far to its express object of rivalling Christianity, is a doubtful problem. Maximus was a Tyrian; Numenius came from Apamea in Syria; Ammonius Saccas, the first great Neo-Platonist, was of Alexandria. Plotinus came from Lycopolis in Egypt, and was perhaps a Copt; Porphyry and Iamblichus were Syrians. Plutarch, as Bishop Theodoret said, was a Hellene of the Hellenes.385 But the necessity of competing with the rising Faith doubtless operated very strongly in developing the mystical tendencies always tacitly inherent in Platonism, and proclaimed by the Neo-Platonists at the very commencement. This rivalry emphasized that out-Platonizing of Plato which culminated in the Alexandrian Trinity, and that competition with the Christian miracles which issued in the triple folly of Magic, Theurgy, and Theosophy. Plutarch, knowing that the necessity of confuting an adversary is liable to cause exaggeration and distortion, removed his Epicurean from the scene when he wished to discuss the providential dispensation of human affairs. The circumstances of his time, and the bent of his own character, which inclined him to seek points of agreement rather than to emphasize points of difference, saved him from the prejudices of the odium theologicum. But in the third century Christianity could not be disposed of by contemptuous phrases, or equally contemptuous silence. The Neo-Platonists came into direct contact with the new Religion, both in its literature and in its practice. Ammonius Saccas, the teacher who satisfied all the yearning aspirations of Plotinus, had been a Christian in the days when he was young and carried a porter’s knot on the quays.386 Porphyry informs us that he had met Origen, and Socrates, the Church historian, asserts that Porphyry had himself been a Christian. The evidence of Bishop Theodoret, which cannot be accepted as regards Plutarch, may easily be admitted as regards Plotinus.387 Porphyry wrote fifteen books against the Christians, which were publicly burned by Theodosius 200 years later. He demonstrated that the prophecies of Daniel were composed after the event, and in the Third Book of his Collection of Oracles, he devotes a chapter to “the foolishness of the Christians,” and finds a place for Christ in his lowest rank of supernatural beings. Plutarch’s thoughts were not disturbed either by anti-Christian polemic, or by the necessity of finding a place for Christ in his spiritual world.
The modifications which these influences wrought in that body of Hellenic wisdom which had been the material of Plutarch’s work were most conspicuous in the Theology and Dæmonology of the Neo-Platonists. Plutarch had been content to state the Unity, Eternity, Absoluteness of God. He needed such a conception to make the world intelligible; but he defined his conception with a rare simplicity which satisfies the practical mind as well as meets the essential requirements of Philosophy. But the Neo-Platonist theology refines and subdivides and abstracts to an extent which puzzles and bewilders its most earnest students, and removes God infinitely further from mankind than even the Ideas of Plato are removed. “According to Plotinus, God is Goodness without Love. Man may love God, but God cannot love man.” Even the “Divine Soul,” the third Hypostasis of the Neo-Platonist Trinity, that which lies nearest the comprehension of the common intellect, “is of little intellectual or religious significance in the mind of Plotinus.” Dogmatism would be unbecoming on a subject where Kirchner and Zeller are at variance, and where the French lucidity of Vacherot and Saisset casts little more light than the close and careful analysis of Dr. Bigg.388 But it is necessary to a full understanding of Plutarch’s position to consider his relation to his successors as well as to his predecessors, and we are therefore compelled to a brief analysis of the Neo-Platonic Theology and Dæmonology, putting ourselves under more competent guidance than we can ourselves hope to supply. “The Supreme Cause,” says Dr. Bigg, “God, in the proper sense of the word,... embraces in Himself a unity of Three Hypostases.... Hypostasis signifies the underlying cause of the phenomenal manifestation. Hence it can be applied to all three Persons of the Platonic Trinity, while Being could only be used of the second and third.—Each Hypostasis is a person, but a purely intellectual person. All three are one, like three mutually enfolding thoughts, and where one is there is the All in the fullness of its power. All are eternal, but the second is inferior to the first, because ‘begotten,’ and the third to the second, for the same reason.” “God,” says M. Saisset, “is threefold, and yet a whole. The divine nature, conceived as absolutely simple, admits of division; at the pinnacle of the scale soars Unity; beneath it Intelligence, identical with Being, or the Logos; in the third rank, the Universal Soul, or the Spirit. We have not here three gods, but three hypostases of the same God. An Hypostasis is not a substance, it is not an attribute, it is not a mode, it is not a relation. Unity is above Intelligence and Being, it is above Reason; it is incomprehensible and ineffable; without Intelligence itself, it generates Intelligence; it gives birth to Being, and is not itself Being. Intelligence, in its turn, without motion or activity as it is, produces the Soul, which is the principle of activity and motion. God conceived as a perfect type of which the human soul is a copy, the infinite and universal Soul, is the third hypostasis. God conceived as absolute, eternal, simple, motionless Thought, superior to space and time, is the second hypostasis.” But soul and thought and being are terms relative to the human mind. “God is above thought, above Being: He is, therefore, indivisible and inconceivable. He is the One, the Good, grasped by Ecstasy. This is the third hypostasis.” M. Saisset continues: “Such are the three terms which compose this obscure and profound Trinity. Human reason, reason still imperfectly free from the meshes of sense, stops with the conception of the Universal Soul, the active principle of motion; the reason of the Philosophers rises higher, to the Motionless Intelligence, the depository of the essences and types of all things; it is love and ecstasy alone that can carry us to the conception of Absolute Unity.”
Almost the only thing that is easy to understand in the Neo-Platonic theology is its adoption of the conceptions of various schools of Greek Philosophy. This Eclecticism has a superficial resemblance to that of Plutarch: but it is Eclecticism formally enumerating and classifying its results, not harmonizing and unifying them. The third hypostasis is the λόγος ὁ ἐν τῇ ὕλῃ of the Stoics; the second hypostasis is the Intelligence, the eternal, absolute, and motionless Νοῦς of Aristotle, while the first has striking affinities with the Pythagorean One. But, by a forced process of interpretation, all the three Hypostases are found in Plato. In the “Laws” and the “Phædrus” Plato stopped with the conception of the Third Hypostasis, the World Soul, the origin and cause of movement in the created world, which in the “Timæus” is represented as a creation of the Demiurgus. In the God of the “Banquet” and the “Republic,” who is the source of Being and Intelligence, Plato was anticipating the Second Hypostasis; while in the “Parmenides” he describes the First Hypostasis, that absolute Unity which has no relation with either Being or Reason, or with anything else either actual or conceivable. The placing of these three different conceptions of God in three different compartments of thought, in three different Scales of Existence, is not to unify them: nor is that process made any the more feasible by the invention of the term Emanation, by which the Second Hypostasis proceeds from the First, and the Third from the Second.389 Plutarch’s Eclecticism is based upon the needs of the moral life: that of Neo-Platonism was actuated by a desire for formal harmony, and was steeped in a mysticism which operated in drawing the soul away from action to a divine contemplation. The Perfect Vision, the revelation of the First Hypostasis, is the culmination of the soul’s progress. The Second and Third Hypostases, being subject to relations and conditions, are susceptible of approach through the Reason; but the First Hypostasis, being unconditioned, cannot be grasped by Reason, which moves in the sphere of conditions and relations. Hence, the Perfect Vision repudiates that Reason of which it is the culmination: “for thought is a kind of movement, but in the Vision is no movement.” In the Revelation of the Perfect Vision, as well as in the formal development of the Trinity, we see the influence of a desire to compete with Christianity.
This ecstatic contemplation of the highest conception of their Theology exhibited a mysticism which had a more degrading side, one which is specially conspicuous in the Neo-Platonist Dæmonology. There also the Mysticism is in combination with refinements of logical definition. Plotinus takes the floating conceptions of Dæmonology and makes them submit to a rigid classification in formal harmony with the tripartite character of the Divine Nature. Divine Powers he divides into three classes. The first Power is that which dwells in the world of Ideas, apart from the perception of man and in close touch with the Divine Intelligence. The next is the race of visible Gods, the Stars, Nature, Earth: the third is that of the Dæmons. The Dæmons are again subdivided into three ranks: Gods, Loves, and Dæmons. Porphyry insists on a similar classification. In one of the oracles collected by him and preserved by Eusebius, the beings of the Dæmonic hierarchy are classified with equal strictness, but with greater simplicity than that shown by Plotinus. His highest rank corresponds with that of his Master. The second rank corresponds with Plotinus’ third class, but does not here undergo a tripartite subdivision. His third class, unlike the first, which moves in the presence of God, is far away from communion with Him, and corresponds with the created and visible gods in the second class of Plotinus. He is not always faithful to this simplicity. In the third book of his “De Philosophia ex Oraculis” he admits another class of Dæmons called Heroes, admitting Christ to their number. Elsewhere he divides the Dæmons into archangels, angels, and dæmons. Proclus will have six ranks: and Dionysius the Areopagite, who classified this Dæmonlore for the Christian Church, will have nine. We can equally discern here the operation of that spurious Eclecticism which fits its thefts into the clamps of a preconceived system. The simple notion of Beings intermediate between God and Man, breaking the distance between the two by participating in the Divine and Human nature, is rendered absurd and impossible by its compulsory harmonizing with the demand of the Alexandrine Trinity. Plotinus thought he had made Aristotle agree with Plato, but the harmony was of the same character as that secured between Christianity and Neo-Platonism by making the Christian God-man a Neo-Platonist Dæmon. The Ideas of Plato, the νόησις τῆς νοήσεως of Aristotle, and the World Soul of the Stoics: how easy to reconcile these different conceptions of the Deity, if they are placed in different spheres of thought, and connected by the mysterious process of Emanation! The Neo-Platonist school was damned by its fatal proclivity for trinities. There were three kinds of gods, three kinds of dæmons, and three methods of approach to the supernatural world. These three methods were of course systematic, almost scientific, constructions. Before Porphyry there were Magic (γοητεία) and Theosophy (θεοσοφία). That philosopher introduced a third and middle term Theurgy (θεουργία). Theosophy was the process by which the philosopher attained the Perfect Vision, arrived at the consummation of ἕνωσις. Magic was the process by which the evil Dæmons, whom Porphyry puts under the dominion of Serapis and Hecate, were approached. The object of Theurgy was communion with the good Dæmons. Aided by Oriental fervour, we know the absurdities which these systems developed in the world of practice. But the development of these sciences on the theoretical side was enough to drag them down with their own weight. In Proclus the practical and the theoretic sides of Neo-Platonism are both driven to a culmination which passes the intelligence of humanity. “From the Incommunicable One spring—one knows not how—a host of Henads. Each has the character of absolute being, yet each has distinctive qualities. The Henads run down in long lines; the Intelligible are followed by the Intellectual, these by the Overworldly, these again by the Inworldly. From the Intelligible springs the family of Being, from the Intellectual that of Intelligence, from the Overworldly that of Soul, from the Inworldly that of Nature. These principal ‘chains’ are mainly like brooks falling into one river; that which has a body may also have a soul and an intelligence; but they subdivide as they go down, there are different kinds of intelligences and different kinds of souls dependent on them, so that the river is perpetually branching off into other rivers. Yet, further, the principal chains have to be multiplied by the number of Henads, for each chain is a family depending on a God, and exhibiting throughout the characteristic of that God. It includes not only Angels, Heroes, Demons, and human beings, but stones, plants, animals, which bear the signature of the deity, and have sacramental virtues with respect to him.”
If Proclus believed all this, we can understand his being a victim to the grossest superstition, both in belief and in practice. In the life of Proclus, second Aristotle as he was, we see the natural culmination of that excess of Reason and that exaggeration of Emotion which had marked the Neo-Platonic attitude from the beginning. When Justinian closed the School of Athens in the Sixth Century its professors, the last representatives of Neo-Platonism, were being hunted down as practitioners of magic of the meanest description. The “De Superstitione” of Plutarch marked a stage in the history of the human mind which the Neo-Platonists left behind, and which the European world has only just attained again after centuries of horrible crimes born of a sincere belief in witchcraft.390
It is a natural subject of speculation to those who are interested in the history of this period, how far the character of modern civilization would have been modified, had not the free and tolerant traditions of Greece been clamped into the systematized absurdities of Neo-Platonism. The struggle for social and political ascendancy reacted also upon the liberal and gentle spirit of the Man of Nazareth, whose teachings were thus embedded in a theological formalism which robbed them of half their meaning and all their inspiration. Christianity fought the enemy with its own weapons, and the scientific terminology of the Neo-Platonists gave definiteness to the Christian conception of the Trinity and the celestial hierarchy, while the whole system of Dæmonology, which has played so sinister a part in modern civilization, was to be found entire in the works of Porphyry and Proclus. It has even been asserted that the chief merit of the Neo-Platonist school lay in the fact that it prepared the educated circles of Pagan Society for the acceptance of the Gospel, and laid the foundations for the construction of Christian Theology.391 But it is conceivable that had Christianity come face to face with the calm rationalism and gentle piety of Pagan Religion and Philosophy as they appear in Plutarch, more of the spirit, if less of the form, of the old tradition might have passed into the teachings of the new Faith. We should, perhaps, then have been spared the martyrdom of Christians at the hands of Christians, the Inquisition, and the whole terrible consequences of the Odium Theologicum. Plutarch suggested a frame of mind rather than inculcated a body of dogma, and in that he resembled the founder of Christianity a great deal more than the most honoured theologians of the Church have done. But Paganism girt on its armour in direct hostility to the new Creed, and from these clenched antagonisms sprang that accentuation of points of difference which broke the continuity of civilization, and separated the modern from the classical world by a chasm which the efforts of four centuries have not succeeded in bridging over.392 Is it not possible that Paganism, which out of the multitude of separate gods had evolved the idea of the One Pure and Perfect Deity, might also, out of the many-sided activities of the half-human, half-divine Dæmons, have arrived at the belief in a single mediatory power, and, with a perception unblinded by polemic bitterness, have been prepared to merge this conception in the Divine Man of the Catholic Church?393
But though the spirit of Plutarch was not destined in this way to pass directly on to the believer in Christianity, the time was to come when, among the best and purest adherents of that faith, his teachings would be regarded as efficacious for the sincerest goodness. “The works of Jeremy Taylor,” says Archbishop Trench, “contain no less than two hundred and fifty-six allusions or direct references made by him to the writings of Plutarch.” But direct indebtedness of this kind does not necessarily imply similarity of spirit, and fortunately the mental attitude of Plutarch is one which appears essential to human progress, and does not depend upon the continuity of a tradition. “Plutarch,” wrote Emerson, “will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.”394 He will be perpetually rediscovered because there will be a perpetually recurring necessity to look at life from his point of view. But he will be perpetually rediscovered because he is perpetually allowed to disappear. There will always be those among the disciples of Religion and the followers of Science who maintain that there can be no truce, no toleration between the two, and the history of the human race will be formulated into an indictment against the Superstition of the one, and the most terrible anathemas of the Church will be fulminated against the Atheism of the other. Meanwhile those who take a middle course and recognize the “immortal vitality of Philosophy and the eternal necessity of Religion,”395 and would leave the individual mind to select its appropriate support from the dogmas of the one or the discoveries of the other, without dressing Philosophy in the fantastic garb of Religion, as the Neo-Platonists did, or turning Religion into a matter of rules and regulations as the Clerical Rationalists of the Eighteenth Century did, will be regarded by the extremists as traitors at once to the cause of progress and the cause of morality, and will be placed among the—
“Anime triste di coloro
Che visser senza infamia, e senza lodo.
