The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

by T. R. Glover

CHAPTER III

PLUTARCH

Stoicism as a system did not capture the ancient world, and even upon individuals it did not retain an undivided hold. To pronounce with its admirers to-day that it failed because the world was not worthy of it, would be a judgment, neither quite false nor altogether true, but at best not very illuminative. Men are said to be slow in taking in new thoughts, and yet it is equally true that somewhere in nearly every man there is something that responds to ideas, and even to theories; but if these on longer acquaintance fail to harmonize with the deeper instincts within him, they alarm and annoy, and the response comes in the form of re-action.

In modern times, we have seen the mind of a great people surrendered for a while to theorists and idealists. The thinking part of the French nation was carried away by the inspiration of Rousseau into all sorts of experiments at putting into hasty operation the principles and ideas they had more or less learnt from the master. Even theories extemporized on the moment, it was hoped, might be made the foundations of a new and ideal social fabric. The absurdities of the old religion yielded place to Reason—embodied symbolically for the hour in the person of Mme Momoro—afterwards, more vaguely, in Robespierre's Supreme Being, who really came from Rousseau. And then—"avec ton Être Suprème tu commences à m'embêter," said Billaud to Robespierre himself. Within a generation Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Bonald, and de la Mennais were busy refounding the Christian faith. "The rites of Christianity," wrote Chateaubriand, "are in the highest degree moral, if for no other reason than that they have been practised by our fathers, that our mothers have watched over our cradles as Christian women, that the Christian religion has chanted its psalms over our parents' coffins and invoked peace upon them in their graves."

Alongside of this let us set a sentence or two of Plutarch. "Our father then, addressing Pemptides by name, said, 'You seem to me, Pemptides, to be handling a very big matter and a risky one—or rather, you are discussing what should not be discussed at all (tà akínêta kineîn), when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reason and demonstration for everything. For the ancient and ancestral faith is enough (arkeî gàr hê pátrios kaì palaià pistis), and no clearer proof could be found than itself—

Not though man's wisdom scale the heights of thought—

but it is a common home and an established foundation for all piety; and if in one point its stable and traditional character (tò bébainon autês kaì nenomismenon) be shaken and disturbed, it will be undermined and no one will trust it.... If you demand proof about each of the ancient gods, laying hands on everything sacred and bringing your sophistry to play on every altar, you will leave nothing free from quibble and cross-examination (oudèn asykophánteton oud abasániston).... Others will say that Aphrodite is desire and Hermes reason, the Muses crafts and Athene thought. Do you see, then, the abyss of atheism that lies at our feet, if we resolve each of the gods into a passion or a force or a virtue?'"[[1]]

Such an utterance is unmistakeable—it means a conservative re-action, and in another place we find its justification in religious emotion. "Nothing gives us more joy than what we see and do ourselves in divine service, when we carry the emblems, or join in the sacred dance, or stand by at the sacrifice or initiation.... It is when the soul most believes and perceives that the god is present, that she most puts from her pain and fear and anxiety, and gives herself up to joy, yes, even as far as intoxication and laughter and merriment.... In sacred processions and sacrifices not only the old man and the old woman, nor the poor and lowly, but

The thick-legged drudge that sways her at the mill,

and household slaves and hirelings are uplifted by joy and triumph. Rich men and kings have always their own banquets and feasts—but the feasts in the temples and at initiations, when men seem to touch the divine most nearly in their thought, with honour and worship, have a pleasure and a charm far more exceeding. And in this no man shares who has renounced belief in Providence. For it is not abundance of wine, nor the roasting of meat, that gives the joy in the festivals, but also a good hope, and a belief that the god is present and gracious, and accepts what is being done with a friendly mind."[[2]]

Continuity of religion

One of Chateaubriand's critics says that his plea could be advanced on behalf of any religion; and Plutarch had already made it on behalf of his own. He looks past the Stoics, and he finds in memory and association arguments that outweigh anything they can say. The Spermaticos Logos was a mere Être Suprème—a sublime conception perhaps, but it had no appeal to emotion, it waked no memories, it touched no chord of personal association. We live so largely by instinct, memory and association, that anything that threatens them seems to strike at our life,

So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Some such thought is native to every heart, and the man who does not cling to his own past seems wanting in something essentially human. The gods were part of the past of the ancient world, and if Reason took them away, what was left? There was so much, too, that Reason could not grasp; so much to be learnt in ritual and in mystery that to the merely thinking mind had no meaning,—that must be received. Reason was invoked so lightly, and applied so carelessly and harshly, that it could take no account of the tender things of the heart. Reason destroyed but did not create, questioned without answering, and left life without sanction or communion. It was too often a mere affair of cleverness. It had its use and place, no doubt, in correcting extravagances of belief, but it was by no means the sole authority in man's life, and its function was essentially to be the handmaid of religion. "We must take Reason from philosophy to be our mystagogue and then in holy reverence consider each several word and act of worship."[[3]]

Plutarch is our representative man in this revival of religion, and some survey of his life and environment will enable us to enter more fully into his thought, and through him to understand better the beginnings of a great religious movement, of which students too often have lost sight.

For centuries the great men of Greek letters were natives of every region of the eastern Mediterranean except Greece, and Plutarch stands alone in later literature a Hellen of the motherland—Greek by blood, birth, home and instinct, proud of his race and his land, of their history, their art and their literature. When we speak of the influence of the past, it is well to remember to how great a past this man looked back, and from what a present. Long years of faction and war, as he himself says, had depopulated Greece, and the whole land could hardly furnish now the three thousand hoplites that four centuries before Megara alone had sent to Platæa. In regions where oracles of note had been, they were no more; their existence would but have emphasized the solitude—what good would an oracle be at Tegyra, or about Ptoum, where in a day's journey you might perhaps come on a solitary shepherd?[[4]] It was not only that wars and faction fights had wasted the life of the Greek people, but with the opening of the far East by Alexander, and the development of the West under Roman rule, Commerce had shifted its centres, and the Greeks had left their old homes for new regions. Still keen on money, philosophy and art, they thronged Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, and a thousand other cities. The Petrie papyri have revealed a new feature of this emigration, for the wills of the settlers often mention the names of their wives, and these were Greek women and not Egyptian, as the names of their fathers and homes prove.[[5]] Julius Cæsar had restored Corinth a century after Mummius destroyed it, and Athens was still as she had been and was to be for centuries, the resort of every one who loved philosophy and literature.[[6]] These were the two cities of Greece; the rest were reminders of what had been. In one of these forsaken places Plutarch was born, and there he was content to live and die, a citizen and a magistrate of Chæronea in Boeotia.

His family circle

His family was an old one, long associated with Chæronea. From childhood his life was rooted in the past by the most natural and delightful of all connexions. His great-grandfather, Nicarchus, used to tell how his fellow-citizens were commandeered to carry wheat on their own backs down to Anticyra for Antony's fleet—and were quickened up with the whip as they went; and "then when they had taken one consignment so, and the second was already done up into loads and ready, the news came that Antony was defeated, and that saved the city; for at once Antony's agents and soldiers fled, and they divided the grain among themselves."[[7]] The grandfather, Lamprias, lived long and saw the grandson a grown man. He appears often in Plutarch's Table Talk—a bright old man and a lively talker—like incense, he said, he was best when warmed up.[[8]] He thought poorly of the Jews for not eating pork—a most righteous dish, he said.[[9]] He had tales of his own about Antony, picked up long ago from one Philotas, who had been a medical student in Alexandria and a friend of one of the royal cooks, and eventually medical attendant to a son of Antony's by Fulvia.[[10]] Plutarch's father was a quiet, sensible man, who maintained the practice of sacrificing,[[11]] kept good horses,[[12]] knew his Homer, and had something of his son's curious interest in odd problems. It is perhaps an accident that Plutarch never mentions his name, but, though he often speaks of him, it is always of "my father" or "our father"—the lifelong and instinctive habit. There were also two brothers. The witty and amiable Lamprias loved laughter and was an expert in dancing—a useful man to put things right when the dance went with more spirit than music.[[13]] Of Timon we hear less, but Plutarch sets Timon's goodness of heart among the very best gifts Fortune has sent him.[[14]] He emphasizes the bond that brothers have in the family sacrifices, ancestral rites, the common home and the common grave.[[15]] That Plutarch always had friends, men of kindly nature and intelligence, and some of them eminent, is not surprising. Other human relationships, to be mentioned hereafter, completed his circle. He was born, and grew up, and lived, in a network of love and sympathy, the record of which is in all his books.

Plutarch was born about the year 50 A.D., and, when Nero went on tour through Greece in 66 A.D., he was a student at Athens under Ammonius.[[16]] He recalls that among his fellow-students was a descendant of Themistocles, who bore his ancestor's name and still enjoyed the honours granted to him and his posterity at Magnesia.[[17]] Ammonius, whom he honoured and quoted throughout life, was a Platonist[[18]] much interested in Mathematics.[[19]] He was a serious and kindly teacher with a wide range of interests, not all speculative. Plutarch records a discussion of dancing by "the good Ammonius."[[20]] He was thrice "General" at Athens,[[21]] and had at any rate once the experience of an excited mob shouting for him in the street, while he supped with his friends indoors.

