Between Past and Present: The Dialogues
[In the following essay, Lamberton examines Plutarch's predecessors in the genre of the dialogue and discusses how he developed this form beyond his models.]
THE DIALOGUE AS A GENRE
The Lives gained a rapid and long-lived popularity that has tended to eclipse the rest of the Plutarchan corpus. The most unfortunate victims of this neglect in modern times have been the dialogues, representatives of a literary genre that thrived in antiquity, lived on into the Middle Ages, was revived in the Renaissance and survived into the eighteenth century, but since then has had relatively few practitioners. Plutarch, to judge by the surviving evidence, considered the dialogue central to his literary activity. Despite all the work he put into the Lives, one might even argue that his creations in the genre that was preeminently Plato's were the ones that mattered most. Certainly they provided him with a vehicle whose obliqueness he savored and whose capacity to juxtapose the complementary and the contradictory, argument for argument's sake, and multiple tentative solutions he found congenial.
Although we hear of a few earlier, lost dialogues, the talk of one brilliant talker—Socrates—seems to have given birth to the dialogue as a genre in the Greek world. Antecedents can be found in Herodotus and in Thucydides, dialogues embedded in historical narrative that sometimes seem to be re-creations of actual debates, with the issues marshaled plausibly on either side (e.g., the Melian Dialogue [Thucydides 5.84-114]) and that in other instances are purely literary creations, with ideas and arguments dramatized in contexts that can hardly be historical (e.g., Herodotus 3.80-83). The independent dialogue, however, the freestanding work consisting entirely of the display of a discussion presented as historical, was for all practical purposes the invention of the Socratics, with their teacher as protagonist. Plato may not have been the first among them to do create one. We know, in any case, of at least half a dozen others who wrote Socratic dialogues, although only Plato's and Xenophon's survive, along with fragments of the competition. The Socratic dialogue was never an exercise in transcription. Rather, it was a literary genre, and one with subgenres, including Socrates' Defense Speech (Apologia).
Right from the start, then, the dialogue was an elusive combination of memoir and fiction. Plato's own dialogues are by no means uniform. The ancient historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius (3.49-51) divided and subdivided them, using as his major categories “instructional” and “inquisitive,” and he acknowledged that others used categories such as “narrative” and “dramatic,” but he thought these more appropriate to plays than to Plato. But the analogy to drama was lost on no one. In Aristotle's lost dialogue On Poets, the Socratic dialogue was juxtaposed with Sophron's prose mimes (frs. 72, 73 Rose), and the later Platonists had a story that the young Plato was on his way to a career as a dramatist until he was redirected by Socrates toward writing a prose drama of intellectual inquiry instead of plays for the stage.
Plato's dialogues defy reductive summary. There is no satisfactory answer to the question of why he chose to make the Socratic dialogue the unique vehicle for the publication of his ideas. There is a general agreement that the simpler, aporetic dialogues, such as the Ion and Euthyphro, where Socrates is seen testing and refuting others' claims to wisdom, are concerned in large part with the representation of the activity and the thought of the historical Socrates, whereas the “middle” dialogues, such as the Republic, and “late” dialogues, such as the Parmenides and the Sophist, use Socrates and his interlocutors as personae to develop notions and concerns that were Plato's own and not his teacher's. There is also a general agreement that at some level Plato's motive must have been protreptic and that the dialogues present intellectual inquiry for the interested spectator while they invite that spectator to come closer and embrace the philosophical life.
Of the many puzzling and elusive conventions of the Platonic dialogues, two are of particular importance in approaching the dialogues of Plutarch: the frame and the myth. By frame, I mean the explanation, provided within the dialogue, of the conditions and occasion of the original conversation to be re-created for the reader, including the chain of transmission of the account. Some are direct and uncomplicated, either lacking a separable frame (e.g., the Crito) or narrated by Socrates in an autobiographical mode (as is the Republic). Others, however, are oddly insistent on the distance that separates the original conversation from the retelling.
Plato's Symposium, for instance, opens as a dialogue between Apollodoros (devoted Socratic and weepiest of the attendants of Socrates on his last day) and a nameless friend. The friend has asked for an account of a dinner party “a long time ago” at the home of Agathon, the tragic poet, a dinner party attended by Socrates and Alcibiades. Apollodoros begins by telling the friend that he has it all clearly in mind because he happened to be asked “just the other day” by Glaucon to recall the same evening. Glaucon had already heard it from a man named Phoenix, who heard it from Aristodemos, who was actually present at the party. Phoenix's account was unsatisfactory, however, so Glaucon came to Apollodoros, whose source for the whole matter is the same Aristodemos who had told Phoenix about it in the first place.
