and being dragged away from the altars like fugitive slaves, they have
now nothing left them but their tombs and graves. Which made Antigonus
the Elder, when one Hermodotus had in his poems declared him to be
son to the Sun and a God, to say to him: Friend, he that empties my
close-stoolpan knows no such matter of me. And Lysippus the carver had
good reason to quarrel with the painter Apelles for drawing Alexander’s
picture with a thunder-bolt in his hand, whereas himself had made him
but with a spear, which (he said) was natural and proper for him and a
weapon the glory of which no time would rob him of.
25. Therefore they maintain the wiser opinion, who hold that the things
here storied of Typhon, Osiris, and Isis were not the events of Gods,
nor yet of men, but of certain grand Daemons, whom Plato, Pythagoras,
Xenocrates, and Chrysippus (following herein the opinion of the most
ancient theologists) affirm to be of greater strength than men, and to
transcend our nature by much in power, but not to have a divine part
pure and unmixed, but such as participates of both the soul’s nature
and the body’s sensation, capable of receiving both pleasure and pain,
and all the passions that attend these mutations, which disorder some
of them more and others of them less. For there are divers degrees both
of virtue and vice, as among men, so also among Daemons. For what they
sing about among the Greeks, concerning the Giants and the Titans, and
of certain horrible actions of Saturn, as also of Python’s combats with
Apollo, of the flights of Bacchus, and the ramblings of Ceres, come
nothing short of the relations about Osiris and Typhon and others such,
which everybody may lawfully and freely hear as they are told in the
mythology. The like may be also said of those things that, being veiled
over in the mystic rites and sacred ceremonies of initiation, are
therefore kept private from the sight and hearing of the common sort.
26. We also hear Homer often calling such as are extraordinary good
“Godlike,” and “God’s compeers,” and “gifted with wisdom by the
Gods.”[20] But the epithet derived from Daemons we find him to bestow
upon the good and bad indifferently, as,
“Daemon-like sir, make haste, why do you fear the Argives thus?”
And then on the contrary,
“When the fourth time he rushed on like a Daemon;”
and again where Jupiter speaks thus to Juno:
Daemonial dame, what hath poor Priam done
To anger you so much, or what his sons,
That you resolve fair Ilium’s overthrow,
And your revengeful purpose won’t forego?
where he seems to make Daemons to be of a mixed and unequal temper and
inclination. Whence it is that Plato assigns to the Olympic Gods dexter
things and odd numbers, and the opposite to these to Daemons. And
Xenocrates also is of opinion, that such days as are commonly accounted
unlucky, and those holy days in which are used scourgings, beatings of
breasts, fastings, uncouth words, or obscene speeches, do not appertain
to the honor of Gods or of good Daemons; but he thinks there are in
the air, that environs us about, certain great and mighty natures, but
withal morose and tetrical ones, that take pleasure in such things as
these, and if they have them, they do no farther mischief. On the other
side, the beneficent ones are styled by Hesiod “Holy Daemons,” and
“Guardians of Mankind,” and,