XVIII. ‘More reasonable, that, Boethus,’ said Serapion, ‘and more in
tune with the Muses. For we ought not to fight against the God, nor to
remove, along with his prophecy, his Providence and Godhead also, but
rather to seek fresh solutions for apparent contradictions, and never to
surrender the reverent belief of our fathers.’ ‘Excellent Serapion!’ I
said, ‘you are right. We were not abandoning Philosophy, as cleared out
of the way and done for, because once upon a time philosophers
[Sidenote: F] put out their dogmas and theories in verse, as Orpheus,
Hesiod, Parmenides, Empedocles, Thales, whereas later on they gave it
up, and have now all given it up—except you! In your hands Poetry is
returning home to Philosophy, and clear and noble is the strain in which
she rallies our young people. Astronomy again: she was not lowered in
the hands of Aristarchus, Timocharis, Aristyllus, Hipparchus, all
writing in prose, whereas Eudoxus, [Sidenote: 403] Hesiod, and Thales
used metre, if we assume that Thales really wrote the _Astronomy_
attributed to him. Pindar actually expresses surprise at the neglect, in
his own day, of a mode of melody....[104] There is nothing out of the
way or absurd in seeking out the causes of such changes; but to remove
arts and faculties altogether, whenever there is disturbance or
variation in their details, is not fair.’
XIX. ‘And yet’, interposed Theon, ‘those instances have involved really
great variations and novelties, whereas of the [Sidenote: B] oracles
given here we know of many in prose even in old days, and those on no
trifling matters. When the Lacedaemonians, as Thucydides[105] has told
us in his history, consulted the God about their war with the Athenians,
he promised them victory and mastery, and that “he himself will help
them, invited or uninvited.” And again, that, if they did not restore
Pleistoanax[106], they shall plough with a silver share.[107] When the
Athenians consulted him about their expedition in Sicily, he directed
them to bring the priestess of Erythrae to Athens; now the woman’s name
was Peace. When Deinomenes the Siceliot inquired about his sons, the
answer was that all three should [Sidenote: C] reign as tyrants. “And
the worse for them, O Master Apollo”, rejoined Deinomenes. “That too”,
added the God, “to form part of the answer.” You know that Gelo had the
dropsy and Hiero the stone, while they reigned; Thrasybulus, the third,
was involved in revolutions and wars and soon lost his throne. Then
Procles, tyrant of Epidaurus, after putting many others to death in
cruel and unlawful ways, at last killed Timarchus, who had come to him
from Athens with money, after receiving him with hospitality and
kindness; he thrust his body into a crate and flung it out to sea. This
he did by the hands of Cleander of Aegina, no one else knew. Afterwards,
when [Sidenote: D] himself in trouble, he sent his brother Cleotimus, to
consult the oracle secretly about his own exile and retirement. The God
answered that he granted exile to Procles, and retirement either to the
place where he had ordered his Aeginetan friend to lodge the crate, or
where the stag sheds his horn. The tyrant understood the God to bid him
fling himself into the sea, or bury himself underground (for the stag
buries his horn deep out of sight, when it falls off). He waited a short
time, then, when his affairs became desperate, went into exile. But the
friends of Timarchus caught and slew him, and cast out the corpse into
the sea. [Sidenote: E] Now comes the strongest instance: the statutes by
which Lycurgus regulated the Lacedaemonian constitution were given to
him in prose. So Alyrius, Herodotus, Philochorus, and Ister, the men who
most zealously set about collecting metrical prophecies, have written
down oracular responses which were not in metre, and Theopompus, who was
exceptionally interested [Sidenote: F] about the oracle, has
administered a vigorous rebuke to those who do not hold that the Pythia
prophesied in metre in those days; yet, when he wanted to prove the
point, he has found an exceedingly small number of such answers, which
shows that the others, even at that early time, were put forth in prose.
