Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
I recently came across some verses of no mean quality, my dear Sarapion, which Dicaearchus believes Euripides addressed to Archelaus: "I do not wish, though poor, to give gifts to a rich man, lest you judge me foolish, or think that in giving I am really asking. For the giver of small things from little means confers no favor on those who possess much, and if he is distrusted while giving, he gains nothing but a reputation for ill nature and meanness besides." Consider, then, how far gifts of money fall short, in generosity and beauty, of the gifts that come from reasoned wisdom—gifts which it is honorable to give, and for which the givers may fairly ask like gifts in return from those who receive them. I, for my part, in sending to you and, through you, to our friends there some of my Pythian discourses as a kind of first-fruits, confess that I expect others, more numerous and better, from you in return, inasmuch as you live in a great city and enjoy leisure amid a wealth of books and studies of every kind.
Our friend Apollo, then, seems to heal and resolve the perplexities of life by giving oracles to those who consult him, but the perplexities that concern reasoned discourse he himself instills and sets before the mind naturally inclined to philosophy, implanting in the soul a desire that leads it on toward truth—as is clear from many other things and especially from the consecration of the E. For it is reasonable to suppose that this letter did not come to occupy a place of honor beside the god by chance, nor merely as if it had been allotted its rank among the letters at random, and so received the status of a sacred dedication and a spectacle—but rather that either those who in the beginning philosophized about the god perceived in it some peculiar and extraordinary power, or else made use of it as a symbol pointing to something else worthy of study, and so admitted it in this way.
Often, then, on other occasions, when the subject was raised in the school, I would gently turn it aside and pass it by; but recently I was drawn into it by my sons, who were vying to entertain some strangers whom—since they were about to leave Delphi at once—it was not decent to put off or to refuse, eager as they were to hear something before all else. So, sitting down beside the temple, I began partly to inquire on my own and partly to question them, and under the influence of the place and of the discussion itself, I recalled what we once heard long ago, at the time when Nero was visiting, from Ammonius and certain others who were discussing the matter, when the same difficulty had likewise arisen there. That the god is no less a philosopher than a prophet seemed to everyone plain, and on this point Ammonius rightly assigned each of the names, explaining that he is called Pythian for those who are beginning to learn and to inquire; Delian and Phanaean for those to whom something of the truth is already being disclosed and is beginning to shine forth; Ismenian for those who already possess knowledge; and Leschenorian whenever men are active and take their pleasure in conversing and philosophizing with one another.
"And since," he said, "the beginning of philosophizing is inquiry, and inquiry is wonder and perplexity, it is reasonable that most matters concerning the god should seem to be hidden away in riddles, and to call for some account of the why and an explanation of the cause—for example, in the case of the undying fire, the fact that only fir and laurel among woods are burned there as incense; and the fact that two Fates, though three are usually reckoned, are set up everywhere; and the fact that no woman is permitted to approach the oracle; and the matter of the tripod, and all such things—these, offered to men who are not utterly without reason or without soul, entice and invite them to consider something, and to listen, and to converse about them.
Consider also these inscribed maxims, 'Know thyself' and 'Nothing in excess'—how many inquiries they have set philosophers in motion, and what a multitude of discourses has sprung up from each of them as if from a seed! Of none of these, I think, is the subject now under inquiry any less fruitful a source of discourse." When Ammonius had said this, his brother Lamprias said, "Well, the account we have heard is simple and quite brief. For they say that those wise men—called by some sophists—were themselves five in number: Chilon, Thales, Solon, Bias, and Pittacus; but when Cleobulus, the tyrant of Lindos, and then Periander of Corinth, who had no share at all in virtue or wisdom, but by force of power, friends, and favors compelled a reputation for themselves, thrust their way into the title of the wise, and sent out and scattered abroad through Greece certain maxims and sayings resembling those spoken by the genuine sages—the true men, indignant at this, being unwilling to expose the imposture openly, nor to incur the enmity of men of great power for the sake of reputation, and to fight it out with them, instead met together by themselves in this place and conferred with one another, and dedicated the letter which stands fifth in the order of the alphabet and signifies the number five, calling the god to witness on their own behalf that they were five, and rejecting and casting off the sixth and the seventh as not belonging to them.