The Symposium presents itself, then, as a re-creation by Apollodoros for his anonymous interlocutor of an account he gave a few days ago to Glaucon, based on a report by Aristodemos, who was there, of a conversation many years in the past. Apollodoros mentions that he subsequently checked “a few things” with Socrates, who confirmed Aristodemos's account. Why all this confusing narrative paraphernalia? The most satisfying answer is that it problematizes from the start the issue of knowledge—knowledge, in this case, of the past, of what was said on a specific occasion. How do we know such things? By repetitions of reports of reports of (perhaps) eyewitnesses. Our knowledge, in other words, is mediated. We have no direct and verifiable perception of a truth as ordinary and everyday as a dinner-party conversation some years ago. Given the frailty of the chain that links us to this truth, what must we think of the larger epistemological dilemmas that confront us?
This explanation of Plato's odd, distancing frame stories combines the philosophical with the esthetic. Other explanations have been offered: there is no way to prove, for instance, that this cumbersome frame is not simply Plato's way of legitimating the account he is about to deliver and rendering it more credible. Our explanation, however, has the tacit approval of at least one ancient student of Plato's dialogues: Plutarch. As we shall see, Plutarch manipulates the frames of his dialogues in precisely this spirit, savoring the paradox of our endlessly frustrated attempts to know the truth.
The myths of Plato's dialogues are even more problematic than the frames. The bulk of most of the dialogues consists of attempts to solve problems, attempts that we may broadly categorize as analytic. The specific techniques illustrated range from the Socratic elenchus, or refutation, to the “division” tested in the Sophist. Plato's arguments are not always logically sound, and in a number of instances we cannot say whether their failures of logic were clear to Plato or not. It is nevertheless fair to characterize all of this material as rational analysis, as attempts—successful or failed, seriously portrayed or ironically parodied—to use the resources of mind, reason, and discourse to reach certainty on some issue or other. These arguments sometimes include illustrations, analogous to mind experiments, that serve to clarify or focus some matter under discussion. Thus in Republic 7 (514a-520a), Socrates uses the illustration of the cave to sum up what has already been said about education and to introduce the notion that the state will have to compel the philosopher to rule. The story of the people trapped in the cave, vivid as it is, is circumscribed. Its function within the argument is adequate to explain its presence and to exhaust its significance.
In roughly ten instances, however, Plato introduced stories—myths, nonanalytic, nonverifiable narratives, characterized by fabulous and folkloric elements—into contexts that do not wholly exhaust them. Some, including the wonderful comic creation myth fabricated by Aristophanes in the Symposium, may be explained as illustrations, like the cave story. One way or another, though, each takes over the exposition, as if it constituted an alternative to the analytic discourse, another way of talking about the world, unfettered by the demands of proof or logical demonstration. In two instances—the creation story of the Timaeus and the story of Atlantis in the Crito—this sort of discourse dominates to the point that the dialogue is reduced to storytelling, and any possible philosophical value is obscured, if such value can be equated with rational inquiry.
One of the most outrageous of Plato's myths is the “Myth of Er,” which brings the Republic to a close. It has greatly offended some of Plato's most devoted and careful readers. Julia Annas denounces it as a blatantly “consequentialist” reversal and subversion of what has gone before. Socrates, she points out, spends many hours (the content of 286 Stephanus pages) attempting to demonstrate to his interlocutors that justice, or simply doing right, is an end in itself in the context of the successful life—and then in the final seven pages he tells a colorful fairy tale about reward and punishment in the afterlife (Introduction to Plato's Republic, 349-53). Various solutions to this dilemma have been explored, but for our purposes it suffices to note the problem itself. Plato in his dialogues repeatedly shifts gears, often at or near the end of a dialogue, abandoning rational inquiry in favor of colorful and implausible storytelling, sometimes seemingly at odds with whatever gains have been attained up to that point by the use of rationally structured language.
These two problematic aspects of Plutarch's primary model, the Platonic dialogue, are central to his own creative reworking of the genre. Much has been lost between Plato and Plutarch. Aristotle wrote perhaps fifteen dialogues that circulated to a general public. Cicero and Plutarch both read them. Remarks of Cicero's suggest that Aristotle's dialogues opened with proems and that Aristotle was at least sometimes the principal speaker, but neither claim is certain, given the nature of the surviving fragments.
