The three ‘myths’ which are found in these Dialogues are all avowedly
Platonic; they are introduced and dismissed in Platonic formulae, and
much of the imagery is drawn from Plato. Yet the treatment is Plutarch’s
own, and the style, though dignified and elevated after his fashion,
never suggests an imitation of Plato which could only be parody. New
matter is brought in, mostly gleaned from the astronomy of his day. The
movements of the heavenly bodies have been an inspiration to later poets
of verse and prose:
_Minerva breathes on me, Apollo guides,
And the nine Muses point me to the Bears._
To Plutarch the subject was rather one of earnest curiosity, as he turns
to account the details and their theological application, read by him in
the philosophers of, or nearly of, his own age.
The purpose of the Platonic myth is to carry the argument beyond and
above the region of logic and analysis, into that of poetry and
constructive truth, upon matters where strict proof was impossible. The
reader may be referred to Bishop Westcott’s Essay on _Religious Thought
in the West_, and to Professor J. A. Stewart’s book on _The Myths of
Plato_.
(1) It will be convenient to look first into the myth of Thespesius in
Plutarch’s Dialogue _On the Instances of Delay in Divine Punishment_
(see pp. 205-13 of this book). The motive is identical with that of the
myth of Er in the _Republic_, yet with a difference. Plato gives us an
experience from the world beyond death, granted to one who had been
taken for dead during several days, in order to carry to a higher plane
his argument for the victory here and hereafter of Justice over
Injustice. Plutarch, as a moral teacher and ‘physician of souls’,
concerned to restore individuals who have fallen, and to keep the
falling on their feet, gives us the picture of ‘The Rake Reformed’,
taking an extreme instance of a vicious character restored to sanity by
glimpses of penalties and of bliss beyond this life, in order to deter
and encourage others under temptation. The name Aridaeus, changed to
Thespesius, ‘The Divine’, as an earnest of the reformation, reminds us
of Ardiaeus the tyrant, in Plato. The language naturally falls into that
of the Judgement-myth in the _Gorgias_. It is introduced by a similar
form of words:
‘Now listen while I tell you a very beautiful story (λόγος) which you I
think will call a myth (μῦθος), for all that I am about to say I wish to
be regarded as true’ (Plato).
‘I can tell you a story which I have lately heard, yet I hesitate lest
it may appear to you a myth.... Let me first make good the “probability”
of my view, then we will start the myth, if myth indeed it be’
(Plutarch).
The details in Plutarch are fuller and grimmer, and the language, though
solemn, lacks the stately reticence of Plato. We are often reminded of
words and thoughts in the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus. The celestial
imagery is vague, and does not seem to suggest any special source more
modern than Plato. It has a general resemblance to a passage in the
_Phaedo_ (c. 58, p. 109 D, E).
‘We, dwelling in a hollow of the Earth, think that we dwell upon the
Earth itself; and the air we call Heaven, and think that it is that
Heaven wherein are the courses of the stars: whereas, by reason of
weakness and sluggishness, we cannot go forth out of the air; but if a
man could journey to the edge thereof, or having gotten wings could fly
up, it would come to pass that even as fishes here which rise out of the
sea do behold the things here, he, looking out, would behold the things
there, and if his strength could endure the sight thereof, would see
that there are the True Heaven, and the True Light, and the True Earth’
(Tr. J. A. Stewart).
The daemons are only mentioned as Ministers or Ushers in the
after-world; there is no threefold division of the man into body, soul,
and mind, only one into body and soul; there is one reference to Delphi
and its oracle, where a popular belief that Night and Apollo were
partners is corrected. An attentive reading will bring out a resemblance
of words and phrases to those familiar to us in the Sixth Book of the
_Aeneid_, the subject of E. Norden’s fruitful and convincing study.
(2) The beautiful story of Timarchus, the young friend of Socrates’ son,
who passed into a trance in the cave of Trophonius, and saw things of
the unseen world which were to be fully revealed to him three months
later, i. e. in actual death, comes into the Dialogue _On the Genius of
Socrates_ (pp. 36-40) to explain the special correspondence during life
between the God and those gifted souls who possess mind, and become
daemons or spirits after death. Here the three-fold division into body,
soul, and mind (see p. 303) is maintained. A practical application of
the myth is drawn by Theanor, the young Pythagorean visitor.