And that this is said not without reason, one might learn by hearing what those connected with the shrine report: that the golden E was called that of Livia, Caesar's wife; the bronze one that of the Athenians; but the first and oldest one, which in substance is still wooden, they call to this day 'the E of the wise men,' as having become a dedication not of one man but common to all of them." Now Ammonius smiled quietly to himself, suspecting that Lamprias was making use of an opinion of his own, but pretending it was history and hearsay from others, so as to avoid responsibility for it.
Then another of those present said that this resembled the nonsense that a Chaldean stranger had been talking recently—that seven of the letters emit a sound of their own, and seven are the stars that move in heaven with a motion complete in itself and unconnected with others; and that E stands second in order among the vowels from the beginning, just as the sun stands second among the planets counting from the moon; and that virtually all Greeks consider Apollo to be identical with the sun. "But this," he said, "is entirely from the market stall and the assembly-crowd. It seems Lamprias, without realizing it, has stirred up against himself men who came from the shrine to hear his own account." For what that man had said, none of the Delphians knew; but they were bringing forward into the open the common and touristic opinion, holding that it is neither the visual shape nor the sound but only the name of the letter that has some symbolic meaning.
"For it is," as the Delphians suppose, and as Nicander the priest, who was then presiding, used to say, "the form and figure of an approach to the god, and it holds the leading place among the questions that those who consult the oracle put to him each time as they make their inquiries: 'shall I be victorious?' 'shall I marry?' 'is it advantageous to sail?' 'to farm?' 'to go abroad?' But the god, being wise, bids the logicians good day, thinking that nothing results from the particle 'if' together with the proposition that follows it, and that all questions are subordinate to this—yet he conceives of and welcomes them all as real matters of fact.
Since, moreover, to ask questions, as one asks a seer, is peculiar to us, while to pray is common to us as addressed to a god, they hold that the letter contains no less the power of wishing than of asking: for 'if only' (ei gar), each one who prays says. And Archilochus: 'If only it might be granted me to touch Neobule's hand.' And they say that the second syllable of the word eithe ('would that') is a mere lengthening, as in Sophron's phrase 'along with children, would that she needed'; and in the Homeric line, 'so, I think, I too shall loosen his fury' — while in the word 'if' the optative sense is sufficiently and adequately expressed."
When Nicander had gone through all this—you know our companion Theon—he asked Ammonius whether logic had any right to speak up for itself, having heard itself so thoroughly abused; and when Ammonius urged him to speak and come to its defense, Theon said: "Well, that the god is most given to logical reasoning, most of his oracles make plain, for it belongs to the same faculty both to resolve and to create ambiguities. Further, as Plato used to say, when an oracle was given commanding that the altar at Delos be doubled, a task which is the very height of achievement in geometry, the god was not really commanding this, but was instructing the Greeks to study geometry: so, then, in issuing ambiguous oracles, the god increases and strengthens the art of logical reasoning, as being necessary for those who are going to understand him correctly.
In logic, surely, this connective conjunction 'if' has the greatest power, since it forms the most rational of propositions, the conditional. For how could the conditional be otherwise, seeing that even the beasts have knowledge of the existence of things, while nature has granted to man alone the contemplation and judgment of consequence? For that 'it is day and there is light,' wolves and dogs and birds, of course, perceive; but that 'if it is day, there is light'—nothing else but man understands, since he alone has a conception of the connection and interrelation of the leading and the following terms with one another, and of their relation and difference, from which demonstrations take their most authoritative starting point.
Since, then, philosophy is concerned with truth, and the light of truth is demonstration, and the starting point of demonstration is the conditional, it is fitting that the power which holds this together and produces it should have been consecrated by wise men to the god who most of all loves truth. And the god is a prophet, while the prophetic art concerns the future as derived from what is present or past; for of nothing is the coming-into-being uncaused, nor is foreknowledge without reason—but since all things that come to be follow upon and are bound up with the things that have already come to be, and the things that will come to be with the things now coming to be, in a chain proceeding from beginning to an end that completes it, the one who knows how to bind and interweave the causes with one another in accordance with nature also knows how to foretell things present, things future, and things past.
