The Obsolesence of Oracles (intro-4)

Plutarch’s answer to the question why many oracles in Greece have ceased to function is that the population is now much less than it was, and so there is less need for oracles now than in earlier times. For example, at Delphi there used to be twro prophetic priestesses with a third held in reserve; now there is only one, and yet she is sufficient for every need.

The statement of this simple fact hardly requires twenty-nine folio pages, but in this essay, as in the two preceding, there is much of the conversation of cultured persons which is not directly connected with the subject. Thus we find a discussion of whether the year is growing shorter, whether the number of the worlds is one or some number not more than five or is one hundred and eighty-three. We have further discussion of the number five, some astronomy, and a good deal of geometry, some interesting bits of information about Britain and the East and a rather long discussion of the daimones, the beings a little lower than the gods and considerably higher than mortals; perhaps the translation demi-gods might best convey the idea in English. These beings are thought by many persons to be in charge of the oracles; certainly the god himself does not appear personally at his oracles; and in the case of the

oracle at Delphi some account is given of the accidental discovery by a shepherd of the peculiar powers of the exhalation from the cleft in the rocks.

Students of English literature will be interested in the dramatic description of the announcement of the death of Pan; and students of religion will be interested in the essay as a very early effort to reconcile science and religion. That the essay had an appeal to theologians is clear from the generous quotations made from it by Eusebius and Theodoretus. We could wish that they had quoted even more, since their text is usually superior to that contained in the manuscripts, which in some places are quite hopeless. The mss. have also an unusual number of lacunae. Much has been done in the way of correction, sometimes perhaps too much, since Plutarch’s thought is not always necessarily so logical as the editors would make it.

Some parts of the essay make rather difficult reading, but it also contains passages of considerable interest and even beauty.

The essay is No. 88 in Lamprias’s list of Plutarch’s works.

The conversation is professedly narrated by Plutarch’s brother Lamprias to Terentius Priscus, but some have thought that Plutarch has used the person of Lamprias to represent himself, possibly because of the official position held by Plutarch at Delphi.

(The persons taking part in the conversation are: Lamprias, Demetrius, Cleombrotus, Ammonius, Philip, Didymus, and Heracleon.)

The story[*] is told, my dear Terentius Priscus, that certain eagles or swans, flying from the uttermost parts of the earth towards its centre, met in Delphi at the omphalus, as it is called; and at a later time Epimenides[*] of Phaestus put the story to test by referring it to the god and upon receiving a vague and ambiguous oracle said,

Now do we know that there is no mid-centre of earth or of ocean;

Yet if there be, it is known to the gods, but is hidden from mortals.

Now very likely the god repulsed him from his attempt to investigate an ancient myth as though it were a painting to be tested by the touch.

Yet a short time before the Pythian games, which were held when Callistratus[*] was in office in our own day, it happened that two revered men coming from opposite ends of the inhabited earth met together at Delphi,

Demetrius[*] the grammarian journeying homeward from Britain to Tarsus, and Cleombrotus of Sparta, who had made many excursions in Egypt and about the land of the Cave-dwellers, and had sailed beyond the Persian Gulf; his journevings were not for business, but he was fond of seeing things and of acquiring knowledge; he had wealth enough, and felt that it was not of any great moment to have more than enough, and so he employed his leisure for such purposes; he was getting together a history to serve as a basis for a philosophy that had as its end and aim theology, as he himself named it. He had recently been at the shrine of Ammon, and it was plain that he was not particularly impressed by most of the things there, but in regard to the everburning lamp he related a story told by the priests which deserves special consideration; it is that the lamp consumes less and less oil each year, and they hold that this is a proof of a disparity in the years, which all the time is making one year shorter in duration than its predecessor; for it is reasonable that in less duration of time the amount consumed should be less.

The company was surprised at this, and Demetrius went so far as to say that it was ridiculous to try in this way to draw great conclusions from small data, not, as Alcaeus[*] puts it, painting the lion from a single claw, but with a wick and lamp postulating a mutation in the heavens and the universe, and doing away completely with mathematical science.