Plutarch had many interests in Athens, in its literature, its philosophy and its ancient history—in its relics, too, for he speaks of memorials of Phocion and Demosthenes still extant. But he lingers especially over the wonders of Pericles and Phidias, "still fresh and new and untouched by time, as if a spirit of eternal youth, a soul that was ageless, were in the work of the artist."[[22]] Athens was a conservative place, on the whole, and a great resort for strangers. The Athenian love of talk is noticed by Luke with a touch of satire, and Dio Chrysostom admitted that the Athenians fell short of the glory of their city and their ancestors.[[23]] Yet men loved Athens.[[24]] Aulus Gellius in memory of his years there, called his book of collections Attic Nights, and here and there he speaks of student life—"It was from Ægina to Piræus that some of us who were fellow-students, Greeks and Romans, were crossing in the same ship. It was night. The sea was calm. It was summertime and the sky was clear and still. So we were sitting on the poop, all of us together, with our eyes upon the shining stars," and fell to talking about their names.[[25]]

His travels

When his student days were over, Plutarch saw something of the world. He alludes to a visit to Alexandria,[[26]] but, though he was interested in Egyptian religion, as we shall see, he does not speak of travels in the country. He must have known European Greece well, but he had little knowledge, it seems, of Asia Minor and little interest in it. He went once on official business for his city to the pro-consul of Illyricum—and had a useful lesson from his father who told him to say "We" in his report, though his appointed colleague had failed to go with him.[[27]] He twice went to Italy in the reigns of Vespasian and Domitian, and he seems to have stayed for some time in Rome, making friends in high places and giving lectures. Of the great Latin writers of his day he mentions none, nor is he mentioned by them. But he tells with pride how once Arulenus Rusticus had a letter from Domitian brought him by a soldier in the middle of one of these lectures and kept it unopened till the end.[[28]] The lectures were given in Greek. He confesses to his friend Sossius Senecio that, owing to the pressure of political business and the number of people who came about him for philosophy, when he was in Rome, it was late indeed in life that he attempted to learn Latin; and when he read Latin, it was the general sense of a passage that helped him to the meaning of the words. The niceties of the language he could not attempt, he says, though it would have been a graceful and pleasant thing for one of more leisure and fewer years.[[29]] That this confession is a true one is shown by the scanty use he makes of Roman books in his biographies, by his want of acquaintance with Latin literature, poetry and philosophy, and by blunders in detail noted by his critics. Sine patris is a poor attempt at Latin grammar for a man of his learning, and in his life of Lucullus he has turned the streets of Rome into villages through inattention to the various meanings of vicus.[[30]]

But, as he says, he was a citizen of a small town, and he did not wish to make it smaller,[[31]] and he went back to Chæronea and obscurity. A city he held to be an organism like a living being,[[32]] and he never cared for a man on whom the claims of his city sat loosely—as they did on the Stoics.[[33]] The world was full of Greek philosophers and rhetoricians, lecturing and declaiming, to their great profit and glory, but Plutarch was content to stay at home, to be magistrate and priest. If men laughed to see him inspecting the measurement of tiles and the carrying of cement and stones—"it is not for myself, I say, that I am doing this but for my native-place."[[34]] This was when he was Telearch—an office once held by Epameinondas, as he liked to remember. Pliny's letters show that this official inspection of municipal building operations by honest and capable men was terribly needed. But Plutarch rose to higher dignities, and as Archon Eponymos he had to preside over feasts and sacrifices.[[35]] He was also a Boeotarch. The Roman Empire did not leave much political activity even to the free cities, but Plutarch loyally accepted the new era as from God, and found in it many blessings of peace and quiet, and some opportunities still of serving his city. He held a priesthood at Delphi, with some charge over the oracle and a stewardship at the Pythian games. He loved Delphi, and its shrine and antiquities,[[36]] and made the temple the scene of some of his best dialogues. "The kind Apollo (ho phílos)," he says, "seems to heal the questions of life, and to resolve them, by the rules he gives to those who ask; but the questions of thought he himself suggests to the philosophic temperament, waking in the soul an appetite that will lead it to truth."[[37]]

He does not seem to have gained much public renown, but he did not seek it. The fame in his day was for the men of rhetoric, and he was a man of letters. If he gave his time to municipal duties, he must have spent the greater part of his days in reading and writing. He says that a biographer needs a great many books and that as a rule many of them will not be readily accessible—to have the abundance he requires, he ought really to be in some "famous city where learning is loved and men are many"; though, he is careful to say, a man may be happy and upright in a town that is "inglorious and humble."[[38]] He must have read very widely, and he probably made good use of his stay in Rome. In philosophy and literature it is quite probable that he used hand-books of extracts, though this must not imply that he did not go to the original works of the greater writers. But his main interest lay in memoirs and travels. He had an instinct for all that was characteristic, or curious, or out-of-the-way; and all sorts of casual references show how such things attached themselves to his memory. Discursive in his reading, as most men of letters seem to be, with a quick eye for the animated scene, the striking figure, the strange occurrence, he read, one feels, for enjoyment—he would add, no doubt, for his own moral profit; indeed he says that he began his Biographies for the advantage of others and found them to be much to his own.[[39]] He was of course an inveterate moralist; but unlike others of the class, he never forgets the things that have given him pleasure. They crowd his pages in genial reminiscence and apt allusion. There is always the quiet and leisurely air of one who has seen and has enjoyed, and sees and enjoys again as he writes. It is this that has made his Biographies live. They may at times exasperate the modern historian, for he is not very systematic—delightful writers rarely are. He rambles as he likes and avowedly passes the great things by and treasures the little and characteristic. "I am not writing histories but lives," he says, "and it is not necessarily in the famous action that a man's excellence or failure is revealed. But some little thing—a word or a jest—may often show character better than a battle with its ten thousand slain."[[40]]

But, after all, it is the characteristic rather than the character that interests him. He is not among the greatest who have drawn men, for he lacks the mind and patience to go far below the surface to find the key to the whole nature. When he has shown us one side of the hero, he will present another and a very different one, and leave us to reconcile them if we can. The contradictions remain contradictions, and he wanders pleasantly on. The Lives of Pericles and Themistocles, for instance, are little more than mere collectanea from sources widely discrepant, and often quite worthless. Of the mind of Pericles he had little conception; he gathered up and pleasantly told what he had read in books. He had too little of the critical instinct and took things too easily to weigh what he quoted.

Above all, despite his "political" energy and enthusiasm, it was impossible, for a Greek of his day to have the political insight that only comes from life in a living state. How could the Telearch of Chæronea under the Roman Empire understand Pericles? Archbishop Trench contrasts his enthusiasm about the gift of liberty to Greece by Flamininus with the reflection of Wordsworth that it is a thing

which is not to be given
By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven.

Plutarch really did not know what liberty is; Wordsworth on the other hand had taken part in the French Revolution, and watched with keen and sympathetic eyes the march of events throughout a most living epoch. It is worth noting that indirectly Plutarch contributed to the disasters of that epoch, for his Lycurgus had enormous influence with Rousseau and his followers who took it for history. Here was a man who made laws and constitutions in his own head and imposed them upon his fellow-countrymen. So Plutarch wrote and believed, and so read and believed thinking Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, like himself subjects of a despotism and without political experience.

Besides Biographies he wrote moral treatises—some based on lectures, others on conversation, others again little better than note-books—pleasant and readable books, if the reader will forgive a certain want of humour, and a tendency to ramble, and will surrender his mind to the long and leisurely sentences, for Plutarch is not to be hurried. Everything he wrote had some moral or religious aim. He was a believer, in days of doubt and perplexity. The Epicurean was heard at Delphi. Even in the second century, when the great, religious revival was in full swing, Lucian wrote and found readers. Men brought their difficulties to Plutarch and he went to meet them—ever glad to do something for the ancestral faith. Nor was he less ready to discuss—or record discussions of—questions much less serious. Was the hen or the egg first? Does a varied diet or a single dish help the digestion more? Why is fresh water better than salt for washing clothes? Which of Aphrodite's hands did Diomed wound?

It is always the same man, genial, garrulous, moral and sensible. There are no theatricalities in his style—he is not a rhetorician even on paper.[[41]] He discards the tricks of the school, adoxography, epigram and, as a rule, paradox. His simplicity is his charm. He is really interested in his subject whatever it is; and he believes in its power of interesting other men, too much to think it worth while to trick it out with extraneous prettinesses. Yet after he has discussed his theme, with excursions into its literary antecedents and its moral suggestions, we are not perhaps much nearer an explanation of the fact in question,[[42]] nor always quite sure that it is a fact. Everything interests him, but he is in no hurry to get at the bottom of anything; just as in the Lives he is occupied with everything except the depths of his hero's personality. It remains that in his various works he has given us an unexampled pageant of antiquity over a wide reach of time and many lands, and always bright with the colour of life—the work of a lover of men. "I can hardly do without Plutarch," wrote Montaigne; "he is so universal and so full, that upon all occasions, and what extravagant subject soever you take in hand, he will still intrude himself into your business, and holds out to you a liberal and not to be exhausted hand of riches and embellishments." What Shakespeare thought of him is written in three great plays.[[43]]

His wife and children

But so far nothing has been said of Plutarch's own home. The lot of the wife of a great preacher or moralist is not commonly envied; and the tracts which Plutarch wrote upon historic women and their virtues, and on the duties of married life, on diet and on the education of the young, suggest that Timoxena must have lived in an atmosphere of high moral elevation, with a wise saw and an ancient instance for every occurrence of the day. But it is clear that he loved her, and his affection for their four little boys must have been as plain to her as to his readers—and his joy when, after long waiting, at last a little girl was born. "You had longed for a daughter after four sons," he writes to her, "and I was glad when she came and I could give her your name." The little Timoxena lived for two years, and the letter of consolation which Plutarch wrote her mother tells the story of her short life. "She had by nature wonderful good temper and gentleness. So responsive to affection, so generous was she that it was a pleasure to see her tenderness. For she used to bid her nurse give the breast to other children and not to them only, but even to toys and other things in which she took delight. She was so loving that she wished everything that gave her pleasure to share in the best of what she had. I do not see, my dear wife, why things such as these, which gave us so much happiness while she lived, should give us pain and trouble now when we think of them."[[44]] He reminds her of the mysteries of Dionysus of which they were both initiates. In language that recalls Wordsworth's great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, he suggests that old age dulls our impressions of the soul's former life, and that their little one is gone from them, before she had time to fall in love with life on earth. "And the truth about this is to be seen in the ancient use and wont of our fathers," who did not observe the ordinary sad rites of burial for little children, "as if they felt it not right in the case of those who have passed to a better and diviner lot and place.... And since to disbelieve them is harder than to believe, let us comply with the laws in outward things, and let what is within be yet more stainless, pure and holy."[[45]]

Two of the sons had previously died—the eldest Soclaros, and the fourth, "our beautiful Chæron"—the name is that of the traditional founder of Chæronea. The other two, Autobulus and Plutarch grew up. Some of these names appear in the Table Talk, while others of his works were written at the suggestion of his sons.