More likely to have influenced Plutarch's practice are the dialogues of two fourth-century thinkers whose works have almost totally vanished, Dicaearchus and Heraclides of Pontus. Of the first, we can say only that he wrote dialogues and that Plutarch read him. He wrote a book whose title is reported as “The Descent to the Oracle of Trophonios” (cited by Athenaeus 594e-f), which might lurk in the background of the myth of Socrates' Sign. Heraclides wrote nearly fifty dialogues, if we can believe Diogenes Laertius (5.86-94), who lists all his titles under that rubric. Although Heraclides frequented philosophers in Athens, he is generally treated as an intellectual lightweight, a judgment shared by ancients and moderns. Plutarch, though, refers to him at least ten times and recommends him especially warmly for children:
It is clear that in the area of philosophical discourse the very young take more pleasure in books that do not seem philosophical or even serious, and they enjoy listening to them and pay attention. They enjoy not just Aesop's Fables and stories from the poets but the Abaris of Heraclides and the Lycon of Ariston as well, with ideas about souls mixed up with mythology, and they are excited by them.
(“Poetry” 14e)
Abaris was a Hyperborean shaman of whom all sorts of fabulous tales were told. The two random snippets of Heraclides' dialogue that survive (as illustrations of points of syntax) support Plutarch's description (Heraclides frr. 74, 75 Wehrli):
Snakes crawled out of their lairs nearby and rushed at the corpse, but they were held off by the dogs that snarled and barked at them.
And [Abaris?] said the daimon, now transformed into a young man, turned to him a second time and told him to believe that the gods exist and that they concern themselves with human affairs.
Heraclides' dialogue On the Soul contained a firsthand account of the fate of souls reported by one Empedotimos of Syracuse. This was very widely read and commented on by later Platonists and was compared to what clearly was its literary model, the Myth of Er in Plato's Republic. Heraclides seems to have embellished his version of the near-death tale with precisely the sort of poetic metaphysics that we find in Plutarch, centuries later. The Neoplatonist Iamblichus gives us the most elaborate reconstruction:
Again, another group of Platonists [postulates that] the soul is always in a body, but that it spends time in a lighter body and then returns to live in a flesh-and-blood body. They say that souls go off into some portion of the perceptible universe and that they descend into a solid body at various times and from various places—Heraclides of Pontus defines this place as the Milky Way, but others distribute souls through all the heavenly spheres and maintain that they descend from there to return here
(Heraclides fr. 97 Wehrli)
What we see in the Milky Way in the night sky, then, was claimed by a character in a dialogue of Heraclides to be souls, wrapped in the fiery vehicle that sustains them between incarnations. We know from Plutarch's testimony (Cam. 22) that he himself had read the dialogue in question. Clearly, then, Heraclides was not exclusively for children. Plutarch also noted (Live Unknown 1130b) that “some philosophers consider the soul to be light, as far as its substance is concerned,” and he may well have been thinking of Heraclides' myth. As we shall see, it was certainly to his taste.
After Heraclides, it is difficult to identify specific practitioners of the dialogue who are likely to have influenced Plutarch's practice. The best candidate among preserved authors might well be Cicero, whose De Republica is modeled on Plato's Republic. This dialogue is only partially preserved, but we have the end, a dream reported by the principal speaker, the younger Scipio Africanus. The discussion that immediately preceded the account of the dream is lost, but it seems to have included reference to Plato's Myth of Er (whose place the dream occupies in Cicero's Republic), perhaps dismissing it as a fiction. Scipio's dream is a visitation from his homonymous older relative by adoption, the great general of the Second Punic War. It consists of a string of prophecies, followed by a tour of the universe not unlike Er's. Cicero and Plutarch made their respective contributions to the genre of the dialogue by looking back on much the same models, some evident and some lost to us. Those contributions seem, however, to be largely independent of one another. Cicero's dialogues do not contain the poetically elaborated myths that are the beauty of Plutarch's, and Plutarch in turn shows little knowledge of Cicero's dialogues.
Of the seventy-some preserved pieces in the Moralia generally accepted as authentic, sixteen make some use of dialogue form, but four of these quickly turn into speeches or monologues. Of the remaining twelve, the ninety-one short dialogues of the Table Talk constitute a separate subgenre, although participants in those symposia often appear in the more elaborate dialogues as well. All of the rest (and much of the Table Talk) might be broadly characterized as philosophical, though varying considerably in presentation and imaginative elaboration.