XX. ‘Some oracles, however, still run into metres, one of which has made
“necessary business”[108] a household word. There is in Phocis a temple
of “Hercules Woman-Hater”, where the practice is for the consecrated
priest not to associate with a woman during his year. So they appoint
comparatively old men to the priesthood. However, not very long ago, a
young man of good character, but ambitious, who was in love with
[Sidenote: 404] a girl, accepted the office. At first he put constraint
on himself and avoided her; but one day, when he was resting after wine
and dancing, she burst in, and he yielded. Then, in his fear and
confusion, he fled to the oracle, and proceeded to ask the God about his
offence, and whether it admitted of excuse or expiation. He received
this reply:
_All needful business doth the God allow._
All the same, if it be granted that nothing is prophesied in our own
day, otherwise than in metre, the difficulty will be so much greater
about the ancients, who sometimes employed metre for the responses,
sometimes not. There is nothing strange, my [Sidenote: B] young friend,
in either one or the other, so long as we hold sound, pure views about
the God, and do not suppose that it is himself who formerly used to
compose the verses, or who now suggests the answers to the Pythia,
speaking as it were from under a mask.
XXI. ‘However, it is worth our while to pursue this inquiry at greater
length another time. For the present, let us remember our results, which
are briefly these: Body uses many instruments, soul uses body and its
parts, soul has been brought into being as the instrument of God. The
excellence of an instrument is to imitate most closely the power which
uses it, with all its [Sidenote: C] own natural power, and to reproduce
the effect of his essential thought, but to exhibit it, not pure and
passionless and free from error, as it was in the creative artist, but
with a large admixture of foreign element. For in itself it is invisible
to us, but appearing “other” and through another medium it is saturated
with the nature of that medium. I pass over wax and gold and silver and
copper, and all other varieties of moulded substance, which take on one
common form of impressed likeness, but add to the copy, each its own
distinct speciality. I pass over the myriad distortions of images and
reflections from a single form in [Sidenote: D] mirrors, plane, hollow,
or convex. For nothing seems better to reproduce the type, no instrument
more obediently to use its own nature, than the moon. Yet taking from
the sun his bright and fiery rays, she does not transmit them so to us;
mingled with herself they change colour and also take on a different
power; the heat has wholly disappeared, and the light fails from
weakness before it reaches us. I think you know the saying found in
Heraclitus, that “The King whose seat is at [Sidenote: E] Delphi, speaks
not, nor conceals, but signifies.”[109] Take and add then to what is
here so well said, the conception that the God of this place employs the
Pythia for the hearing as the sun employs the moon for the seeing. He
shows and reveals his own thoughts, but shows them mingled in their
passage through a mortal body, and a soul which cannot remain at rest or
present itself to the exciting power unexcited and inwardly composed,
but which boils and surges and is involved in the stirrings and
troublesome passions from within. As whirlpools do not keep [Sidenote:
F] a steady hold on bodies borne round and round and also downwards,
since an outer force carries them round, but they sink down of their own
nature, so that there is a compound spiral movement, of a confused and
distorted kind, even so what we call inspiration seems to be a mixture
of two impulses, and the soul is stirred by two forces, one of which it
is a passive recipient, one from its own nature. We see that inanimate
and stationary bodies cannot be used or forced contrary to their own
nature, that a cylinder cannot be moved as if it were a sphere or a
cube, that a lyre cannot be played like a flute or a trumpet like a
harp, but that the artistic use of a thing is no other than the natural
use. Is it possible then that the animate and self-moving, which has
both impulse and reason, can be treated in any other way than is
agreeable to the habit, force, or natural condition which [Sidenote:
405] is already existent within it? Can an unmusical mind be excited
like a musical, an unlettered mind by literature, a mind untrained in
reasoning, whether speculative or disciplinary, by logic? It is not to
be spoken of.