Mischiate sono a quel cattivo coro
Degli Angeli, che non furon ribelli
Nè fur fedeli a Dio, ma per sè foro.”396
But so long as human nature is composite: so long as it is compelled to feel an interest in the home joys of earth, and is endowed with an imagination which soars beyond the actual realities of life to the possibilities that lie beyond its limits: so long will the spirit which dominated Plutarch operate in inducing men “to borrow Reason from Philosophy, making it their Mystagogue to Religion:” so long will it be recognized that the most subtle Dialectic and the most spiritualized rapture are dangerous at once to Reason and Religion unless they are brought into contact with the necessities of daily life, and made to subserve the ends of practical goodness in the sphere of man’s natural and immediate interests. This recognition of Ethics as the dominating end of all Thought and Emotion will lead men on that firm path of reasonable happiness which, in Plutarch’s own favourite expression, lies midway between the headlong precipice of Atheism and the engulfing quagmire of Superstition.
FINIS
Footnotes
1 See the Heading of the Lamprian Catalogue: Bernardakis. vol. vii. p. 473.
2 Plutarchi Chæronensis Moralia recognovit Gregorius N. Bernardakis (Leipzig. Teubner. 7 vols. and Appendix).
3 Classical Review, vol. iv. (1890), p. 306.
4 (Then of Goettingen.) See the Præfatio to Bernardakis’ Second Volume.
5 The Treatise of Plutarch, De Cupiditate Divitiarum, edited by W. R. Paton. (David Nutt. 1896.) We have also consulted Mr. Paton’s Plutarchi Pythici Dialogi tres (Berlin, 1893). (An emendation of Mr. Paton’s is noted infra, p. 90.)
6 Leben, Schriften und Philosophie des Plutarch von Chæronea, von R. Volkmann (Berlin, 1869).
7 De la Morale de Plutarque, par Octave Gréard (Paris, 1866).
8 Plutarch, his Life, his Parallel Lives, and his Morals. Five Lectures by Richard Chenevix Trench, D.D., &c. (London, 1873).
9 The Greek World under Roman Sway, from Polybius to Plutarch, by J. P. Mahaffy, D.D., &c. (London, 1890).
10 Mahaffy, p. 321. How Plutarch could possibly have “taken pains to understand” Christianity when, in Professor Mahaffy’s own words (p. 349), he “seems never to have heard of it,” we must leave it to Professor Mahaffy to explain.
11 Ibid. p. 321.
12 Ibid. p. 349.
13 Volkmann, vol. ii. cap. 1.
14 Gréard, Preface to Third Edition, p. iii.
15 De Apologetica Plutarchi Chæronensis Theologia (Marburg, 1854). Seibert refers to two other authors who had dealt with some aspects of his own subject—Absolute demum opusculo Schreiteri commentationem de doctrina Plutarchi theologica et morali scriptam... necnon Nitzchii Kiliensis de Plutarcho theologo et philosopho populari disquisitionem 1849 editam conferre licuit.—We have been unable to see a copy of either of these dissertations, although Trench also alludes to Schreiter’s work. They did not, in Seibert’s opinion, render his work unnecessary; but he enjoyed the inestimable advantage of the friendship of Zeller, who helped him “libris consilioque.”
16 Politik und Philosophie in ihrem Verhältniss, &c., by H. W. J. Thiersch (Marburg, 1853).—Damals stand Plutarch, dem bereits Trajan consularische Ehren bewilligt hatte, auf der höchsten Stufe des Ansehens. (For M. Gréard’s destruction of this Legend see his first chapter.—Légende de Plutarque.)
17 The Essays of Plutarch, by W. J. Brodribb. Fortnightly Review, vol. 20, p. 629.
18 “He cared not for the name of any sect or leader, but pleaded the cause of moral beauty in the interests of truth only.”—Merivale’s “Romans under the Empire,” cap. 60, where there is an excellent, but unfortunately too brief, account of our author.
19 Œuvres Morales de Plutarque, traduites du grec par Dominic Ricard (1783-1795).—“Rapprochée un texte, la version de Ricard est, dans sa teneur générale, d’une élégance superficielle et d’une fidélité peu approfondie.”—Gréard. Trench also severely condemns some of the translations in the edition issued in Dryden’s name.
20 Plutarch’s Morals, translated from the Greek by several hands, corrected and revised by W. W. Goodwin, Ph.D. (London, 1870).—“It may have been a fortunate thing for some of our translators that Bentley was too much occupied with the wise heads of Christ Church to notice the blunders of men who could write notes saying that the Parthenon is a ‘Promontory shooting into the Black Sea, where stood a chappel dedicated to some virgin godhead, and famous for some Victory thereabout obtain’d.’”—Editor’s Preface.
21 Plutarch’s Morals. Theosophical Essays. Translated by the late C. W. King, M.A. (London, 1889). Ethical Essays translated by A. R. Shilleto, M.A. (London, 1888).
22 Tertullian: De Carne Christi, 5.—“Crucifixus est Dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est. Et mortuus est Dei filius; prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile est.”
23 St. Augustine: Confessiones, vi. 5.—“Ex hoc tamen quoque jam præponens doctrinam Catholicam, modestius ibi minimeque fallaciter sentiebam juberi ut crederetur quod non demonstrabatur (sive esset quid demonstrandum, sed cui forte non esset, sive nec quid esset), quam illic temeraria pollicitatione scientiæ credulitatem irrideri; et postea tam multa fabulosissima et absurdissima, quia demonstrari non poterant, credenda imperari.”—The principle inherent in the five italicized words is identical with that which the writer exposes as an example of the absurd credulity of the Manichæans. The difference is merely one of degree.
24 Attempts have, of course, been made at various times to rationalize a Religion whose cardinal principle is Faith. Paley and Butler are conspicuous examples in the history of Anglican Christianity but neither the one nor the other supplied any widespread inspiration to the religious life of the day. Butler, “who had made it his business, ever since he thought himself capable of such sort of reasoning, to prove to himself the being and attributes of God,” who “found it impossible to dissociate philosophy from religion in his own mind,” and “would have agreed with South that what is nonsense upon a principle of Reason will never be sense upon a principle of Religion,” was yet compelled to admit that “it was too late for him to try to support a falling Church;” and it is a matter of national history that Wesley, with his direct appeal to the principle of “justification by faith,” did more to reinvigorate the religious life of England than all the cultured rationalists who adorned the English Church in those days. And in these later days Butler has not escaped the charge of “having furnished, with a design directly contrary, one of the most terrible of the persuasives to Atheism that has ever been produced.” (Butler, by the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, M.A.) Paley likewise thought it a just opinion “that whatever renders religion more rational renders it more credible,” and devoted his genius to the task of making religion more rational, but has done little more than furnish a school text-book for theological students. Further, what Christian, in his heart of hearts, and at those moments which he would regard as his best, does not respond more readily to the sublime sentiment of Tertullian than to the ratiocinations of the Analogy or the Evidences?
25 M. Constant Martha’s Études morales sur l’Antiquité, from which we have taken this just and striking phrase of Bossuet, gives an interesting account of the passionate and anguished manner in which the calm precepts of the famous “Golden Verses of Pythagoras” were applied by Christianity:—“Le philosophe, si sévère qu’il fût, se traitait toujours en ami;... le chrétien au contraire,... passe souvent par des inquiétudes inconnues à la sereine antiquité.” (L’Examen de Conscience chez les Anciens.)
26 “Belief is a virtue, Doubt is a sin.”—Quoted by J. A. Froude, Short Studies, vol. i. p. 243.
27 Certain emotional aspects of Greek Religion are dealt with in the subsequent analysis of Plutarch’s teaching.
28 Horace: Epist. i. 6, 15, 16.
29 Gaston Boissier: De la Religion Romaine, vol. i. p. 21. Cf. Cicero: De Natura Deorum, ii. 28.
30 Cf. the remark of Seneca: Epistolæ ad Lucilium, i. 21.—“Quod fieri in senatu solet, faciendum ego in philosophia quoque existimo. Quum censuit aliquis, quod ex parte mihi placeat, jubeo illum dividere sententiam, et sequor.”—For a summary of interesting examples of the manner in which this spirit of compromise worked out in practical religious questions, see Boissier, pp. 22, sqq.
31 Virgil: Georgics, 1. 268-272.—Cf. the note of Servius on this passage: “Scimus necessitati religionem cedere.” On the general character of Roman Religion, cf. Constant de Rebecque: Du Polythéisme Romain.—“On dirait que les dieux ont abjuré les erreurs d’une jeunesse fougueuse pour se livrer aux occupations de l’âge mûr. La religion de Rome est l’âge mûr des dieux, comme l’histoire de Rome est la maturité de l’espèce humaine.”
32 Macrobius: Saturnalia, iii. 9.—“Si deus, si dea est, cui populus civitasque Carthaginiensis est in tutela, teque maxime ille,” etc.
33 Plutarch: De Iside et Osiride. (Passages subsequently quoted.) Cf. Dion Chrysostom: De Cognitione Dei. (Vol. i. p. 225, Dindorf’s Text.)
34 Dionysius of Halicarnassus: De Antiquitatibus Romanorum, ii. 18.—Though Livy’s account of the administrative measures of Numa is written in a totally different spirit from that of Dionysius, it may be noted that Numa is depicted as introducing religion as an aid to political stability.—“Ne luxuriarentur otio animi, quos metus hostium disciplinaque militaris continuerat, omnium primum, rem ad multitudinem imperitam et illis sæculis rudem efficacissimam Deorum metum injiciendum ratus est.” (Livy, i. 19.) Cicero confesses that the auspices had been retained for the same reason. (De Div., ii. 33.)
35 The indignant phrases with which Horace scathes the degeneracy of his own times in this respect clearly indicate the religious aspect of the patriotic self-immolation of Regulus:—
“Milesne Crassi conjuge barbara
Turpis maritus vixit et hostium
(Proh curia inversique mores!)
Consenuit socerorum in armis
Sub rege Medo Marsus et Apulus
Anciliorum et nominis et togæ
Oblitus æternæque Vestæ
Incolumi Jove et urbe Roma?” (Od., iii. 5.)
36 Cf. Boissier: De la Religion Romaine, vol. i. p. 17.—“Nonseulement la religion romaine n’encourage pas la dévotion, mais on peut dire qu’elle s’en méfie. C’est un peuple fait pour agir; la rêverie, la contemplation mystique lui sont étrangères et suspectes. Il est avant tout ami du calme, de l’ordre, de la regularité; tout ce qui excite et trouble les âmes lui déplaît.” Boissier quotes as the remark of Servius on Georgics, 3. 456, the words, “Majores religionem totam in experientia collocabant;” but what Servius really wrote was, “Majores enim expugnantes religionem, totum in experientia collocabant,” and he gives an apt reference to Cato’s speech on the Catilinarian conspiracy as reported by Sallust:—“Non votis neque suppliciis muliebribus auxilia deorum parantur: vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo, prospere omnia cedunt.” Propertius (iii. 22) boasts that Rome is free from the more extravagantly emotional legends of Greek mythology.
37 Cicero: De Nat. Deor. lib. iii.—Cf. the “theory of Twofold Truth,” which was “accepted without hesitation by all the foremost teachers in Italy during the sixteenth century,” who “were careful to point out, they were philosophers, and not theologians.”—The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, by John Owen (p. 186, second edition).
38 Cicero: Tusc. Disp. i. 1.—“Iam illa quæ natura, non literis, adsecuti sunt, neque cum Græcia neque ulla cum gente sunt conferenda; quæ enim tanta gravitas, quæ tanta constantia, magnitudo animi, probitas, fides, quæ tam excellens in omni genere virtus in ullis fuit, ut sit cum majoribus nostris comparanda?”
39 A situation forecast in the well-known passage of Plato’s Republic, 619 C, in reference to the soul who has chosen for his lot in life “the most absolute despotism he could find.”—“He was one of those who had lived during his former life under a well-ordered constitution, and hence a measure of virtue had fallen to his share, through the influence of habit, unaided by philosophy.” (Davis and Vaughan’s translation.) What could more accurately describe the character of early Roman morality than these words?
40 It was inability to grasp this truth that explained the “patriotic” opposition of the Elder Cato to the lectures of Carneades, Critolaus, and Diogenes. He was “unwilling that the public policy of Rome, which for the Roman youth was the supreme norm of judgment and action, and was possessed of unconditional authority, should, through the influence of foreign philosophers, become subordinated, in the consciousness of these youths, to a more universal ethical norm.” Ueberweg: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (Morris and Porter’s translation, p. 189, vol. i.). (Cf. M. Martha: Le Philosophe Carnéade à Rome.)
41 Cicero: De Officiis, i. 43.—“Princepsque omnium virtutum illa sapientia quam σοφίαν Græci vocant—prudentiam enim, quam Græci φρόνησιν, aliam quandam intellegimus, quæ est rerum expetendarum fugiendarumque scientia; illa autem sapientia quam principem dixi rerum est divinarum et humanarum scientia, in qua continetur deorum et hominum communitas et societas inter ipsos—ea si maxima est, ut est certe, necesse est quod a communitate ducatur officium id esse maximum.”—He is here emphasizing the social duties of the individual man.
42 De Divinatione, ii. 2.—“Quod enim munus reipublicæ afferre majus meliusve possumus, quam si docemus atque erudimŭs juventutem? his præsertim moribus atque temporibus, quibus ita prolapsa est, ut omnium opibus refrænenda ac coërcenda sit.”—We shall venture to believe that personally Cicero was not a religious man, in spite of the religious usefulness of his philosophic work, and also notwithstanding Trollope’s contention that “had Cicero lived a hundred years later I should have suspected him of some hidden knowledge of Christian teaching.” (Trollope’s Life of Cicero, chapter on “Cicero’s Religion.”) Cicero’s Letters have as much religion in them as Lord Chesterfield’s—and no more.
43 Herod. ii. 53.
44 Hesiod: Works and Days, 280 sqq. (cf. 293-326). Here also is to be found that famous description of the hard and easy roads of Virtue and of Vice. The reward held out to progress in Virtue is that this road, too, becomes pleasant and easy at last.
45 Οὗτος μὲν πανάριστος ὃς αὐτῷ πάντα νοήσῃ. (Hesiod: Works and Days, 293.)—It is not surprising that Aristotle quotes this verse with approval, or that it commended itself to the genius of Roman writers. (Cf. Livy, xxii. 29; Cicero: Pro Cluentio, c. 31.)
46 Pindar: Olymp., 1, v. 28, sqq. (Christ’s Teubner Edition).
47 Plutarch: De Ε apud Delphos, 385 B.D.
48 See The Ethics of Aristotle, by Sir Alexander Grant, Essay II.
49 Horace’s “Mutatus Polemon” is well known. The details of the story are given in practically the same form by Diogenes Laertius, Valerius Maximus (vi. 6. 15), and by Lucian in his dramatic version in the Bis Accusatus (16, 17). Philostratus—Lives of the Sophists, i. 20—gives an intensely modern account of the conversion of the sophist Isæus. (See also Note on p. 28.)
50 Plato: Laws, 642 C. (Jowett’s translation.)
51 Browning’s Asolando, “Development.” (P. 129, first edition.)
52 For the influence of the Greek Myths in this direction, cf. Propertius, Book iii. 32.
“Ipsa Venus, quamvis corrupta libidine Martis,
Nec minus in cælo semper honesta fuit,
Quamvis Ida palam pastorem dicat amasse
Atque inter pecudes accubuisse deam.
...
Dic mihi, quis potuit lectum servare pudicum,
Quæ dea cum solo vivere sola deo?”
St. Augustine’s criticism of the famous passage in the Eunuchus of Terence (Act iii. sc. 5), where Chærea is encouraged in his clandestine amour by a picture of Jupiter and Danaë, is, of course, painfully justified by the facts as reported by the dramatist. (Confessiones, lib. i.)
