as the comic poet has it; but what you want to learn is the |E| nature of air, and the property in virtue of which its repeated contact has coloured the bronze.’ Diogenianus said that it was. ‘And I too,’ Theon continued, ‘my young friend, let us follow the quest together; and first, if you will agree, ask why olive oil produces a more copious rust on the metal than other liquids; it does not, of course, actually make the deposit, being pure and uncontaminated when it is applied.’ ‘Certainly not;’ said the young man, ‘the real cause appears to me to be something different; the oil is fine, pure, and transparent, so the rust when it meets it is specially evident, whereas with other liquids it becomes invisible.’ ‘Excellent,’ said Theon, ‘my |F| young friend, that is prettily put. But consider also, if you please, the cause given by Aristotle.’ ‘I do please’, he said. ‘Aristotle says that the rust, when it comes over other liquids, passes invisibly through and is dispersed, because the particles are irregular and fine, whereas in the density of oil it is held up and permanently condensed. If, then, we can frame some such hypothesis for ourselves, we shall not be wholly at a loss for a spell to charm away this difficulty.’
IV. We encouraged him and agreed, so he (Theon) went |396| on to say that the air of Delphi is thick and close of texture, with a tenseness caused by reflection from the hills and their resistance, but is also fine and biting, as seems to be proved by the facts of digestion of food. The tenuity allows it to enter the bronze, and to scrape up from it much solid rust, which rust again is held up and compressed, because the density of the air does not allow it a passage through; but the deposit breaks out, because it is so copious, and takes on a rich bright colour on the surface. We applauded this, but the stranger remarked that either hypothesis alone was sufficient for the argument. ‘The fineness’, |B| he went on, ‘will be found to be in contradiction to the density of which you speak, but there is no necessity to assume it. The bronze, as it ages, exhales or throws off the rust by its own inherent action; the density holds together and solidifies the rust, and makes it apparent because of its quantity.’ Theon broke in: ‘What is to prevent, Sir, the same thing being both fine and dense, as silks or fine linen stuffs, of which Homer says
And from the close-spun weft the trickling oil will fall,[[85]]
where he indicates the minute and delicate workmanship of the fabric by the fact that the oil would not remain, but trickled |C| or glided off, the fineness at once and the density refusing it a passage. And, again, the scraping up of the rust is not the only purpose served by the tenuity of the air; it also makes the colour itself pleasanter to the eye and brighter, it mingles light and lustre with the blue.’
V. Here there was an interval of silence; the guides were again getting their speeches in hand. A certain oracle given in verse was mentioned—I think it was one about the reign of Aegon the Argive—when Diogenianus observed that he had often been surprised at the badness and common quality of the verses in which the oracles are delivered. Yet the God is Choirmaster of the Muses, and eloquent language is no less |D| his function than beauty of ode or tune, and he should have a voice far above that of Homer and Hesiod in verse. Here we have most of the oracles saturated with bad taste and poverty of metre and diction. Then Serapion, the poet, who was with us from Athens, said: ‘Then do we really believe that these verses are the God’s, yet venture to say that they fall behind Homer and Hesiod in beauty? Shall we not rather take them for all that is best and most beautiful in poetry, and revise our judgement of them prejudiced by familiarity with a bad standard?’ Boethus, the geometer—you know the man, |E| already on his way to the camp of Epicurus—broke in: ‘Have you ever heard the story of Pauson the painter?’ ‘Not I’, said Serapion. ‘Well, it is worth hearing. It appears that he had contracted to paint a horse rolling, and painted him galloping. The owner was indignant; so Pauson laughed and turned the canvas upside down, with the result that the lower parts became the upper, and there was the horse rolling, not galloping. So |F| it is, Bion tells us, with certain syllogisms when converted. Thus some will tell us not that the oracles are quite beautiful because they are the God’s, but that they are not the God’s because they are bad! That point may be left unsettled. But that the verses used in the oracles are bad poetry,’ he went on, ‘is made clear also in your judgement, my dear Serapion, is it not so? For you write poems which are philosophical and severe as to matter, but in force and grace and diction more like the work of Homer and Hesiod than the utterances of the Pythia.’
VI. Then Serapion: ‘Yes, we are sick, Boethus, sick in ears and in eyes; luxury and softness have accustomed us to think things beautiful as they are more sweet, and to call them so. Soon we shall actually be finding fault with the Pythia because |397| she does not speak with a more thrilling voice than Glauce the singing-girl, or use costly ointments, or put on purple robes to go down into the sanctuary, or burn on her censer cassia, mastic, and frankincense, but only bay leaves and barley meal. Do you not see’, he went on, ‘what grace the songs of Sappho have, how they charm and soothe the hearers, while the Sibyl “with raving mouth”, as Heraclitus says, “utters words with no laughter, no adornment, no spices”,[[86]] yet makes her voice carry to ten thousand years, because of the God. And Pindar[[87]] tells us that Cadmus heard from the God “right music”, not |B| sweet music, or delicate music, or twittering music. What is passionless and pure gives no admission to pleasure; she was cast out in this very place, together with pain,[[88]] and the most of her has dribbled away, it seems, into the ears of men.’
