INTRODUCTION
The three Dialogues of Plutarch entitled:
I. On the E at Delphi,
II. Why the Pythia does not now give her Oracles in Verse,
III. On the cessation of the Oracles,
may be conveniently treated as a group, and assumed to be a collection of those ‘Pythian Dialogues’ which the author sent to his friend Serapion. I and II certainly are so, III has a separate dedication. Other Dialogues, e. g. that on Delays in Divine Punishment, are also records of conversations which took place at Delphi; but these three are concerned with questions suggested by the temple and prophetic office of Apollo, as to which they give much curious information. If they leave us unsatisfied as to matters of still deeper interest, and tell us nothing about the policy of Delphi in the Persian wars, the counsel given to Orestes, which is fiercely controversial matter, or the popular feeling towards the oracle represented in the Ion of Euripides, this is only what we learn to put up with in reading Greek books. Indeed it is of a piece with the purposes imputed to Apollo himself, who sets us problems but does not supply their solution. ‘The king whose oracle is in Delphi neither tells nor conceals, but signifies.’
We have few indications of date, or of mutual relations between the three Dialogues. I is based upon the author’s recollection of a conversation which took place ‘a long time ago’, about A. D. 66, the date of Nero’s visit to Greece. A principal speaker is Ammonius the Peripatetic philosopher of Lamprae, Plutarch’s instructor, who also speaks, with the same authority, in III. In II, Serapion, the Athenian poet, to whom the collection is dedicated in I, takes a leading part. Theon, a literary friend, who appears frequently in the Symposiacs and in the Face in the Moon comes into I and II. An interesting person is Demetrius of Tarsus, another literary friend, who, in III, has just returned from Britain, and who has been probably identified with ‘Demetrius the Scribe’, named on two bronze tablets found at York, and now in the York Museum (see Hermes, vol. 46, p. 156). The year of Callistratus at Delphi, which marks the date of III, is conjecturally fixed as A. D. 83-4 (see Pontow in Philologus for 1895, and cp. Sympos. vii. 5). As Agricola’s term of office ended in A. D. 84 or 85, Demetrius may have served under him. The general tranquillity of the world depicted in III hardly gives us much to build upon.
In I Plutarch and his brother Lamprias are both speakers. Lamprias appears in his usual character, a good companion, light-hearted and reckless; Plutarch speaks gravely and at length, and the debate is closed by Ammonius. In III Lamprias, Plutarch not being named, speaks gravely throughout, and, on the suggestion of Ammonius, closes the debate. In II, neither brother is named, and the last speaker is Theon.
In the Symposiac Dialogues one or other brother is usually present, sometimes both. In the Face in the Moon Lamprias alone takes part, and he acts as moderator.
It is not easy to interpret these facts. M. Gréard concludes that Lamprias died early. If so, was the name, which was borne by the grandfather and by one of the sons, transferred, for literary purposes, to Plutarch himself? M. Chenevière, in his pleasant essay on Plutarch’s friends (a Latin prize dissertation) suggests that, under whatever name, the leading speaker always conveys Plutarch’s own views.
Certain topics recur in this series of Dialogues. Thus the problem as to the meaning of the E at Delphi, which is the main subject of I, is glanced at, with some impatience, by Philippus the historian in III.
The identification of Apollo with the sun, dismissed at the end of I as a mere beautiful fancy, is questioned again in III and allowed to stand over as unsettled. It is touched upon in II, c. 12.
The hypothesis of a plurality of worlds, brought forward by Plutarch in I. c. 11, with special reference to the views of Plato in the Timaeus, reappears, again in connexion with the five regular solids, in III.
It may be noticed that Plutarch was not, at the date of the conversation narrated in I, a priest of the temple (see c. 16).
Much of the matter of III reappears, with little variety of substance, in the Face in the Moon, the attack on Aristotle’s theory of the distribution of matter in the one corresponding to that upon the Stoics in the other, and the accounts of the imprisonment of Cronus by his son (or Briareus) being almost identical. It is probable that in both Plutarch has drawn immediately upon Posidonius, and through him from Xenocrates and others. The question is discussed with great thoroughness by Dr. Max Adler (Dissertationes Vindobonenses, 1910).
The situation of Delphi is one of extraordinary beauty, as well as interest:
Some few miles north-east of the ancient site of Cirrha the mountainous range of Parnassus shoots out two little spurs towards the sea, thus locking on three sides an inclined valley, as the tiers of an ancient circus embrace the arena below. Upon the fourth side a small river runs, by name the Pleistus, which has forced its way between the eastern spur and Mount Cirphius, directly south and opposite; crosses laterally at the foot of the glen; then, sweeping round in a shining curve, before many leagues unites its waters to the bay. The descending slope that forms the amphitheatre is broken by ridges into three terraces, such as the traveller is wont to see in hilly countries. On the highest rose the sanctuary; below was the town and the cultivated hollow which poets called the Vale of Delphi; above all towered the ridges of Parnassus itself,[[50]] sheer walls of rock, rising inland towards the summit of the chain, desolate, grand, and picturesque. Those who stood above the level of the temple, and turned their gaze toward the south-west, might perhaps have looked far over to the smiling gulf of Corinth, an unbroken prospect of well-watered fields. Upon their left was the famous plane-tree, and the spring of Castalia, whose stream, leaping down between two rocks, out of a huge cleft that divided them, lost itself in a dell below, till it fell finally into the Pleistus; and mounting the rough ascent, just beyond the little torrent, might be seen the sacred way, which, issuing from the same gorge as the Pleistus, rounded the flank of the promontory of rock and climbed up its warm side. Few are the shadows that pass over the valley; through the long day the southern sun beats down on it, and the brilliancy of the sky is immortalized in the name which the inhabitants conferred upon the hills about, of Phaedriades, or shining cliffs.