His slaves

From the family we pass to the slaves, and here, as we should expect, Plutarch is an advocate of gentleness. In the tract On Restraining Anger a high and humane character is drawn in Fundanus, who had successfully mastered a naturally passionate temper. It has been thought that Plutarch was drawing his own portrait over his friend's name. A naïve tendency to idealise his own virtues he certainly shares with other moralists. Fundanus urges that, while all the passions need care and practice if they are to be overcome, anger is the failure to which we are most liable in the case of our slaves. Our authority over them sets us in a slippery place; temper here has nothing to check it, for here we are irresponsible and that is a position of danger. A man's wife and his friends are too apt to call gentleness to the slaves mere easy-going slackness (atonían kaì rhathumían). "I used to be provoked by such criticism myself against my slaves. I was told they were going to pieces for want of correction. Later on I realized that, first of all, it is better to let them grow worse through my forbearance than by bitterness and anger to pervert oneself for the reformation of others. And, further, I saw that many of them, through not being punished, began to be ashamed of being bad, and that forgiveness was more apt than punishment to be the beginning of a change in them—and indeed that they would serve some men more readily for a silent nod than they would others for blows and brandings. So I persuaded myself that reasoning does better than temper."[[46]] It will be remarked that Fundanus, or his recording friend, does not here take the Stoic position that the slave is as much a son of God as the master,[[47]] nor does he spare the slave for the slave's sake but to overcome his own temper. So much for theory; but men's conduct does not always square with their theories, and in life we see men guilty of kind-heartedness and large-mindedness not at all to be reconciled with the theories which they profess, when they remember them.

It is curious that one of the few stories of Plutarch that come from outside sources should concern this very tract and the punishment of a slave. Gellius heard it from the philosopher Taurus after one of his classes. Plutarch, Taurus said, had a worthless slave and ordered him a flogging. The man loudly protested he had done no wrong, and at last, under the stimulus of the lash, taunted his master with inconsistency—what about the fine book on controlling Anger? he was angry enough now. "Then Plutarch, slowly and gently" asked what signs of anger he showed in voice or colour or word? "My eyes, I think, are not fierce; nor my face flushed; I am not shouting aloud; there is no foam on my lip, no red in my cheek; I am saying nothing to be ashamed of; nothing to regret; I am not excited nor gesticulating. All these, perhaps you are unaware, are the signs of anger."[[48]] Then turning to the man who was flogging the slave, he said, "In the meantime, while I and he are debating, you go on with your business."[[49]] The story is generally accepted, and it is certainly characteristic. The philosopher, feeling his pulse, as it were, to make sure that he is not angry, while his slave is being lashed, is an interesting and suggestive picture, which it is well to remember.

How long Plutarch lived we do not know. He refers to events of the year 104 or 105, and in his Solon he speaks of Athens and Plato each having an unfinished masterpiece, so that he cannot have known of the intention of the Emperor Hadrian to finish the temple of Zeus Olympics.[[50]] All that this need imply is that the Solon was written before 125 A.D. As to his death, it is certainly interesting when we recall how full of dreams and portents his Biographies are, to learn from Artemidorus' great work on the Interpretation of Dreams (written some forty years later) that Plutarch, when ill, dreamed that he was ascending to heaven, supported by Hermes. Next day he was told that this meant great happiness. "Shortly after he died, and this was what his dream and the interpretation meant. For ascent to heaven means destruction to a sick man, and the great happiness is a sign of death."[[51]] Plutarch might well have accepted this himself.

Such was Plutarch's life—the life of a quiet and simple-minded Greek gentleman, spent amid scenes where the past predominated over the present,—nullum sine nomine saxum, where Antiquity claimed him for her own by every right that it has ever had upon man. The land of his fathers, the literature, the art, the philosophy, the faith, and the reproduction of the good old life in the pleasant household[[52]]—everything conspired to make him what he was. We now come to his significance in the story of the conflict of religions in the Roman Empire.

Plutarch not a philosopher

A good deal has been written about Plutarch's philosophy. His works are full of references to philosophy and philosophers, and he leaves us in no doubt as to his counting himself a disciple of Plato; his commentaries on Platonic doctrines give him a place in the long series of Plato's expositors. But no one would expect a writer of the first century to be a man of one allegiance, and Plutarch modifies the teaching of Plato with elements from elsewhere. It has then been debated whether he should, or should not, be called an Eclectic, but not very profitably. The essential thing to note is that he is not properly a philosopher at all, much as the statement would have astonished him.[[53]] His real interest is elsewhere; and while he, like the Greeks of his day, read and talked Philosophy interminably, as men in later ages have read and talked Theology, it was not with the philosophic spirit. Philosophy is not the mistress—rather, he avows, the servant of something else; and that means that it is not Philosophy. His test of philosophic thought and doctrine was availability for the moral and religious life—a test which may or may not be sound, as it is applied. But Plutarch was an avowed moralist, didactic in every fibre; and everything he wrote betrays the essential failure of the practical man and the moralist—impatience, the short view. From his experience of human life in its manifold relations of love and friendship, he came to the conclusion that "the ancient faith of our fathers suffices." It is also plain that he was afraid of life without religion. So far as a man of his training would—a man familiar with the history of philosophy, but without patience or depth enough to be clear in his own mind, he associated truth with his religion; at all events it was "sufficient," for this he had found in his course through the world. Definite upon this one central point, he approached philosophy, but not with the true philosopher's purpose of examining his experience, in accordance with the Platonic suggestion[[54]]; rather, with the more practical aim of profiting by every serviceable thought or maxim which he could find. And he certainly profited. If he started with preconceptions, which he intended to keep, he enlarged and purified them—in a sense, we may say, he adorned and enriched them. For whereever he found a moving or suggestive idea, a high thought, he adopted it and found it a place in his mind, though without inquiring too closely whether it had any right to be there. In the end, it is very questionable whether the sum of his ideas will hold together at all, if we go beyond the quick test of a rather unexamined experience. We have already seen how he protested against too curious examination. "There is no philosophy possible," wrote John Stuart Mill, "where fear of consequences is a stronger principle than love of truth."

But to such criticisms a reply is sometimes suggested, which is best made in the well-known words of Pascal—"the heart has its reasons which the reason does not know."[[55]] The experience which led Plutarch to his conclusion was real and sound. There is an evidential value in a good father, in wife and children—even in a telearchy with its tiles and cement—which is apt to be under-estimated. For with such elements in life are linked passions and emotions, which are deeply bound up with human nature, and rule us as instincts—blind reasons of the heart. Like all other things they require study and criticism if they are not to mislead, and those who most follow them are sometimes the worst judges of their real significance. On the other hand the danger of emotion, instinct and intuition as guides to truth is emphasized enough,—it was emphasized by the Stoics; and a contribution is made to human progress, when the value of these guides to truth is re-asserted, even to the extent of obvious exaggeration, by some one, who, like Plutarch, has had a life rich in various human experience. It remains however, in Plutarch's case as in all such cases, the fundamental question, whether the supposed testimony of instinct and intuition is confirmed. If it is not confirmed, it may be taken to have been misunderstood.

Keeping the whole life of this man in view, and realizing its soundness, its sweetness and its worth, we must see what he made of the spiritual environment of man's life in general—laying stress on what in his system, or his attempt at a system, is most significant, and postponing criticism. It should be said once for all that a general statement of Plutarch's views cannot be quite faithful, for he was a man of many and wandering thoughts, and also something of an Academic; and whatever he affirmed was with qualifications, which in a short summary must be understood rather than repeated.

The knowledge of God

Our knowledge of God and of things divine comes to us, according to Plutarch, from various sources. There is the consensus of mankind. "Of all customs first and greatest is belief in gods. Lycurgus, Numa, Ion and Deucalion, alike sanctified men, by prayers and oaths and divinations and oracles bringing them into touch with the divine in their hopes and fears. You might find communities without walls, without letters, without kings, without houses, without money, with no need of coinage, without acquaintance with theatres and gymnasia; but a community without holy rite, without a god, that uses not prayer nor oath, nor divination, nor sacrifice to win good or avert evil—no man ever saw nor will see.... This is what holds all society together and is the foundation and buttress of all law."[[56]]

This evidence from the consensus of mankind is brought to a higher point in the body of myth inherited from the past, and in custom and law—and is so far confirmed by reason. But we can go further and appeal to the highest and best minds of antiquity, who in their own highest moments of inspiration confirmed the common view. "In the matter of belief in gods, and in general, our guides and teachers have been the poets and the lawgivers, and, thirdly, the philosophers—all alike laying down that there are gods, though differing among themselves as to the number of the gods and their order, their nature and function. Those of the philosophers are free from pain and death; toil they know not, and are clean escaped the roaring surge of Acheron."[[57]] "It is likely that the word of ancient poets and philosophers is true," he says.[[58]] Plutarch was a lover of poetry and of literature, and he attributed to them a value as evidence to truth, which is little intelligible to men who have not the same passion.[[59]] Still the appeal to the poets in this connexion was very commonly made.