53 Plato: Phædo, 69 B.
54 “Before the fifth century, philosophy had been entirely physical or metaphysical.”—Sir A. Grant: Aristotle. (Essay already quoted.) The word italicized is surely too sweeping. (The thought is repeated with some qualification on page 67.) Cf. Diogenes Laertius: i. 18, and i. 13. Cicero: Tusc. Quæst., v. 4; Acad., i. 4, 15. Aristotle speaks with greater truth and moderation.—Metaph., i. 6. The distinction between Socrates and previous philosophers lies not so much in the fact that they were not ethical philosophers as that he was not a physical philosopher.
55 Herod. i. 75. Cf. the amusing story told by Plutarch (De Sollertia Animalium, 971 B, C), in which a mule laden with salt lightens its load in crossing a river by soaking its packages well under the water. Thales enters the ranks against the clever mule, and comes off easy winner by giving him a load of sponges and wool.
56 Herod. i. 170. Cf. Plutarch: Cum Principibus Viris Philosopho esse disserendum, 779 A.
57 Ritter and Preller, p. 10. (Quoting Simplicius: Physica, 6, a.)
58 Simplicius: Physica. (Quoted by Ritter and Preller, p. 10.)
59 “Heraclitus used to say that Homer, and Archilochus as well, ought to be expelled from the Contests and cudgelled.”—D. L., ix. 1.
60 See Plutarch: Adversus Coloten, 118 C; and Stobæus: Anthologion, v. 119, and iii. 84. (Vol. i. pp. 94 and 104.—Tauchnitz Edition.)
61 Plutarch: De Exilio, 604 A.
62 Diogenes Laertius, ii. 6.
63 Alex. Aphrod: De Fato, ii., quoted by Ritter and Preller, p. 28. Cf. Pseudo-Plutarch: De Placitis Philosophorum, 885 C, D.
64 Aristotle: Metaphysics, i. 3.
65 Ritter and Preller, p. 52.—Cf. Ueberweg on Leucippus and Democritus, “The ethical end of man is happiness, which is attained through justice and culture.”
66 Magna Moralia, i. 1, and i. 34. Cf. Aristotle: Eth. Nich., v. 5.—“The Pythagoreans defined the just to be simply retaliation—and Rhadamanthus (in Æschylus) appears to assert that justice is this: ‘that the punishment will be equitable when a man suffers the same thing as he has done.’” (Thomas Taylor’s translation of The Works of Aristotle.)
67 Ueberweg, p. 47. See also citations in last note.
68 How fruitful, the whole Attic Tragedy demonstrates.
69 Ritter and Preller, p. 79 (from Clemens Alexandrinus).
70 Cf. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus:—
“Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy,
For when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.”
71 Martha: L’Examen de Conscience chez les Anciens (“études morales sur l’Antiquité”).—“Ce poème, attribué par les uns à Pythagore lui-même, par d’autres à Lysis, son disciple, par d’autres encore ou à Philolaüs ou à Empédocle, ne remonte pas sans doute à une si haute antiquité, mais il est certainement antérieur au christianisme, puisque des écrivains qui ont vécu avant notre ère, entre autres le Stoïcien Chrysippe, y ont fait quelquefois allusion... Hieroclès dit formellement que les Vers d’or ne sont pas l’œuvre d’un homme, mais celle de tout le sacré collège pythagoricien.”—The author of the verses is, doubtless, unknown, but their general attribution in antiquity to a Pythagorean source is in harmony with the universal recognition that they cohere with the ethical doctrine of the school. M. Martha subjects ancient philosophers and critics to a severe reprehension on the ground that they saw in these verses a mere inculcation of the practice of the memory—“Un certain nombre d’anciens sont tombés dans la plus étrange méprise. Ils ont cru qu’il s’agissait ici d’un exercice de mémoire.” But, giving all the force which M. Martha assigns to the passages he quotes in support of this view, we must not leave out of consideration the important part which a good memory was believed to subserve in practical ethics. See the pseudo-Plutarchic tract De Educatione Liberorum, 9 F. Cf. Epictetus, lib. iii. cap x.
Seneca (De Ira, 3, cap. 36) learned the practice inculcated by the golden verses from Sextus, who was claimed as a Pythagorean (Ritter and Preller, 437).
72 Plato: Republic, 600 B.
73 Plutarch: Adversus Coloten, 1126; cf. D. L., ix. 23. See also Plato’s Parmenides, and cf. Ueberweg on Parmenides.
74 Leslie Stephen: The Science of Ethics (concluding sentence).
75 For a brief expression of this identity, see Dion. Ch. De Exilio, xiii. p. 249.—“To seek and strive earnestly after Virtue—that is Philosophy.” Cf. Seneca: Epist., i. 37; et passim.
76 See Martha: La prédication morale populaire (“Les moralistes sous l’empire romain,” pp. 240, 241).—“A cette époque la philosophie était une espèce de religion qui imposait à ses adeptes au moins l’extérieur de la vertu. Les sophistes se reconnaissent à leur mœurs licencieuses et à leurs manières arrogantes, les philosophes à la dignité de leur conduite et de leur maintien. On entrait dans la philosophie par une sorte de conversion édifiante: on ne pouvait en sortir que par une apostasie scandaleuse.” See the passages referred to by M. Martha, and, in addition, Dion’s account of his “conversion” in Oratio xiii. (De Exilio), and his comparisons between the sophist and the peacock, and the philosopher and the owl, in Oratio xii. (De Dei Cognitione).
77 Cicero: Acad. Poster., i. 4. (Reid’s translation.) Cf. Ritter and Preller: sec. 204, note “a” on Xenophon: Memorabilia, iv. 3. 1, and i. 4. 4.—“Socratem quodam modo naturæ studuisse vel ex nostro loco luculenter cernitur, ubi deprehendis eum teleologicam quæ dicitur viam ingressum, quæ ratio transiit ad Socraticos. Inde corrigendus Cicero Acad. Poster., i. 4.” Cf. Benwell’s Preface to his edition of the Memorabilia: “Quam graviter de Dei providentia et de admirabili corporis humani structura Socratem disserentem inducit!”—It must be conceded, however, that in Xenophon’s account Socrates is described as discussing natural phenomena still with a view to ethical edification. (Memorab., iv. 3.)
78 Plato: Timæus, 59 C.
79 W. S. Landor: Diogenes and Plato (Imaginary Conversations).—“Draw thy robe around thee; let the folds fall gracefully, and look majestic. That sentence is an admirable one, but not for me. I want sense, not stars.” Cf. Dr. Martineau: Plato (Types of Ethical Theory).—“The perfection which consists in contemplation of the absolute, or the attempt to copy it, may be the consummation of Reason, but not of character.”
80 Cf. Landor: loc. cit.—“The bird of wisdom flies low, and seeks her food under hedges; the eagle himself would be starved if he always soared aloft and against the sun. The sweetest fruit grows near the ground, and the plants that bear it require ventilation and lopping.”
81 Archer-Hind: The Phædo of Plato, Appendix I.
82 Cf. Martineau: “Types of Ethical Theory”: Plato, p. 97, vol. i.—“For the soul in its own essence, and for great and good souls among mankind, Plato certainly had the deepest reverence; but he had no share in the religious sentiment of democracy which dignifies man as man, and regards with indifference the highest personal qualities in comparison with the essential attributes of common humanity.—He rated so high the difficulty of attaining genuine insight and goodness that he thought it much if they could be realized even in a few; and had no hope that the mass of men, overborne by the pressure of material necessity and unchastened desires, could be brought, under the actual conditions of this world, to more than the mere beginnings of wisdom.”
83 Aristotle: Ethics, i. cap. 3. Cf. i. 6 and i. 8.
84 Ethics, i. 3, 4, where also the verse from the Works and Days is quoted; cf. sec. 6.
85 Ethics, i. 8.
86 Grant’s Aristotle, vol. i. p. 155.
87 See Ritter and Preller, sec. 392, for the authorities on this head.
88 A Voice from the Nile, by James Thomson. An Epicurean would have heartily responded to the verse following those quoted in the text from this fine poem—“And therefore Gods and Demons, Heaven and Hell.”
89 Diogenes Laertius (Ritter and Preller, 380. Cf. Cic.: De Finibus, i. 7).
90 Cf. Pseudo-Plutarch: De Placitis Philosophorum. 877 D.
91 Diogenes Laertius, x. 142. Cf. Cic.: De Finibus, i. 19.—“Denique etiam morati melius erimus quum didicerimus quid natura desideret.” (Ritter and Preller, p. 343).
92 Cf. the statement of Seneca (Epist., 89, 9).—“Epicurei duas partes philosophiæ putaverunt esse, naturalem atque moralem: rationalem removerunt.”
93 “Through the great weight which, both in theory and in their actual life with each other, was laid by the Epicureans on Friendship (a social development which only became possible after the dissolution of the bond which had so closely united each individual citizen to the Civil Community), Epicureanism aided in softening down the asperity and exclusiveness of ancient manners, and in cultivating the social virtues of companionableness, compatibility, friendliness, gentleness, beneficence, and gratitude, and so performed a work whose merit we should be careful not to under-estimate.”—Ueberweg: Grundriss. Cf. Horace: Sat., I. iv. 135—“dulcis amicis.” The other elements of the Epicurean ideal are also realized in Horace’s character, as his writings have left it to us.
94 This breaking away of the barriers between the teaching of various schools was, doubtless, largely due to the increasing importance which they universally attached to Ethics. The fact, at any rate, is indisputable. Every history of Greek philosophy, from the Third Century onward, is freely scattered with such phrases as these from Ueberweg:—“The new Academy returned to Dogmatism. It commenced with Philo of Larissa, founder of the Fourth School.... His pupil, Antiochus of Ascalon, founded a Fifth School, by combining the doctrines of Plato with certain Aristotelian, and more particularly with certain Stoic theses, thus preparing the way for the transition to Neo-Platonism.”—“In many of the Peripatetics of this late period we find an approximation to Stoicism.”
95 As regards Epicureanism, see the Adversus Coloten, the De latenter vivendo, and the Non posse suaviter viri secundum Epicurum. Plutarch’s polemic against Stoicism is specially developed in the three tracts, Stoicos absurdiora Poetis dicere, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis, and De communibus Notitiis. Plutarch’s attitude is purely critical: he is by no means constructive. His criticism has been severely dealt with by H. Bazin in his dissertation, De Plutarcho Stoicorum Adversario. It is worthy of note that Plutarch deals entirely with the founders of the two schools, not with the later developments of their teachings.
96 Thiersch, who regards Plutarch as the inaugurator of that moral reformation which, as we attempt to show in the next chapter, was operating before he was born, asserts that at the time when Plutarch began his work, the prevailing manner of life was based upon an Epicurean ideal. (Der Epikureismus war die Popularphilosophie des Tages, denn in ihr fand die herrschende Lebensweise ihren begrifflichen Ausdruck.—Thiersch: Politik und Philosophie in ihrem Verhältniss, etc., Marburg, 1853.) If this be so, and we willingly make the admission, there was little need for reform here, although, as Seneca found (Ad Lucilium, xxi. 9), it may have been necessary to explain to a misunderstanding world what Epicureanism really was. Whatever Plutarch, as nominal Platonist, may polemically advance against Epicureanism, the ideal of Epicurus and Metrodorus is realized in the conduct of the group of people whose manner of life is represented in the Symposiacs.
97 For some considerations on this subject see the concluding chapter.
[98] E.g., Dr. August Tholuck.—At the termination of an article, “Ueber den Einfluss des Heidenthums aufs Leben,” in which he ransacks classical authors and Christian fathers for anything which may serve to exhibit the degradation of Pagan society, he quotes the words of Athanasius to give expression to the conclusion referred to in the text. The whole of Champagny’s brilliant and fascinating work on the Cæsars is dominated by the same spirit, a spirit utterly inconsistent with that attitude of philosophical detachment in which history should be written, (Études sur l’Empire Romain, tome iii., “Les Césars.”) Archbishop Trench, too, says of our period that it “was the hour and power of darkness; of a darkness which then, immediately before the dawn of a new day, was the thickest.” (Miracles, p. 162.) Prof. Mahaffy, in the same uncritical spirit, refers to the “singular” and “melancholy” spectacle presented by Plutarch in his religious work, “clinging to the sinking ship, or rather, trying to stop the leak and declare her seaworthy.” (Greeks under Roman Sway, p. 321.)
99 See Dean Merivale, Romans under the Empire, vol. vii.
100 See “St. Paul and Seneca” (Dissertation ii. in Lightfoot on “Philippians”) for a full account of the question from the historical and critical standpoints. The learned and impartial Bishop has no difficulty in proving that the resemblances between Stoicism and Christianity were due to St. Paul’s acquaintance with Stoic teaching, and not to Seneca’s knowledge of the Christian faith.
Theodoret, bishop of Cyrus, in Syria (consecrated A.D. 420), appears to have been the first to assert the operation of Christian influences on Plutarch:—“Plotinus, Plutarch, and Numenius, and the rest of their tribe, who lived after the Manifestation of our Saviour to the Gentiles, inserted into their own writings many points of Christian Theology.” (Theodoretus, Græcarum affectionum curatio—Oratio ii., De Principio.) In another place he makes a still more definite assertion: “Plutarch and Plotinus undoubtedly heard the Divine Gospel.” (Oratio x., De Oraculis.) Rualdus, in the ninth chapter of his Vita Plutarchi, given towards the end of the first volume of the Paris edition of 1624, dare not be so emphatic as Theodoret:—“There are, in the writings of Plutarch, numerous thoughts, drawn from I cannot say what hidden source, which, from their truth and importance, could be taken for the utterances of a Christian oracle. I do not hesitate, therefore, to say of him, as Tertullian said of Seneca, that he is ‘often our own man.’” And he even goes so far as to admit that, though Plutarch never attacked the Christian faith, and might have read the New Testament as well as the Old, it is quite impossible to claim him as a believer.—Brucker, in a slight account of Plutarch in his Historia Critica Philosophiæ, takes a more critical view.—“The fact that Plutarch, in his numerous writings, nowhere alludes to the Christians, I do not know whether to attribute to his sense of fairness, or even to actual favour, or whether to regard it as an indication of mere neglect and contempt.” That Brucker is inclined to the alternative of contempt is shown by a comment in a footnote on Tillemont’s assertion (Histoire des Empereurs), that Plutarch ignored the Christians, “not daring to speak well, not wishing to speak ill.” “It appears to me,” says Brucker, “that the real reason was contempt for the Christians, who were looked upon as illiterate.”
Of modern examples of this tendency one may be sufficient. In the introduction to an American translation of the De Sera Numinis Vindicta, the editor, after enumerating the arguments against any connexion between Plutarch and Christianity, concludes:—“Yet I cannot doubt that an infusion of Christianity had somehow infiltrated itself into Plutarch’s ethical opinions and sentiment, as into those of Seneca.” (“Plutarch on the Delay of the Divine Justice,” translated, with an introduction and notes, by Andrew P. Peabody, Boston, 1885.)
101 See Dion: Ad Alexandrinos, p. 410 (Dindorf). See also p. 402. Cf. Philostratus: Vitæ Sophistarum, i. 6.
102 E.g., Conjugalia Præcepta, 140 A.—“Those who do not associate cheerfully with their wives, nor share their recreations with them, teach them to seek their own pleasures apart from those of their husbands.”
103 Tibullus: Eleg., i. 1. Cf. Propertius: Eleg., iii. 15. “Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus amore: Nox tibi longa venit, nec reditura dies.”