The most fanciful consists of a discussion between Odysseus and a pig named Oinker (Gryllus)—formerly one of his men, now transformed by Circe—about the rationality of animals. The Symposium of the Seven Sages presents itself as a first-person account of the table talk of the pre-philosophical wise men of archaic Greece. Seven of the remaining eight dialogues present discussions among individuals close to Plutarch; he himself is present and named in only one. Plutarch is presumably the “I” of The E at Delphi as well and may be lurking behind other personae. Several of these dialogues include elaborately and self-consciously developed myths, but the dialogue Love attractively substitutes a love story—or a story of passion and abduction—for the myth. This unfolds simultaneously with the discussion and ultimately provides closure in a wedding scene. Socrates' Sign is the most ambitious of the dialogues, and the only one where Plutarch presumes to join Plato and Xenophon in expanding the Socratic corpus. Set twenty years after Socrates' death and appropriating two of the speakers Plato used in the Phaedo, this major dialogue with its fabulous and colorful myth marks Plutarch's most successful venture into combining philosophy, (exemplary) history, and rhetoric into a single, coherent whole.
THE DELPHIC DIALOGUES
It seems appropriate for most of what concerns the god to be concealed in riddles.
—The E at Delphi 385c
Plutarch is the only insider to provide us with evidence regarding the oracular shrine at Delphi, but it will come as no surprise that this evidence is in large part infuriatingly indirect and notoriously difficult to use. The bulk of it is concentrated in three dialogues, all set at the site and all implying, but never explicitly claiming, the presence of Plutarch himself. Of the three, The E at Delphi is in this sense the most straightforward. The nameless first person addresses the dialogue to Sarapion (a poet, mentioned in the Table Talk and a participant in another Delphic dialogue), claiming that a recent discussion of the E had reminded him of a discussion of this odd dedication that occurred “long ago” (E 385b), when Nero was in Delphi (67 c.e.). In the recalled conversation that follows, the speaker—let us call him Plutarch to avoid periphrasis—discusses the E with Lamprias (Plutarch's brother) and others. His teacher Ammonios had the last word (E 391e-394c), and although Ammonios's explanation does not replace the others, it carries an authority the others lack. Here, the distancing static introduced by the frame is minimal, but the recent discussion of the E to which the speaker refers, which was attended by his grown sons, is imposed as a sort of silenced echo across generations. The Disapperance of Oracles is also presented by a nameless first person, who addresses it to Terentius Priscus (identifiable, but not mentioned elsewhere in the Plutarchan corpus), precisely (and uselessly) specifying the date of the conversation as just before the Pythian Games presided over by the undatable Callistratos (Disappearance 410a). What is ingenious and playful about the obfuscating frame here, though, is that the “I” is belatedly identified as Plutarch's brother Lamprias (Disappearance 413d), whereas everything up to that point would suggest that we are hearing Plutarch's own voice—an assumption that The E at Delphi allows us to sustain. Plutarch thus remains absent (or disguised) in this discussion. The other Delphic dialogue never mentions Plutarch, although several of the interlocutors are denizens of the Table Talk, and there are plausible reasons for taking the character named Theon to be a mask, or a mouthpiece, for the author.
This, then, is the way Plutarch the Delphic priest turns his insider's information into literature. He uses the distancing convention of the frame, developed by Plato, to erase himself from the picture—or, rather, to obscure his own identity in the manner of a protected witness whose image is optically blurred to prevent recognition. In this case, however, we know all along—or think we know—whose voice we are hearing. The blurring is for purely esthetic reasons, even though these impinge on the issue of knowledge and ignorance and consequently on much else besides. Nothing is less authentic, less transparent, than Plutarch's voice speaking from within the Delphic shrine. These characters in dialogue, exploring, arguing, and counterarguing, are doing exactly what the Delphic priesthood rigorously refused to do: they are explaining, interpreting, unfolding, Delphic mysteries. The dialogue itself is not forbidden, but its closure decidedly is. The priest cannot possibly speak in his own voice, and ultimately no conclusion can be reached that is not subject to further interrogation and revision.
