The Obsolesence of Oracles (10-14)

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.[*]

Yes, said Cleombrotus, I hear this from many persons, and I observe that the Stoic Conflagration, just as it feeds on the verses of Heracleitus and Orpheus, is also seizing upon those of Hesiod. But I cannot brook this talk of universal destruction; and such impossibilities, in recalling to our minds these utterances, especially those about the crow and the stag, must be allowed to revert upon those that indulge in such exaggeration. Does not a year include within itself the beginning and the end of all things which the Seasons and the Earth make grow, [*] and is it not foreign to men’s ways to

call it a generation? As a matter of fact you yourselves surely agree that Hesiod by the word generation means a man’s life. Is not that so?

Yes, said Demetrius.

And this fact also is clear, said Cleombrotus, that often the measure and the things measured are called by the same name, as, for example, gill, quart, gallon, and bushel.[*] In the same way, then, in which we call unity a number, being, as it is, the smallest number and the first; so the year, which we use as the first measure of man’s life, Hesiod has called by the same name as the thing measured, a generation. The fact is that the numbers which those other persons produce have none of those notable and conspicuous qualities which may be inherent in numbers. The number nine thousand, seven hundred and twenty[*] has been produced by adding together the first four numbers and multiplying them by four,[*] or by multiplying four by ten. Either process gives forty, and when this is multiplied five times by three it gives the specified number.[*] But concerning these matters there is no need for us to disagree with Demetrius. In fact, even if the period of time in which the soul of the demigod or hero changes its life[*] be longer or shorter, determinate or indeterminate, none the less the proof will be there on the basis which he desires, fortified by clear testimony from ancient times, that in the confines, as it were, between gods and men there exist certain natures susceptible to

human emotions and involuntary changes, whom it is right that we, like our fathers before us, should regard as demigods, and, calling them by that name, should reverence them.

As an illustration of this subject, Xenocrates, the companion of Plato, employed the order of the triangles; the equilateral he compared to the nature of the gods, the scalene to that of man, and the isosceles to that of the demigods; for the first is equal in all its lines, the second unequal in all, and the third is partly equal and partly unequal, like the nature of the demigods, which has human emotions and godlike power. Nature has placed within our ken perceptible images and visible likenesses, the sun and the stars for the gods, and for mortal men beams of light,[*] comets, and meteors, a comparison which Euripides[*] has made in the verses:

He that but yesterday was vigorous

Of frame, even as a star from heaven falls,

Gave up in death his spirit to the air.

But there is a body with complex characteristics which actually parallels the demigods, namely the moon; and when men see that she, by her being consistently in accord with the cycles through which those beings pass,[*] is subject to apparent wanings and waxings and transformations,some call her an earth-like star, others a star-like earth,[*] and others the domain of Hecate, who belongs both to the earth and to the heavens. Now if the air that is between the earth and the moon were to be removed and withdrawn, the unity and consociation of the universe would be destroyed, since there would be an empty and unconnected space in the middle; and in just the same way those who refuse to leave us the race of demigods make the relations of gods and men remote and alien by doing away with the interpretative and ministering nature, as Plato[*] has called it; or else they force us to a disorderly confusion of all things, in which we bring the god into men’s emotions and activities, drawing him down to our needs, as the women of Thessaly are said to draw down the moon.[*] This cunning deceit of theirs, however, gained credence among women when the daughter of Hegetor, Aglaonicê, who was skilled in astronomy, always pretended at the time of an eclipse of the moon that she was bewitching it and bringing it down.[*] But as for us, let us not listen to any who say that there are some oracles not divinely inspired, or religious ceremonies and mystic rites which are disregarded by the gods; and on the other hand let us not imagine that the god goes in and out and is present at these ceremonies and helps in conducting them; but let us commit these matters to those ministers of the gods to whom it is right to commit them, as to servants and clerks, and let us believe that demigods are guardians of sacred rites of the gods and prompters in the Mysteries, while others go about as avengers of arrogant and grievous cases of injustice. Still others Hesiod[*] has very impressively addressed as

Holy

Givers of wealth, and possessing in this a meed that is kingly,

implying that doing good to people is kingly. For as among men, so also among the demigods., there are different degrees of excellence, and in some there is a weak and dim remainder of the emotional and irrational, a survival, as it were, while in others this is excessive and hard to stifle. Of all these things there are, in many places, sacrifices, ceremonies, andlegends which preserve and jealously guard vestiges and tokens embodied here and there in their fabric.

Regarding the rites of the Mysteries, in which it is possible to gain the clearest reflections and adumbrations of the truth about the demigods, let my lips be piously sealed, as Herodotus[*] says; but as for festivals and sacrifices, which may be compared with ill-omened and gloomy days, in which occur the eating of raw flesh, rending of victims, fasting, and beating of breasts, and again in many places scurrilous language at the shrines, and

Frenzy and shouting of throngs in excitement

With tumultuous tossing of heads in the air,[*]

I should say that these acts are not performed for any god, but are soothing and appeasing rites for the averting of evil spirits. Nor is it credible that the gods demanded or welcomed the human sacrifices of ancient days, nor would kings and generals have endured giving over their children and submitting them to the preparatory rites and cutting their throats to no purpose save that they felt they were propitiating and offering satisfaction to the wrath and sullen temper of some harsh and implacable avenging deities, or to the insane and imperious passions of some who had not the power or desire to seek satisfaction in a natural and normal way. But as Heracles laid siege to Oechalia for the sake of a maiden,[*] so powerful and impetuous divinities, in demanding a human soul which is incarnate within a mortal body, bring pestilences and failures of crops upon States and stir up wars and civil discords, until they succeed in obtaining what they desire. To some, however, comes the opposite; for example, when I was spending a considerable time in Crete, I noted an extraordinary festival being celebrated there in which they exhibit the image of a man without a head, and relate that this used to be Molus,[*] father of Meriones, and that he violated a young woman; and when he was discovered, he was without a head.