104 Tibullus: Eleg., i. 3. “Quod si fatales iam nunc explevimus annos,” to the end of the Elegy.
105 Tib. i. 3 (sub finem).
106 Propertius: Eleg., ii. 13, 28; iv. 5, 23 sqq.; iv. 4.
107 Tib., i. 10.
108 Lucan: Pharsalia, i. 670.
109 The basis of the work of Augustus, and of the religious reforms inaugurated or developed by him, is laid in the recognition of a fact noted by Balbus in Cic., De Nat. Deorum, lib. ii. 3. “Eorum imperiis rempublicam amplificatam qui religionibus paruissent. Et si conferre volumus nostra cum externis, ceteris rebus aut pares aut etiam inferiores reperiemur; religione, id est, cultu deorum, multo superiores.” Cf. Horace: Od., iii. 6, vv. 1-4; Livy, xlv. 39.
110 Hor.: Od., iii. 6.
111 See Boissier: Religion Romaine, vol. i. cap. 5.—Le Sixième Livre de l’Enéide. St. Augustine must surely have felt the religious influence of the Æneid when he experienced the emotion which he describes in the well-known passage in the First Book of the Confessions—plorare Didonem mortuam (cogebar), quia se occidit ob amorem: cum interea meipsum morientem, Deus Vita mea, siccis occulis ferrem miserrimus. (Lib. i. cap. xiii.)
112 Ovid: Fasti, 4, 203; cf. Meta., i. sec. 8.
113 See the Life of Persius, included, with the Lives of Terence, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, and Pliny the Elder, in the writings of Suetonius.
114 Macleane’s Persius.—Introduction.
115 Persius: Sat., v. 62-64.—At te nocturnis juvat impallescere chartis, Cultor enim juvenum purgatas inseris aures Fruge Cleanthea.
116 Pharsalia, ix. 554-555.
117 Pharsalia, ix. 570. We have not been able to refrain from quoting these—as other—well-known verses in the text. They are the highest expression of the Stoic Pantheism. “Virtus” has the appearance of a rhetorical climax; but has it been noticed that the great modern poet of Pantheism—for what else was Wordsworth?—also makes humanity the highest embodiment of that “presence... Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man?”
118 Quis labor hic superis, &c., vi. 490, et passim.
119 Felices errore suo, &c., i. 459.
120 Scrutabitur scholas nostras, et obiiciet philosophis congiaria, amicas, gulam: ostendet mihi alium in adulterio, alium in popina, alium in aula.—Seneca: Epist., i. 29.
121 Philostratus, i. 7. The quaint turn of the version in the text is from Blount’s 1681 translation of the Life of Apollonius.
122 Dion: Oratio 32, pp. 402-3 (Dindorf).
123 See Dion: De Cognitione Dei (pp. 213-4) for an interesting comparison between the owl and the philosopher on the one hand, and the sophist and the peacock on the other. (Cf. Ad Alexandrinos, p. 406, where the sufferings of the faithful philosopher are in implied contrast to the rewards that await the brilliant sophist.)
124 Iliad, ix. 312-3 (Chapman’s translation). This actual text is quoted in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists (i. 25) as a criticism on some of the false and fantastic exercises of the Sophists. The “distant lapse” referred to in the text is constantly evident in the dramas of the best Athenian period. And history shows that there was a strong tendency in the Hellenic character agreeing with that indicated by the evidence of the dramatists, notwithstanding the outcry raised when Euripides summed up the whole matter in his famous line in the Hippolytus (Hipp. 612).
125 Philostratus: Vitæ Sophistarum, lib. i. sec. 24.
126 E.g., De Stoic. Repug., 1033 A, B; De Audiendo, 43 F.
127 See frequent passages in Seneca’s letters to Lucilius, e.g. Ep. i. 16, 20. Cf. De Vita Beata, cap. 18, where Seneca defends himself and other philosophers against the charge “aliter loqueris: aliter vivis.” He will not be deterred from the pursuit of virtue by any truth human weakness may have to admit in the charge.
This note is well marked in both Aurelius and Epictetus (ii. 19. Cf. Aulus Gellius, xvii. 19). The praise of Ulysses at the end of the De Deo Socratis of Apuleius is couched in the same strain.
128 Catullus, xvi. 4, 5; Ovid: Tristia, ii. 353-4; Martial, i. 5.
129 Pliny: Ep. v. 3. Plutarch, also, is legitimately offended at the loose language of the founders of Stoicism (see De Stoic. Repug., 1044 B), and his expressions, as are those of Pliny’s friends, are quite in harmony with the modern attitude on the question. Apuleius defends himself against a similar charge to that brought against Pliny by a similar display of great names.—“Fecere tamen et alii talia” (De Deo Socratis).
130 Horace: Ep. i. 1, 14.
131 Epictetus: Encheir., 49; Discourses, iii. 2; i. 17.
132 Seneca: Epist. ad Lucilium, i. 21. Here are a few of the egregia dicta which Seneca takes from the teachings of Epicurus, or Metrodorus, or alicujus ex illa officina.—“Honesta res est læta paupertas,” “Satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus,” “Philosophiæ servias oportet ut tibi contingat vera libertas,” “Si cui sua non videntur amplissima, licet totius mundi dominus sit, tamen miser est,” “Quid est turpius, quam senex vivere incipiens?” “Is maxime divitiis fruitur, qui minime divitiis indiget,” “Immodica ira gignit insaniam,” “Sic fac omnia, tanquam spectet Epicurus,” “Initium est salutis, notitia peccati,” &c. Yet Seneca was the acerrimus Stoicus of Lactantius (Div. Inst., i. 5).
133 Fragment 120 in Bergk’s third edition, 144 in his fourth edition, and 107 in Böckh’s edition. W. Christ includes it in his selections—ἐξ ἀδήλων εἰδῶν (No. 4).
134 Iliad, ix. 498; xi. 3, 73; iv. 440.
135 Amatorius, 763 C, sqq.; cf. De Placitis Philosoph., lib. i. 879-880 A. This tract cannot be quoted as authority for Plutarch’s views; it is in several places distinctly, even grossly, anti-Platonic, and in other places even more distinctly Epicurean. As an example of the reverence with which Plutarch constantly alludes to Plato, the first conversation in the Eighth Book of the Symposiacs may be quoted. The conversation arises out of a celebration of Plato’s birthday, and Plutarch gives a sympathetic report of the remarks of Mestrius Florus, who is of opinion that those who impute the philosopher’s paternity to Apollo do not dishonour the God. Cf. this and hundreds of other similar examples with the bitterly contemptuous expressions in the De Placitis, 881 A, a section which concludes with an emphatic exposition of that Epicurean view which Plutarch exerts himself so strenuously to confute in the De Sera Numinis Vindicta. Bernardakis “stars” the De Placitis, though Zimmerman quotes it as evidence against the sincerity of Plutarch’s piety (Epistola ad Nicolaum Nonnen, cap. 7: “aperte negat providentiam”). Wyttenbach says the De Placitis was “e perditis quibusdam germanis libris compilatum.” Christopher Meiners (Historia Doctrinæ de Vero Deo, p. 246) attacks the boldness of the writer, “quâ deorum numen et providentiam impugnavit, quæque a Plutarchi pietate et moribus longe abhorret.” Corsini seems to think that the incredible labour involved in the compilation makes it worthy of Plutarch. His edition, with notes, translation, and dissertations, makes a very handsome quarto, which is a monument of combined industry and simplicity. He makes no comment on the anti-Platonic expressions alluded to above (Corsinus: Plutarchi De Placitis Philosophorum, libri v., Florence, 1759), nor does Mahaffy either, who regards the De Placitis as genuine, though he calls it jejune. I have been unable to see a copy of Beck’s 1787 edition, which Volkmann highly praises. It may be observed with regard to the passage referred to at the head of this note that Plutarch would never have limited the contribution of philosophy to the knowledge of God to τὸ φυσικόν. Dion Chrysostom (De Dei Cognitione, 393, sqq.) mentions the same three sources of the knowledge of the Divine nature as Plutarch, but also postulates a primeval and innate cognition of God.
136 Cf. the Pseudo-Plutarchic De Placit. Phil., 880 A.
137 Λόγον ἐκ φιλοσοφίας μυσταγωγὸν ἀναλαβόντες. De Iside et Osiride, 378 A, B. “Un lien pieux se formait entre le myste et son mystagogue, lien qui ne pouvait plus se rompre sans crime.”—Maury, vol. ii. cap. xi. For the saying of Theodorus about “taking with the left hand what is offered with the right,” see De Tranquillitate Animi, 467 B.
138 De Iside et Osiride, and De Superstitione, passim.
139 Cf. Diog. Laert. vii. 134 (Ritter and Preller, sect. 404).—“God, by transformation of His own essence, makes the world.”—Grant’s Aristotle, Essay vi., “The Ancient Stoics.” Cf. Plut: De Stoic. Repugn. 1053.
140 De Ε apud Delphos, 388 F.
141 Quomodo Adulator, 78 E. Cf. Eunapius on Historians of Philosophy. “No one has written any careful account of the lives of philosophers, among whom we count not only Ammonius, teacher of divinest Plutarch, but also Plutarch himself, the darling and delight of all Philosophy.” Eunapius thinks that the Parallel Lives were Plutarch’s finest work, but adds that “all his writings are thickly sown with original thoughts of his own, as well as with the teachings of his Master.”
142 393 E.
143 Plutarch elsewhere comments upon the εὑρησιλογία of the Stoics in finding explanations of the various names of the popular Deities (Quomodo Adolescens, 31 E). Cicero (De Natura Deorum, iii. 24) represents Cotta as charging the Stoics with supporting the crudest superstitions of the popular faith by the skill which they displayed in finding a mysterious significance in the current names and legends:-“Atque hæc quidem et ejusmodi ex vetere Græcia fama collecta sunt; quibus intelligis resistendum esse, ne perturbentur religiones. Vestri autem non modo hæc non repellunt, verum etiam confirmant, interpretando quorsum quidque pertineat.”
144 Iliad, xv. 362-4.
145 In another place Plutarch expresses the view that the original Creator of the world bestowed upon the stuff of the phenomenal world a principle of change and movement by which that stuff often dissolves and reshapes itself under the operation of natural causes without the intervention of the original Creator (De Defectu Orac., 435-6).
146 Plutarch, in this Essay, distinctly places himself in opposition to Plato, whose views, for the purposes of contrast, may be summarized from two well-known passages of the Republic. In 337 B, C, the greater part of the myths current in the popular poets are repudiated. Then, after that famous series of criticisms applied to particular passages taken from Homer and Hesiod and other poets, after his analysis of the various kinds of “narration,” and his implicit inclusion of the great poets of Greece among the masters of that kind of imitative narration which a man will the more indulge in, the more contemptible he is, Plato concludes with that ironical description of the reception which a Homer or a Hesiod would have to meet in a state founded on the Platonic ideal. “We shall pay him reverence as a sacred, admirable, and charming personage; we shall pour perfumed oil upon his head and crown him with woollen fillets; but we shall tell him that our laws exclude such characters as he, and shall send him away to some other city than ours.”—398 A, B (Davies and Vaughan’s translation). Plutarch, however, takes the world as it is. He admits that poetry is a siren, but refuses to stop the ears of the young people who listen to her fascinating strains. Lycurgus was mad in thinking he could cure drunkenness by cutting down the vineyards; he should rather have brought the water-springs nearer to the vines. It is better to utilize the vine of poetry by checking and pruning its “fanciful and theatrical exuberance” than to uproot it altogether. We must mingle the wine with the pure water of philosophy, or, to use another image, poetry and philosophy must be planted in the same soil, just as the mandragora, which moderates the native strength of the wine, is planted in vineyards (Quomodo Adolescens, 15 E).
August Schlemm, in his De fontibus Plutarchi Commentationum De Aud. Poetis et de Fortuna (Göttingen, 1893), subjects the structure of the De Audiendis to a very close and careful analysis, and comes to the conclusion that the main sources of Plutarch’s material are to be found in the writings of Stoic and Peripatetic philosophers. He notes that Plutarch’s examples are taken from the same Homeric, verses as Plato’s, and adds, “Quæ cum ita sint, quomodo hæ Plutarchum inter et Platonem similitudines ortæ sint dubium jam esse non potest. Plutarchus, ut in eis quæ antecedunt, ita etiam hic, usus est libro Peripatetici cujusdam, qui, ut criminationes a Platone poetis factas repelleret, hujus modi fictiones in natura artis poeticæ positas esse demonstravit et commentationi suæ inseruit poetarum versus a Platone vituperatos.” Chrysippus had composed a work on How to study Poetry, Zeno one entitled On Poetical Study, and Cleanthes another, called On the Poet.
The opinion of so conscientious a scholar on Plutarch’s “appropriations” is worth quoting:—“tenendum est... Plutarchum non eum fuisse qui more compilatorum libros aliorum ad verbum exscriberet sed id egisse ut ea quæ legisset atque collegisset referret, sed ita ut modo sua intermisceret, modo nonnulla omitteret vel mutaret.”
147 De Iside et Osiride, 353 E.
148 De Ε apud Delphos, 393 D. Cf. De Defectu, 433 E. Ammonius is here evidently referring to a remark made (386 B) by “one of those present” to the effect that “practically all the Greeks identify Apollo with the Sun.” The words of Ammonius quoted in the text are strikingly similar in spirit to the famous verses in the “In Memoriam:”—
“O thou that after toil and storm
May’st seem to have reached a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form,
“Leave thou thy sister when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
“Her faith through form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good:
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!”
149 Consolatio ad Apollonium, 102 A.—“He was a very sage and virtuous youth, conspicuous for the reverence which he paid to the gods, to his parents, and to his friends.” This is nearly the old Hellenic ideal as expressed, e.g., in the lines from the “Antiope” of Euripides, preserved by Stobæus, “On Virtue”—
“There be three virtues for thy practice, child:
Honour the gods, revere thy loving parents,
Respect the laws of Greece.”
150 Amatorius, 756 B.
151 Amatorius, 762 A.
152 De Defectu Orac., 435 E.
153 Consolatio ad Uxorem, 612. Cf. De Defectu Orac., 437 A.
154 Supplying, as Bernardakis does after Wyttenbach, καὶ οὐκ ἀγνοῶ ὁτι ταῦτα πολλὰς ἔχει ἀπορίας.
155 De Pythiæ Orac., 409 C. Cf. De Rep. Ger., 792 F.
156 Plutarch puts these words into the mouth of Theon, a literary man, and a most intimate friend of his own. But Theon is here a mere modest disguise of Plutarch, just as “Lamprias” is in the De Defectu Oraculorum. The argument is, in any case, not affected—the statement is clearly Plutarch’s own. (See the note on that dialogue in a subsequent chapter.)
157 De Pythiæ Orac., 409 B.
158 The antiquarian regret of Propertius for the old simple worships of Rome—“Nulli cura fuit externos quærere divos Cum tremeret patrio pendula turba sacro” (Eleg., v. 1)—touched a chord which very few Romans would have responded to in Plutarch’s time.
159 De Exilio, 602 E. This recognition of the sacred character of the Emperor does not preclude criticisms of individual rulers, e.g., Nero: De Sera Num. Vindicta, 567 F; and Vespasian: Amatorius, 771 C.
160 De Pythiæ Orac., 408 B.
161 Cf. the fate of Chæroneia under Antony, as told by Plutarch’s grandfather (see Life of Antony, 948 A, B).
162 814 A.
163 Præcepta Reip. Ger., 813, et passim:—He insists, however (814 E, F), that subservience must not go too far, and he is also careful to point out such brilliant openings for political ambition as are left by the peculiar conditions of the time (805 A, B).
164 Plutarch states that the aim of his political advice is to enable a man not only to become “a useful citizen,” but also “to order his domestic affairs with safety, honour, and justice” (De Unius in Repub., &c., 826 C).
165 Præcepta Reip., 824 C.
166 Præcepta Reip., 813 F.
167 Propertius, iv. 11. “Hæc Di condiderant, hæc Di quoque mœnia servant.” Plutarch’s essay reads like an exposition of this text of the Roman poet.