But men are not only dependent on the tradition of their fathers and the inspiration of poets and philosophers, much as they should, and do, love and honour these. The gods make themselves felt in many ways. There was abundant evidence of this in many established cases of theolepsy, enthusiasm (éntheos) and possession. Again there were the oracles, in which it was clear that gods communicated with men and revealed truths not otherwise to be gained—a clear demonstration of the spiritual. Men were "in anguish and fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years," but Delphi has not failed; for "the language of the Pythian priestess, like the right line of the Mathematicians—the shortest between two points, makes neither declension nor winding, has neither double meaning nor ambiguity, but goes straight to the truth. Though hard to believe and much tested, she has never up to now been convicted of error,—on the contrary she has filled the shrine with offerings and gifts from barbarians and Greeks, and adorned it with the beautiful buildings of the Amphictyons."[[60]] The revival of Delphi in Plutarch's day, "in so short a time," was not man's doing—but "the God came here and inspired the oracle with his divinity." And Delphi was not the only oracle. The Stoics perhaps had pointed the way here with their teaching on divination, but as it stands the argument (such as it is) is said to be Plutarch's own.[[61]] Lastly in this connexion, the mysteries offered evidence, but here he is reticent. "As to the mysteries, in which we may receive the greatest manifestations and illuminations of the truth concerning dæmons—like Herodotus, I say, 'Be it unspoken.'"[[62]]

Absolute being

Philosophy, poetry, tradition, oracles and mysteries[[63]] bring Plutarch to belief in gods. "There are not Greek gods and barbarian, southern or northern; but just as sun, moon, sky, earth and sea are common to all men and have many names, so likewise it is one Reason that makes all these things a cosmos; it is one Providence that cares for them, with ancillary powers appointed to all things; while in different people, different honours and names are given to them as customs vary. Some use hallowed symbols that are faint, others symbols more clear, as they guide their thought to the divine."[[64]] This one ultimate Reason is described by Plutarch in terms borrowed from all the great teachers who had spoken to the Greeks of God. The Demiurge, the One and Absolute, the World-Soul and the rest all contribute features.[[65]]

"We," he says, "have really no share in Being, but every mortal nature, set between becoming and perishing, offers but a show and a seeming of itself, dim and insecure"; and he quotes the famous saying of Heraclitus that it is impossible to descend into the same river twice, and develops the idea of change in the individual. "No one remains, nor is he one, but we become many as matter now gathers and now slips away about one phantasm and a common form (or impress).... Sense through ignorance of Being is deceived into thinking that the appearance is. What then indeed is Being? The eternal, free from becoming, free from perishing, for which no time brings change.... It is even impious to say 'Was' or 'Will be' of Being; for these are the varyings and passings and changings of that which by nature cannot abide in Being. But God is, we must say, and that not in time, but in the æon that knows no motion, time or variation, where is neither former nor latter, future nor past, older nor younger; but God is one, and with one Now he has filled Always, and is alone therein the one that Is."[[66]]

The symbol E at Delphi affords him a text here. It is one of "the kind Apollo's" riddles to stimulate thought. Plutarch read it as Epsilon and translates it "Thou Art," and from this as from the very name of Apollo he draws a lesson as to the nature of real Being. The name A-poll-ô means of itself the "Not-Many," and the symbol E is the soul's address to God—God is, and God is one. Not every one understands the nature of the divine; men confuse God with his manifestations. "Those who suppose Apollo and the sun to be one and the same, we should welcome and love for their pious speech, because they attach the idea (epínoia) of God to that thing which they honour most of all they know and crave for," but we should point them higher, "bid them go upward and see the truth of their dream, the real Being (tèn ousían)." They may still honour the image—the visible sun. But that a god should do the work of the sun, that there should be changes and progressions in a god, that he should project fire from himself and extend himself into land, sea, winds and animals, and into all the strange experiences of animals and plants (as the Stoics taught)—it is not holy even to hear such things mentioned. No, God is not like Homer's child playing on the sand, making and unmaking; all this belongs to another god, or rather dæmon, set over nature with its becomings and perishings.[[67]] To confuse gods and dæmons is to make disorder of everything.

It is here that the real interest of Plutarch's theology begins; for, as Christian apologists were quick to point out, all the philosophers were in the last resort monotheists. But the ultimate One God is by common consent far from all direct contact with this or any other universe of becoming and perishing. For it was questioned how many universes (kósmoi) there might be[[68]]—some conjecturing there would be one hundred and eighty-three—and if there were more than one, the Stoics asked what became of Fate and Destiny, and would there not be many "Zeuses or Zênes"? Why should there be? asked Plutarch; why not in each universe a guide and ruler with mind and reason, such as he who in our universe is called lord and father of all? What hinders that they should all be subjects of the Fate and Destiny that Zeus controls; that he should appoint to each several one of them his own realm, and the seeds and reasons of everything achieved in it; that he should survey them, and they be responsible to him? That in the whole scheme of things there should be ten universes, or fifty, or a hundred, all governed by one Reason, all subordinate to one rule, is not impossible. The Ultimate God rules through deputies.[[69]]

The deputies of the supreme

These deputies are Plutarch's chief concern in theology. The Stoics and he were at one about the Supreme and Ultimate God, waiving the matter of personality, which he asserted and which they left open. But when the Stoics turned the deputy gods into natural forces, which we might call laws of nature, or, still worse, into natural objects like wine and grain,[[70]] Plutarch grew angry and denounced such teaching as atheism. "We must not as it were turn them into queen-bees who can never go out, nor keep them shut up in the prison of matter, or rather packed up, as they (the Stoics) do, when they turn the gods into conditions of the atmosphere and mingled forces of water and fire, and thus beget them with the universe and again burn them up with it; they do not leave the gods at liberty and free to move, as if they were charioteers or steersmen; no! like images they are nailed down, even fused to their bases, when they are thus shut up into the material, yes, and riveted to it, by being made partakers with it in destruction and resolution and change."[[71]] This is one of many assertions of the existence of ancillary gods, who are not metaphors, nor natural laws, but personal rulers of provinces, which may very well be each a universe, free and independent. "The true Zeus" has a far wider survey than "the Homeric Zeus" who looked away from Troy to Thrace and the Danube, nor does he contemplate a vacant infinite without, nor yet (as some say) himself and nothing else. To judge from the motions of the heavens, the divine really enjoys variety, and is glad to survey movement, the actions of gods and men, the periods of the stars.[[72]]

Dæmons

Thus under the Supreme is a hierarchy of heavenly powers or gods, and again between them and men is another order of beings, the dæmons.[[73]] These, unlike the gods, are of mixed nature, for while the gods are emanations or Logoi of the Supreme, the dæmons have something of the perishable. "Plato and Pythagoras and Xenocrates and Chrysippus, following the ancient theologians, say that dæmons are stronger than men and far excel us in their natural endowment; but the divine element in them is not unmixed nor undiluted, but partakes of the soul's nature and the body's sense-perception, and is susceptive of pleasure and pain, while the passions which attend these mutations affect them, some of them more and others less. For there are among dæmons, as among men, differences of virtue and wickedness."[[74]] "It can be proved on the testimony of wise and ancient witnesses that there are natures, as it were on the frontiers of gods and men, that admit mortal passions and inevitable changes, whom we may rightly, after the custom of our fathers, consider to be dæmons, and so calling them, worship them."[[75]] If the atmosphere were abolished between the earth and the moon (for beyond air and moon it was generally supposed that the gods lived[[76]]), the void would destroy the unity of the universe; and in precisely the same way "those who do not leave us the race of dæmons, destroy all intercourse and contact between gods and men, by abolishing what Plato called the interpretive and ancillary nature, or else they compel us to make confusion and disorder of everything, by bringing God in among mortal passions and mortal affairs, fetching him down for our needs, as they say the witches in Thessaly do with the moon."[[77]] And "he, who involves God in human needs, does not spare his majesty, nor does he maintain the dignity and greatness of God's excellence."[[78]] The Stoic teaching that men are "parts of God" makes God responsible for every human act of wickedness and sin—the common weakness of every pantheistic system.[[79]]

Thus the dæmons serve two purposes in religious philosophy. They safeguard the Absolute and the higher gods from contact with matter, and they relieve the Author of Good from responsibility for evil. At the same time they supply the means of that relation to the divine which is essential for man's higher life—"passing on the prayers and supplications of men thitherward, and thence bringing oracles and gifts of blessing."[[80]] "They say well, who say that when Plato discovered the element underlying qualities that are begotten—what nowadays they call matter and nature—he set philosophers free from many great difficulties; but to me they seem to solve more difficulties and greater ones, who set the race of dæmons between gods and men and discovered that in some such way it made a community of us and brought us together, whether the theory belongs to the Magians who follow Zoroaster, or is Thracian and comes from Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian."[[81]] Homer, he adds, still uses the terms "gods" and "dæmons" alike; "it was Hesiod who first clearly and distinctly set forth the four classes of beings endowed with reason, gods, dæmons, heroes and finally men."

