To silly souls a teacher plain and brief.
|407| The same turn of things which brought clearness brought also a new standard of belief; it shared the general change. Whereas of old that which was not familiar or common, but, in plain words, contorted and over-phrased, was ascribed by the many to an implied Divinity, and received with awe and reverence; in later times men were content to learn things clearly and easily with no pomp or artifice; they began to find fault with the poetical setting of the oracles, not only as a hindrance to the perception of truth, because it mingled indistinctness and |B| shadow with the meaning, but also because by this time they were getting to mistrust metaphors, riddles, and ambiguities, as so many holes or hiding-places provided for him who should trip in his prophecy, that he might step into them and secure his retreat. You might have heard it told by many, how certain persons with a turn for poetry still sit about the place of oracles, waiting to catch the utterances, and then weaving verses, metres, rhythms, according to occasion, as a sort of vehicle. As to your Onomacrituses, and Herodotuses, and Cinaethons,[[121]] and the censures which they brought upon the oracles, by importing tragedy and pomp where they were out of place, I let the charge pass, and do not admit it. Most, |C| however, of the discredit which attached so copiously to poetry came from the gang of soothsayers and scamps who strolled around the ceremonies of the Great Mother and of Serapis, with their mummeries and tricks, turning verses out of their own heads, or taking them at random from handbooks, for servant boys and silly girls, such as are best attracted by metre and a poetic cast of words; from all which causes poetry seemed to put herself at the service of cheats, and jugglers, and lying prophets, and was lost to truth and to the tripod.
XXVI. ‘Thus I should not be surprised to find that the old people sometimes required a certain ambiguity, circumlocution, |D| indistinctness. For it was not then a case of “A” approaching the oracle with a question, if you please, about the purchase of a slave, or “B” about business; powerful states, haughty kings and tyrants, would consult the God on public affairs, men whom it did not answer the officials of his temple to vex and provoke by letting them hear what they did not wish to hear. For the God does not obey Euripides,[[122]] who sets up as a lawgiver with
Phoebus, none but he,
May give men prophecies.
|E| He uses mortal men as ministers and prophets, whom it is his duty to make his care, and to protect, lest they perish at the hands of the bad while serving him. He does not then choose to conceal the truth; what he used to do was to give a twist to its manifestation, which, like a beam of light, is refracted more than once in its passage, and is parted into many rays as it becomes poetry, and so to remove whatever in it was harsh and hard. Tyrants might thus be left in ignorance, and enemies not be forewarned. For them he threw a veil in the innuendoes |F| and ambiguities which hid the meaning from others, but did not elude the intelligence of the actual consultants who gave their whole mind to the answers. Hence, now that things have changed, it is sheer folly to criticize and find fault with the God, because he thinks right to give his aid no longer in the same manner but in another.
XXVII. ‘Another thing is this: Language receives no greater advantage from a poetical form than this, that a meaning which is wrapped and bound in metre is more easily remembered and grasped. Now in those days much memory was required. Many things used to be explained orally; local indications, the times when things were to be done, rites of Gods across the seas, secret burying-places of heroes, hard to be discovered by those setting off for lands far from Greece. You know about Chius |408| and Cretinus, and Nesichus, and Phalanthus, and many other leaders of expeditions, how many clues they needed to find the proper place appointed to each for settlement, while some of them missed the way, as did Battus.[[123]] He thought that he would be turned out, not understanding what the place was to which he had been sent; then he came a second time loudly complaining. Then the God answered:
Thou that hast never been there, if thou know’st Libya the sheepland
Better than I that have been, then wonderful wise is thy wisdom.
So he sent him out again. Then Lysander entirely failed to make out the hill Orchalides,[[124]] otherwise called Alopecus, and the river Hoplites,