168 “Et hoc verbo monere satis est, Τύχης nomine contineri omnem rerum actionumque efficientiam, quæ a Virtute disjuncta, nec in hominis potestate posita est; sive illa ut casus et temeritas, sive ut divina providentia informetur.”—Wyttenbach. Schlemm says that this tract and the De Alexandri sive virtute sive fortuna are “meræ exercitationes rhetoricæ in quibus certam quandam philosophiam persequi in animo non habebat.” Yet the rhetoric of the De Fortuna Romanorum is in wonderful harmony with Plutarch’s mature opinion as deliberately expressed in the De Republica Gerenda.
169 Virgil: Georgics, ii. 534; Plut: De Fortuna Romanorum, 316 E. This may be a conscious reminiscence of Virgil’s line. If Plutarch had not read Virgil, he may have heard so famous a verse quoted by his friends at Rome. He himself translates a passage from “the poet Flaccus” in his Life of Lucullus (518 C—Horace: Ep., i. 6, 45). The question of Plutarch’s acquaintance with Latin is very important for investigations into the historical sources of his “Lives;” but it lies beyond our present limits. It is fully dealt with by Weissenberger in his Die Sprache Plutarchs (1895). He exculpates Plutarch from some of the grosser mistakes in Latinity imputed to him by Volkmann.
170 317 B, C.
171 Cicero: Quæst. Tusc., i. 23.
172 Amatorius, 762 A.
173 One need scarcely go so far as Professor Lewis Campbell, who says that the main result of the “Ethics” of Plutarch is to show “how difficult it was for a common-sense man of the world to form distinct and reasonable opinions on matters of religion in that strangely complicated time” (Religion in Greek Literature, 1898). But Professor Campbell is also of opinion that “the convenient distinction between gods and demons, which he (i.e. Plutarch) and others probably owed to their reading of Plato, is worth dwelling on because it was taken up for apologetic purposes by the early Christian fathers.” Surely its religious value to an age which did not anticipate the coming of “the early Christian fathers” makes the distinction worth study from a point of view quite different from that represented in Christian apologetics.
174 See Maury, vol. i. p. 352.—“Pythagore admet l’existence de démons bons et mauvais comme les hommes, et tout ce qui lui paraissait indigne de l’idée qu’on devait se faire des dieux, il en faisait l’œuvre des démons et des héros.” (For a fuller discussion of this question see the chapters on Dæmonology.)
175 Plutarch devotes so much of his work to an exposition of his views of the Divine character, that one feels inclined to regard him less as a philosopher in the general sense than as a theologian. A kindly piece of description of his own (see De Defectu Orac., 410 A), in which he mentions Cleombrotos of Lacedemon as “a man who made many journeys, not for the sake of traffic, but because he wished to see and to learn,” and says that as a result of his travels and researches he was compiling a practically complete corpus of philosophical material, the end and aim of philosophy being, as he used to put it, “Theology”—may be spoken with equal truth of Plutarch himself. We cannot, perhaps, do better than apply the term Θεόσοφος to him, and support the appellation with an interesting passage from M. Maury, in which he deals with the distinction between theosophs and philosophers in the early stages of Greek philosophy and religion:—“Les uns soumettant tous les faits à l’appréciation rationelle, et partant de l’observation individuelle, pour expliquer la formation de l’univers substituaient aux croyances populaires un système créé par eux, et plus ou moins en contradiction avec les opinions du vulgaire: c’étaient les philosophes proprement dits. Les autres acceptaient la religion de leurs contemporains,... ils entreprenaient au nom de la sagesse divine, dont ils se donnaient pour les interprètes, non de renverser mais de réformer les notions théologiques et les formes religieuses, de façon à les mettre d’accord avec leurs principes philosophiques” (Maury, vol. i. p. 339). Cf. C. G. Seibert, De Apologetica Plutarchi Theologia (1854):-“Finis autem ad quem tendebat ipsa erat religio a majoribus accepta, qua philosophiæ ope purgata æqualium animos denuo implere studebat.” He thinks Plutarch was a theologian first and a philosopher after. (In the passage quoted above from the De Defectu it is difficult not to regard Mr. Paton’s emendation of φιλόθεος μὲν οὖν καὶ φιλόμαντις as more in accordance with the character of Cleombrotos than the φιλοθεάμων καὶ φιλομαθής of Bernardakis’ text, although, of course, he was a great traveller and an ardent student.)
176 De E, 392 A. Cf. Plato: Laches, 240 C.
177 393 A-D.
178 394 C.
179 De Defectu, 413 D.
180 433 D, E.
181 426 B.
182 1051 E.
183 1052 E.
184 De Defectu Orac., 420 E.
185 Æschylus: Prometheus Vinctus, 210.
186 De Iside et Osiride, 352 A. We need not here trouble with Plutarch’s fanciful philology, almost as fanciful as that of some modern Aryanists. His meaning is clear—Absolute Being is the object of the worship of Isis—cf. Max Müller: Selected Essays, vol. i. p. 467: “Comparative philologists have not yet succeeded in finding the true etymology of Apollo.” (Plato’s derivations are given in the Cratylus, 266 C.)
187 Iliad, xiii. 354. (Chapman’s translation.)
188 De Iside et Osiride, 351 E.
189 Neoplatonism, by C. Bigg, D.D. (“Chief Ancient Philosophies”), p. 216.
190 Cf. the De Placitis Philosophorum, 881 B.
191 De Ε apud Delphos, 384 F.
192 386 E.
193 Alluding to Hesiod—Works and Days, 735 sq.
194 De Sera Numinis Vindicta, 562 B.
195 De Ε, 393 A.
196 De Ε, 387 B, C.
197 Plato: Philebus, 39 E.
198 Aristotle: Ethics, viii. 12.
199 De Superstitione, 167 E.
200 De Defectu Orac., 423 E.
201 Plutarch on The Delay of the Deity in Punishing the Wicked: revised edition, with notes, by Professors H. B. Hackett and W. S. Tyler. (New York, 1867.)
202 Sur les Délais de la Justice Divine dans la punition des coupables, par le Comte Joseph de Maistre. (Lyons et Paris, 1856.)—“J’ai pris,” says de Maistre, “j’ai pris quelques libertés dont j’espère que Plutarque n’aura point se plaindre;” and, speaking of the jeunesse surannée of Amyot’s style, he adds: “Son orthographe égare l’œil, l’oreille ne supporte pas ses vers: les dames surtout et les étrangers le goûtent peu.” Another French critic justly remarks on these “liberties” of de Maistre: “C’est trop de licence. Plutarque n’est pas un de ces écrivains qui laissent leurs pensées en bouton” (Gréard, p. 274). Yet it is upon de Maistre’s “paraphrase” that Gréard bases his own analysis!
203 Wyttenbach: De Sera Numinis Vindicta (Præfatio). It is pleasant to repeat the praise which Christian writers have poured on this tract. “Diese Schrift” says Volkmann, “gehört meines Erachtungs unbedingt mit zu dem schönsten, was aus der gesammten nachclassischen Litteratur der Griechen überhaupt auf uns gekommen ist.” (Volkmann, vol. ii. p. 265.) One may wonder a little, perhaps, at the limitation conveyed in the nach of nachclassischen.—Trench says that some of Plutarch’s arguments “would have gone far to satisfy St. Augustine, and to meet the demands of his theology.”
204 The Epicurean author of the De Placitis, still inveighing against “that tall talker, Plato,” is bitterly emphatic on this point.—“If there is a God, and human affairs are administered by His Providence, how comes it that bareness prospers, while the refined and good fall into adversity?” And he instances the murder of Agamemnon “at the hands of an adulterer and an adultress,” and the death of Hercules, that benefactor of humanity, “done to death by Dejaniras drugs.” (881 D.)
205 Symposiacs, 642 C, 700 E.
206 Symposiacs, 654 C.
207 Thucyd., iii. 38. Cleon’s famous speech on the Mytilenean question.
208 “Hujus rei aut omnino Lycisci ne vestigium quidem uspiam reperi.”—Wyttenbach.
209 In allusion, of course, to the famous verse of an unknown poet:—
Ὀψὲ θεῶν ἀλέουσι μύλοι, ἀλέουσι δὲ λεπτὰ.
210 540 E.
211 Deleting ἢ after ῥάδιον with Bernardakis. 549 F.
212 Note the change of number: θεῶν—εἰδὼς.
213 Cf. the well-known passage in the Timæus (Timæus, 29 C, D).
214 550 D. “Etsi hæc sententia disertis verbis in Platone, quod sciam, non exstet, ejus tamen ubique sparsa sunt vestigia.” Wyttenbach adds: “Summam autem hominum virtutem et beatitudinem in eo consistere, ut imitatione Deorum eis similes evadant, communis fere omnium Philosophorum fuit sententia.”
215 Plutarch has another well-known passage of the Timæus in his memory here.—Timæus, 29 D.
216 “Neque hoc disertis verbis in Platone legere me memini; sed cum variis locis... confer.”—Wytt.
217 551 D.
218 553 A, 553 F.
219 Laws, 728 C. The reference is to Hesiod: Works and Days, 265, 266, though Plutarch quotes verse 265 in a form different from the vulgate. Goettling (Ap. Paley) thinks Plutarch’s version “savours more of antiquity.” Aristotle: Rhetoric, iii. 9, quotes the vulgate.
220 554 D. Literally, “they were not punished when they grew old, but grew old in punishment.”
221 555 E, F.
222 Stobæus: Anthologion, Tit. 79, 15.
223 557 D. Cf. the sarcasm of the Academic Cotta in the De Natura Deorum, iii. 38: “Dicitis eam vim Deorum esse ut, etiam si quis morte pœnas sceleris effugerit, expetantur eæ pœnæ a liberis, a nepotibus, a posteris. O miram æquitatem Deorum!”
224 558 F.
225 559 E.
226 560 C. Wyttenbach quotes Lucretius, iii. 437 and 456: “Ergo dissolvi quoque convenit omnem animai Naturam ceu fumus in altas aeris auras.” He might have added, iii. 579, sqq.: “Denique, cum corpus nequeat perferre animai Discidium, quin id tetro tabescat odore, Quid dubitas quin ex imo penitusque coörta, Emanarit uti fumus diffusa animæ vis?” Plutarch is probably thinking of Plato’s “intelligent gardener” (Phædrus, 276 B), although, as Wyttenbach says, “Horti Adonidis proverbii vim habent.” The English reader will think of Shakespeare’s beautiful lines—
“Thy promises are like Adonis’ gardens,
That one day bloom’d, and fruitful were the next.”
Henry VI., Pt. 1, act i. sc. 6.
227 560 F.
228 561 A.
229 564 C.
230 Cf. Timon of Athens, act iii. sc. 1: “Let molten coin be thy damnation.”
231 561 A.—In the long extract, preserved by Stobæus, from Plutarch’s De Anima (Anthologion: Tit. 120, 28.—The Tauchnitz edition of 1838, however, ascribes this passage to Themistius, perhaps by confusion with extract No. 25), Plutarch allows his imagination to play freely with the fortunes of the soul in the afterworld. In a beautiful passage, Timon compares death to initiation into the Great Mysteries—an initiation in which gloom and weariness and perplexity and terror are followed by the shining of a wondrous light, which beams on lovely meadows, whose atmosphere resounds with sacred voices that tell us all the secret of the mystery, and whose paths are trod by pure and holy men. Timon concludes with Heraclitus that, if the soul became assuredly convinced of the fate awaiting it hereafter, no power would be able to retain it on earth. But Plutarch himself is not convinced: he is charmed and seduced, but Reason holds him back from accepting as certainties the “airy subtleties and wingy mysteries” of Imagination. Under the stress of a desire to console his wife for the loss of her little daughter, he reminds her that the “hereditary account” and the Mysteries of Dionysus—in which, he says, both of them were initiated—equally repudiate the notion that the soul is without sensation after death (Consolatio ad Uxorem, 611 D). In his polemic against the Epicureans he chiefly emphasizes the emotional aspect of the desire for immortality;—the Epicurean denial of immortality destroys “the sweetest and greatest hopes of the majority of mankind”—one of these “sweetest and greatest hopes” being that of seeing retribution meted out to those whose wealth and power have enabled them to flout and insult better men than themselves; it robs of its satisfaction that yearning of the thoughtful mind for unstinted communion with the great masters of contemplation; and deprives the bereaved heart of the pleasant dream of meeting its loved and lost ones in another world (Non posse suav., 1105 E). There is no doubt that Plutarch wished to believe in the immortality of the soul, but the evidence is not conclusive that he did; at the most it is with him a “counsel of perfection,” not an “article of faith.”
232 “It it not clear from the writings of Plutarch to what extent he was a monotheist.” This is the opinion of Charles W. Super, Ph.D., LL.D., and it is supported by the irrefragable proof that Plutarch “uses θεὸς both with and without the article.” This judgment is given, of all places in the world, at the conclusion of a translation (a very indifferent one, by the way) of the De Sera Numinis Vindicta. (“Between Heathenism and Christianity:—Being a Translation of Seneca’s De Providentia and Plutarch’s De Sera Numinis Vindicta.” by Charles W. Super, Ph.D., LL.D., Chicago, 1899.)
233 Plutarch himself is ignorant of its origin, and does not know whether it was Magian, Orphic, Egyptian, or Phrygian. (De Defectu Orac., 415 A. Cf. Isis and Osiris, 360 E, “following the Theologians of old.”) Those who believed, like Rualdus, that Plato had read the Old Testament (see note, page 45), had no difficulty in assigning the doctrine of Dæmons to a Jewish source. Wolff, speaking of the systematic dæmonology constructed by the neo-Platonists, alludes to this passage in Plutarch, and says:—“Hæc omnia artificiosa interpretatione ex Platonis fluxerunt fabulis; ex oriente fere nihil assumebatur. Namque Judæi aliis principiis, ac reliqui, profecti decem dæmonum genera constituerant; Chaldæi vetustiores non dæmonum genera, sed septem archangelos planetis præfectos colebant; nec credendum Plut., De Defectu Orac., 415 A. Studebat enim Plutarchus, præsertim in Comm: de Iside et de Socratis dæmonio, Græcorum placita ad Ægypti Asiæque revocare sapientiam, et quum ab Orpheo et Atti sancta quædam mysteria dicerentur profecta esse, arcanis his ritibus summam de diis doctrinam significari suspicabatur” (Wolff, op. cit.).—Volkmann, who had carefully studied Plutarch’s relationship both to his philosophical predecessors and to foreign forms of religious faith, had previously arrived at a different conclusion from that embodied in the words italicized above.—“Er war darum kein Eklektiker oder Synkretist, und was man nun gar von seiner Vorliebe für Orientalische Philosophie und Theologie gesagt hat gehört ledeglich in das Gebiet der Fabel. Plutarchs philosophisch-allegorische Auslegung aber der Ægyptischen Mythen von Isis und Osiris geht von der ausdrücklichen Voraussetzung aus dass diese Gottheiten wesentlich Hellenische sind” (Volkmann, vol. ii. p. 23). But these varying views are simply two different ways of regarding the real fact, which is that Plutarch regards foreign myths and Greek alike as different expressions of the conception of Divine Unity—such Unity not being either Hellenic or Egyptian, but simply absolute (see subsequent analysis of the De Iside et Osiride).
234 Diogenes Laertius, viii. 32. Ritter and Preller also refer to Apuleius’ De Deo Socratis: “Atenim Pythagoricos mirari oppido solitos, si quis se negaret unquam vidisse Dæmonem, satis, ut reor, idoneus auctor est Aristoteles.” (Below this passage in my edition of Apuleius (the Delphin, of 1688) appears the note “Idem scribit Plutarch, in libello περὶ θαυμασίων ἀκουσμάτων.” This libellus I cannot identify with any enumerated in the catalogue of Lamprias.)