The dæmons, then, are the agents of Providence, of the One Reason, which orders the universe; they are the ministers of the divine care for man. And here perhaps their mediation is helped by the fact that the border lines between themselves and the gods above on the one hand, and men below on the other, are not fixed and final. Some dæmons, such as Isis, Osiris, Herakles and Dionysos, have by their virtue risen to be gods,[[82]] while their own numbers have been recruited from the souls of good men.[[83]] "Souls which are delivered from becoming (geneseôs) and thenceforth have rest from the body, as being utterly set free, are the dæmons that care for men, as Hesiod says";[[84]] and, just as old athletes enjoy watching and encouraging young ones, "so the dæmons, who through worth of soul are done with the conflicts of life," do not despise what they have left behind, but are kindly minded to such as strive for the same goal,—especially when they see them close upon their hope, struggling and all but touching it. As in the case of a shipwreck those on shore will run out into the waves to lend a hand to the sailors they can reach (though if they are out on the sea, to watch in silence is all that can be done), so the dæmons help us "while the affairs of life break over us (baptixoménous hypò tôn pragmatôn) and we take one body after another as it were carriages." Above all they help us if we strive of our own virtue to be saved and reach the haven.[[85]]

But this is not all, for in his letter written to console Apollonios Plutarch carries us further. There was, he says, a man who lost his only son—he was afraid, by poison. It perhaps adds confidence to the story that Plutarch gives his name and home; he was Elysios of Terina in Southern Italy. The precision is characteristic. Elysios accordingly went to a psychomanteion, a shrine where the souls of the dead might be consulted.[[86]] He duly sacrificed and went to sleep in the temple. He saw in a dream his own father with a youth strikingly like the dead son, and he was told that this was "the son's dæmon,"[[87]] and that the death had been natural, and right for the lad and for his parents. Elsewhere Plutarch quotes the lines of Menander—

By each man standeth, from his natal hour,
A dæmon, his kind mystagogue through life—[[88]]

but he prefers the view of Empedocles that there are two such beings in attendance on each of us.[[89]] The classical instance of a guardian spirit was the "daimonion" of Socrates, on which both Plutarch and Apuleius wrote books.[[90]] Plutarch discusses many theories that had been given of it, but hardly convinces the reader that he really knew what Socrates meant.

In a later generation it was held that if proper means were taken the guardian spirit would come visibly before a man's eyes. So Apuleius held, and Porphyry records that when an Egyptian priest called on the dæmon of Plotinus to manifest himself in the temple of Isis (the only "pure" spot the Egyptian could find in Rome), there came not a dæmon but a god; so great a being was Plotinus.[[91]] Plutarch discusses the question of such bodily appearances in connexion with the legend of Numa and Egeria. He can believe that God would not disdain the society of a specially good and holy man, but as for the idea that god or dæmon would have anything to do with a human body—"that would indeed require some persuasion." "Yet the Egyptians plausibly say that it is not impossible for the spirit of a god to have intercourse with a woman and beget some beginnings of life," though Plutarch finds a difficulty in such a union of unequals.[[92]]

Plutarch has comparatively little to say of visible appearances of tutelary or other dæmons. To what lengths of credulity men went in this direction will be shown in a later chapter. Yet a guardian who does not communicate in some way with the person he guards, and a series of dæmonic and divine powers content to be inert and silent, would be futile; and in fact there was, Plutarch held, abundance of communication between men and the powers above them. It was indeed one of the main factors of his religion that man's life is intimately related to the divine.

Plutarch, of course, could know nothing of the language in use to-day, but it is clear that he was familiar with some or all of the phænomena, which in our times have received a vocabulary of their own, for the moment very impressive. Psychopathic, auto-suggestion, telepathy, the subliminal self—the words may tell us something; whether what they tell us is verifiable, remains to be seen. Plutarch's account of the facts, for the description of which this language has been invented, seems even more fantastic to a modern reader, but it must be remembered that he and his contemporaries were led to it at once by observation of psychical phænomena, still to be observed, and by philosophic speculation on the transcendence of God. As a body of theories, the ancient system holds together as well as most systems in the abstract. It was not in theory that it broke down. Plutarch as usual presents it with reservations.

The mantic art

The dæmons are not slow to speak; it is we who are slow to hear. "In truth we men recognize one another's thoughts, as it were feeling after them in the dark by means of the voice. But the thoughts of the dæmons are luminous and shine for those who can see; and they need no words or names, such as men use among themselves as symbols to see images and pictures of what is thought, while, as for the things actually thought, those they only know who have some peculiar and dæmonic light. The words of the dæmons are borne through all things, but they sound only for those who have the untroubled nature and the still soul—those, in fact, whom we call holy and happy (daimoníous)."[[93]] Most people think the dæmon only comes to men when they are asleep, but this is due to their want of harmony. "The divine communicates immediately (di autoû) with few and but rarely; to most men it gives signs, from which rises the so-called Mantic art"[[94]]—prophecy or soothsaying. All souls have the "mantic" faculty—the capacity for receiving impressions from dæmons—though not in an equal degree. A dæmon after all is, from one point of view, merely a disembodied soul, and it may meet a soul incorporated in a body; and thus, soul meeting soul, there are produced "impressions of the future,"[[95]] for a voice is not needed to convey thought.

But if a disembodied soul can foresee the future, why should not a soul in a body also be able? In point of fact, the soul has this power, but it is dulled by the body. Memory is a parallel gift. Some souls only shake off the influence of the body in dreams, some at the approach of death.[[96]] The mantic element is receptive of impressions and of anticipations by means of feelings, and without reasoning process (asyllogistôs) it touches the future when it can get clear of the present. The state, in which this occurs, is called "enthusiasm," god-possession—and into this the body will sometimes fall of itself, and sometimes it is cast into it by some vapour or exhalation sent up by the earth. This vapour or whatever it is (tò mantikòn theûma kaì pneûma) pervades the body, and produces in the soul a disposition, or combination (krâsin), unfamiliar and strange, hard to describe, but from what is said it may be divined. "Probably by heat and diffusion it opens pores [or channels] whereby impressions of the future may be received."[[97]] Such a vapour was found to issue from the ground at Delphi—the accidental discovery of a shepherd, Coretas by name, who spoke "words with God in them" (phônàs enthousiódeis) under its influence; and it was not till his words proved true that attention was paid to the place and the vapour. There is the same sort of relation between the soul and the mantic vapour as between the eye and light.

But does not this vapour theory do away with the other theory that divination is mediated to us by the gods through the dæmons? Plutarch cites Plato's objection to Anaxagoras who was "entangled in natural causes" and lost sight of better causes and principles beyond them. There are double causes for everything. The ancients said that all things come from Zeus; those who came later, natural philosophers (physidoì), on the contrary "wandered away from the fair and divine principle," and made everything depend on bodies, impacts, changes and combinations (krâsis); and both miss something of the truth. "We do not make Mantic either godless or void of reason, when we give it the soul of man as its material, and the enthusiastic spirit and exhalation as its tool or plectron. For, first, the earth that produces these exhalations—and the sun, who gives the earth the power of combination (krâsis) and change, is by the tradition of our fathers a god; and then we leave dæmons installed as lords and warders and guards of this combination (krâseôs), now loosening and now tightening (as if it were a harmony), taking away excessive ecstasy and confusion, and gently and painlessly blending the motive power for those who use it. So we shall not seem guilty of anything unreasonable or impossible."[[98]]

Plutarch gives an interesting account of a potion, which will produce the same sort of effect. The Egyptians compound it in a very mystical way of sixteen drugs, nearly all of which are fragrant, while the very number sixteen as the square of a square has remarkable properties or suggestions. The mixture is called Kyphi, and when inhaled it calms the mind and reduces anxiety, and "that part of us which receives impressions (phantastikòn) and is susceptive of dreams, it rubs down and cleans as if it were a mirror."[[99]]

The gods, he says, are our first and chiefest friends.[[100]] Not every one indeed so thinks—"for see what Jews and Syrians think of the gods!"[[101]] But Plutarch insists that there is no joy in life apart from them. Epicureans may try to deliver us from the wrath of the gods, but they do away with their kindness at the same moment; and Plutarch holds it better that there should even be some morbid element (pháthos) of reverence and fear in our belief than that, in our desire to avoid this, we should leave ourselves neither hope, nor kindness, nor courage in prosperity, nor any recourse to the divine when we are in trouble.[[102]] Superstition is a rheum that gathers in the eye of faith, which we do well to remove, but not at the cost of knocking the eye out or blinding it.[[103]] In any case, its inconvenience is outweighed "ten thousand times" by the glad and joyous hopefulness that counts all blessing as coming from the gods. And he cites in proof of this that joy in temple-service, to which reference has already been made. Those who abolish Providence need no further punishment than to live without it.[[104]]

But the pleasures of faith are not only those of imagination or emotion. For while the gods give us all blessings, there is none better for man to receive or more awful for God to bestow than truth. Other things God gives to men, mind and thought he shares with them, for these are his attributes, and "I think that of God's own eternal life the happiness lies in his knowledge being equal to all that comes; for without knowledge and thought, immortality would be time and not life."[[105]] The very name of Isis is etymologically connected with knowing (eidénai); and the goal of her sacred rites is "knowledge of the first and sovereign and intelligible, whom the goddess bids us seek and find in her."[[106]] Her philosophy is "hidden for the most part in myths, and in true tales (lógois) that give dim visions and revelations of truth."[[107]] Her temple at Sais bears the inscription: "I am all that has been and is and shall be, and my veil no mortal yet has lifted."[[108]] She is the goddess of "Ten Thousand Names."[[109]]

Plutarch connects with his belief in the gods "the great hypothesis" of immortality. "It is one argument that at one and the same time establishes the providence of God and the continuance of the human soul, and you cannot do away with the one and leave the other."[[110]] If we had nothing divine in us, nothing like God, if we faded like the leaves (as Homer said), God would hardly give us so much thought, nor would he, like women with their gardens of Adonis, tend and culture "souls of a day," growing in the flesh which will admit no "strong root of life." The dialogue, in which this is said, is supposed to have taken place in Delphi, so Plutarch turns to Apollo. "Do you think that, if Apollo knew that the souls of the dying perished at once, blowing away like mist or smoke from their bodies, he would ordain so many propitiations for the dead, and ask such great gifts and honours for the departed—that he would cheat and humbug believers? For my part, I will never let go the continuance of the soul, unless some Herakles shall come and take away the Pythia's tripod and abolish and destroy the oracle. For as long as so many oracles of this kind are given even in our day, it is not holy to condemn the soul to death."[[111]] And Plutarch fortifies his conviction with stories of oracles, and of men who had converse with dæmons, with apocalypses and revelations, among which are two notable Descents into Hades,[[112]] and a curious account of dæmons in the British Isles.[[113]]

The theory of dæmons lent itself to the explanation of the origin of evil, but speculation in this direction seems not to have appealed to Plutarch. He uses bad dæmons to explain the less pleasant phases of paganism, as we shall see, but the question of evil he scarcely touches. In his book on Isis and Osiris he discusses Typhon as the evil element in nature, and refers with interest to the views of "the Magian Zoroaster who, they say, lived about five hundred years before the Trojan War." Zoroaster held that there were two divine beings, the better being a god, Horomazes (Ormuzd), the other a dæmon Areimanios (Ahriman), the one most like to light of all sensible things, the other to darkness and ignorance, "and between them is Mithras, for which reason the Persians call Mithras the Mediator." But the hour of Mithras was not yet come, and in all his writings Plutarch hardly alludes to him more than half a dozen times.[[114]] It should be noted that, whatever his interest in Eastern dualism with its Western parallels, Plutarch does not abandon his belief in the One Ultimate Good God.