And Homer did well to place first the things present, then the future, and then the past; for it is from what exists that the syllogism proceeds, according to the power of the conditional, as in 'if this is, this precedes it,' and again, 'if this is, this will come to be.' For the technical and logical element, as has been said, is knowledge of sequence, while perception supplies the minor premise to reason. Hence, even though it may seem a strained point to make, I shall not shrink from asserting that this—reasoned discourse—is the true tripod of truth, which, having established the sequence of the consequent upon the antecedent, then, adding the fact of existence, draws the conclusion of the demonstration.
As for the Pythian god, then, if indeed he delights in music and in the songs of swans and the sounds of the lyre, what wonder is it that out of love for logical reasoning he should embrace and cherish this part of discourse, which he sees philosophers making use of most and to the greatest degree? And Heracles—not yet having freed Prometheus, nor yet having conversed with the sophists in the company of Chiron and Atlas, but still young and thoroughly Boeotian—by rejecting logic and mocking the word 'if,' seemed to be tearing away by force the second leg of the tripod and contending against the god on behalf of his own art; since, as time went on, he too seems to have become at once most prophetic and most skilled in logic."
When Theon had finished, it was, I think, Eustrophus the Athenian who said to us: "Do you see how eagerly Theon defends logic, all but putting on the lion's skin himself? So it is not likely that we too, who reckon absolutely all things—facts, natures, and first principles alike, both divine and human—in terms of number, and who make this above all our guide and lord over the things that are beautiful and honorable, should keep silent, but rather that we should offer to the god the first-fruits of our beloved mathematics: holding that the E itself, in itself, differs from the other letters neither in power nor in shape nor in name, but that it has been honored as the sign of a number great and sovereign over the whole—the pentad, from which the wise called the act of counting 'pempazein.'"
Eustrophus said this to us not in jest, but because at that time I was passionately devoted to mathematical studies, and was likely soon to be honoring 'nothing in excess' in all things, once I had come to the Academy. I said, then, that Eustrophus resolved the puzzle most excellently by means of number: "for," I said, "since every number is divided into the even and the odd, the monad is common to both in its power (which is why, when added, it makes the odd number even, and the even number odd), and since two is taken as the origin of the even, and three of the odd, and five is generated when these are mixed together, it has reasonably come to be honored as the first number produced from the first numbers, and has been named 'marriage' from the resemblance of the even to the female and, in turn, of the odd to the male.
For in divisions of numbers into equal parts, the even number, when split apart in every way, leaves behind a certain receptive principle and space within itself, as it were, whereas in the odd number, when it undergoes the same treatment, there is always a productive middle term left over from the division; by which it is more fruitful than the other, and when mixed it always dominates and is never dominated—for from the mixture of the two, by no combination does an even number result, but by every combination an odd one does.
Further, and still more, each shows its distinctive character by being multiplied by and combined with itself: for no even number, when joined with an even number, ever produces an odd result, nor does it depart from its own nature, being through weakness barren and incapable of producing anything other than itself; whereas odd numbers, when combined with odd numbers, produce many even numbers because of their thoroughgoing fruitfulness. The other powers and distinctions of numbers one could not properly go through at present. As, then, the five, arising from the union of the first male number and the first female number, the Pythagoreans called 'marriage'; and it is also called 'nature,' because, when multiplied by itself repeatedly, it always comes back around to itself again.
For just as nature, taking a grain of wheat as seed and pouring it out, produces in the middle many shapes and forms through which it brings the work to its end, but at the very end reveals wheat once more, restoring the beginning in the completion of the whole process—so too, among the other numbers, when they are multiplied by themselves, they end in others as they grow; only the number five, and six along with it, when multiplied by themselves that many times over, reproduce and preserve themselves. For six times six is thirty-six, and five times five is twenty-five.
And again, the number six does this only once, becoming a square from itself in a single way; but for the pentad, while this too happens through multiplication, it also has the peculiar property of producing, by addition, either itself or the decad, adding itself to itself part by part, and this happens continually, the number thereby imitating the principle that orders and governs the whole universe. For just as that principle preserves...
...out of itself produces the cosmos, and out of the cosmos again produces itself: “All things are exchanged for fire,” says Heraclitus, “and fire for all things, just as goods are exchanged for gold and gold for goods.” So too the pentad's union with itself is naturally disposed to generate nothing incomplete or foreign, but has fixed transformations: for it produces either itself or the decad, that is, either what is proper to it or what is perfect.”
“So if someone should ask what this has to do with Apollo, we shall say: not to Apollo alone, but to Dionysus as well, who has no less a share in Delphi than Apollo does. We hear the theologians, some speaking in verse and some without meter, singing that the god, being by nature indestructible and eternal, but subject to certain transformations of himself ordained by fate and reason, at one time kindles his nature into fire, making all things alike to all, and at another time becomes manifold, appearing in different shapes and passions and powers, as he does now, and is called the cosmos, by the most familiar of his names.
But the wiser among them, concealing this from the many, call his transformation into fire 'Apollo' on account of his oneness, and 'Phoebus' on account of his purity and unstained nature. As for his turning into winds and water and earth and stars and the generations of plants and animals, and the ordering that results, they hint at this affection and change as a kind of tearing apart and dismemberment, and they call him Dionysus and Zagreus and Nyktelios and Isodaites; and those who speak of his deaths and rebirths recount, in myths and riddles proper to the changes described, certain destructions and disappearances.
And to the one they sing dithyrambic songs full of suffering, with a certain wandering and dispersion characteristic of change — for Aeschylus says that a tumultuous dithyramb befits accompanying the revel-band of Dionysus — while to the other they sing a paean, an orderly and temperate strain. They depict the one as ever ageless and young, the other as manifold and multiform in paintings and sculptures; and in general they attribute to the one likeness, order, and unmixed seriousness, and to the other a certain irregularity mixed with playfulness, insolence, seriousness, and madness, invoking him as 'Dionysus the reveler, rouser of women, who flourishes amid frenzied honors' — not unreasonably taking what is proper to each of the two changes.
Since the periods of these changes are not of equal length, but the one they call 'satiety' is longer, and the one called 'want' shorter, they observe the proportion accordingly: for the rest of the year they use the paean at the sacrifices, but at the onset of winter they rouse the dithyramb and put a stop to the paean, and for three months they invoke this god in place of that one — reckoning that the ratio of the ordered world's time to the time of the conflagration is three to one.
“But this has been drawn out beyond due measure. It is clear, though, that they associate the pentad with him, since it produces at one time itself, like fire, and at another the decad out of itself, like the cosmos.
“And do we suppose that music, which is most pleasing to the god, has no share in this number? For the greatest part, one might almost say, of the art of harmony concerns the concords. And that these are five and no more, reason refutes anyone who wishes to hunt for them irrationally, by sensation alone, among strings and finger-holes. For all of them derive their origin from ratios of numbers: the ratio of the fourth is four to three, of the fifth three to two, of the octave two to one, of the octave-plus-fifth three to one, and of the double octave four to one.
As for the interval which the theorists of harmony introduce alongside these — the so-called octave-plus-fourth, which steps outside due measure — it is not worth accepting, since in doing so they indulge the irrational element of hearing against reason, as though granting it special privilege. And to pass over the five positions of the tetrachord, and the five primary tones — or modes, or scales, whichever we should call them — by whose raising and lowering, more or less, all the remaining degrees of pitch, low and high, arise: is it not true that, though the intervals are many, or rather infinite, only five are melodic — the quarter-tone, the semitone, the tone, the tone-and-a-half, and the ditone — and that no other space in sound, smaller or larger, bounded by high and low pitch, is melodic?”
“There are many other such instances,” I said, “which I could bring forward, passing over Plato, who says there is one cosmos, on the ground that if there are others besides this one, and this one is not alone, they would be five in all and no more. And yet even if this cosmos is one and unique, as Aristotle too believes, in a certain way it too is composed and fitted together out of five worlds: one of earth, one of water, a third of fire, and a fourth of air; and the fifth, heaven, which some call light, others aether, and others simply a fifth substance — since to move in a circle is, by nature, the property of that body alone, not by necessity nor by chance. And having recognized also the five most beautiful and most perfect figures found in nature — the pyramid, the cube, the octahedron, the icosahedron, and the dodecahedron — he assigned each one appropriately to each element.
There are also those who match the powers of the senses, equal in number to those primary elements, to them: observing that touch is resistant and earthy, and that taste receives the qualities of things tasted through the moisture of what is tasted. Air, when struck, becomes voice and sound for hearing. Of the two remaining senses, smell, the province of the sense of smell, is an exhalation generated by heat and is of a fiery nature; while sight, kindred to aether and light and shining forth through that kinship, produces a blending of the two that share a common nature, a kind of fusion. Neither the living creature has any other sense, nor does the cosmos have any other simple and unmixed nature — but a wondrous distribution and correspondence, it seems, has come about between the five senses and the five elements.”
Then, pausing and stopping for a moment, “What an oversight, Eustrophus,” I said, “we have very nearly committed, passing over Homer — who was the first to divide the cosmos into five portions, assigning the three middle ones to the three gods, and leaving the two extremes, Olympus and earth, of which the one is the boundary of the lower regions and the other of the upper, as common to all and unallotted to any.
“But,” I went on, “the argument must be brought back, as Euripides says. For those who honor the tetrad teach us, not without merit, that by its principle every body has come into being. Since everything solid consists of length and breadth that has acquired depth, and a point, ranked as a unit, precedes length; and length without breadth is called a line, and is length; and the motion of a line in breadth produced the generation of a surface, in a triad; and when depth is added to these, through a fourth term the growth advances into a solid — it is clear to everyone that the tetrad, having advanced nature this far, to the point of completing a body and providing a tangible, resistant mass, then leaves it deficient in the greatest thing.
For the soulless, simply put, is orphaned and incomplete and fit for nothing whatsoever, so long as soul does not make use of it; but the motion or disposition that engenders soul, coming about by a change through a fifth term, renders nature complete, and possesses a principle that much more authoritative than the tetrad's, by as much as the living being surpasses the soulless in worth.
Furthermore, the symmetry and power of the pentad, prevailing still further, did not allow the ensouled to proceed into infinite kinds, but furnished five forms for all living things. For there are, surely, gods, and daemons, and heroes, and after these, as a fourth kind, human beings, and last, as a fifth, the irrational and beast-like kind. Again, if you were to divide the soul itself according to its nature, its first and dimmest part is the nutritive, the second the perceptive, then the appetitive, and after that the spirited; and having arrived at the power of reason and brought nature to completion, it comes to rest, as it were, at the summit, in the fifth.
“Now since the number possesses so many and such great powers, its origin too is beautiful — not the one we already discussed, arising from a dyad and a triad, but that which the unit produced by uniting with the first square number. For the unit is the origin of every number, and the first square is the tetrad; and from these, as though form met matter reaching its limit, comes the pentad. And if some rightly hold that the unit itself is also a square — being its own power and terminating in itself — then the pentad, having arisen from two of the primary squares, leaves no possibility of surpassing it in nobility.” “But the greatest point,” I said, “I am afraid, once spoken, will embarrass our Plato — just as he himself said Anaxagoras was embarrassed over the matter of the moon, when he claimed as his own an opinion about its illumination that was in fact very ancient. For has he not said as much in the Cratylus?”
“Certainly,” said Eustrophus, “but I do not see what parallel there is.” “Well, you surely know that in the Sophist he demonstrates five principal first-principles: being, sameness, otherness, and, fourth and fifth in addition to these, motion and rest. And again, using another kind of division in the Philebus, he says that the one is the unlimited and the other the limit, and that when these are mixed, all generation results. As the cause by which the mixture occurs, he posits a fourth kind; and he has left us to infer a fifth, by which the things mixed are again separated and set apart.
I conjecture that these are spoken of as images of those former principles: the unlimited corresponding to becoming, the limit to rest, the mixing principle to sameness, and the separating principle to otherness. But even if these are different, either way the result stands in five kinds and distinctions.
“Someone will say that, having perceived this before Plato and learned of it, he consecrated two E's to the god, a manifest sign and symbol of the number of all things. But indeed he also recognized that the good appears manifest in five kinds, of which the first is measure, the second the well-proportioned, the third mind, the fourth the sciences and arts and true opinions concerning the soul, and the fifth, if there is any pure pleasure unmixed with pain — at which point he stops, adding the Orphic line: 'In the sixth generation, cease the order of the song.'”
“On top of what has been said,” I remarked, “I shall sing to you one brief word for the understanding, to those around Nicander: for on the sixth day of the new month, when someone brings the Pythia down into the town hall, the first of the three lots comes about for you by casting five against each other, her side taking three and his side two. Is that not how it stands?” And Nicander said, “So it is, but the reason may not be disclosed to others.” “Well then,” I said, smiling, “until the god grants us, once we have become his priests, to learn the truth, this too shall be added to what has been said in praise of the pentad.”
Such, as I recall, was the end of the arithmetical and mathematical encomium of the E.
Ammonius, since he himself placed no small part of philosophy in mathematics, was pleased with what had been said and remarked: “It is not worthwhile to argue too precisely against the young men on these points, except to note that each of the numbers will furnish no small material to those who wish to praise and celebrate it. And what need is there to speak of the other numbers? For Apollo's sacred hebdomad would use up the whole day before one could go through all its powers in speech. In that case, by the common rule, we shall be declaring our wise men to be at war both with the god and with long tradition, if — having pushed the hebdomad aside from its presidency — they consecrated the pentad to the god as somehow more fitting.
“I think, then, that the letter signifies neither a number, nor an order, nor a connective, nor any other of the deficient parts of speech; rather, it is a complete address and greeting to the god in its own right, which, by the very utterance, sets the speaker's mind upon the god's power. For the god, as each of us approaches him here, greets us, as it were, with the words 'Know thyself' — which is no less a greeting than 'Hail.' And we, in turn, answering the god, say 'Thou art,' rendering to him this address of being as true and without falsehood, and belonging to him alone who alone possesses it.
“For in reality we have no share whatsoever in being; rather, every mortal nature, existing between coming-to-be and perishing, offers only a dim and uncertain appearance and semblance of itself. And if you press your thought to grasp it, it is like a violent attempt to grip water: by squeezing and compressing it together, the very act destroys what it seizes as it flows away; so too, reason, pursuing the excessive vividness of each thing among the things that are affected and changed, is thrown off — swept now toward its coming-to-be, now toward its perishing — unable to lay hold of anything that abides or truly is.
“For it is not possible, according to Heraclitus, to step twice into the same river; nor is it possible to touch a mortal substance twice in the same state, but by the sharpness and speed of its change 'it scatters and gathers again' — or rather not even 'again' nor 'afterward,' but at the same instant it comes together and departs, 'approaches and withdraws.' Hence what is coming-to-be of it does not even reach the point of being, because its generation never ceases nor stands still, but, ever changing from seed, makes first an embryo, then an infant, then a child, then in turn a stripling, a young man, then a man, an elder, an old man — each later stage of growth and age destroying the earlier ones.
“But we, absurdly, fear one single death, though we have already died so many times, and are dying still. For it is not only, as Heraclitus said, that 'death for fire is birth for air, and death for air is birth for water,' but still more plainly in our own case: the man in his prime perishes when the old man comes to be, the young man perished into the man in his prime, and the child into the young man, and the infant into the child; he of yesterday has died into him of today, and he of today is dying into him of tomorrow. No one remains, nor is anyone one thing, but we become many, circling around some one...
...a phantasm, and the common imprint of matter as it is driven around and slips away. For how, remaining the same, do we now delight in one set of things, formerly in another, love or hate opposite things, admire and blame opposite things, use different words and different feelings, no longer having the same appearance, the same form, or the same mind? For it is not likely that one undergoes different experiences without changing, nor that one who changes remains the same; and if
he is not the same, then he does not exist at all, but this very thing changes, becoming one person out of another; and perception is deceived through ignorance of what really is, taking the apparent for the real. "What then truly is? That which is eternal, ungenerated, and imperishable, to which time brings no change at all. For time is something in motion, appearing together with matter that is in motion, ever flowing and never containing anything, like
a vessel of destruction and generation. Of time, indeed, the words ‘afterward’ and ‘before,’ and ‘will be’ and ‘has been,’ the moment they are spoken, are of themselves a confession of not-being: for to say of what has not yet come to be, or has already ceased to be, that ‘it is,’ is foolish and absurd. And as for that on which we most rest our thought of
time when we utter ‘it is now present’ and ‘it is here’ and ‘now,’ this too our reasoning, slipping away, wholly destroys once again. For it is squeezed out into the future and the past, like a point that those wishing to see it are forced, of necessity, to split apart. And if the nature that is measured undergoes the same fate as the thing that measures it, then none of it remains or truly is, but all things come to be and perish according to
their apportionment with respect to time. Hence it is not even pious to say of Being that it ‘was’ or ‘will be’; for these are certain declensions and transitions and variations belonging to what is not by nature fitted to remain in being." "But God is—one must say so—and he exists in respect to no time at all, but in respect to the eternity that is unmoving, timeless, and unswerving,
