The Obsolesence of Oracles (46-47)

When Demetrius had told this tale he lapsed into silence. But I, wishing to crown, as it were,

the discussion, glanced again towards Philip and Ammonius who were sitting side by side. They seemed to me to be desirous of saying something to us, and again I checked myself. Then Ammonius said, Philip also has some remarks to make, Lamprias, about what has been said; for he himself thinks, as most people do, that Apollo is not a different god, but is the same as the sun.[*] But my difficulty is greater and concerns greater matters. I do not know how it happened, but a little time ago we yielded to logic in wresting the prophetic art from the gods and transferring it merely to the demigods. But now it seems to me that we are thrusting out these very demigods, in their turn, and driving them away from the oracle and the tripod here, when we resolve the origin of prophecy, or rather its very being and power, into winds and vapours and exhalations. For these temperings and heatings and hardenings that have been spoken of serve only the more to withdraw repute from the gods and suggest in regard to the final cause some such conclusion as Euripides[*] makes his Cyclops employ:

The earth perforce, whether it will or no,

Brings forth the grass to fat my grazing flocks.

But there is one difference: he says that he does not offer them in sacrifice to the gods, but to himself and to his belly, greatest of divinities, whereas we offer both sacrifices and prayers as the price for our oracles. What possesses us to do so, if our souls carry within themselves the prophetic power, and it is some particular state of the air or its currents which stirs this to activity? And what is the significance of the libations poured over the victims and the refusal to give responses unless the whole victim from the hoofjoints up is seized with a trembling and quivering, as the libation is poured over it? Shaking the head is not enough, as in other sacrifices, but the tossing and quivering must extend to all parts of the animal alike accompanied by a tremulous sound; and unless this takes place they say that the oracle is not functioning, and do not even bring in the prophetic priestess. Yet it is only on the assumption that they ascribe the cause almost entirely to a god or a demigod that it is reasonable for them to act and to believe thus; but on the basis of what you say it is not reasonable. For the presence of the exhalation, whether the victim be excited or not, will produce the inspiration and will dispose the soul auspiciously, not only the soul of the priestess, but that of any ordinary person with whom it may come into contact. Wherefore it is silly to employ one woman alone for the purpose of the oracles and to give her trouble by watching her to keep her pure and chaste all her life. As a matter of fact, this Coretas, who the people of Delphi say was the first, because he fell in, to supply any means of knowing about the power with which the place is endowed, was not, I think, any different from the rest of the goatherds and shepherds, if so be that this is not a fable or a fabrication as I, for one, think it is. When I take into account the number of benefactions to the Greeks for which this oracle has been responsible, both in wars and in the founding of cities, in cases of pestilence and failure of crops, I think it is a dreadful thing to assign its discovery and origin, not to God and Providence, but to chance and accident. But regarding these matters, he added, I wish that Lamprias would say something to us. Will you wait?

Certainly I will, said Philip, and so will all who are here. For what you have said has set us all thinking.

Then I, addressing myself to him, said, Not only has it set me thinking, Philip, but it has filled me with confusion, if, in the presence of so many men such as you all are, I seem, in contradiction to my years, to give myself airs over the plausibility of my argument and to upset or disturb any of the beliefs regarding the Deity which have been conceived in truth and in piety. I shall defend myself by citing Plato as my witness and advocate in one. That philosopher[*] found fault with Anaxagoras, the one of early times, because he was too much wrapped up in the physical causes and was always following up and pursuing the law of necessity as it was worked out in the behaviour of bodies, and left out of account the purpose and the agent, which are better causes and origins. Plato himself was the first of the philosophers, or the one most prominently engaged in prosecuting investigations of both sorts, to assign to God, on the one hand, the origin of all things that are in keeping with reason, and on the other hand, not to divest matter of the causes necessary for whatever comes into being, but to realize that the perceptible universe, even when arranged in some such orderly way as this, is not pure and unalloyed, but that it takes its origin from matter when matter comes into conjunction with reason. Observe first how it is with the artists. Take as our first example the far-famed stand and base for the mixing-bowl here which

Herodotus[*] has styled the bowl-holder; it came to have as its material causes fire and steel and softening by means of fire and tempering by means of water, without which there is no expedient by which this work could be produced; but art and reason supplied for it the more dominant principle which set all these in motion and operated through them. And, indeed, the author and creator of these likenesses and portraits here stands recorded in the inscription[*]:

Thasian by race and descent, Aglaophon’s son Polygnotus

Painted the taking of Troy, showing her citadel’s sack;

so that it may be seen that he painted them. But without pigments ground together, losing their own colour in the process, nothing could achieve such a composition and sight. Does he, then, who is desirous of getting hold of the material cause, as he investigates and explains the behaviour of the red earth of Sinopê and the changes to which it is subject when mixed with yellow ochre, or of the light-coloured earth of Melos when mixed with lamp-black, take away the repute of the artist? And he that goes into the details of the hardening and the softening of steel, how it is relaxed by the fire, and becomes pliant and yielding for those who forge and fashion it, and then, plunged anew into clear water, is contracted and compacted by the coldness because of the softness and looseness of texture previously engendered by the fire, and acquires a tenseness and firmness which Homer[*] has called the brawn of steel — does such an investigator any the less preserve intact for the artist the credit for the creation of the work? I think not. In fact there are some who question the properties of medicinal agents, but they do not do away with medical science. And thus when Plato[*] declared that we see by the commingling of the irradiation from our eyes with the light of the sun, and that we hear by the vibration of the air, he certainly did not mean by this to abrogate the fundamenta! fact that it is according to the design of Reason and Providence that we have been endowed with sight and hearing.