This then in bare outline is a scheme of Plutarch's religion, though, as already noted, the scheme is not of his own making, but is put together from incidental utterances, all liable to qualification. It is not the religion of a philosopher; and the qualifications, which look like concessions to philosophic hesitation, mean less than they suggest. They are entrenchments thrown up against philosophy. He is an educated Greek who has read the philosophers, but he is at heart an apologist—a defender of myth, ritual, mystery and polytheism. He has compromised where Plato challenged. His front (to carry out the military metaphor) extends over a very long line—a line in places very weakly supported, and the dæmons form its centre. It is the dæmons who link men to the gods, and through them to the Supreme, making the universe a unity; who keep the gods immune from contact with matter and from the suggestion of evil; and what is more, they enable Plutarch to defend the myths of Greek and Egyptian tradition from the attack of philosopher and unbeliever. And this defence of myth was probably more to him than the unity of the universe. Every kind of myth was finding a home in the eventual Greek religion, many of them obscene, bestial and cruel—revolting to the purity and the tenderness developing more and more in the better minds of Greece. They could not well be detached from the religion, so they had to be defended.

There are, for example, many elements in the myth of Isis and Osiris that are disgusting. Plutarch recommends us first of all, by means of the preconceptions supplied by Greek philosophy upon the nature of God, to rule out what is objectionable as unworthy of God, but not to do this too harshly. Myth after all is a sort of rainbow to the sun of reason,[[115]] and should be received "in a holy and philosophic spirit."[[116]] We must not suppose that this or the other story "happened so and was actually done." Many things told of Isis and Osiris, if they were supposed to have truly befallen "the blessed and incorruptible nature" of the gods, would be "lawless and barbarous fancy" which, as Æschylus says—

You must spit out and purify your mouth.[[117]]

But, all the same, myth must be handled tenderly and not in too rationalistic a spirit—for that might be opening the doors to "the atheist people." Euhemerus, by recklessly turning all the gods into generals and admirals and kings of ancient days, has covered the whole world with atheism,[[118]] and the Stoics, as we have seen, are not much better, who turn the gods into their own gifts. No, we may handle myth far too freely—"ah! yet consider it again!" There are so many possibilities of acceptance. And "in the rites of Isis there is nothing unreasonable, nothing fictitious, nor anything introduced by superstition, but some things have an ethical value, others a historical or physical suggestion."[[119]]

Evil dæmons

In the second place, if nothing can be done for the myth or the rite—if it is really an extreme case—Plutarch falls back upon the dæmons. There are differences among them as there are among men, and the elements of passion and unreason are strong in some of them; and traces of these are to be found in rites and initiations and myths here and there. Rituals in which there is the eating of raw flesh, or the rending asunder of animals, fasting or beating of the breast, or again the narration of obscene legends, are to be attributed to no god but to evil dæmons. How many such rituals survived, Plutarch does not say and perhaps he did not know; but the Christian apologists were less reticent, and Clement of Alexandria and Firmicus Maternus and the rest have abundant evidence about them. Some of these rites, Plutarch says, must have been practised to avert the attention of the dæmons. "The human sacrifices that used to be performed," could not have been welcome to the gods, nor would kings and generals have been willing to sacrifice their own children unless they had been appeasing the anger of ugly, ill-tempered, and vengeful spirits, who would bring pestilence and war upon a people till they obtained what they sought. "Moreover as for all they say and sing in myth and hymn, of rapes and wanderings of the gods, of their hiding, of their exile and of their servitude, these are not the experiences of gods but of dæmons." It is not right to say that Apollo fought a dragon for the Delphic shrine.[[120]]

But some such tales were to be found in the finest literature of the Greeks, and they were there told of the gods.[[121]] In reply to this, one of Plutarch's characters quotes the narrative of a hermit by the Red Sea.[[122]] This holy man conversed with men once a year, and the rest of the time he consorted with wandering nymphs and dæmons—"the most beautiful man I ever saw, and quite free from all disease." He lived on a bitter fruit which he ate once a month. This sage declared that the legends told of Dionysus and the rites performed in his honour at Delphi really pertained to a dæmon. "If we call some dæmons by the names that belong to gods,—no wonder," said this stranger, "for a dæmon is constantly called after the god, to whom he is assigned, and from whom he has his honour and his power"—just as men are called Athenæus or Dionysius—and many of them have no sort of title to the gods' names they bear.[[123]]

Superstition

With Philosophy so ready to be our mystagogue and to lead us into the true knowledge of divine goodness, and with so helpful a theory to explain away all that is offensive in traditional religion, faith ought to be as easy as it is happy and wholesome. But there is another danger beside Atheism—its exact opposite, superstition; and here—apart from philosophical questions—lay the practical difficulty of Plutarch's religion. He accepted almost every cult and mythology which the ancient world had handed down; Polytheism knows no false gods. But to guide one's course aright, between the true myth and the depraved, to distinguish between the true and good god and the pseudonymous dæmon, was no easy task. The strange mass of Egyptian misunderstandings was a testimony to this—some in their ignorance thought the gods underwent the actual experience of the grain they gave men to sow, just as untaught Greeks identified the gods with their images; and some Egyptians worshipped the animals sacred to the gods; and so religion was brought into contempt, while "the weak and harmless" fell into unbounded superstition, and the shrewder and bolder into "beastly and atheistic reflections."[[124]] And yet on second thoughts Plutarch has a kindly apology for animal-worship.[[125]]

Plutarch himself wrote a tract on superstition in which some have found a note of rhetoric or special pleading, for he decidedly gives the atheist the superiority over the superstitious, a view which Amyot, his great translator, called dangerous, for "it is certain that Superstition comes nearer the mean of true Religion than does Atheism."[[126]] Perhaps it did in the sixteenth century, but in Plutarch's day superstition was the real enemy to be crushed. Nearly every superstitious practice he cites appears in other writers.

Superstition, the worst of all terrors, like all other terrors kills action. It makes no truce with sleep, the refuge from other fears and pains. It invents all kinds of strange practices, immersions in mud, baptisms,[[127]] prostrations, shameful postures, outlandish worships. He who fears "the gods of his fathers and his race, saviours, friends and givers of good"—whom will he not fear? Superstition adds to the dread of death "the thought of eternal woes." The atheist lays his misfortunes down to accident and looks for remedies. The superstitious makes all into judgments, "the strokes of God," and will have no remedies lest he should seem "to fight against God" (theomacheîn). "Leave me, Sir, to my punishment!" he cries, "me the impious, the accursed, hated of Gods and dæmons"—so he sits in rags and rolls in the mud, confessing his sins and iniquities, how he ate or drank or walked when the dæmonion forbade. "Wretched man!" he says to himself, "Providence ordains thy suffering; it is God's decree." The atheist thinks there are no gods; the superstitious wishes there were none. It is they who have invented the sacrifices of children that prevailed at Carthage[[128]] and other things of the kind. If Typhons and Giants were to drive out the gods and become our rulers, what worse could they ask?

A hint from the Conjugal Precepts may be added here, as it suggests a difficulty in practice. "The wife ought not to have men friends of her own but to share her husband's; and the gods are our first and best friends. So those gods whom the the husband acknowledges, the wife ought to worship and own, and those alone, and keep the great door shut on superfluous devotions and foreign superstitions. No god really enjoys the stolen rites of a woman in secret."[[129]] This is a counsel of peace, but if "ugly, ill-tempered and vengeful spirits" seem to the mother to threaten her children, who will decide what are superfluous devotions?

The religion of Plutarch is a different thing from his morality. For his ethics rest on an experience much more easy to analyse, and like every elderly and genial person he has much that he can say of the kindly duties of life. Every reader will own the beauty and the high tone of much of his teaching, though some will feel that its centre is the individual, and that it is pleasant rather than compulsive and inevitable. After all nearly every religion has, somewhere or other, what are called "good ethics," but the vital question is, "What else?" In the last resort is ecstasy, independently of morality, the main thing? Are words and acts holy as religious symbols which in a society are obviously vicious? What propellent power lies behind the morals? And where are truth and experience?

Apology or truth?

What then is to be said of Plutarch's religion? Here his experience was not so readily intelligible, and every inherited and acquired instinct within him conspired to make him cling to tradition and authority as opposed to independent judgment. His philosophy was not Plato's, in spite of much that he borrowed from Plato, for its motive was not the love of truth. The stress he lays upon the pleasure of believing shows that his ultimate canon is emotion. He does not really wish to find truth on its own account, though he honestly would like its support. He wishes to believe, and believe he will—sit pro ratione voluntas. "There is something of the woman in Plutarch," says Mr Lecky. Like men of this temperament in every age, he surrenders to emotion, and emotion declines into sentimentalism. He cannot firmly say that anything, with which religious feeling has ever been associated, has ceased to be useful and has become false. He may talk bravely of shutting the great door against Superstition, but Superstition has many entrances—indeed, was indoors already.