As the supposed Dialogue takes place in B. C. 378, we do not expect to
find in it the astronomy of Plutarch’s day, though he would not have
shrunk from any anachronism. The general imagery is again that of the
_Phaedo_, but there is a sea on which circular bodies, the stars which
are men’s souls, float. The current which bears them is circular, yet
not completely circular, not ending in the point where it started, but
describing a continuous spiral (just as the moon does with reference to
the earth’s path). This sea is inclined to the middle and highest point
of the firmament by ‘a little less than eight-ninths of the whole’. This
is puzzling; it may suggest the inclination of the ecliptic to the
equator, or, again, that of the Milky Way to the ecliptic. Doubtless
some explanation will be forthcoming. An interesting detail is ‘Styx, a
way to Hades’, clearly the shadow in a lunar eclipse, since the moon
‘only avoids Styx by a slight elevation, and is caught once in one
hundred and seventy-seven secondary measures’, the exact number of
periods of twenty-four hours contained in six lunar months, the normal
interval between two eclipses (see p. 286). ‘Secondary measures’ is a
curious expression, since Plutarch elsewhere (Plat. Quaest. 3, p. 1006
E) calls periods of a day and a night ‘the primary measures’. It seems
not impossible that δευτέροις here has replaced some word which the
scribe could not make out, such as νυχθημέροις. We have the four
principles of birth and death, as in the _Face in the Moon_; only there
Clotho takes the moon for her sphere of office, and Lachesis the earth,
here Lachesis takes the moon, Clotho the sun, Atropus the ‘unseen’.
Neither list agrees with the assignment of functions by Xenocrates (see
the end of Dr. M. Adler’s Dissertation mentioned below).
(3) Sylla’s tale in the _Face in the Moon_ (pp. 299-308), a traveller’s
story picked up in Carthage from one of those curious characters found
on the outer margin of the Greek world in whom Plutarch delighted, is
brought in with admirable dramatic fitness, shown in Sylla’s eagerness
to produce it at the very outset, in the preparation for it by the
skirmish between Theon and Lamprias, and in the vivacity of the
narrative. It is dismissed with a Platonic formula:
‘Such is the story which I heard the stranger relate.... But you and
your friends, Lamprias, may take the story in what way you will.’
Compare: ‘I am persuaded, O Callicles, that these things that are told
are true.... Perchance this shall seem to you an old wife’s fable, and
thou wilt despise it: well mightest thou despise it, if by searching we
could find out aught better and truer’ (_Gorgias_, 526 D, 527 A). The
astronomy of the myth is in the main that of the preceding Dialogue, and
Sylla shows considerable familiarity with Plato and also with
Xenocrates. It is perhaps noticeable how little interest Plutarch shows
in geographical detail, contenting himself with such vague and
antiquated views as sufficed for a setting to the story. He appears not
to name Pytheas at all in the _Lives_, and only once (on a question of
the tides) in the _Moralia_.
The whole Dialogue has been the subject of a careful study by Dr. Max
Adler of Vienna (_Dissertationes Vindobonenses_, 1910). Without entering
into his general view of the structure, we may observe that Dr. Adler
seems to be very successful in establishing the close connexion between
it and the Dialogue _On the Cessation of the Oracles_, which he is
probably right—though he reserves the proofs—in regarding as based upon
it, and later in date. This comes out especially in the passages about
the captivity of Cronus (cp. p. 301 with pp. 135-6), and the argument
about ‘the Middle’ (cp. p. 270 with p. 144). He produces a happy
quotation from Maximus Tyrius to establish beyond doubt that the source
of an important passage about mind (pp. 271-2) was in Posidonius. His
general conclusion as to the myth, is that it too is in the main from
Posidonius, and that when Plutarch draws upon Xenocrates, it is through
Posidonius. The latter appears to have been a writer of great industry
and encyclopaedic learning, quoted as an authority on matters of
history, physical geography, and what we should now call anthropology;
not an original force in Philosophy, but successful in reconciling
systems and making them available for human needs; one the aim of whose
life-work was, in the words of one of his most recent exponents, _to
make men at home in the universe_ (_Stoics and Sceptics_, by Edwyn
Bevan, p. 98).
Any one who will read Sylla’s myth, with a good map of the moon’s
surface before him, will be able to locate for himself the ‘Gulf of
Hecate’, and the long valleys leading to the Elysian plains, which, on
her side remote from earth, enjoy diffused sunlight. There need be no
idea of shafts or tunnels driven through the solid body of the moon.
Cicero’s _Dream of Scipio_, written more than a century before
Plutarch’s Dialogue, and also drawn from Posidonius, will be found an
admirable companion piece, enforcing, in language of singular beauty and
elevation, those duties to country and ancestors which find inadequate
expression in the Greek thought of the first century of our era.