The Oracle at Delphi no Longer Given in Verse (12)

During this conversation we were moving forward. While we were looking at the bronze palm-tree in the treasure-house of the Corinthians, the only one of their votive offerings that is still left, the frogs[*] and water-snakes, wrought in metal about its base, caused much wonder to Diogenianus, and naturally to ourselves as well. For the palm does not, like many other trees, grow in marshes, or love water; nor do frogs bear any relation to the people of Corinth so as to be a symbol or emblem of their city, even as, you know, the people of Selinus are said to have dedicated a golden celery plant,[*] and the people of Tenedos the axe, derived from the crabs which are found on the island in the neighbourhood of Asterium, as the place is called. For these, apparently, are the only crabs that have the figure of an axe on the shell. Yet, in fact, wre believe that to the god himself ravens and swans and wolves and hawks, or anything else rather than these creatures, are pleasing.

Sarapion remarked that the artisan had represented allegorically the nurture and birth and exhalation of the sun from moisture, whether he had read what Homer[*] says, Swiftly away moved the Sun, forsaking the beautiful waters, or whether he had observed that the Egyptians, to show the beginning of sunrise, paint a very young baby sitting on a lotus flower.[*] I laughed and said, Where now, my good friend? Are you again slyly thrusting in your Stoicism here and unostentatiously slipping into the discussion their kindlings and exhalations,[*] not indeed bringing down the moon and the sun, as the Thessalian women do,[*] but assuming that they spring up here from earth and water and derive their origin from here? For Plato[*] called man also a celestial plant, as though he were held upright from his head above as from a root. But you Stoics ridicule Empedocles[*] for his assertion that the sun, created by the reflection of celestial light, about the earth,

Back to the heavens again sends his beams with countenance fearless.

And you yourselves declare the sun to be an earth-born creature or a water-plant, assigning him to the kingdom of the frogs or water-snakes. But let us refer all this to the heroics of the Stoic school, and let us make a cursory examination of the cursory work of the artisans. In many instances they indeed show elegance and refinement, but they have not in all eases avoided frigidity and over-elaboration. Just as the man who constructed the cock upon the hand of Apollo’s statue showed by suggestion the early morning and the hour of approaching sunrise, so here, one might aver, has been produced in the frogs a token of springtime when the sun begins to dominate the atmosphere and to break up the winter; that is, if, as you say, we must think of Apollo and the Sun, not as two gods, but as one.

Really, said Sarapion, do you not think so, and do you imagine that the sun is diiferent from Apollo? [*]

Yes, said I, as different as the moon from the sun; but the moon does not often conceal the sun, nor conceal it from the eyes of all,[*] but the sun has caused all to be quite ignorant of Apollo by diverting the faculty of thought through the faculty of perception from what is to what appears to be.