We have only to look at his treatise on Isis and Osiris to see the effects of compromise in religion. He will never take a firm stand; there are always possibilities, explanations, parallels, suggestions, symbolisms, by which he can escape from facing definitely the demand for a decisive reformation of religion. As a result, in spite of the radiant mist of amiability, which he diffuses over these Egyptian gods, till the old myths seem capable of every conceivable interpretation, and everything a symbol of everything else, and all is beautiful and holy—the foolish and indecent old stories remain a definite and integral part of the religion, the animals are still objects of worship and the image of Osiris stands in its original naked obscenity.[[130]] And the Egyptian is not the only religion, for, as Tertullian points out, the old rites are still practised every where!" with unabated horrors, symbol or no symbol.[[131]] Plutarch emphasizes the goodness and friendliness of the gods, but he leaves the evil dæmons in all their activity. Strange and awful sacrifices of the past he deprecates, but he shows no reason why they should not continue. God, he says, is hardly to be conceived by man's mind as in a dream; and he thanks heaven for its peculiar grace that the oracles are reviving in his day; he believes in necromancy, theolepsy and nearly every other grotesque means of intercourse with gods and dæmons. He calls himself a Platonist; he is proud of the great literature of Greece; but nearly all that we associate in religious thought with such names as Xenophanes, Euripides and Plato, he gently waves aside on the authority of Apollo. It raises the dignity of Seneca when we set beside him this delightful man of letters, so full of charm, so warm with the love of all that is beautiful, so closely knit to the tender emotions of ancestral piety—and so unspeakably inferior in essential truthfulness.

The ancient world rejected Seneca, as we have seen, and chose Plutarch. If Plutarch was not the founder of Neo-Platonism, he was one of its precursors and he showed the path. Down that path ancient religion swung with deepening emotion into that strange medley of thought and mystery, piety, magic and absurdity, which is called the New Platonism and has nothing to do with Plato. Here and there some fine spirit emerged into clearer air, and in some moment of ecstasy achieved "by a leap" some fleeting glimpse of Absolute Being, if there is such a thing. But the mass of men remained below in a denser atmosphere, prisoners of ignorance and of fancy—in an atmosphere not merely dark but tainted, full of spiritual and intellectual death.

Chapter III Footnotes:

[[1]] Amatorius, 13, 756 A, D; 757 B. The quotation is from Euripides, Bacchæ, 203.

[[2]] Non suaviter, 21, 1101 E-1102 A.

[[3]] de Iside, 68, 378 A.

[[4]] de def. orac. 8, 414 A.

[[5]] Mahaffy, Silver Age of Greek World, p. 45.

[[6]] Horace is the best known of Athenian students. The delightful letters of Synesius show the hold Athens still retained upon a very changed world in 400 A.D.

[[7]] Life of Antony, 68.

[[8]] Symp. i, 5, 1.

[[9]] Symp. iv, 4, 4.

[[10]] v. Ant. 28.

[[11]] Symp. iii, 7, 1.

[[12]] Symp. ii, 8, 1.

[[13]] Symp. viii, 6, 5, hubristès òn kaì philogelôs physei. Symp. ix, 15, 1.

[[14]] de fraterno amore, 16, 487 E. Volkmann, Plutarch, i, 24, suggests he was the Timon whose wife Pliny defended on one occasion, Epp. i, 5, 5.

[[15]] de frat. am. 7, 481 D.

[[16]] de E. 1, 385 B.

[[17]] v. Them. 32, end.

[[18]] Zeller, Eclectics, 334.

[[19]] de E. 17, 391 E. Imagine the joys of a Euclid, says Plutarch, in non suaviter, 11, 1093 E.

[[20]] Symp. ix, 15.

[[21]] Symp. viii, 3, I.

[[22]] Pericles 13.

[[23]] Dio Chr. Rhodiaca, Or. 31, 117.

[[24]] Cf. the Nigrinus.

[[25]] Gellius, N.A. ii, 21, 1, vos opici, says Gellius to his friends—Philistines.

[[26]] Symp. v, 5, 1.

[[27]] Polit. præc. 20, 816 D.

[[28]] de curiositate, 15.

[[29]] Demosthenes, 2.

[[30]] See Volkmann, i, 35, 36; Rom. Qu. 103; Lucullus, 37, end.

[[31]] Demosthenes, 2.

[[32]] de sera, 15, 559 A.

[[33]] de Stoic. rep. 2, 1033 B, C.

[[34]] Pol. Præc. 15, 811 C.

[[35]] Symp. ii, 10, 1; vi, 8, 1.

[[36]] Reference to Polemo's hand-book to them, Symp. v, 2, 675 B.

[[37]] de E. 384 F.

[[38]] Demosthenes, 2; and 1.

[[39]] Timoleon, pref.

[[40]] Alexander, 1.

[[41]] de tranqu. animi, i, 464 F, ouk akroáseôs héneka therôménês kalligraphían—a profession often made, but in Plutarch's case true enough as a rule.

[[42]] See, e.g., variety of possible explanations of the E at Delphi, in tract upon it.

[[43]] Stapfer, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (tr.), p. 299. "It may be safely said he followed Plutarch far more closely than he did even the old English chroniclers."

[[44]] Cons. ad Ux. 2-3, 608 C, D.

[[45]] Cons. ad Ux. 11, 612 A, B. Cf. non suaviter, 26, 1104 C, on the loss of a child or a parent.

[[46]] de coh. ira. 11, 459 C; cf. Progress in Virtue, 80 B, 81 C, on epieíkeia and praotês as signs of moral progress.

[[47]] Cf. Sen. Ep. 47; Clem. Alex. Pæd. iii, 92.

[[48]] A curious parallel to this in Tert. de Patientia, 15, where Tertullian draws the portrait of Patience—perhaps from life, as Dean Robinson suggests—after Perpetua the martyr.

[[49]] Gellius, N.A. i, 26.

[[50]] Solon, 32.

[[51]] Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, iv, 72. On this author see chapter vii.

[[52]] See non suaviter, 17, 1098 D, on the unspeakably rich joy of such a life of friendly relations with gods and men.

[[53]] Progress in Virtue, 4, 77 C, Love of Philosophy compared to a lover's passion, to "hunger and thirst."

[[54]] Plato, Apology, 38 A, ho dè anexétastos bíos ou biôtos anthrópô.

[[55]] Pensées, Art. xxiv, 5.

[[56]] Adv. Coloten (foe Epicurean), 31, 1125 D, E. For this argument from consensus, see Seneca, Ep. 117, 6, Multum dare solemus præsumptioni omnium hominum et apud nos veritatis argumentum est aliquid omnibus videri: tanquam deos esse inter alia hoc colligimus, quod omnibus insita de dis opinio est, nee ulla gens usquam est adeo extra leges moresque projecta ut non aliquos deos credat. This consensus rests (with the Stoics) on the common preconceptions of the mind, which are natural. For ridicule of the doctrine of consensus, see Lucian, Zeus Tragædus, 42.

[[57]] Amatorius, 18, 763 C. Cf. view of Celsus ap. Orig. c. Cels. vii, 41.

[[58]] Consol. ad Apoll. 34, 120 B.

[[59]] Quomodo Poetas, 1, 15 E, F, poetry a preliminary study to philosophy, prophilosophêtéon toîs poiémasin.

[[60]] de Pyth. orac. 29, 408 F. Cf. the pagan's speech in Minucius Felix, 7, 6, pleni et mixti deo vates futura præcerpunt ... etiam per guietem deos videmus....

[[61]] So Volkmann, Plutarch, ii, 290 n. Cf. a passage of Celsus, Orig. c. Cels. viii, 45.

[[62]] de def. or. 14, 417 C, empháseis and diapháseis.

[[63]] Tertullian sums up the pagan line of argument and adds a telling criticism in his book adversus Nationes, ii, 1: adversus hæc igitur nobis negotium est, adversus institutiones maiorum, auctoritates receptorum, leges dominantium, argumentationes prudentium, adversus vetustatem consuetudinem necessitatem, adversus exempla prodigia miracula, quæ omnia adulterinam istam divinitatem corroboraverint.... Maior in huiusmodi penes vos auctoritas litterarum quam rerum est.

[[64]] de Iside, 67, 377 F-378 A

[[65]] Oakesmith, Religion of Plutarch, p. 88—a book which I have found of great use.

[[66]] de E. 18-20. Cf. Clem. Alex. Protr. 84. The true To-day of God is eternity. Also Tert. ad Natt. ii, 6, on the axiom of no change in God.

[[67]] de E. 21.

[[68]] Cf. Plato, Timæus, 55 D.

[[69]] Plutarch, de. def. orac. 29, 425 F-426 A. Celsus has the same view; (Origen, c. Cels. v, 25; vii, 68): the world's regions are severally allotted to epoptai under Providence; so that local usages may well be maintained in such form as pleases them; to alter these would be impious, while to worship the dæmons is to honour God, who is not jealous of them. Cf. Plutarch, de fortuna Romanorum, 11, 324 B, ho Rômaiôn mégas daímôn ... tê pólei synebésas kaì synauxetheis, kthe—the tract is a poor and rhetorical one, and the phrase may be merely a synonym for "luck." See also Celsus (Orig. c. Cels. viii, 58) on the Egyptian attribution of the human body to thirty-six "dæmons or gods of æther," so that by prayer to the right one disease in any part of the body may be cured; Celsus gives some of their names. The Christians assumed a somewhat similar scheme with a rather different development. Athenagoras, an apologist of the second century, gives the following account in his Presbeia, 24-27. A system of angels under Providence existed, some good and some bad, enjoying free-will as men also do; "the ruler of matter and of the forms in it" lusted after virgins and succumbed to flesh, and neglected the administration entrusted to him; others fell with him; they cannot regain heaven but meantime occupy the air; their children by mortal women were giants and the souls of these are the dæmons; the ruler of matter directs all things against God; with matter are connected the soul's worse impulses. See also Clem. Alex. Strom. vi, 157, on angelic governance of individual nations and cities; and Lactantius, Instit. ii, 8, 14, whose account fairly resembles that of Athenagoras. Tertullian, however, suggests (Apol. 11) that the Creator had no need of ancillary gods to complete his work.