XXII. ‘Again, Homer is my witness: he assumes[110] that nothing, so to
speak, is brought about without a God; he does not, however, describe
the God as using all things for all ends, but according to the art or
faculty which each possesses. For do you not see, dear Diogenianus, that
Athena, when she wants to persuade the Achaeans, calls in Odysseus;[111]
when to wreck the truce, she looks for Pandarus;[112] when to rout the
Trojans, she [Sidenote: B] approaches Diomede?[113] Why? because Diomede
is a sturdy man and a fighter, Pandarus an archer and a fool, Odysseus a
clever speaker and a sensible man. For Homer was not of the same mind as
Pindar[114], if Pindar it was who wrote
_Sail on a crate, if God so choose ‘twill swim._
He knew that different faculties and natural gifts are appointed for
different ends; each is moved in its own way, even if the moving force
be one for all. As then the force cannot move that which walks so as to
make it fly, nor that which lisps to speak clearly, nor the thin voice
to be melodious—why, Battus himself was sent as colonist of Libya to get
his voice, because he was a lisper, with a thin voice, but withal a
kingly, statesman-like, [Sidenote: C] prudent man—, even so it is
impossible for one who has no letters and knows no verse to talk like a
poet. And so she who now serves the God has been born as respectably as
any man here, and has lived as good and orderly a life; but having been
reared in the house of small farmer folk, she brings nothing with her
from art or from any practice or faculty whatsoever, as she goes down
into the sanctuary. As Xenophon[115] thinks that the bride should step
into her husband’s home having seen as little as may be, and heard as
little, so she, ignorant and untried in almost all things, and a true
virgin in soul, is associated with [Sidenote: D] the God. Yet we, who
think that the God, when he “signifies”, uses the cries of herons and
wrens and ravens, and never ask that they, as the messengers and heralds
of the God, should put things into clear rational phrases, do
nevertheless ask that the Pythia should use a voice and style as though
from the Thymele, not unembellished and plain, but with metre and
elevation, and trills, and verbal metaphors, and a flute accompaniment!
XXIII. ‘What shall we say then about her older predecessors? Not one
thing, I think, but several. In the first place, [Sidenote: E] as has
been already said, they, too, for the most part, used to give the
responses in prose. In the second place, those times produced
temperaments and natural conditions which offered an easy and convenient
channel for the stream of poetry, to which were at once superadded, in
one and another, an eagerness, an impulse, a preparation of soul, all
resulting in a readiness which needed but a slight initial movement from
without to give the imagination a turn. So it was that not only were
astronomers and philosophers drawn, as Philinus says, in their several
directions, but also, when men were mellow with wine and sentiment, some
undercurrent of pity or joy would come, and they would [Sidenote: F]
glide into a song-like voice; drinking parties were filled with amorous
strains and songs, books with poems in writing. When Euripides
wrote:[116]
_Love can teach, he makes
A poet of a stranger to the Muse_,
he did not mean that Love implants a faculty for poetry or music; the
faculty is there already, but Love stirs and warms what was latent and
idle. Or are we to say, Sir Stranger, that no one now loves, that Love
has gone by the heels, because there is none who, to quote Pindar,[117]
_Scatters with easy grace
The vocal shafts of love and joy._
[Sidenote: 406] That is absurd. Loves there are and many of them, and
they master men; but when they associate with souls which have no
natural turn for music, they drop the flute and the lyre, yet are vocal
still and fiery through and through, as much as of old. It is an
unhallowed thing to say, and an unfair, that the Academy was loveless,
or the choir of Socrates and Plato; yet, while we have their love
dialogues to read, they have left no poems. Why not declare at once that
Sappho was the only woman who [Sidenote: B] ever loved, if you are to
say that Sibylla alone had the gift of prophecy, or Aristonica, and the
others who delivered themselves in verse? Wine, as Chaeremon[118] used
to say,
_Is mingled with the moods of them that drink_,
and the prophetic inspiration, like that of love, uses the faculty which
is subjected to it, and stirs its recipients according to the nature of
each.