235 “Plato, ne Anaxagoræ aut Socratis modo impietatis reus succumberet, præterea ne sanctam animis hebetioribus religionem turbaret, intactos reliquit ritus publicos et communem de diis dæmonibusque opinionem; quæ ipse sentiat, significat quidem, sed, ut solet in rebus minus certis et a mera dialectica alienis, obvoluta fabulis” (Wolff, De Dæmonibus, loc. cit.). Is it permissible to suppose that the third consideration—that expressed in the italicized words—operated more strongly on Plato than either or both of the first two? Aristotle, at any rate, takes up a much firmer attitude in face of the popular mythology, which he regards as fabulously introduced for the purpose of persuading the multitude, enforcing the laws, and benefiting human life (Metaphysics, xi. (xii.) 8, T. Taylor’s translation). This famous passage is as outspoken as Epicureanism.
236 Plato: Politicus, 271 D. A similar “dispensation” is provided in the Laws, 717 A.
237 Plato: Symposium, 202 E.
238 Herodotus: ii. 53.
239 De Defectu Orac., 415 B.
240 Hesiod: Works and Days, 122-125 (Elton’s translation).
241 Works and Days, 253. Cf. the beautiful fragment from Menander preserved by Plutarch, De Tranquillitate Animi, 474 B:—
“By every man, the moment he is born,
There stands a guardian Dæmon, who shall be
His mystagogue through life.”
242 Works and Days, 141-2.
243 De Defectu Oraculorum, 445 B.—Pluto, too, though perhaps not quite with the innocent purpose of Homer, gives “dæmons” as an alternative to “gods”—Timæus, Sec. 16. (A passage charged with the most mordant irony against the national religious tradition.)
244 De Defectu Orac., 416 C.
245 Cf. Wolff: “Neque discrepat hac in re communis religio: multi enim dæmones mali Græcorum animos terrebant, velut Acco, Alphito, Empusa, Lamia, Mormo, sive Mormolyce,” &c.—Considering the numerous references made to the subject of Dæmonology by Greek poets and philosophers from Hesiod and Empedocles downwards, with all of which, as is clear from the citations made in our text, Plutarch is perfectly familiar, Prof. Mahaffy’s note on this point is a little mysterious.—“Mr. Purser points out to me that Plutarch rather popularized than originated this doctrine, and himself refers it to various older philosophers.” (Mahaffy, p. 313.)—It needs no very close study of Plutarch to see for one’s self that he does not claim to have originated the doctrine, and that he knows himself to be dealing with a long-standing and widespread tradition.
246 For a similar process, cf. the quotation from Dr. Jackson’s Treatise on Unbelief, given by Sir Walter Scott in Demonology and Witchcraft, p. 175, note: “Thus are the Fayries, from difference of events ascribed to them, divided into good and bad, when it is but one and the same malignant fiend that meddles in both.”
247 Cf. Götte: Das Delphische Orakel: “In Zeiten, wo dasselbe keine Bedeutung mehr hatte, wo es nur dazu dienen konnte, den finstersten Aberglauben fortzupflanzen und zu erhalten, und die Menschen über die wahre Leitung der Dinge in der Welt, über die wahren Mittel, durch welche sich Jeder sein Glück bereitet, zu täuschen, wurde das Orakelwesen von den frommen Vätern unserer Kirche für die Ausgeburt des Teufels angesehen,” &c.—Cf. also, 1 Corinthians x. 20-22.
248 See, for these illustrations, Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft, Pater’s Apollo in Picardy, and Heine’s Gods in Exile. (“Unter solchen Umständen musste Mancher, dessen heilige Haine konfisciert waren, bei uns in Deutschland als Holzhäcker taglöhnern und Bier trinken statt Nektar.”)
249 361 A. sqq.
250 The author of the De Placitis (882 B.) gives a very vague and slight account of the history of Dæmonology, probably from motives of Epicurean contempt, if one may judge from the curt sentence which concludes his brief note:—“Epicurus admits none of these things.”—He merely says that Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, and the Stoics asserted the existence of spirits called “Dæmons,” and adds that the same philosophers also maintained the existence of Heroes some good, some bad. The distinction between good and bad does not apply to the Dæmons. The identical words of this passage in the De Placitis are used by Athenagoras (Legat: pro Christ., cap. 21) to express a definite statement about Thales, who is asserted to have been the first who made the division into God, dæmons, heroes.
251 Plutarch has here preserved some very beautiful verses of Empedocles, in which this punishment is described. Another fragment of verse from Empedocles (De Exilio, 607 C) depicts with equal force and beauty the punishment by the Dæmons of one who has been handed over to them to atone for his crimes.
252 Here should be noted the tendency to assimilate the good Dæmons to the gods—a tendency to which reference has already been made.
253 De Defectu Orac., 419 A.
254 De Defectu Orac., 419 A.
255 419.—Mrs. Browning could hardly have read the De Defectu when she stated that her fine poem “The Dead Pan” was “partly founded on a well-known tradition mentioned in a treatise of Plutarch (‘De Oraculorum Defectu’), according to which, at the hour of the Saviour’s agony, a cry of ‘Great Pan is dead!’ swept across the waves in the hearing of certain mariners,—and the oracles ceased.” (It was one of the mariners who uttered the cry, “The great Pan is dead!” having been thrice requested by a supernatural voice to do so. But such errors of detail are unimportant in view of the fact that the whole spirit of the story is misunderstood by the poetess.)
256 So one may conjecture from the description given by Demetrius, who “sailed to the least distant of these lonely islands, which had few inhabitants, and these all held sacred and inviolable by the Britons.” Plutarch’s Demetrius has been identified with “Demetrius the Clerk” who dedicated, “to the gods of the imperial Palace,” a bronze tablet now in the Museum at York.—See King’s translation of the Theosophical Essays in the “Bohn” series, p. 22.
257 420 B.
258 360 D.
259 361 E. We shall see elsewhere that, just as a good Dæmon may be promoted to the rank of a god, so a good man may be lifted to the status of a Dæmon, like Hesiod’s people of the Golden Age. (De Dæmonio Socratis, 593 D. Cf. De Defectu Orac., 415 B.)
260 361 F. 364 E.
261 Cf. Apuleius, De Deo Socratis.—“Neque enim pro majestate Deûm cælestium fuerit, ut eorum quisquam vel Annibali somnium pingat, vel Flaminio hostiam conroget, vel Accio Nævio avem velificet, vel sibyllæ fatiloquia versificet, etc. Non est operæ Diis superis ad hæc descendere. Quad cuncta” (he says elsewhere) “cælestium voluntate et numine et auctoritate, sed Dæmonum obsequio et opera et ministerio fieri arbitrandum est.”
262 De Ε apud Delphos, 394 A.
263 De Fato, 572 F, sqq.—Bernardakis “stars” this tract as doubtfully Plutarch’s. But the passage quoted, at any rate, is not discrepant from Plutarch’s views elsewhere, though expressing them more concisely, and with more appearance of system than usual with him. The similarity to Plato’s tripartite division of the heavenly powers in the Timæus is, of course, evident, but the text has a note of sincerity which is lacking in the Platonic passage.
264 De Defectu, 417 C. (For the verse quoted in the original, cf. W. Christ’s Pindar, p. 232.)
265 417 D.
266 The nearest approach to this identification is made by the mysterious stranger whom Cleombrotus finds near the Red Sea, who appeared once every year among the people living in that neighbourhood, and who gave the pious traveller much information concerning Dæmons and their ways; which he was well fitted to do, as he spent most of his time in their company and that of the pastoral nymphs. He said that Python (whom Apollo slew) was a dæmon; that the Titans were dæmons; that Saturn may have been a dæmon. He then adds the significant words, “There is nothing to wonder at if we apply to certain Dæmons the traditional titles of the gods, since a Dæmon who is assigned to a particular god, deriving from him his authority and prerogatives, is usually called by the name of that same god” (421 E). But this somewhat daring testimony is, we are not surprised to find, preceded by a hint that in these matters we are to drink from a goblet of mingled fact and fancy.—(421 A.)
267 De Defectu Orac., 426 D.
268 Isis and Osiris, 360 E.
269 Isis and Osiris, 360 F.
270 Isis and Osiris, 361 C. The passage in the “Banquet” referred to has been already quoted (see p. 123).
271 It would be otiose to illustrate by examples the universal and splendid fame of the Delphic oracle. One may perhaps be given which is not commonly quoted. Pliny the elder, who in one passage sneeringly includes the oraculorum præscita among the fulgurum monitus, auruspicum prædicta, atque etiam parva dictu, in auguriis sternutamenta et offensiones pedum, by means of which men have endeavoured to discover hints of divine guidance, nevertheless, in another passage, quotes two wise oracles as having been “velut ad castigandam hominum vanitatem a Deo emissa.” (Lib. ii. cap. 5, and vii. cap. 47.)—The political, religious, and moral influence of the Delphic oracle has been exhaustively dealt with by Wilhelm Götte in the work already cited (see p. 127, note), and by Bouché-Leclerq in the third volume of his “Histoire de la Divination dans l’Antiquité.” On the general question of divination it would, perhaps, be superfluous to consult anything beyond this monumental work, with its exhaustive references and its philosophic style of criticism.
272 Juvenal: Sat. vi. 555.
273 Lucan, v. 111, sq.
274 —“Muto Parnassus hiatu
Conticuit, pressitque Deum: seu spiritus istas
Destituit fauces, mundique in devia versum
Duxit iter: seu barbarica cum lampade Pytho
Arsit, in immensas cineres abiere cavernas,
Et Phœbi tenuere viam: seu sponte Deorum
Cirrha silet fatique sat est arcana futuri
Carmine longævæ vobis commissa Sibyllæ:
Seu Pæan solitus templis arcere nocentes,
Ora quibus solvat nostro non invenit ævo.”
275 The main argument of the third and shortest of the Delphic tracts has been already given. A brief description of its contents is added by way of note, to show its connexion with the two larger tracts. The tract takes the form of a letter from Plutarch to Serapion, who acts as a means of communication between Plutarch and other common friends. Its object is to ascertain why the letter Ε was held in such reverence at the Delphic shrine. A series of explanations is propounded, probably representing views current on the subject, varying, as they do, from those proper to the common people to those which could only have been the views of logicians or mathematicians. Theon, a close friend of Plutarch’s, maintains that the syllable is the symbol of the logical attributes of the God, Logic, whose basis is Ει (“if”), being the process by which philosophical truth is arrived at. “If, then, Philosophy is concerned with Truth, and the light of Truth is Demonstration, and the principle of Demonstration is Connexion, it is with good reason that the faculty which includes and gives effect to this process has been consecrated by philosophers to the god whose special charge is Truth.”... “Whence, I will not be dissuaded from the assertion that this is the Tripod of Truth, namely, Reason, which recognizing that the consequent follows from the antecedent, and then taking into consideration the original basis of fact, thus arrives at the conclusion of the demonstration. How can we be surprised if the Pythian God, in his predilection for Logic, is specially attentive to this aspect of Reason, to which he sees philosophers are devoted in the highest degree?” This connexion of Reason with Religion, a familiar process in Plutarch, is followed by a “list of the arithmetical and mathematical praises of the letter Ε” involving Pythagorean speculations, and the culmination of the whole piece lies in the splendid vindication by Ammonius of the Unity and Self-Existence and Eternity of the Deity. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of his argument is the assignation to Apollo of the functions of the Supreme Deity: an easy method of bringing Philosophy and Mythology to terms; a mode of operation perhaps not unaffected by that Mithraic worship which, on its classical side, was to culminate in Julian’s famous prayer to Helios. The tract also furnishes, as already stated, a clear example of the method by which the literal terms known in the worship of Dionysus and Apollo are refined from their grosser elements and idealized by the subtleties of the philosophic intellect, which then accepts them as appropriate designations for the various functions of the God. The pleasant seriousness, too, of all the interlocutors is worthy of note, as presenting a type of religious discussion of whose calmness and dignity the modern world knows little. It would be interesting, for example, to hear a group of classical philosophers discuss the excommunication of Professor Mivart by Cardinal Vaughan, or of Tolstoi by Pobedonostzeff.
276 This Diogenianus does not appear to be identical with the Diogenianus of Pergamos, twice mentioned in the Symposiacs, although Bernardakis does not distinguish them in his Index.
277 Philinus was an intimate friend of Plutarch’s (Symposiacs, 727 B; De Sollertia Animalium, 976 B); and, except in this Dialogue and in the De Soll. Anim., appears only as taking his part in the social intercourse of the Symposiacs, and as contributing his share to the discussion of the various quaint and curious problems forming so large a portion of the “Table Talk” of Plutarch and his friends. He has Pythagorean tendencies; eats no flesh (727 B); objects to a rich and varied diet, being of opinion that simple food is more easily digestible (660 F); explains somewhat crudely why Homer calls salt θεῖος (685 D); proves that Alexander the Great was a hard drinker (623 E); explains why Pythagoras advised his followers to throw their bedclothes into confusion on getting up (728 B, C); and tells a story of a wonderful tame crocodile which lay in bed like a human being (De Soll. Anim., 976 B). A very charming account of Plutarch’s friends has been given by M. A. Chenevière, in his “De Plutarchi familiaribus,” written as a Litt.D. thesis for a French University in 1886.
278 395 A.
279 396 D. Cf. Symposiacs, 628 A.
280 396 E. Boethus, a genial and witty man, with whom, notwithstanding his Epicureanism, Plutarch lives on terms of intimate social intercourse. In Symposiacs, 673 C, Boethus, now described as an Epicurean sans phrase, entertains, in Athens, Plutarch, Sossius Senecio, and a number of men of his own sect. After dinner the company discuss the interesting question why we take pleasure in a dramatic representation of passions whose exhibition in real life would shock and distress us. At another time he appears, together with Plutarch and a few other friends, at a dinner given by Ammonius, then Strategos at Athens for the third time, and explains, upon principles of Epicurean Science (Symposiacs, 720 F), why sounds are more audible at night than by day.
281 396 F.
282 See note, p. 149.
283 Cf. Cicero: De Divinatione, ii. 50.—“Quis est enim, qui totum diem jaculans, non aliquando collineet? Totas noctes dormimus; neque ulla fere est, qua non somniemus: et miramur, aliquando id, quod somniarimus, evadere? Quid est tam incertum quam talorum jactus? tamen nemo est quin, sæpe jactans, venereum jaciat aliquando, nonnumquam etiam iterum, ac tertium,” &c. Also ii. 971.—“Casus autem innumerabilibus pæne seculis in omnibus plura mirabilia quam in somniorum visis effecerit.”
284 399.
285 Cf. Herodotus: ii. 135.
286 401 E.
287 “Pyrrhi temporibus iam Apollo versus facere desierat.”—Cicero: De Div., ii. 56. Plutarch, however, is able to say, “Even nowadays some oracles are published in verse,” and to cite a very interesting instance (De Pyth. Orac., 404 A).
288 408 C, D.
289 409 D.
290 404 C.
