|E| V. When Ammonius had done, ‘Rather’, said I, ‘tell us all about the oracle, Cleombrotus; for the old reputation of the divine power there was great, nowadays it seems to be somewhat dwindling.’ As Cleombrotus was silent, and cast his eyes downwards, Demetrius said: ‘There is no need to raise questions about what is happening there, when we see the growing enfeeblement of the oracles nearer home, I might rather say the cessation of all save one or two; the question is from what cause has their power thus passed away? Why mention others, when Boeotia, in old times full of voices with her oracles, has now been quite deserted, as though by sources of |F| water, and a great drought of prophecy has possessed the land? Nowhere, except round Lebadeia, has Boeotia anything to give to those who wish to draw water from prophetic art; for the rest, silence or utter desertion is the order. Yet in the times of the Persian wars it was in no less repute than that of |412| Amphiaraus, and Mys, as it would seem, tried both.[[132]] So the prophet of the Ptoan Oracle, in former times accustomed to use Aeolian, uttered a response in the tongue of the Barbarians, which none of the local persons present understood, but Mys alone; however, the Barbarian caught the inspiration, and the injunction did not need to be translated into Greek. As to the slave sent to the shrine of Amphiaraus, he seemed to see in his sleep a minister of the God, who first spoke to turn him out telling him that the God was not present, then used his hands to push him, and, when he persisted, took a great stone and smote him on the head. This was all a |B| prediction in act of what was to come about; for Mardonius was defeated by the Greeks under no king but a regent and a lieutenant of a king, and he fell struck by a stone,[[133]] just as the Lydian appeared in his sleep to be struck. At that time the oracle at Tegyrae was flourishing; there they say that the God was born, and of the streams which flow past it one, as some tell, is called the “Palm”, the other the “Olive” to this day. Again, in the Persian wars, when Echecrates was prophet, the God promised victory and might in war to |C| the Greeks. Then in the Peloponnesian war, when the Delians had been turned out of their island, it is said that an oracle was brought from Delphi, ordering them to discover the place where Apollo was born, and to perform certain sacrifices there. When they were in wonder and perplexity at the idea that the God had not been born among them but elsewhere, the Pythia added that a crow should reveal to them the spot. They went away and reached Chaeroneia, where they heard the landlord of the inn conversing with certain strangers on their way to Tegyrae about the oracle. These strangers, on leaving, addressed the woman in saying farewell as Corone (Crow). Then they |D| understood the oracle, and having sacrificed at Tegyrae, managed shortly to effect their return. There have been more recent manifestations at these prophetic shrines, but now they have failed; so that it may well be worth while here, in the home of the Pythian, to discuss the cause of the change.’
VI. By this time we were away from the temple, and had reached the doors of the Hall of the Cnidians. Passing inside, we saw the friends for whom we were making, seated and waiting for us. There was a general stillness because of the hour; people were anointing themselves or watching the athletes. Then Demetrius, with a quiet smile, said: ‘Shall |E| I tell a story, or shall I speak the truth? My belief is that you have no problem in hand worth a thought; I see you seated much at your ease, with relaxation on your faces.‘ ‘Oh yes;’ broke in the Megarian Heracleon, ‘we are not inquiring whether the verb “to throw” loses a lambda in the future, nor as to the positive forms of “worse”, “better”, “worst”, |F| “best”. Those are the questions, those and others like them, which bring frowns and wrinkles! All others we may examine like philosophers, with brows steady, and quietly, not looking death and daggers at the company.’ ‘Then take us as we are,’ said Demetrius, ‘and with us the subject upon which we have actually fallen, one which is proper to the place, and concerns us all for the God’s sake. And mind! no wrinkled eyebrows when you attack it!’
VII. We mingled our companies and sate down in and out |413| of each other, and Demetrius had propounded the subject, when up sprang the Cynic Didymus, by nickname Planetiades, struck the ground two or three times and shouted out: ‘Oho! Oho! a mighty difficult subject, which needs much inquiry, you have brought us! A wonder indeed that, with so much wickedness poured over the earth, not only “Modesty and Sense of Justice”, to quote Hesiod,[[134]] have deserted human life, but Divine Providence, too, has packed up its oracles and is gone from everywhere. I throw out the opposite problem for you to discuss. Why have they not ceased long ago? Why has not Hercules or some other God withdrawn the tripod, |B| filled every day with foul ungodly questions, propounded to the God by some as if he were a sophist whom they were to catch out, by others to ask about treasures or inheritances or marriages which law forbids. The result is that Pythagoras is proved mighty wrong when he said that men are always at their best when they approach the Gods.[[135]] Accordingly, things which it were decent to cloak and deny in the presence of an older man, diseases and affections of the soul, these they lay bare and open before the God!’ He wanted to go on, but Heracleon plucked at his cloak, and I, almost his greatest |C| intimate present, said: ‘Dear Planetiades, leave off provoking the God. He is easy to be entreated and gentle:
Mildest to mortal men pronounced to be,
as Pindar[[136]] says. And whether he be sun, or lord and father of the sun, lord and father beyond all that is visible, it is not likely that he should deem us modern men unworthy of a voice from himself, being to them the cause of birth and nurture and being and thinking. It is not seemly, either, that Providence, our thoughtful kindly mother, who produces and maintains all things for us, should remember our misdeeds in one matter only—prophecy, and should take away what she |D| originally gave. As if in those old days there were not more bad men because men were more, when oracles were set up in so many parts of the inhabited world! Come here, and sit down again! Swear a Pythian truce with wickedness, whom you are chastising in word every day; join us in seeking some other cause for the alleged failure of the oracles.’ My words had some effect; Planetiades went away by the doors and in silence.
VIII. There was a short interval of quiet, then Ammonius |E| addressed me. ‘Lamprias,’ he said, ‘take care what we are doing, and give your mind to the discussion, lest we find ourselves making out that the God is no true cause. He who thinks that the cessation of the oracles is due to something other than the will of a God, suggests the thought that they come into being and exist, not because of the God, but in some other way. For if prophecy be the work of a God, there is no greater or stronger power to remove and abolish it. Now the argument of Planetiades displeased me in many points, especially as to the inconsistency which he makes out in the God, at one time |F| turning away from vice and disowning it, at another admitting it; as though a king or tyrant were to shut out bad men at one door, and admit them to interviews by another. Start with the operation most proper to the Gods, which is great, yet never excessive, always sufficient in itself; and tell me that |414| Hellas has had the largest share in the general depopulation caused by former revolutions and wars over the whole perhaps of the inhabited globe, and could now scarcely provide all round three thousand hoplites, the number which the single state of Megara sent out to Plataea.[[137]] Why, for the God to have left many places of his oracle would be merely to expose the desolation of Greece. Then I will put myself in your hands for ingenuity. For who would get the good if there were an oracle at Tegyrae as there formerly was, or near Ptoum, where it is a day’s work to meet one man minding his flocks. This very spot, most venerable of all and most renowned “for time and fame”, was for a long time made desert and unapproachable by a savage beast, a female dragon as the story goes; but this is to invert the facts of its lying idle; the |B| wilderness invited the beast, the beast did not make the wilderness. But when, in the good pleasure of the God, Hellas revived in her cities, and the place had men in plenty, two prophetesses were employed, who were lowered in turn, and a third was appointed to relieve. Now there is only one, and we do not complain, for she is enough for those who need her. So we have no cause to blame the God; the prophetic establishment now subsisting suffices for all, and sends away all with what they want. Agamemnon used to employ seven heralds, yet |C| scarcely could control the numerous assembly, whereas in a few days you will see in the theatre here that a single voice reaches all present, and even so it is with prophecy; then it used more voices to reach more persons, now we should fairly wonder at the God if he allowed his prophecy to flow to waste like water, or like the rocks to find an echo for the voices of shepherds and their flocks.’
IX. When Ammonius had said this, and I remained silent, Cleombrotus addressed me: ‘Have you now granted’, he said, |D| ‘that the God makes and also destroys the oracles?’ ‘By no means’, I said. ‘I maintain that no prophetic shrine or oracle is destroyed by the God’s agency. It is as with many other things which he makes or provides; Nature brings in destruction and negation; or rather Matter, which is negation, unweaves and breaks up that which is brought into being by the more powerful cause. Even so I think there are times of obscuration and withdrawal of prophetic forces. The God gives many fair things to men, but gives nothing immortal, so that, in the words of Sophocles:[[138]]
The works of Gods may die, but not the Gods.
I say that their essence and their power must be sought in |E| Nature and in Matter, the origin being rightly reserved to the God. It would be simple and childish to suppose that the God himself creeps into the bodies of the prophets and speaks from there, using as instruments their mouths and voices, like those ventriloquists once called “Eurycleis”, now “Pythones”. He who mixes up the God with mortal needs does not spare |F| his majesty nor preserve the dignity and the greatness of his excellence.’
X. Then Cleombrotus: ‘You are right. Yet it is hard to grasp and to define how, and up to what point, we may make use of Providence; and therefore those who make the God the cause of nothing at all, and also those who make him the common cause of all, go wide of moderation and decency. It is well said, on the one hand, that Plato, in discovering the element which underlies created qualities, now called “Matter” or “Nature”, relieved philosophers from perplexities |415| many and great. It seems to me, on the other, that those who have inserted the class of daemons between Gods and men, to draw and knit together the fellowship of the two orders after a fashion, have cleared away more perplexities and greater; whether the view belongs to Zoroaster and the Magi, or comes from Thrace and Orpheus, or from Egypt, or from Phrygia, as we conjecture from seeing in both those countries many elements of death and mourning in the rites celebrated there, mingled with those of initiation. Among the Greeks, Homer appears still to use both names indifferently, and sometimes |B| to call the Gods daemons. Hesiod first clearly and distinctly laid down four classes of reasonable beings, Gods, then daemons, then heroes, last of all men; and here he appears to admit transition, the golden race of men passing into daemons many and great, the demigods at last into heroes.[[139]] Others make out a change for bodies and souls alike. As water is seen to be produced out of earth, air from water, and fire from air, and the substance is borne upwards, even so the better souls receive their change from men into heroes, from heroes into daemons. From the daemons again, a few in a long course of time, upborne |C| through virtue, become full partakers of divine nature. To some it happens not to have control of themselves; so they subside and again enter mortal bodies, and endure a life as dim and unillumined as an exhalation.