XXIV. ‘Not but that, if we look also into the subject of the God and his
foreknowledge, we shall see that the change has taken place for the
better. For the use of language is like exchange in coined money. Here
also it is familiarity which gives currency, the purchasing power varies
with the times. There was a day when metres, tunes, odes were the coins
of language in use; all History and Philosophy, in a word, every
[Sidenote: C] feeling and action which called for a more solemn
utterance, were drawn to poetry and music. It is not only that now but
few understand, and they with effort, whereas then all the world were
listeners, and all felt pleasure in what was sung,
_who fats his flock,
Who ploughs the soil, who snares the wingèd game_,
as Pindar[119] has it. More than that, there was an aptitude for poetry,
most men used the lyre and the ode to rebuke, to encourage, to frame
myths and proverbs; also hymns to the Gods, prayers, thanksgivings, were
composed in metre and song, as genius or practice enabled them to do.
And so it was with prophecy; the God did not grudge it ornament and
grace, or drive from hence into disgrace the honoured Muse of the
tripod; [Sidenote: D] he rather led her on, awakening and welcoming
poetic natures; he gave them visions from himself, he lent his aid to
draw out pomp and eloquence as being fitting and admirable things. Then
there was a change in human life, affecting men both in fortune and in
genius. Expediency banished what was superfluous, top-knots of gold were
dropped, rich robes discarded; probably too clustering curls were shorn
off, and the buskin discontinued. It was not a bad training, to set the
beauty of [Sidenote: E] frugality against that of profusion, to account
what was plain and simple a better ornament than the pompous and
elaborate. So it was with language, it changed with the times, and
shared the general break-up. History got down from its coach, and
dropped metre. Truth was best sifted out from Myth in prose; Philosophy
welcomed clearness, and found it better to instruct than to astonish, so
she pursued her inquiry in plain language. The God made the Pythia leave
off calling her own fellow townsmen “fire-burners”, the Spartans
“serpent-eaters”, [Sidenote: F] men “mountaineers”, rivers
“mountain-drainers”. He cleared the oracles of epic verses, unusual
words, circumlocutions, and vagueness, and so prepared the way to
converse with his consultants just as laws converse with states, as
kings address subjects, as disciples hear their masters speak, so
framing language as to be intelligible and convincing.
XXV. ‘For it should be clearly understood that the God is, in the words
of Sophocles,[120]
_Unto the wise a riddling prophet aye,
To silly souls a teacher plain and brief._
[Sidenote: 407] The same turn of things which brought clearness brought
also a new standard of belief; it shared the general change. Whereas of
old that which was not familiar or common, but, in plain words,
contorted and over-phrased, was ascribed by the many to an implied
Divinity, and received with awe and reverence; in later times men were
content to learn things clearly and easily with no pomp or artifice;
they began to find fault with the poetical setting of the oracles, not
only as a hindrance to the perception of truth, because it mingled
indistinctness and [Sidenote: B] shadow with the meaning, but also
because by this time they were getting to mistrust metaphors, riddles,
and ambiguities, as so many holes or hiding-places provided for him who
should trip in his prophecy, that he might step into them and secure his
retreat. You might have heard it told by many, how certain persons with
a turn for poetry still sit about the place of oracles, waiting to catch
the utterances, and then weaving verses, metres, rhythms, according to
occasion, as a sort of vehicle. As to your Onomacrituses, and
Herodotuses, and Cinaethons,[121] and the censures which they brought
upon the oracles, by importing tragedy and pomp where they were out of
place, I let the charge pass, and do not admit it. Most, [Sidenote: C]
however, of the discredit which attached so copiously to poetry came
from the gang of soothsayers and scamps who strolled around the
ceremonies of the Great Mother and of Serapis, with their mummeries and
tricks, turning verses out of their own heads, or taking them at random
from handbooks, for servant boys and silly girls, such as are best
attracted by metre and a poetic cast of words; from all which causes
poetry seemed to put herself at the service of cheats, and jugglers, and
lying prophets, and was lost to truth and to the tripod.