But the property of the temple was not bounded by the extent of the view. Above, on the heights, as far as Ligorea and Tithorea, both Doric villages—towards the west, beyond the Stadium, and the hill on which it nestled, to Amphissa and the pasturages along its stream—all was part of the Ager Apollinis, sacred to the god and to his priests for ever.
From the Arnold Prize Essay for 1859, by Charles (afterwards Lord) Bowen.
The topographical and archaeological facts to be gathered from authorities prior to modern excavations are collected by Dr. J. H. Middleton in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1888. The results of the subsequent work of the French excavators, directed by M. Homolle, may conveniently be studied in Dr. J. G. Frazer’s Commentary on Pausanias, Book 10, where the history of the successive temples is followed out. The dimensions of the temple itself, which stood on a rocky plateau or terrace, were about 197 feet by 72 feet. The Sacred Way ran round the temple, and close to it on its northern and western sides, and was followed by the party described by Plutarch in the second of the three Dialogues (c. 17) in order to reach the southern steps.
I
ON THE ‘E’ AT DELPHI
(In the Pronaos of the temple at Delphi the visitor was confronted by certain inscriptions (γράμματα): ‘Know thyself’—‘Nothing too much’—‘Go bail and woe is at hand’—all exhortations to wisdom or prudence (Plato, Charmides, 163-4). To these is to be added, on the sole authority of Plutarch’s Dialogue, the letter E, pronounced EI.)
THE SPEAKERS
Ammonius, the Platonist philosopher, Plutarch’s teacher.
Lamprias, Plutarch’s brother.
Plutarch.
Theon, a literary friend.
Eustrophus, an Athenian.
Nicander, a priest of the temple.
Chap. 1. Dedication to Serapion at Athens. I am sending you, as an instalment, some of my Pythian Dialogues. What is the problem put before us by Apollo under the form of the letter E? I had always avoided the question, but here is a report of a conversation with some visitors, of whom Ammonius was one, in, or soon after, the year A. D. 66, when Nero came to Greece.
2. Ammonius was arguing that Apollo propounds subjects for philosophical inquiry in the ordinances and emblems of his temple, not least in this letter E.
3. Lamprias quoted the traditional account, that the Wise Men, who were properly five, not seven, met here, and, after discussion, set up the letter E, as a numeral, for a protest against the intrusion of a sixth and seventh into their company. The ancient wooden E is still called that of the Wise Men.
4. Ammonius smiled, knowing Lamprias to be capable of improvising a ‘traditional view’. One of the company mentioned a Chaldaean visitor, who had lately talked much nonsense about the number seven. The officials of the temple know no view except that the letter is significant as a word (‘if’ or ‘whether’).
5. Nicander confirmed this. ‘If’ is used with us in the formula of questions put to the god, or, as ‘if only’, in prayers.
6. Theon puts in a plea for ‘Dialectic’, i.e. Logic. ‘If’ is the conjunction which holds together the conjunctive proposition or syllogism, the special prerogative of human intellect. Hercules, in his early days, mocked at Logic and the E, and then removed the tripod by force.
7. Eustrophus: ‘Bravo, Theon, a Hercules, all but the lion’s skin!’ He appeals to the devotees of Mathematics to say a word for the arithmetical virtues of the number five (a thrust at Plutarch himself, who had yet to learn Academic moderation in his zeal for Mathematics).
8-16. Plutarch loq.:
8. Yes, five has virtues: 5 = 2 + 3, the first even added to the first odd. It is called ‘Marriage’. After multiplication it reproduces itself, and so symbolizes the ‘Conflagration’ and ‘Renovation’ of Heraclitus (and the Stoics),
9. Which relate to the legends of Apollo and also of Dionysus.
10. Five, when multiplied, gives alternately five itself and the perfect ten. It is also essential in harmonies.
11. Plato holds that, if there are more worlds than one, there may be five, and no more. Aristotle that there is one world composed of five elements, the five regular solids.
12. The five senses are related to the five elements and the five solids.
13. We must not forget Homer, and his five-fold division of the universe. But, going back: Four dimensions (point, line, plane, solid) are all very well. But animate being requires a fifth.
14. The true derivation is not 2 + 3 = 5 but 1 + 4 i.e., unity (which is itself really a square) plus the first square.
15. There are five modes of being (see the Sophist, and Philebus of Plato). Some early inquirer saw this, and set up two E’s.
16. I ask the initiated whether five has not a special virtue in their mysteries. (‘Yes,’ from Nicander, ‘but it is a secret.’) Well I must wait till I become a priest myself.
17. Ammonius, though in sympathy with Mathematics, deprecates too much exactness. There is much to be said for the number seven. But the ‘E’ is really something different from all the suggestions. The God greets his visitors with ‘Know Thyself.’ They answer, Thou Art.
18. We ‘are’ not at all, but always change from state to state, and so (says Heraclitus) does all Nature.
19. In true being is no past, present, or future; our common speech confesses to our not being.
20. But God IS, and is rightly addressed as ‘Thou Art’ or ‘Thou Art One’.
21. The identification of Apollo with the sun is a beautiful attempt to grasp the spiritual through the sensible. Not so the stories of his change into fire, and the like, which are better ascribed to some daemon than to the God. ‘Know Thyself’ calls us back from these lofty speculations: ‘Man, know thy nature and its limitations!’