Neither of these things, said Cleombrotus, will disturb these men; certainly they will not concede any superior accuracy to the mathematicians, since it is more likely that a set period of time, in movements and cycles so far away, should elude mathematical calculation than that the measurement of the oil should elude the very men who were always giving careful attention to the anomaly and watching it closely because of its strangeness. Besides, Demetrius, not to allow that small things are indication of great stands directly in the way of many arts; for it will result in taking away from us the demonstration of many facts and the prognostication of many others. Yet you people try to demonstrate to us also a matter of no small importance: that the heroes of old shaved their bodies with a razor, because you meet with the word razor in Homer[*]; also that they lent money on interest because Homer[*] somewhere says that a debt is owing, not recent nor small, the assumption being that owing signifies accumulating. And again when Homer[*] speaks of the night as swift, you cling to the expression with great satisfaction and say that it means this: that the Earth’s shadow is by him called conical, being caused by a spherical body; and as for the idea that medical science can predict a pestilential summer by a multitude of spiders’ webs or by the fig-leaves in the spring when they are like crows’ feet, who of those that insist that small things are not indications of great will allow this to go unchallenged? Who will endure

that the magnitude of the sun be measured by reference to a quart or a gill, or that, in the sun-diai here, the inclination of the acute angle which its shadow makes with the level plane be called the measurement of the elevation of the ever-visible pole above the horizon? This was what one might hear from the priests of the prophetic shrine there; so some other rejoinder must be offered to them, if we would make for the sun the wonted order of its course immutable, in accord with the tradition of the ages.

Thereupon Ammonius the philosopher, who was present, exclaimed, Not for the sun only, but for the whole heavens. For the sun’s course in passing from solstice to solstice must inevitably become shorter and not continue to be so large a part of the horizon as the mathematicians say it is, since the southern portion is constantly subject to a contracting movement, which brings it closer to the northern portion; and so our summer must become shorter and its temperature lower, as the sun turns about within narrower limits and touches fewer parallels of latitude at the solstitial points; moreover, the phenomenon observed at Syenê,[*] where the upright rods on the sun-dials cast no shadow at the time of the summer solstice, is bound to be a thing of the past; many of the fixed stars must have gone below the horizon, and some of them must be touching one another, or have become coalescent, as the space separating them has disappeared! But if, on the other hand, they are going to assert that, while all the other bodies are without change, the sun displays

irregularity in its movements, they will not be able to state the cause of the acceleration which affects the sun alone among so many bodies, and they will throw into confusion almost all the celestial mechanics, and into complete confusion those relating to the moon, so that they will have no need of measures of oil to prove the difference. In fact, the eclipses will prove it, as the sun more frequently casts a shadow on the moon and the moon on the earth; the other facts are clear, and there is no need to disclose in further detail the imposture in the argument.

But, said Cleombrotus, I myself actually saw the measure; for they had many of them to show, and that of this past year failed to come up to the very oldest by not a little.

Then, said Ammonius, taking up the argument again, this fact has escaped the notice of the other peoples among whom ever-burning fires have been cherished and kept alive for a period of years which might be termed infinite? But on the assumption that the report is true, is it not better to assign the cause to some coldness or moisture in the air by which the flame is made to languish, and so very likely does not take up nor need very much to support it? Or, quite the reverse, may we assign the cause to spells of dryness and heat? In fact, I have heard people say before this regarding fire, that it burns better in the winter,[*] being strongly compacted and condensed by the cold; whereas in warm, dry times it is very weak and loses its compactness and intensity, and if it burns in the sunlight, it does even worse, and takes hold of the fuel without energy, and consumes it more slowly. Best of all, the cause might be assigned to the oil itself; for it is not unlikely that in days of old it

contained incombustible material and water, being produced from young trees; but that later, being ripened on full-grown trees and concentrated, it should, in an equal quantity, show more strength and provide a better fuel, if the people at Ammon’s shrine must have their assumption preserved for them in spite of its being so strange and unusual.