XXVI. ‘Thus I should not be surprised to find that the old people
sometimes required a certain ambiguity, circumlocution, [Sidenote: D]
indistinctness. For it was not then a case of “A” approaching the oracle
with a question, if you please, about the purchase of a slave, or “B”
about business; powerful states, haughty kings and tyrants, would
consult the God on public affairs, men whom it did not answer the
officials of his temple to vex and provoke by letting them hear what
they did not wish to hear. For the God does not obey Euripides,[122] who
sets up as a lawgiver with
_Phoebus, none but he,
May give men prophecies._
[Sidenote: E] He uses mortal men as ministers and prophets, whom it is
his duty to make his care, and to protect, lest they perish at the hands
of the bad while serving him. He does not then choose to conceal the
truth; what he used to do was to give a twist to its manifestation,
which, like a beam of light, is refracted more than once in its passage,
and is parted into many rays as it becomes poetry, and so to remove
whatever in it was harsh and hard. Tyrants might thus be left in
ignorance, and enemies not be forewarned. For them he threw a veil in
the innuendoes [Sidenote: F] and ambiguities which hid the meaning from
others, but did not elude the intelligence of the actual consultants who
gave their whole mind to the answers. Hence, now that things have
changed, it is sheer folly to criticize and find fault with the God,
because he thinks right to give his aid no longer in the same manner but
in another.
XXVII. ‘Another thing is this: Language receives no greater advantage
from a poetical form than this, that a meaning which is wrapped and
bound in metre is more easily remembered and grasped. Now in those days
much memory was required. Many things used to be explained orally; local
indications, the times when things were to be done, rites of Gods across
the seas, secret burying-places of heroes, hard to be discovered by
those setting off for lands far from Greece. You know about Chius
[Sidenote: 408] and Cretinus, and Nesichus, and Phalanthus, and many
other leaders of expeditions, how many clues they needed to find the
proper place appointed to each for settlement, while some of them missed
the way, as did Battus.[123] He thought that he would be turned out, not
understanding what the place was to which he had been sent; then he came
a second time loudly complaining. Then the God answered:
_Thou that hast never been there, if thou know’st Libya the
sheepland
Better than I that have been, then wonderful wise is thy wisdom._
So he sent him out again. Then Lysander entirely failed to make out the
hill Orchalides,[124] otherwise called Alopecus, and the river Hoplites,
_Also the dragon, earthborn, in craftiness coming behind thee_,
and was defeated in battle and slain in those very spots by [Sidenote:
B] Neochorus, a man of Haliartus, who bore a shield with the device of a
serpent. There are many such answers given to the old people, all hard
to grasp and remember, which I need not give you at length, since you
know them.
XXVIII. ‘Our present settled condition, out of which the questions now
put to the God arise, I welcome and accept. There is great peace and
tranquillity, war has been made to cease, there are no wanderings in
exile, no revolutions, no tyrannies, no other plagues or ills in Greece
asking for potent and extraordinary remedies. But when there is nothing
complicated or mysterious, or dangerous, only questions on petty
[Sidenote: C] popular matters, like school themes, “whether I should
marry”, “whether I should sail”, “whether I should lend”, and the most
serious responses given to states are concerning harvests and
cattle-breeding and public health, to clothe these in metre, to devise
circumlocutions, to introduce strange words on questions calling for a
plain, concise answer, is what an ambitious sophist might do, bedizening
the oracle for his own glory. But the Pythia is a lady in herself, and
when she descends thither and is in the presence of the God, she cares
for truth rather than for [Sidenote: D] glory, or for the praise or
blame of men.
