Complete Works of Plutarch Part 56

The purpose, Neptune, well thou know'st thyself For which I called thee; true, they needs must die, But still they claim my care.

And in other places (I. xxii. 168):--

A woful sight mine eyes behold: a man I love in plight around the walls! my heart For Hector grieves.

He refers to the royal dignity of the G.o.ds and their loving care of men, saying (O. i. 65):--

How should I forget divine Odysseus, who in understanding is beyond mortals, and beyond all men hath done sacrifice to the deathless G.o.ds who keep the wide heaven?

How he makes the G.o.ds mingling with and working with men themselves it is possible to learn completely in many pa.s.sages for just as he represents Athene once helping Achilles and always aiding Odysseus, so he represents Hermes helping Priam, and again Odysseus, for he says (O.

xvii. 485):--

Yea even the G.o.ds, in the likeness of strangers from far countries, put on all manner of shapes, and wander through cities to watch the violence and the righteousness of men.

It is the characteristic of divine providence to wish men to live justly. This the poet indicates very clearly (O. xiv. 83):--

Verily it is not forward deeds the G.o.ds love, but they reverence justice and the righteous acts of men.

And (O. xvi. 386):--

When Jove Pours down his fiercest storms in wrath to men, Who in their courts unrighteous judgments pa.s.s.

Then just as he introduces the G.o.ds caring for men, so he represents men as mindful of them in every crisis. As the leader, succeeding in an action, says (I. viii. 526):--

Hopeful to Jove I pray, and all the G.o.ds To chase from hence these fate-inflicted hounds.

And in danger (I. xvii. 646):--

Father Jove, from o'er the sons of Greece, Remove this cloudy darkness.

And again when one has slayed another (I. xxii. 379):--

Since heaven has granted us this man to slay.

And dying (I. xxii. 358):--

But see I bring not down upon thy head the wrath of heaven.

From what other place than here did originate that doctrine of the Stoics? I mean this, that the world is one and in it both G.o.ds and men minister, sharing in justice by their nature. For when he says (I. xx.

4):--

Then Jove to Themis gave command to call The G.o.ds to council from the lofty height Of many ridg'd Olympus.

Why, Lord of lightning, hast thou summoned here The G.o.ds of council, dost thou aught desire Touching the Greeks and Trojans?

What does this mean except that the world is conducted by civilized laws and the G.o.ds consult under the presidency of the father of G.o.ds and men?

His opinion on fate he shows clearly in his poems (I. vi. 488):--

Dearest, wring not thus my heart, For till my day of destiny is come No man may take my life, and when it comes Nor brave, nor coward can escape that day.

But among the other things in which he confirms the power of fate, he thinks as the most-approved philosophers have thought after him,--Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus,--that not all things happen by fate, but some things are in the power of men, the choice of whom is free. The same man in a way acts as he desires and falls into what he does not desire. And this point of view he has clearly expounded in many places, as in the beginning of each of his poems: in the "Iliad" saying the wrath of Achilles was the cause of the destruction of the Greeks and that the will of Zeus was fulfilled; in the "Odyssey" that the comrades of Odysseus went to their destruction by their own folly. For they had offended by touching the sacred oxen of the Sun, although they could have abstained from doing so. Yet it was foreordained (O. xi. 110):--

But if thou hurtest them, I signify ruin for thy ships, and for thy men, and even though thou shalt thyself escape.

If thou doest them no hurt and art careful to return, so may ye yet reach Ithaca, albeit in evil case.

So not to violate them depended on themselves, but that those who had done the evil should perish follows from fate.

It is possible to avoid what happens accidentally by foresight as he shows in the following (O. v. 436):--

Then of a truth would luckless Odysseus have perished beyond what was ordained had not gray-eyed Athene given him some counsel. He rushed in and with both his hands clutched the rock whereto he clung till the great wave went by.

Then on the other hand running a great danger as he was, he had perished by fortune; yet by prudence he was saved.

Just as about divine things there are many divine reasonings in the philosophers taking their origin from Homer, so also with human affairs it is the same. First we will take up the subject of the soul. The most n.o.ble of the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato is that the soul is immortal. To it in his argument Plato affixed wings. Who first determined this? Homer says this among other things (I. xvi. 856):--

But the soul flying on its members came to Hades,--i.e. into a formless and invisible place, whether you think it in the air or under the earth.

But in the "Iliad" he makes the soul of Patroclus stand by the side of Achilles (I. xxiii. 65):--

The soul of wretched Patroclus came.

He makes a small speech for him in which he says this (I. xxiii. 72):--

The spirits and spectres of departed men Drove me from them, nor allow to Cross the abhorred river.

In the "Odyssey" through the whole account of the descent to Hades what else does he show but that souls survive after death, and when they drink blood can speak. For he knows that blood is the food and drink of the spirit, but spirit is the same thing as soul or the vehicle of the soul.

123. Most clearly he reveals that he considers man is nothing else but soul, where he says (O. xi. 90):--

There came up the soul of the Theban Tiresias having a golden sceptre.

Purposely he changes the word for soul to the masculine, to show that it was Tiresias. And afterward (O. xi. 601):--

And after him I described the mighty Heracles, his phantom I say; but as for himself he hath joy at the banquet among the deathless G.o.ds.

For here again he showed that the semblance thrown off from the body appeared, but no longer connected with its matter. The purest part of the soul had gone away; this was Heracles himself.

124. Whence that seems to philosophers a probable theory that the body is in a way the prison house of the soul. And this Homer first revealed; that which belongs to the living he calls [Greek omitted] (from "binding") as in this line (I. i. 115):--

Not the body nor the nature.

O. iv. 196:--

A body came to the woman.

O. xvi. 251:--

By my form, my virtue, my body.

But that which has put off the soul he calls nothing else but body as in these lines (I. vii. 79):--