VII. When Serapion had done, Theon smiled. ‘Serapion’, he said, ‘has paid his usual tribute to his own proclivities, making capital out of the turn which the conversation had taken about pain and pleasure! But for us, Boethus, even if these verses are inferior to Homer, let us never suppose that the God has composed them; he only gives the initial impulse according to the capacity of each prophetess. Why, suppose the answers had |C| to be written, not spoken. I do not think we should suppose that the letters were made by the God, and find fault with the calligraphy as below royal standard. The strain is not the God’s, but the woman’s, and so with the voice and the phrasing and the metre; he only provides the fantasies, and puts light into her soul to illuminate the future; for that is what inspiration is. To put it plainly, there is no escaping you prophets of Epicurus—yes, you too, Boethus, are drifting that way—you blame those old prophetesses because they used bad poetry, and you also blame those of to-day because they speak their answers in |D| prose, and use the first words which come, that they may not be overhauled by you for headless, hollow, crop-tailed lines.’ Then Diogenianus: ‘Do not jest, in Heaven’s name, no! but help us to solve the problem which is common to us all. There is not a Greek[[89]] living who is not in search of a rational account of the fact that the oracle has ceased to use verse, epic or other.’ Theon interrupted: ‘At the present moment, my young friend, we seem to be doing a shabby turn by the guides, taking the bread out of their mouths. Suffer them first to do |E| their office, afterwards you shall discuss in peace whatever you wish.’
VIII. Our round had now brought us in front of the statue of Hiero, the tyrant. Most of the stories the stranger knew well, but he good-naturedly lent his ear to them. At last, when he heard that a certain bronze pillar given by Hiero, which had been standing upright, fell of its own accord on the very day when Hiero died at Syracuse, he showed surprise. I set myself to remember similar instances, such as the notable one of Hiero the Spartan, how before his death at Leuctra the eyes fell out |F| of his statue, and the gold stars disappeared which Lysander had dedicated after the naval battle of Aegospotami. Then the stone statue of Lysander himself broke out into such a growth of weeds and grass that the face was hidden. At the time of the Athenian disaster at Syracuse, the golden berries kept dropping off from the palm trees, and crows chipped the shield on the figure of Pallas. Again, the crown of the Cnidians, which Philomelus, tyrant of Phocis, had given to Pharsalia the dancing |398| girl, caused her death, as she was playing near the temple of Apollo in Metapontum, after she had removed from Greece into Italy. The young men made a rush at the crown, and in their struggle to get it from one another, tore the woman to pieces. Now Aristotle used to say that no one but Homer made ‘words which stir, because of their energy’.[[90]] But I would say that there have been votive offerings sent here which have movement in a high degree, and help the God’s foreknowledge to signify things; that none of them is void or without feeling, but all are full of Divinity. ‘Very good!’ said Boethus; ‘so it is not enough to shut the God into a mortal body once every month. We will also knead him into every morsel of stone and brass, to |B| show that we do not choose to hold Fortune, or Spontaneity, a sufficient author of such occurrences.’ ‘Then in your opinion’, I said, ‘each of the occurrences looks like Fortune or Spontaneity; and it seems probable to you that the atoms glided forth, and were dispersed, and swerved, not sooner and not later, but at the precise moment when each of the dedicators was to fare worse or better. Epicurus helps you now by what he said or wrote three hundred years ago; but the God, unless |C| he take and shut himself up in all things, and be mingled with all, could not, you think, initiate movement, or cause change of condition in anything which is!’
IX. Such was my answer to Boethus, and to the same effect about the Sibyl and her utterances. For when we stood near the rock by the Council Chamber, on which the first Sibyl is said to have been seated on her arrival from Helicon, where she had been brought up by the Muses (though others say that she came from the Maleans, and was the daughter of Lamia the daughter of Poseidon), Serapion remembered the verses in which she hymned herself; how she will never cease from |D| prophesying, even after death, but will herself go round in the moon, being turned into what we call the ‘bright face’, while her breath is mingled with the air and borne about in rumours and voices for ever and ever; and her body within the earth suffers change, so that from it spring grass and weeds, the pasture of sacred cattle, which have all colour, shapes, and qualities in their inward parts whereby men obtain forecasts of future things. Here Boethus made his derision still more evident. |E| The stranger observed that, although these things have a mythical appearance, yet the prophecies are attested by many overturnings and removals of Greek cities, inroads of barbarian hordes, and upsettings of dynasties. ‘These still recent troubles at Cumae and Dicaearchia[[91]], were they not chanted long ago in the songs of the Sibyl, so that Time was only discharging his debts in the fires which have burst out of the mountain, the boiling seas, the masses of burning rocks[[92]] tossed aloft by the winds, the ruin of cities many and great, so that if you visit them in broad daylight you cannot get a clear idea of the site, the ground being covered with confused ruins? It is |F| hard to believe that such things have happened, much harder to predict them without divine power.’
X. ‘My good Sir,’ said Boethus, ‘what does happen in Nature which is not Time paying his debts? Of all the strange unexpected things, by land or sea, among cities and men, is there any which some one might not foretell, and then, after it has happened, find himself right? Yet this is hardly foretelling at all; it is telling, rather it is tossing or scattering words into the infinite, with no principle in them. They wander about, often Fortune meets them and throws in with them, but it is all spontaneous. It is one thing, I think, when what has been foretold happens, quite another when what will happen is foretold. Any statement made about things then non-existent contains intrinsic error, it has no right to await the confirmation |399| which comes from spontaneous happening; nor is it any true proof of having foretold with knowledge that the thing happened after it was foretold, for Infinity brings all things. No, the “good guesser”, whom the proverb[[93]] has announced to be the best prophet, is like a man who hunts on the trail of the future, by the help of the plausible. These Sibyls and Bacises threw into the sea, that is, into time, without having any real clue, nouns and verbs about troubles and occurrences of every description. Some of these prophecies came about, but they were lies; and what is now pronounced is a lie like them, even if, later on, it should happen to turn out true.’ |B|