The Obsolesence of Oracles (10-11)

You are right, said Cleombrotus; but since it is hard to apprehend and to define in what way and to what extent Providence should be brought in as an agent, those who make the god responsible for nothing at all and those who make him responsible for all things alike go wide of moderation and propriety. They put the case well who say that Plato,[*] by his discovery of the element underlying all created qualities, which is now called Matter and Nature, has relieved philosophers of many great perplexities; but, as it seems to me, those persons have resolved more and greater perplexities

who have set the race of demigods midway between gods and men,[*] and have discovered a force to draw together, in a way, and to unite our common fellowship - whether this doctrine comes from the wise men of the cult of Zoroaster, or whether it is Thracian and harks back to Orpheus, or is Egyptian, or Phrygian, as we may infer from observing that many things connected with death and mourning in the rites of both lands are combined in the ceremonies so fervently celebrated there. Among the Greeks, Homer, moreover, appears to use both names in common and sometimes to speak of the gods as demigods; but Hesiod[*] was the first to set forth clearly and distinctly four classes of rational beings: gods, demigods, heroes, in this order, and, last of all, men; and as a sequence to this, apparently, he postulates his transmutation, the golden race passing selectively into many good divinities, and the demigods into heroes.

Others postulate a transmutation for bodies and souls alike; in the same manner in which water is seen to be generated from earth, air from water, and fine from air, as their substance is borne upward, even so from men into heroes and from heroes into demigods the better souls obtain their transmutation. But from the demigods a few souls still, in the long reach of time, because of supreme excellence, come, after being purified, to share completely in divine qualities. But with some of these souls it comes to pass that they do not maintain control over themselves, but yield to temptation and are again clothed

with mortal bodies and have a dim and darkened life, like mist or vapour.

Hesiod thinks that with the lapse of certain periods of years the end comes even to the demigods; for, speaking in the person of the Naiad, he indirectly suggests the length of time with these words:[*]

Nine generations long is the life of the crow and his cawing,

Nine generations of vigorous men.[*] Lives of four crows together

Equal the life of a stag, and three stags the old age of a raven;

Nine of the lives of the raven the life of the Phoenix doth equal;

Ten of the Phoenix we Nymphs, fair daughters of Zeus of the aegis.

Those that do not interpret generation well make an immense total of this time; but it really means a year, so that the sum of the life of these divinities is nine thousand, seven hundred and twenty years, less than most mathematicians think, and more than Pindar[*] has stated when he says that the Nymphs live

Allotted a term as long as the years of a tree,

and for this reason he calls them Hamadryads.

While he was still speaking Demetrius, interrupting him, said, How is it, Cleombrotus, that you can say that the year has been called a generation? For neither of a man in his vigour nor in his eld, as some read the passage, is the span of human life such

as this. Those who read in their vigour make a generation thirty years, in accord with Heracleitus,[*] a time sufficient for a father to have a son who is a father also; but again those who write in their eld and not in their vigour assign an hundred and eight years to a generation; for they say that fifty-four marks the limit of the middle years of human life, a number which is made up of the first number, the first two plane surfaces, two squares and two cubes,[*] numbers which Plato also took in his Generation of the Soul.[*] The whole matter as stated by Hesiod seems to contain a veiled reference to the Conflagration, when the disappearance of all liquids will most likely be accompanied by the extinction of the Nymphs,

Who in the midst of fair woodlands,

Sources of rivers, and grass-covered meadows have their abiding.[*]