The Dialogue on _Delay in Divine Punishment_ stands somewhat apart from
the others. It deals gravely with grave matters, the ways of Providence
with man, and the ‘last things’. The method is ingenious and
satisfactory. An Epicurean, after scoffing at Providence in a manner
which deeply offends the company, leaves them abruptly. We are reminded
of the departure of the Cynic Didymus at Delphi (p. 124), and of the
immortal episode of Thrasymachus in the First Book of the _Republic_ of
Plato. The small family party which remains, Plutarch, his brother
Timon, his son-in-law Patrocleas, and an intimate friend Olympicus, take
up the points suggested by the attack, not contentiously, or in the
language of the Schools, but with a view to ascertain whether there is
anything in them which concerns reasonable men. The friends successively
raise these points: the slowness of the Gods in punishing, and their
purposes in the delay; the justice of visiting the sins of parents upon
children, or of a city upon a new generation of citizens; the
persistence of the soul after physical death here. In all cases it is
Plutarch who supplies the answer, whereas, in the other long Dialogues,
there is some distribution of parts and an interplay of character. In
the tone of the dissertations, which is sustained, and little relieved
by humour, the piece most nearly resembles the essay _On Superstition_.
Plutarch’s argument is marked by truly academic caution, and an
admission of man’s ignorance and limitations, which might have come from
the pen of Bishop Butler.
When Plutarch has sufficiently established ‘to demonstration’ the
‘probability’ of his position, he adds, at the urgent desire of the
company, a myth, which he had already offered to produce. The ‘myth’ is
a device of which Plato has many examples, intended to give symmetry to
the Dialogue, ‘that it may not go about without a head’. But it is more
than a literary device; it is a satisfaction of the desire for something
poetical and constructive which mere Dialectic can never feed. The myth
about Thespesius here must be compared with that of Timarchus in the
_Genius of Socrates_ and with the traveller’s tale of the Island of
Cronus in the _Face in the Moon_.[199] Of Platonic myths, we are first
reminded of that of Er, which closes the _Republic_, and raises to a
higher plane the question whether the just man or the unjust has the
best of it. There are necessarily strong points of resemblance to the
magnificent judgement myth of the _Gorgias_, and much of the imagery
recalls the _Phaedo_. The _Timaeus_ is not perhaps so conspicuously
before Plutarch’s mind here as it is in other works. While there is so
much which can be referred to Plato, there is nothing to suggest that
Plutarch set himself to make a patchwork out of the stores of his
retentive memory, still less that he sought to imitate the master from
whose genius his industrious and curious mind lay poles apart. His
honesty and his common-sense forbade any such attempt.
It is fortunate that we possess a fragment (redeemed for Plutarch by
Wyttenbach) of a Dialogue with the same speakers, and perhaps intended
to follow immediately, in which, as though in ‘calculated contrast’,
writes M. Gréard (p. 292), to the grim details contained in the Dialogue
before us, we have a delightful picture of what awaits the just beyond
the grave, the truly ‘initiate’. As all the questions discussed in the
main Dialogue are raised in old Greek writers, Homer, Pindar, the
Tragedians, supplemented by the philosophers, and the myth, in its stern
imagery, is on all fours, for instance, with the _Eumenides_ of
Aeschylus, so the comfortable vision of the initiate in the fragment is
anticipated by Greeks who wrote four hundred or five hundred years
before. Thus we have the lines of the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes (154
foll., tr. G. Murray):
_Then you will find a breath about your ears
Of Music, and a light about your eyes
Most beautiful—like this—and myrtle groves,
And joyous throngs of women and of men,
And clapping of glad hands._
And the still more famous picture of Pindar (_Ol._ 2, 68-74, tr. G.
Moberly):
_But who in Godlike strife
Have dared to keep their secret souls from sin,
Thrice tried in either life,
E’en to old Saturn’s tower their bright way win.
There with melodious din
Light breezes, East and West,
Fan with soft breath the Islets of the Blest;
And golden flowerets breathe,
Some from the Island-trees,
Some floating on the ambient seas,
With which their twinèd arms and brows they wreathe._
Perhaps it would hardly be untrue to say that the whole of Plutarch’s
daring speculation owes its origin to the words of Heraclitus, with
which the fragment closes, as to the surprises which await man after
death.
There is one distinct note of date, in the Sibylline prophecy quoted in
c. 22, that the emperor of that day should die in his bed. Vespasian,
who was doubtless meant, died in June, A.D. 79, and the great eruption
of Vesuvius (by which, however, Puteoli does not appear to have suffered
specially) took place in August of the same year. The Dialogue must have
been written later than these events. On the whole, if we may venture a
conjecture where all is uncertain, we may perhaps suppose it to have
followed the _Symposiacs_ at a comparatively short interval, and to have
been an early attempt to apply the method of dialogue to elaborate
discussion of great themes. It has characteristics of its own which
enable us to understand how Erasmus (_Adagia_)[200] felt doubts as to
its genuineness, though we have the confident assurance of Wyttenbach
that there is Plutarch’s seal upon it.
Readers should consult Mr. Oakesmith’s pages on this work (_The Religion
of Plutarch_, pp. 103 foll.), and, on the myth, Bishop Westcott’s Essay
on _The Myths of Plato_ (reprinted in _History of Religious Thought in
the West_), or Professor J. A. Stewart on _The Myths of Plato_.