291 Lamprias. The writer of this letter to “Terentius Priscus” is addressed by the name of “Lamprias” in the course of the dialogue (413 E). This Terentius is not mentioned elsewhere by Plutarch, but one may venture the guess that he was one of the friends whom, as in the case of Lucius the Etrurian, and Sylla the Carthaginian, Plutarch had met at Rome (Symposiacs, 727 B). Sylla and Lucius, whom we know to have been on intimate terms with Plutarch, are interlocutors in the dialogue De Facie in Orbe Lunæ, and one of them uses the same form of address to the writer of that dialogue as is employed by Ammonius in this passage (940 F). There is not the faintest doubt as to the genuineness of either of these two dialogues, and it is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that Plutarch, desiring perhaps to pay a compliment to a relative, veils his own personality in this way: “Omnium familiarium et propinquorum ante ceteros omnes Lampriam fratrem, et ejusdem nominis avum Lampriam, eos imprimis fuisse qui Plutarchi amicitiam memoriamque obtinuerint, nobis apparet” (De Plutarchi Familiaribus—Chenevière). He pays a similar compliment to his friend Theon, who sums up and concludes the argument of the De Pythiæ Oraculis. (For the closeness of Theon’s intimacy with Plutarch, see especially Consolatio ad Uxorem, 610 B, and Symposiacs, 725 F.) Cf. Gréard’s La Morale de Plutarque, p. 303: “Plutarque a ses procédés, qu’on arrive à connaître. D’ordinaire ils consistent à accorder successivement la parole aux défenseurs des systèmes extrèmes et à réserver la conclusion au principal personnage du dialogue. Or ce personnage est presque toujours celui qui a posé la thèse; et le plus souvent il se trouve avoir avec Plutarque lui-même un lien de parenté.”—Plutarch delights to such an extent to bring his friends into his works, that it has even been suggested that no work is authentic without this distinguishing mark. Readers of Plutarch know that one characteristic of his style is the avoidance of hiatus, and that he puts himself to all kinds of trouble to secure this object. In this connexion, Chenevière remarks: “Mirum nobis visum est quod, ne in uno quidem librorum quos hiatus causa G. Benseler Plutarcho abjudicavit, nullius amici nomen offenditur. Scripta autem quæ nullo hiatu fœdata demonstrat, vel amico cuidam dicata, vel nominibus amicorum sunt distincta.” (The work by Benseler referred to is, of course, his De Hiatu in Oratoribus Atticis et Historicis Græcis.)
292 Plutarch does not, of course, wish to convey the suggestion that Apollo’s shrine is still the centre of the earth, and that Britain is as far away in one direction as the Red Sea is in another. The oracle’s repulse of Epimenides, who wished to be certain on the point, indicates that the question is one surrounded with difficulty, and that the wise man will do best to leave it alone. Bouché-Leclerq has a startling comment: “Plutarque ajoute que, de son temps, la mesure avait été verifiée par deux voyageurs partis l’un de la Grande Bretagne et l’autre du fond de la mer Rouge” (La Divination, iii. p. 80).
293 410 A, B. Cf. note, p. 90.
294 411 E.
295 The cessation of the oracles was only comparative. Wolff, in his De Novissima Oraculorum Ætate, examines the history of each oracle separately, and comes to a conclusion that the oracles were not silent even in the age of Porphyry (born A.D. 232): “Nondum obmutuisse numina fatidica Porphyrii tempore. Vera enim ille deorum responsa censuit; quæ Christianis opposuit, ne soli doctrinam divinitus accepisse viderentur.” Strabo alludes to the failure of the oracle at Dodona, and adds that the rest were silent too (Strabo: vii. 6, 9). Cicero alludes with great contempt to the silence of the Delphic oracles in his own times: “Sed, quod caput est, cur isto modo jam oracula Delphis non eduntur, non modo nostrâ ætate, sed jamdiu; ut modo nihil possit esse contemtius? Hoc loco quum urgentur evanuisse aiunt vetustate vim loci ejus, unde anhelitus ille terræ fieret, quo Pythia, mente incitata, oracula ederet.... Quando autem ista vis evanuit? An postquam homines minus creduli esse cœperunt” (De Div., ii. 57). When Cicero wrote this passage he had probably forgotten the excellent advice which the oracle had once given him when he went to Delphi to consult it (Plut.: Cicero, cap. 5).
296 412 D.
297 Some of these points of grammar which attracted the scorn of Heracleon were whether βάλλω loses a λ in the future; and what were the positives from which the comparatives χεῖρον and βέλτιον, and the superlatives χεῖριστον and βέλτιστον were formed (412 E).—“Quelques années après les guerres médiques, le pinceau de Polygnote couvrit la Lesché des Cnidiens à Delphes de scènes empruntées au monde infernal.” (Bouché-Leclerq: iii. 153.)—It would have been more interesting to a modern student if Heracleon had replied that the pictures of Polygnotus were quite sufficient to keep one mentally alert, and had seized the opportunity to give us an exact description of the scenes depicted and the meaning they conveyed to the men of his time. “‘Not all the treasures,’ as Homer has it, ‘which the stone threshold of the Far-darter holds safe within, would now,’ as Mr. Myers says, ‘be so precious to us as the power of looking for one hour on the greatest work by the greatest painter of antiquity, the picture by Polygnotus in the Hall of the Cnidians at Delphi, of the descent of Odysseus among the dead.’”
298 Didymus, “surnamed Planetiades,” is a picturesque figure, evidently drawn from life. It is interesting to compare his attitude with that imposed upon the ideal cynic of Epictetus: “It is his duty then to be able with a loud voice, if the occasion should arise, and appearing on the tragic stage to say, like Socrates, ‘Men, whither are you hurrying? what are you doing, wretches? Like blind people you are wandering up and down: you are going by another road, and have left the true road: you seek for prosperity and happiness where they are not, and if another shows you where they are you do not believe him’” (Long’s Epictetus, p. 251). Planetiades certainly endeavours to play this rôle on the occasion in question, though he is doubtless as far below the stoic ideal as he is above the soi-disant cynics whom Dion met at Alexandria.
299 Cf. Blount: Apollonius of Tyana, p. 37. Blount collects a number of ancient and modern parallels to the thought of Plutarch here. Horace, Epist. i. 16. 59, readily occurs to the memory. (For the Pindaric fragment, see W. Christ, p. 225.)
300 413 D.
301 “Plutarch does not mean to say that Greece was not able at all to furnish 3000 men capable of arms, but that if burgess armies of the old sort were to be formed they would not be in a position to set on foot 3000 ‘hoplites.’”—Mommsen.
302 414 C.
303 417 A, B. Cf. De Facie in Orbe Lunæ, 944 C, D.
304 431 B.
305 436 F.
306 437 F.
307 De Pythiæ Orac., 398 B.
308 De Defectu Orac., 418 E.
309 De Defectu Orac., 438 D.
310 Plutarch, in reply to Boethus the Epicurean, uses an interesting example to illustrate the two opposite views maintained on this point. “Even you yourself here are beneficially influenced, it would seem, by what Epicurus wrote and spoke three centuries ago; and yet you are of opinion that God could not supply a Principle of Motion or a Cause of Feeling, unless He took and shut Himself up in each individual thing and became an intermingled portion of its essence” (398 B, C).
311 “As to Plutarch’s theology, he was certainly a monotheist. He probably had some vague belief in inferior deities (demons he would have called them) as holding a place like that filled by angels and evil spirits in the creed of most Christians; yet it is entirely conceivable that his occasional references to these deities are due merely to the conventional rhetoric of his age” (Andrew P. Peabody: Introduction to a translation—already referred to—of the De Sera Numinis Vindicta). It is a little difficult to be patient with the ignorance displayed in the italicized part of this citation. That Plutarch’s “references to these deities” are not “occasional” is a matter of fact; that they are not “due merely to conventional rhetoric” it is hoped that the analysis in the text—incomplete as it may be in other respects—has at least made sufficiently clear. It is, however, gratifying to find that this American translator, unlike Dr. Super, of Chicago, recognizes that Plutarch “was certainly a monotheist.”
312 Plutarch found the existence of the Dæmons recognized in each of the three spheres which contributed to the formation of religious beliefs—in philosophy, in popular tradition, and in law. Stobæus: Tit. 44, 20 (“On Laws and Customs”—Tauchnitz edition of 1838, vol. ii. p. 164) has an interesting quotation, headed “Preamble of the Laws of Zaleucus,” in which the following passage occurs:—“If an Evil Dæmon come to any man, tempting him to Vice, let him spend his time near temples, and altars, and sacred shrines, fleeing from Vice as from an impious and cruel mistress, and let him pray the gods to deliver him from her power.” Zaleucus may, of course, have been embodying the teaching of his Pythagorean colleagues, but the fact remains that the belief in the influence of Dæmons on human life received the authority of a celebrated system of law, unless we are to be more incredulous than Cicero himself—Quis Zaleucum leges scripsisse non dixit? (Ad Atticum, vi. 1).—(“His code is stated to have been the first collection of written laws that the Greeks possessed.”—Smaller Classical Dictionary, Smith and Marindin, 1898.)
313 Adversus Coloten, 1124 D. The religious value of the belief in Dæmonology is indicated in an interesting passage in the “De Iside et Osiride” in which Isis, by her sufferings, is described as “having given a sacred lesson of consolation to men and women involved in similar sorrows.” 361 E. (In the next sentence she and Osiris are raised from the dæmonic rank to the divine.)
314 Accepting Bernardakis’ first emendation—εἰς θεοὺς ἐπαναφέρει τὰς τῶν πράξεων ἀρχὰς. 580 A.
315 581 F.—Phidolaus would not have been at home among Xenophon’s troops (Anabasis, iii. 2, 9).
316 588 C, D.
317 588 E.
318 589 D.
319 586 A.
320 589 F.
321 591 A.
322 594.
323 De Defectu, 415 B, C. In the De Facie quæ apparet the connexion between mankind and the dæmons in described in similar terms to those employed in the De Dæmonio Socratis. The Dæmons do not spend all their time on the moon; they take charge of oracles, assist at initiatory rites, punish evildoers, help men in battle and at sea, and for any want of fairness or competence in the discharge of these duties they are punished by being driven again to earth to enter human bodies once more (944 D; cf. 944 C).
324 That this truth is one which appeals to the Imagination more cogently than to the Reason, resembling in that respect the belief in the soul’s immortality, is evident to Plutarch. It is on this account that he illustrates it by Myth instead of arguing it by Reason, and takes every precaution to prevent his readers from regarding it as a complete and final presentation of a logically irrefutable belief.
325 Non posse suaviter, &c., 1101 B, C.
326 1101 D.
327 1102 B.
328 De Audiendis Poetis 34 B.
329 Conjugalia Præcepta, 140 D. Champagny sees a reference here to Christianity. But why not also in Plato’s Laws, 674 F, and 661 C?—It is quite in harmony with Plutarch’s love of openness in Religion that to the general reticence displayed by the Greeks on the subject of their religious Mysteries, he seems to add a personal reticence peculiarly his own. Considering how anxiously he hovers about the question of the soul’s immortality (see above, p. 118, and cf. Consolatio ad Apollonium, 120 B, C: “If, as is probable, there is any truth in the sayings of ancient poets and philosophers... then must you cherish fair hopes of your dear departed son”—a passage curiously similar in form and thought to Tacitus, Agric. 46: “Si quis piorum manibus locus, si, ut sapientibus placet,” &c.), it is remarkable that only once—and then under the stress of a bitter domestic bereavement—does he specifically quote the Mysteries (those of Dionysus) as inculcating that doctrine (Ad Uxorem, 611 D). His adoption of an unknown writer’s beautiful comparison of Sleep to the Lesser Mysteries of Death (Consol. ad Apoll., 107 E), and his repetition of the same idea elsewhere (see above, p. 118), may also be indications how naturally the teaching of the Mysteries suggested the idea of immortality. But he most frequently alludes to the Mysteries as secret sources of information for the identification of nominally different deities (De Iside et Osiride, 364 E), or for the assignation of their proper functions to the Dæmons (De Defectu, 417 C), who are regarded as responsible for what Mr. Andrew Lang (“Myth, Ritual, and Religion,” passim) calls “the barbaric and licentious part of the performances” (De Iside et Osiride, 360 E, F). We should perhaps conclude, from the few indications which Plutarch gives of his views on this subject, that he regarded the Mysteries in a twofold light; they were a source of religious instruction, or consolation, respecting the future state of the soul, and they were also a means of explaining and justifying the crude legends which so largely intermingled with the purer elements of Greek religion. Though, as Plutarch hints, many of these barbaric legends were not suited to discussion by the profane, yet the mind, when purified by sacred rites, and educated to the apprehension of sacred meanings, could grasp the high and pure significance of things which were a stumbling-block to the uninitiated, and could make them an aid to a loftier moral life.
330 “Das eigentlich einzige und tiefste Thema der Welt-und Menschengeschichte, dem alle übrigen untergeordnet sind, bleibt der Conflict des Unglaubens und des Aberglaubens.”—Goethe, Westöstlicher Divan (quoted by Tholuck).
331 165 C.
332 165 D.
333 Bernardakis adopts Bentley’s emendation βαπτισμούς, which might be an allusion to Christianity, but would more probably refer to such a process as that already described in the words βάπτισον σεαυτὸν εἰς θάλασσαν. We have previously discussed the general question involved (see p. 45), but may here add the opinion of so unprejudiced a Christian writer as Archbishop Trench, “strange to say. Christianity is to him (Plutarch) utterly unknown.”—(See also note, p. 202).
334 166 B.
335 166 B.
336 168 F.
337 Bello primo, Aristodemum Messeniorum regem per superstitionem animum ac spes omnes despondisse, seque ipsum interfecisse, narrat etiam Pausanias, iv. 3.—Wyttenbach.
338 169 C. Iliad, vii. 193, 194.
339 170 A. Trench quotes Seneca Epist., 123—“Quid enim interest utrum deos neges, an infames?”
340 170 F.
341 To the numerous citations made by Gréard (p. 209), we may add an expression of opinion by Dr. Tholuck, given with special reference to Plutarch’s views on Superstition:—“Wir haben in Alterthum einen hohen Geist, Plutarch, welcher dem, was das Alterthum Aberglaube nannte, viele Betrachtungen gewidmet hat, dem Gegenstande zwar nicht auf den Grund gekommen, aber in der Betrachtuug desselben doch so tiefe religiöse Wahrheiten ausgesprochen, dass wir nicht umhin können, ihn hier ausführlicher dem Leser vorzuführen” (Ueber Aberglauben und Unglauben).
342 Wyttenbach bases this possibility on the 150th entry in the Lamprian catalogue, “On Superstition, against Epicurus.” (Entry No. 155 in the catalogue as given in Bernardakis, vol. vii. pp. 473-7.) But the discussion on this point in the Non posse suaviter forms so important a part of that tract that the title “On Superstition, against Epicurus” would be no inapt title for the whole treatise.
343 The view taken in the text as to the character of this strenuous and noble sermon on Superstition is, of course, quite at variance with the opinion of Prof. Mahaffy, who regards it as “one of those sophistical exercises practised by every one in that age—I mean, the defence of a paradox with subtlety and ingenuity, taking little account of sober truth in comparison with dialectical plausibility.”—Greeks under Roman Sway, p. 318.
344 Pharsalia, viii. 831.
345 Apuleius, Meta: Lib. xi. Lucius (a descendant of Plutarch, by the way), in his pious gratitude, enters the service of the goddess who had uncharmed him.—Rursus donique, quam raso capillo, collegi vetustissimi et sub illis Sullæ temporibus conditi munia, non obumbrato vel obtecto calvitio, sed quoquoversus obvio, gaudens obibam.
346 364 E.
347 354 C.
348 355 B.
349 Cf. De Pyth. Orac., 400 A.
350 355 D.
351 358 E. Mr. Andrew Lang justly remarks, “Why these myths should be considered ‘more blasphemous’ than the rest does not appear” (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii. pp. 116, 117).