[[70]] For a summary of Stoic teaching here, see Cicero, N.D. ii, 60-70.

[[71]] de def. orac. 29, 426 B. Cf. de Iside, 66, 377 D, E. "You might as well give the name of steersman to sails, ropes or anchor."

[[72]] de def. orac. 30, 246 D, E.

[[73]] This triple government of the Universe is worked out in de fato (a tract whose authorship is questioned), but from one passage and another of Plutarch's undoubted works it can be established, though every statement has a little fringe of uncertainties.

[[74]] de Iside, 25, 360 E.

[[75]] de def. orac. 12, 416 C.

[[76]] Cf. Athenagoras, Presb. 24 (quoted in note 1 on p. 95); and Apuleius, de deo Socr. 6, 132, cited on p. 232.

[[77]] de def. orac. 13, 416 F.

[[78]] de def. orac. 9, 414 F.

[[79]] See de comm. not. adv. Stoicos, 33, and de Stoicorum repugn. 33, 34—three very interesting chapters. Clement of Alexandria has the same tone in criticizing this idea—ouk oid hópôs anexethí tis epaiôn toútou theòn egnôkòs apidôn eis tòn bìon tòn hymeteron en hósois phyrómetha kakoîs. eín gar àn oútôs, hò med eipeîn thémis, merikôs hamartanôn ho those, kthe. Strom. ii, 74.

[[80]] de Iside, 26, 361 C. Cf. Plato, Sympos. 202 E, 203 A (referred to above), for the functions of tò daimónion, which is métaxu theoû te kaì thnetou ... hermeneûon kaì diamorthmeûon theoîs tà par anthrôpon kaì anthrópois tà parà theôn kthè ... theòs de anthrópô ou mignutai ... oû toi dè daímones polloì kaì pantodapoí eisin, eîs dè toutôn estì kaì ho Éros.

[[81]] de def. orac. 10, 414 F-415 A.

[[82]] de Iside, 27, 361 E; de def. orac. 10, 415 C; cf. Tert. ad Natt. ii, 2.

[[83]] Romulus, 28; de def. orac. 10, 415 B.

[[84]] Hesiod, Works and Days, 121. "But," asks Tatian (c. 16), "why should they get drastikôteras dynameôs after death?" See the reply given by Plutarch, de def. orac. 39, 431 E. Compare also views of Apuleius (de deo Socr. 15) cited on p. 233.

[[85]] de genio Socratis, 24, 593 D-F. He is thinking of the series of rebirths.

[[86]] On such places and on necromancy in general see Tertullian, de anima, 57, who puts it down to illusion of the evil one—nec magnum illi exteriores oculos circumscribere cui interiorem mentis aciem excæcare perfacile est.

[[87]] Cf. p. 15 on the genius and the fravashi.

[[88]] de tranqu. animi, 15, 474 B.

[[89]] Cf. the story of the appearance to Brutus of his evil genius—ho sós, ô broute, daímôn kakós, Brutus, 36. Basilides the Gnostic (the father of Isidore) is credited with describing Man as a sort of Wooden Horse with a whole army of different spirits in him (Clem. Alex. Strom, ii, 113). Plutarch makes a similar jibe at the Stoic account of arts, virtues, vices, etc., as corporeal or even animate and rational beings—making a man "a Paradise, or a cattle-pen, or a Wooden Horse," de commun. notit. adv. Stoicos, 45, 1084 B. There was a tendency in contemporary psychology to attribute all feelings, etc., to dæmonic influence; cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. ii, 110, who suggests that all páthe are imprints (as of a seal) made on the soul by the spiritual powers against which we have to wrestle. Cf. Tert. de Anima, 41, the evil of soul in part due to evil spirit.

[[90]] Clement says (Strom. vi, 53) that Isidore the Gnostic "in the first book of the expositions of Parchor the Prophet" dealt with the dæmon of Socrates and quoted Aristotle's authority for such tutelary spirits. For the book of Apuleius, see ch. vii.

[[91]] Porphyry, v. Plotini, 10. Cf. Origen, c. Cels. vii, 35, for Celsus' views on the visibility of dæmons, e.g. in the cave of Trophonius.

[[92]] Life of Numa, 4—a most interesting chapter, when it is remembered what other works were being written contemporaneously.

[[93]] de genio Socr. 20, 588 D, 589 D.

[[94]] de gen. Socr. 24, 593 D.

[[95]] de def. orac. 38, 431 C, phantasías toû mellontos.

[[96]] Cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. vi, 46, on preaching of Christ in Hades, where souls, rid of the flesh, see more clearly.

[[97]] de dif. orac. 40, 432 C-E, thermóteti gàr kaì diachysei pórous tinàs anoígein phantastikoùs toû méllontos eikós estin.

For these póroi cf. Clem. Alex. Strom, vii, 36, with J. B. Mayor's note.

[[98]] de def. orac. 46-48, 435 A-437 A (referring to Phædo, 97 D). The curious mixture of metaphors, the double suggestion of krâsis, the parallel from music, and the ambiguity of tò enthousiastikòn (characteristic of the confusion of spiritual and material then prevalent) make a curious sentence in English. On the relation of dæmons to oracles, see also de facie in orbe lunæ, 30, 944 D; also Tertullian, de Anima, 46, who gives a lucid account of dæmons as the explanation of oracles, and Apol. 22—dæmons inhabiting the atmosphere have early knowledge of the weather, and by their incredible speed can pass miraculously quickly from one end of the earth to the other, and so bring information—strange, he adds (c. 25), that Cybele took a week to inform her priest of the death of Marcus Aurelius—o somniculosa diplomata! ("sleepy post").

[[99]] de Iside, 80, 383 E. Clem. Alex. Strom. i, 135, says Greek prophets of old were "stirred up by dæmons, or disordered by waters, fragrances or some quality of the air," but the Hebrews spoke "by the power and mind of God."

[[100]] Præc. Conj. 19. Cf. Plato, Laws, 906 A, symmachoi dè hemîn theoí te áma kaì daímones, hemeîs d' aû ktêma theôn kaì daimónôn.

[[101]] de repugn. Stoic. 38, 1051 E.

[[102]] non suaviter, 20, 1101 B.

[[103]] non suaviter 21, 1101 C. Clem. Alex. Pæd. ii, 1, says it is "peculiar to man to cleanse the eye of the soul."

[[104]] non suaviter, 22, 1102 F.

[[105]] de Iside, 1, 351 D.

[[106]] de Iside, 2, 352 A.

[[107]] de Iside, 9, 354 C, empháseis kaì diapháseis.

[[108]] de Iside, 9, 354 C.

[[109]] de Iside, 53, 372 E, Myriónumos.

[[110]] de ser. num. vind. 18, 560 F.

[[111]] de ser. num. vind. 17, 560 B-D. Justin, Apology, 1, 18, appeals to the belief in the continuance of the soul, which pagans derive from necromancy, dreams, oracles and persons "dæmoniolept."

[[112]] In de sera numinum vindicta and de genio Socratis. Cf. also the account of the souls of the dead given in de facie in orbe lunæ, c. 28 ff.

[[113]] de def. orac. 18, 419 E. Another curious tale of these remote islands is in Clem. Alex. Strom. vi, 33.

[[114]] Cumont, Mysteries of Mithra (tr.), p. 35. Mithraism began to spread under the Flavians, but (p. 33) "remained for ever excluded from the Hellenic world."

[[115]] de Iside, 20, 358 F.

[[116]] de Iside, 11, 355 C.

[[117]] de Iside, 20, 358 E. Cf. the language of Clement in dealing with expressions in the Bible that seem to imply an anthropomorphic conception of God. See p. 291.

[[118]] de Iside, 23, 360 A.

[[119]] de Iside, 8, 353 E.

[[120]] de def. orac. 14, 15, 417 B-F. Cf. Clem. Alex. Protr. 42, apanthropoi kai misánthrôpoi daímones enjoying anthrôpoktonías.

[[121]] So Tertullian urges, ad Natt. ii, 7.

[[122]] This man, or somebody very like him, appears as a Christian hermit in Sulpicius Severus, Dial. i, 17; only there he is reported to consort with angels.

[[123]] de def. orac. 21, 421 A-E. Cf. Tert. de Spect. 10. The names of the dead and their images are nothing, but we know qui sub istis nominibus institute simulacris operentur et gaudeant et divinitatem mentiantur, nequam spiritus scilicet, dæmones. He holds the gods to have been men, long deceased, but agrees in believing in dæmonic operations in shrines, etc.

[[124]] de Iside, 70, 71, 379 B-E.

[[125]] de Iside, 76, 382 A.

[[126]] See discussion in Oakesmith, Religion of Plutarch, p. 185. Gréard, de la Morale de Plutarque, p. 269, ranks it with the best works that have come down to us from Antiquity.

[[127]] Tertullian on pagan baptisms—Isis and Mithras, de Baptismo, 5; de Præscr. Hær. 40.

[[128]] Cf. Tert. Apol. 9, on these sacrifices, in Africa, and elsewhere, and see p. 26.

[[129]] Conjug. Præc. 19.

[[130]] Cf. de Iside, 55, 373 C; 18, 358 B; the image of Osiris, 36, 365 B. Origen (c. Cels. v, 39) remarks that Celsus is quite pleased with those who worship crocodiles "in the ancestral way."

[[131]] If the legend is mere fable, he asks, cur rapitur sacerdos Cereris, si non tale Ceres passet est? cur Saturno alieni liberi immolantur ... cur Idæae masculus amputatur? ad Natt. ii, 8.