XXIX. ‘So perhaps ought we too to feel. As it is, in a sort of agony of
fear, lest the place should lose its reputation of three thousand years,
and a few persons should think lightly of it and cease to visit the
oracle, for all the world as if it were a sophist’s school, we
apologize, and make up reasons and theories about things which we
neither know nor ought to know. We smooth the critic down, and try to
persuade him, whereas we ought to bid him be gone—
_He shall first suffer in a loss not light_—[125]
[Sidenote: E] if that is the view which he takes of the God. Thus, while
you welcome and admire what the Wise Men of old have written up: “Know
thyself”, and “Nothing too much”, not least because of the brevity which
includes in a small compass a close hammer-beaten sense, you blame the
oracles because they mostly use concise, plain, direct phrases. It is
with sayings like those of the Wise Men as with streams compressed into
a narrow channel; there is no distinctness or transparency to the eye of
the mind, but if you look into what has been written or said about them
by those who have wished to learn the full meaning of each, you
[Sidenote: F] will not easily find longer treatises elsewhere. The
language of the Pythia illustrates what mathematicians mean by calling a
straight line the shortest between the same points; it makes no bending,
or curve, or doubling or ambiguity; it lies straight towards truth, it
takes risks,[126] its good faith is open to examination, and it has
never yet been found wrong; it has filled the shrine [Sidenote: 409]
with offerings from Barbarians and Greeks, and has beautified it with
noble buildings and Amphictyonic fittings. Why, you see for yourselves
many buildings added which were not here formerly, many restored which
were ruinous or destroyed. As new trees spring up by the side of those
in vigorous bearing, so the Pylaea flourishes together with Delphi and
is fed upon the same meat; the plenty of the one causes the other to
take on shapeliness and figure and a beauty of temples, and halls of
meeting and fountains of water, such as it never had in the thousand
years before. Now those who dwell about Galaxius [Sidenote: B] in
Boeotia felt the manifest presence of the God in the abundance and more
than abundance of milk:
_From all the kine and every flock,
Plenteous as water from the rock,
Came welling, gurgling on its way
The milk that day.
Hot foot they hied them to the task,
To fill the pail, to fill the cask;
No beechen bowl or crock of clay,
No pot or pan had holiday;
Wine-skin or flagon, none might stay
Within, that day._[127]
But to us he gives tokens brighter and stronger and more evident than
these, in having, after the days of drought, of desertion and poverty,
brought us plenty, splendour, and reputation. True, I am well pleased
with myself for anything which my own [Sidenote: C] zeal or service may
have contributed to this result in support of Polycrates and Petraeus,
well pleased too with him who has been our leader in this policy, to
whose thought and planning most of the improvements are due; but it is
wholly impossible that so great, so vast a change could have been
effected in this short time by merely human care, with no God present
here or lending his Divinity to the place of the oracle.
XXX. ‘But as in those days there were some who found fault with the
responses for obliquity and want of clearness, so now there are those
who criticize them as too simple, which is childishness indeed and rank
stupidity! For as children show more glee and satisfaction at the sight
of rainbows or haloes or comets than in that of the sun or of the moon,
so do these [Sidenote: D] people regret the riddles, allegories, and
metaphors which are so many modes of refraction of prophetic art in a
mortal and fanciful medium. And if they do not fully inquire into the
cause of the change, they go away having passed judgement against the
God, rather than against ourselves or themselves, for having a power of
thought which is too feeble to attain to his counsels.’
Footnote 84:
Again quoted by Plutarch, p. 777 C.
Footnote 85:
_Od._ 7, 107.
Footnote 86:
Fr. 7.
Footnote 87:
In a lost ‘Hymn’, Fr. 32.
Footnote 88:
See H. Richards in _Classical Review_, vol. 29, p. 233.
Footnote 89:
Reading Ἑλλήνων as Ed. Teub. fr. Stegmann.
Footnote 90:
_Rhet._ 3, 11.
Footnote 91:
Puteoli.
Footnote 92:
πετρῶν καταφλεγομένων (J. H. W. Strijd in _Class. Rev._ vol. 28, p.
218).
Footnote 93:
Quoted by Menander, Fr. 243 (Meineke).
Footnote 94:
Quoted also in the _Life of Agesilaus_, c. 3, p. 597.
Footnote 95:
Palaea Kaumene, a volcanic island ejected in 196 B. C. See Tozer’s
_Islands of the Aegean_, p. 97 foll.
Footnote 96:
_Od._ 3, 1.
Footnote 97:
_Tim._ 90.
Footnote 98:
See p. 283.
Footnote 99:
Xen. _Sympos._ c. 2.
Footnote 100:
Reading χώρας for δωρεᾶς with Emperius (ap. Ed. Teub.).
Footnote 101:
See Herod. 1, 51.
Footnote 102:
Fr. 44.
Footnote 103:
Here the text is defective.
Footnote 104:
Here the text is defective.
Footnote 105: