De Defectu Oraculorum
Plutarch
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals, Vol. IV. Goodwin, William W., editor; Midgley, Robert translator. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company; Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1874.
Furthermore, a man may say that dryness, being mixed with heat, attenuateth and subtilizeth the spirit, and makes it pure and of an ethereal nature and consistence; for the soul itself, according to Heraclitus, is of a dry constitution; whereas moisture does not only dim the sight and dull the hearing, but when mingled with the air and touching the superficies of mirrors, dusketh the brightness of the one and takes away the light of the other. Or perhaps, on the contrary, by some refrigeration and condensation of this spirit, like the tincture and hardening of iron, this part of the soul which does prognosticate may become more intense and get a perfect edge. Just as tin being melted with brass (which of itself is rare and spongeous) does drive it nearer and make it more massy and solid, and
Linen is dyed with the bright saffron’s flower.And we have learned of you, Demetrius, that only the river Cydnus cleaneth the knife consecrated to Apollo, in the city of Tarsus in Cilicia, and that there is no other water which can scour and cleanse it. So in the town of Olympia, they temper ashes with the water of the river Alpheus, with which they make a mortar wherewith they plaster the altar there; but if this be attempted to be done by the water of any other river, it is all to no purpose.
It is no wonder then if, the earth sending up many exhalations, only those of this sort transport the soul with a divine fury, and give it a faculty of foretelling future things. And, without a doubt, what is related touching the oracle of this place does herewith agree; for it is here where this faculty of divining first showed itself, by means of a certain shepherd, who chanced to fall down and began to utter enthusiastic speeches concerning future events; of which at first the neighbors took no notice; but when they saw what he foretold came to pass, they had him in admiration; and the most learned among the Delphians, speaking of this man, are used to call him by the name of Coretas. The soul seems to me to mix and join itself with this prophetic exhalation, just as the eye is affected with the light. For the eye, which has a natural property and faculty of seeing, would be wholly useless without the light; so the soul, having this faculty and property of foreseeing
future things, as an eye, has need of a proper object which may enlighten and sharpen it. And therefore the ancients took the sun and Apollo to be the same God; and those who understand the beauty and wisdom of analogy or proportion do tell us, that as the body is to the soul, the sight to the mind, and light to truth, so is the sun with reference to Apollo; affirming the sun to be the offspring proceeding perpetually from Apollo, who is eternal and who continually bringeth him forth. For as the sun enlightens and excites the visive powers of the senses, so Apollo does excite the prophetic virtue in the soul.Those then that imagined that both were one and the same God have with good reason dedicated and consecrated this oracle to Apollo and to the earth, deeming it to be the sun which imprinted this temperature and disposition on the earth, from whence arose this predictive exhalation. For as Hesiod, with far better reason than other philosophers, calls the earth
The well-fixed seat of all things;[*](Hesiod, Theogony, 117.)so do we esteem it eternal, immortal, and incorruptible. But as to the virtues and faculties which are in it, we believe that some fail in one place, and spring up anew in another. It seems also (for so some experiments incline us to conjecture) that these transitions, changes, and revolutions in process of time do circulate and return to the same place, and begin again where they left off. In some countries we see lakes and whole rivers and not a few fountains and springs of hot waters have sometimes failed and been entirely lost, and at others have fled and absconded themselves, being hidden and concealed under the earth; but perhaps some years after do appear again in the same place, or else run hard by. And so of metal mines, some have been quite exhausted, as the silver ones about Attica; and the same has happened to the veins of brass ore in Euboea, of which the best blades were made and hardened in cold water, as the poet Aeschylus tells us,
Taking his sword, a right Euboean blade.It is not long since the quarry of Carystus has ceased to yield a certain soft stone, which was wont to be drawn into a fine thread; for I suppose some here have seen towels, net-work, and coifs woven of that thread, which could not be burnt; but when they were soiled with using, people flung them into the fire, and took them thence white and clean, the fire only purifying them. But all this is vanished; and there is nothing but some few fibres or hairy threads, lying up and down scatteringly in the grain of the stones, to be seen now in the quarry.
Aristotle and his followers affirm that all this proceeds from an exhalation within the earth, and when this fails or removes to another place, or revives and recovers itself again, the phenomena proceeding from them do so too. The same must we say of the prophetical exhalations which spring from the earth, that their virtue also is not immortal, but may wax old and decay; for it is not unlikely that great floods of rain and showers do extinguish them, and that the claps of thunder do dissipate them; or else (which I look upon to be the principal cause) they are sunk lower into the earth or utterly destroyed by the shock of earthquakes and the confusion that attends them, as here in this place there still remain the tragical monuments of that great earthquake that overthrew the city. And in the town of Orchomenus, they say, when the pestilence carried away such multitudes of people, the oracle of Tiresias of a sudden ceased, and remains mute to this day. And whether the like has not happened to the oracles in Cilicia, as we have heard it hath, no man can better inform us than you, Demetrius.