in which there is nothing earlier or later, nothing future or past, nothing older or younger; but being one, he has filled up ‘forever’ with a single ‘now,’ and only what exists in this way is truly real—not having come to be, nor being about to be, nor having begun, nor going to cease. So then we must worship and greet him in this manner, revering him, or indeed, by Zeus, as some of the
ancients did, say ‘Thou art.’ For the divine is not many, as each of us is—an assortment gathered out of countless differences arising amid our passions, a motley aggregate mixed together as at some festival crowd; rather, what truly is must be one, just as the One is what truly is. Otherness, through its difference from Being, passes over into the coming-to-be of not-being. Hence it is fitting that the first and
second and third of the god’s names have this character. For Apollo is, as it were, one who denies the many and disavows plurality; Ieius, as one and alone; and Phoebus, of course, is the name the ancients gave to everything pure and undefiled—just as even now the Thessalians say that their priests, when on the forbidden days they keep to themselves apart, are being ‘phoibonomized,’ that is, I think, purified. And the one is unmixed and
pure, for defilement comes from the mingling of one thing with another—just as somewhere Homer too says that a certain piece of ivory ‘is stained’ when it is reddened with dye; and dyers say that colors which are mixed together are ‘spoiled,’ and they call the mixture ‘corruption.’ It is fitting, then, that to be one and unmixed always belongs to what is imperishable and pure." "As for those who hold that Apollo and the sun are the same, it is right to embrace them and
to love them for their piety of speech, since they place their conception of the god in that thing which, of all they know and desire, they honor most. But now, as we dream of the god in the fairest of dreams, let us wake ourselves and urge him to lead us further upward and to let us behold his waking reality and his very being; and let us also honor this image here and revere the generative power that surrounds it, so far as
it is possible for what is perceptible to honor what is intelligible, and what is in motion to honor what abides—displaying, as it flickers, certain reflections and images somehow of that being’s benevolence and blessedness. But as for his departures and transformations as he sends forth fire, which they say draw him upward, and again his pressing down here and stretching himself into earth and sea and winds and living creatures, and the dreadful sufferings of both animals and plants—it is not even pious to hear of it,
or else he would be inferior to the child in the poet’s image, who plays that game with a heap of sand, piling it up and then scattering it again himself, dealing with the universe always in this same manner, molding the world when it does not exist and then destroying it once it has come to be. On the contrary, whatever has in any way come to be present within the world, this binds its substance together and masters the weakness of the corporeal, which tends toward destruction.
And it seems to me that the saying most opposed to this account—and calling on it as a witness against it—is to say ‘Thou art’ to the god, as though no departure or change ever occurs about him, but that it belongs to some other god, or rather to some daimon appointed over the nature that is bound up with destruction and generation, to do and to undergo this. This is clear at once from the names themselves, which are, as it were, opposite and
antiphonal to one another. For the one is called Apollo, the other Pluto; the one Delian, the other Aidoneus; the one Phoebus (the bright), the other Skotios (the shadowed); and with the one are the Muses and Memory, with the other are Forgetfulness and Silence; and the one is Theorios and Phanaios, while the other is ‘lord of murky night and idle Sleep’;
and the one is ‘of all the gods most hateful to mortals,’ while of him Pindar spoke, not unpleasingly, that ‘he was judged by mortals to be gentlest of all.’ Fittingly, then, Euripides said: ‘the libations for the dead, the dirges for the departed, golden-haired Apollo does not accept.’ And even before him, Stesichorus: ‘Apollo indeed loves above all sportive play and song, but to Hades fell cares and lamentation.’
Sophocles too, assigning to each of the two gods one of the instruments, makes this plain in these words: ‘not the nabla dear to wailing, nor the lyre.’ For the aulos, too, only recently and of late, dared to send forth its voice ‘over things desired’; but in the earliest time it was drawn toward mourning, and its office in that regard was held in no great honor and was not bright or cheerful—until later, all things became mixed together with all.
...they have plunged themselves into confusion, above all by confounding the divine with the daimonic. But surely to the E the saying ‘Know Thyself’ seems, in a way, to stand opposed, and yet in another way it also harmonizes with it once more: for the one has been proclaimed to the god in astonishment and reverence, as to one who exists forever, while the other is a reminder to the mortal of his own nature and weakness."