says Euripides;[[187]] when the soul, warmed and set on fire, rejects the caution which human prudence brings, to avert inspiration, as it so often does, and to quench it.
XLI. ‘After all, it might be not unreasonably asserted that a dryness introduced with the heat subtilizes the current and makes it ethereal and pure. “Best a dry soul”, says Heraclitus;[[188]] moisture not only dulls sight and hearing, but if it |433| touch a mirror or raises[[189]] a mist upon it, takes away brightness and lustre. As the opposite to this, it is not impossible that, by a sort of chilling and condensation of the breath of air, the organ of prognostication is made tense and keen, like steel out of the bath. Or again, as tin when melted in with copper, itself rarefied and full of apertures, welds it together and condenses it, and yet in the result makes it brighter to the eye and purer, so there is nothing to prevent the prophetic exhalation, |B| wherein is something congenial and akin to souls, from filling up their rarefied places, and inserting itself, and pressing all together. For certain things are congenial and proper to certain other things; thus an infusion of the bean into the dyer’s bath seems to assist its efficacy for purple, of nitre for saffron.
Scarlet is mingled for the pearly weft,
says Empedocles. But about Cydnus, and the sacred sword of Apollo at Tarsus, we used to hear the story from you, dear Demetrius, how Cydnus cleans that steel best, and no other water suits the sword. And again, at Olympia, water from |C| Alpheus is poured on the ashes to make them adhere to the altar in a mass, and the water of no other river which has been found has the power of cementing the ash.
XLII. ‘It is not to be wondered at, then, that of the many streams which the earth sends up, these alone affect souls with inspiration and give them imagination of the future. Certainly legend agrees with reason as to this. In this very place it is related that the prophetic virtue was first made manifest by the accidental falling into it of a shepherd, who thereupon uttered sounds as of one inspired. These passed at first unheeded by those present; but afterwards, when the things which the man foretold had happened, there was astonishment. The most learned of the Delphians even mention |D| the man’s name, which was Coretas. I am, however, myself strongly of opinion that a soul acquires a temperature congruous with the prophetic current, such as the eye has with light sympathetic to it. Though the eye possesses the power of seeing, this cannot act without light; and the prophetic organ of the soul needs, as the eye does, a congenial medium to help in kindling its flame, or whetting its edge. Hence most of the older generations used to think that Apollo and the sun were one and the same God, while those who knew and honoured that beautiful and wise proportion, “as body to soul, so sight |E| to intellect, so light to truth”, would add the conjecture “so the power of the sun to the nature of Apollo”, declaring the sun to be his offspring and scion, the ever becoming of the ever subsisting. For the sun kindles and enhances and helps to excite the visual power of the sense, as the God that of prophecy in the soul.
XLIII. ‘It was natural, however, that those who take the view that they are one and the same God should have dedicated this oracle to Apollo and Earth in common, thinking that the sun produces in the earth the disposition and temperament from which come the prophetic exhalations out of her. We |F| then, like Hesiod,[[190]] who understood the matter better than some philosophers, when he called her
Unshaken base of all,
consider her to be eternal and imperishable. But of the powers which are about her it is to be expected that some should fail here, and others come into being there, and that there should be shiftings from place to place, and cross-currents, and that such cycles should often revolve within her if we take time as a whole; and the phenomena point to such an inference. For in the case of lakes and rivers, and still more frequently in that of hot springs, there have been failure and entire disappearance in some places, in others a retreat so to call it, and an absorption; |434| then they reappear at intervals of time in the same places, or bubble up in their neighbourhood. Again, we hear of mines where the ore has been exhausted and then renewed, as in the silver mines of Attica, and the copper lodes of Euboea, out of which the chilled sword-blades used to be manufactured, as Aeschylus[[191]] has said
Th’ Euboean blade, self-tempered, in his hand.
Then there is the rock at Carystus where it is only lately that the yield of delicate thread-like filaments of mineral has ceased. I think some of you will remember having seen towels, and nets, and caps made of these, which were non-inflammable. |B| Any which were soiled by use were placed in a flame out of which they came bright and clear. Now there has been an entire disappearance of these, and scarcely a few fibres or thin filaments run in streaks about the mines.