352 358 F. This is a difficult passage. It seems necessary to read ἀνακλάσει for ἀναχωρήσει (cf. ἀνάκλασις δή που περὶ τὴν ἶριν, Amatorius, 765 E), but even then the meaning is difficult to elicit, and it is not confidently claimed that the rendering in the text has elicited it. Three translations are appended: “For as mathematicians assure us that the rainbow is nothing else but a variegated image of the sun, thrown upon the sight by the reflexion of his beams from the clouds, so ought we to look upon the present story as the representation, or reflexion rather, of something real as its true cause” (Plutarchi De Iside et Osiride Liber: Græce et Anglice, by Samuel Squire, A.M., Cambridge, 1744).—“Und so wie die Naturforscher den Regenbogen für ein Gegenbild der Sonne erklären, das durch das Zurücktreten der Erscheinung an die Wolke bunt wird, so ist hier die Sage das Gegenbild einer Wahrheit, welche ihre Bedeutung auf etwas anderes hin abspiegelt” (Plutarch über Isis und Osiris herausgegeben von G. Parthey, Berlin, 1850).—Legendum ἀναχρώσει vel ἀνακλάσει, ut Reisk. “Et quemadmodum mathematici arcum cælestem Solis tradunt esse imaginem variatam visus ad nubem reflexu: Sic fabula hoc loco indicium est orationis alio reflectentis intellectum.”—Wyttenbach.
353 Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol. ii. p. 120.
354 In our spelling of this name we use the freedom of choice so graciously accorded by Xylander—Si Euhemerus mavis, non repugno.
355 De Placitis Philosophorum, 880 D. Cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum. i. 42. “Ab Euhemero autem et mortes et sepulturæ demonstrantur deorum. Utrum igitur hic confirmasse videtur religionem, an penitus totam sustulisse?” See Mayor’s note on this passage. The references to Lactantius and Eusebius and many others bearing on the question are collected by Corsini in his first dissertation on the De Placitis. Zimmerman is very indignant with Plutarch on account of the charge here brought against Euhemerus and Diagoras, and has defended them against our author with great energy and spirit. (Epistola ad Nicolaum Nonnen qua Euemerus Messenius et Diagoras Melius ab Atheismo contra Plutarchum aliosque defenduntur.)
356 360 A.
357 The language here seems curiously outspoken in view of the now established apotheosis of the Emperors.
358 360 D.
359 356, 357. Cf. De Dædalis Platæensibus.
360 364 A.
361 366 C.
362 364 D.
363 367 D.
364 368 D.
365 369 C. It is clear from a careful examination of the text that Plutarch gives only a critical examination of this theory: he does not adopt it as his own, as has frequently been asserted.
366 369 D. “It is impossible,” argued these ancient thinkers, “that moral life and death, that good and evil, can flow from a single source. It is impossible that a Holy God can have been the author of evil. Evil, then, must be referred to some other origin: it must have had an author of its own.”—“Some Elements of Religion,” by Canon Liddon (Lecture iv. sect. i.).
367 370 E.
368 371 A.
369 See especially the quotations from Plato in 370 F, and the application of Platonic terms in the interpretation of the Isiac and Osirian myth in 372 E, F, 373 and 374. Hesiod, too, is made to agree with this Platonic explanation of the Egyptian legend (374 C), and the Platonic notion of matter is strained to allow of its being identified with Isis (372 E, 374 F). In 367 C, a parallelism is pointed out between Stoic theology and an interpretation of the myth; and in 367 E the death of Osiris on the 17th of the month is used to illustrate, if not to explain, the Pythagorean ἀφοσίωσις of that number.
As regards the identification of particular deities in this tract, reference may be made to 364 E, F and 365 A, B, where Dionysus is identified with Osiris; and to 365 F, where Mnaseas of Patara is mentioned with approval as associating with Epaphus, not only Dionysus, but Serapis and Osiris also. Anticleides is also referred to as asserting that Isis was the daughter of Prometheus and the wife of Dionysus. In 372 D, Osiris is identified with the Sun under the name of Sirius, and Isis with the Moon, in 375, a fanciful philology is called in to aid a further identification of Greek and Egyptian deities; but not much importance is attached to similarities derived in this way. In the next sentence Isis is stated to have been identified with Athene by the Egyptians; and the general principle of identity is boldly stated in 377 C:—“It is quite legitimate to regard these gods as common possessions and not the exclusive property of the Egyptians—Isis and the deities that go in her train are universally known and worshipped. The names, indeed, of certain of them have been borrowed from the Egyptians, not so long ago; but their divinity has been known and recognized for ages.”
370 378 A.
371 There is a strain of mysticism in the De Osiride which is alien from the cheerful common sense which usually marks Plutarch; a remark which also applies to the De Facie quæ apparet in Orbe Lunæ. But the same strain appears in others of his authentic tracts, though mostly operating through the medium of Platonic dreams and myths, e.g. the story of Thespesius in the Sera Num. Vindic., and that of Timarchus in the De Dæmonio Socratis. Besides, one would not ceteris paribus deny the authenticity of Browning’s “Childe Roland” because he had written “The Guardian Angel,” or that of “The Antiquary” because Scott was also the author of “The Monastery.” The tract was probably composed after that return from Alexandria to which Plutarch so charmingly alludes in Sympos., 678 C. Moreover, the very nature of the subject, and the priestly character of the lady to whom it was addressed, as well as the mysterious nature of the goddess whose ministrant she was, are all parts of a natural inducement to mysticism. We must admit that Plutarch here participates in that spirit of mysticism which, always inherent in Platonism, was kept in check by his acutely practical bent, to be revived and exaggerated to the destruction of practical ethics in the dreams and abstractions of the Neo-Platonists.
372 A very slight acquaintance with Plutarch’s writings will serve to dispose of the charge of Atheism brought against him by Zimmerman, the professor of Theology in the Gymnasium of Zurich:—Credo equidem Plutarchum inter eos fuisse qui cum Cicerone crediderint eos qui dant philosophiæ operam non arbitrari Deos esse.—It is true that Zimmerman supports his case by quoting the pseudo-Plutarchean De Placitis (Idem de providentia non minus male loquitur quam ipsi Epicurei), and seems himself afraid to accept the conclusion of his own demonstrations:—Atheum eum fuisse non credo, sed quomodo asserere potuerit Superstitione Atheismum tolerabiliorem esse, simul tamen eos, quos atheos fuisse minime probare potuit, Superstitioni autem inimicissimos, omnem malorum mundum intulisse, consociare nequeo.—But the learned author is too intent on exculpating Noster Euhemerus from Plutarch’s “injustice” to have justice to spare for Plutarch himself.—(J. J. Zimmerman, Epistola ad Nonnen). Gréard quotes other authors of this charge against Plutarch (p. 269).—We cannot allow this opportunity to pass of protesting against the attitude of those who assumed, even in the Nineteenth Century, that it was a sign either of moral depravity, or mental incapacity, in Plutarch not to have been a believer in the Christian faith. Even Archbishop Trench, who admits, concerning such writers as our author, that “many were by them enabled to live their lives after a far higher and nobler fashion than else they would have attained” cannot rid himself of the notion that had Plutarch actively opposed Christianity he would have committed an offence which our generosity might have pardoned, though our justice must recognize that it needed pardon. “Plutarch himself may be entirely acquitted of any conscious attempt to fight against that truth which was higher than any which he had” (p. 13).—“I have already mentioned that, through no fault of his own, he stood removed from all the immediate influences of the Christian Church” (p. 89). But suppose the facts to have been just the opposite of those indicated in the words we have italicized, it would involve the loss of all sense of historical perspective to draw the conclusion which would clearly have been drawn by Trench himself. The use of similar language by Prof. Mahaffy has already been noted. (Pref. p. xii.) The position assumed by writers who maintain this view, is one quite inappropriate for historical discussion, and its natural expression, if it must be expressed at all, is through the medium of such poetical aspirations as that breathed in the epigram of John, the Metropolitan of Euchaita:—
“If any Pagans, Lord, Thy grace shall save
From wrath divine, this boon I humbly crave,
Plato and Plutarch save: Thine was the cause
Their speech supported: Thine, too, were the laws
Their hearts obeyed; and if their eyes were blind
To recognize Thee Lord of human kind,
Needs only that Thy gift of grace be shown
To bring them, and bring all men, to the Throne.”
373 Dr. Martineau (Types of Ethical Theory, vol. i. p. 91) thinks that “we must go a little further than Zeller, who decides that Plato usually conceived of God as if personal, yet was restrained by a doctrine inconsistent with such conception from approaching it closely or setting it deliberately on any scientific ground,” and devotes several closely-reasoned pages to show that, although there was no room for a personal god in Plato’s philosophy, Plato himself was in distinct opposition to his own views as systematically expounded in his writings. “We may regard him as fully aware of the conditions of the problem, and, though unable to solve it without lesion of his dialectic, yet deliberately pronouncing judgment on the side of his religious feeling.” But pace tantorum virorum it will be admitted that the personality of God is not very evident in Plato when those who understand him best can only maintain that it is not essentially interwoven with his philosophy, having only an indirect and accidental existence which is not possible “without lesion of his dialectic.”
374 “Abstractedly, the theology of the Stoics appears as a materialistic pantheism; God is represented as a fire, and the world as a mode of God.” (Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle, vol. i. p. 265.) In the famous “hymn of Cleanthes,” preserved, like so many other of the great wonders of classical literature, by Stobæus, Grant sees an emphatic recognition of the personality of God, but it is equally natural to regard the hymn as a more detailed expression of that necessity of submitting to Destiny—of living in accordance with nature—which Cleanthes enounces in that other famous fragment which Epictetus would have us hold ready to hand in all the circumstances of life:—
“Lead me, O Zeus, and thou O Destiny,
The way that I am bid by you to go:
To follow I am ready. If I choose not,
I make myself a wretch, and still must follow.”
—Epictetus, Encheir. lii. (Long’s translation.) Epictetus, indeed, and Seneca, late comers in the history of Stoicism, have undoubtedly attained to a clear recognition of the personality of God.
375 See the “De cohibenda ira,” “de cupiditate divitiarum,” “de invidia et odio,” “de adulatore et amico.”
376 “De garrulitate,” “de vitioso pudore,” “de vitando aere alieno,” “de curiositate.”
377 “De amicorum multitudine,” and “de adulatore et amico”; “de fraterno amore,” “de amore prolis”; “conjugalia præcepta,” “de exilio,” “consolatio ad uxorem,” “consolatio ad Apollonium.” (“I can easily believe,” says Emerson, “that an anxious soul may find in Plutarch’s ‘Letter to his Wife Timoxena,’ a more sweet and reassuring argument on the immortality than in the Phædo of Plato.”)
378 Zeller says that “the most characteristic mark of the Plutarchian Ethics is their connexion with religion.”—(Greek Philosophy, translated by Alleyne and Abbott.)
379 De Virtute Morali, 440 E.
380 444 C, D. (Cf. 451.)
381 444 D. Cf. Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat, 15 E.
382 445 C.
383 “An virtus doceri possit,” “de virtute et vitio,” 101, C, D.
384 Trench follows Zeller in regarding Plutarch as a forerunner of the Neo-Platonists:—“Plutarch was a Platonist, with an oriental tinge, and thus a forerunner of the new Platonists, who ever regarded him with the highest honour. Their proper founder, indeed, he, more than any other man, deserves to be called, though clear of many of the unhealthy excesses into which, at a later date, many of them ran” (Trench, p. 90). We hope our pages have done something towards putting Plutarch in a different light from that which surrounds him here. As a matter of fact, did the “new Platonists regard him ever with the highest honour?” The testimony of Eunapius we have already quoted (p. 67, note). Himerius is equally laudatory. “Plutarch, who is the source of all the instruction you convey.”—Eclogæ, vii. 4. “I weep for one who, I fondly hoped, would be gifted with speech excelling Minucianus in force, Nicagoras in stateliness, Plutarch in sweetness” (Orat. xliii. 21—Monody on his son’s death). But this is rather late in the history of Neo-Platonism. What about Plotinus, and Porphyry, and Proclus? Trench gives no references in proof of his statement, and we have been unable to find any.
385 Theodoretus: De Oraculis, 951.—“Plutarch of Chæronea, a man who was not Hebrew, but Greek—Greek by birth and in language, and enslaved to Greek ideas.” Cf. Mommsen: The Provinces, from Cæsar to Diocletian, Lib. viii. cap. vii.—“In this Chæronean the contrast between the Hellenes and the Hellenized found expression; such a type of Greek life was not possible in Smyrna or in Antioch; it belonged to the soil like the honey of Hymettus. There were men enough of more powerful talents and of deeper natures, but hardly any second author has known how, in so happy a measure, to reconcile himself serenely to necessity, and how to impress upon his writings the stamp of his tranquillity of spirit, and of his blessedness of life.”
386 Dr. Bigg calls him a renegade, as the Church has called Julian an apostate. A comment of M. Martha’s on this uncharitable practice is worthy of frequent repetition:—“Ainsi donc, que l’on donne à Julien tous les noms qu’il plaira, qu’on l’appelle insensé, fanatique, mais qu’on cesse de lui infliger durement ce nom d’apostat, de peur qu’un historien, trop touché de ses malheurs, ne s’avise un jour de prouver que l’apostasie était excusable.” (“Un chrétien devenu païen.”—Études Morales.)
387 See note, p. 45.
388 Though having also carefully studied both Zeller and Vacherot (Zeller: Die Philosophie der Griechen, vol. iii.; Vacherot: Histoire critique de l’Ecole d’Alexandrie), we have specially used for the purposes of the text the close analysis of the various aspects of Neo-Platonism presented by Dr. Bigg in his “Neo-Platonism,” and the interesting account given by M. Saisset in his article “De l’Ecole d’Alexandrie,” written for the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” of September, 1844, as a review of Jules Simon’s work on the Alexandrian School.—For the Neo-Platonist Dæmonology we have largely consulted Wolff.
389 “In so far as the Deity is the original force, it must create everything. But as it is raised above everything in its nature, and needs nothing external, it cannot communicate itself substantially to another, nor make the creation of another its object. Creation cannot, as with the Stoics, be regarded as the communication of the Divine Nature, as a partial transference of it into the derivative creature; nor can it be conceived as an act of will. But Plotinus cannot succeed in uniting these determinations in a clear and consistent conception. He has recourse, therefore, to metaphors.”—Zeller.
390 “In the year 1722, a Sheriff-depute of Sutherland, Captain David Ross, of Littledean, took it upon him to pronounce the last sentence of death for witchcraft which was ever passed in Scotland. The victim was an insane old woman who had so little idea of her situation as to rejoice at the sight of the fire which was destined to consume her.”—Sir W. Scott: “Demonology and Witchcraft,” cap. 9.
391 See Volkmann, vol. i. cap. i.
392 Cf. M. Martha, “Un chrétien devenu païen,” in his Études Morales: “La philosophie prit tout à coup des allures mystiques et inspirées, elle entoura de savantes ténèbres la claire mythologie compromise par sa clarté; à ses explications symboliques elle mêla les pratiques mystérieuses des cultes orientaux, à sa théologie subtile et confuse les redoutables secrets de la magie: elle eut ses initiations clandestines et terribles, ses enthousiasmes extatiques, ses vertus nouvelles souvent empruntées au christianisme, ses bonnes œuvres, ses miracles même. En un mot, elle devint la théurgie, cet art sublime et suspect qui prétend pouvoir évoquer Dieu sur la terre et dans les âmes. Le christianisme rencontrait donc non plus un culte suranné, facile à renverser, mais une religion vivante, puisant son énergie dans sa défaite, défendu par des fanatiques savants dont le sombre ferveur et l’éloquence illuminée étaient capables d’entraîner aussi une armée de prosélytes.”
393 As it was, the later Neo-Platonists had to content themselves with Apollonius of Tyana, instead of Jesus Christ.—“Apollonius of Tyana, who was no longer a mere philosopher, but a being half-human, half-divine” (Eunapius, op. cit.).
394 See Emerson’s “Introduction” to Goodwin’s translation of the “Morals.”
395 Saisset, op. cit.
396 Dante: Inferno, Canto iii.