Plutarch comes as close as he ever does to making this explicit in Ammonios's imposing speech closing The E at Delphi. The dialogue as a whole consists of attempts to explain the dedication at Delphi of a series of objects in the form of the letter epsilon, E (E 385f-386a). The dedications apparently have a symbolic value—they are signs with some obscure referrent—but the frame of reference is undefined and potentially cosmic in scope. The E could designate the number 5 (represented in Greek by the fifth letter of the alphabet, epsilon), and this in turn could be referred to historical or numerological levels of meaning. Alternatively, as the second vowel in the alphabet, epsilon could have to do with secondness—perhaps the sun (Apollo) as the second planet. Finally, epsilon, whose name is written “epsilon-iota” (εῒ, in the sense that the letter D may be designated by the name “dee” in English), could have any of the meanings of that combination of letters in Greek. In fact, several words consist of these two letters and are more or less distinguished one from another by accents and other diacritics. As εῒ, epsilon could mean “if”—an appropriate dedication here, either as an opener for oracular inquiries (people ask “if” they should do this or that) or as symbolic of the power of the syllogism (“if” x, then y). It could also point to the inquirer's desire: “‘If’ only …” But accented differently, εῒ is the second-person singular of the verb “to be,” meaning “you are” or “you exist.”
This last is the interpretation that Ammonios privileges, so it stands at the top of the hermeneutic hierarchy of the dialogue, though without entirely displacing the others. It is half of an exchange, Ammonios claims, the other half of which is the famous Delphic maxim “Know yourself” (gnothi sauton 392a). In effect, the god says to the inquirer approaching the temple, “Know yourself” (in your ephemeral, mortal being, radically divorced from the unity and eternity of the divine and of truth), to which the inquirer replies with an acknowledgment: “You exist” (i.e., you have being in Plato's sense, eternal and unchanging, whereas we are only becoming, only fragmented creatures with a beginning and an end). What Plutarch's Ammonios does not go on to point out—perhaps because it is self-evident—is that this exchange is strikingly relevant both to the ontology and to the hermeneutics of oracular inquiry and response. The priests never interpret. They accept the inquiries (which may well be the wrong questions or questions asked in the wrong way, for lack of essential knowledge on the part of the seekers), they submit them to the transcendent intelligence accessible through the prophetess, and they deliver the response, Zeus's response, mediated by Apollo and articulated by the prophetess. What comes back is a text, and as the story of human folly so dear to Herodotus reiterates, the inquirer is very likely to get it wrong, to do the wrong thing on the basis of the hard-won text—to fail, in other words, as an interpreter. The ritual exchange into which Ammonios inserts the E is the limit of the god's hermeneutic assistance to the inquirer. Apollo is saying: You had better know who you are (and the relationship to my being of your becoming) or else you will never manage to fit my answer to your question.
The E at Delphi begins, then, as a hermeneutic dilemma, with the dialogue form providing the perfect vehicle for the juxtaposition of competing interpretations, and develops into a pretext for Ammonios to deliver a short lecture on being and becoming. The remaining Delphic dialogues address more general issues regarding the Delphic shrine and prophecy in general, but each likewise ends up with a colorful meditation on an aspect or aspects of Platonic metaphysics.
The order of the dialogues in the modern editions is uniform but rather arbitrary. Robert Flacelière argued influentially a generation ago that The Delphic Oracles Not Now Given in Verse must be the last. It makes mention both of the “recent” eruption of Vesuvius in 79 c.e. (Oracles 398e) and of a recent benefactor of the Delphic shrine (409b-c), whose name has disappeared into a lacuna in the text. Flacelière argued that this must be the same Hadrian whose statue Plutarch erected near the end of his own life. He may have been correct, but the evidence is not compelling. Flacelière's argument for placing this essay at the very end of Plutarch's career rests further on the observation that The Disappearance of Oracles remains aporetic on the nature of oracular communication, whereas the other essay seems more conclusive—Plutarch's last thoughts on the matter, perhaps. My own inclination is to believe that Plutarch was as evasive, tentative, and respectful of the limits of knowledge at the end of his life as he had been throughout it. Some matters do allow conclusions to be reached: the Delphic responses, couched in human language and specifically in Greek, are in a medium that belongs to the priestess, not to the god. The Disappearance of Oracles addresses much larger issues, where certainty is more elusive.
Not the least of the problems that surround the essay The Delphic Oracles Not Now Given in Verse is that the title—and hence the central issue of the dialogue—is misleading. It is certainly possible that at the dramatic date of the dialogue (whenever, between 79 and 120, we may imagine that to be) the oracular shrine offered only prose responses, but responses of the traditional sort, in hexameter verse, are nevertheless well documented for Plutarch's time and later, and not simply in literature, where we must suspect tampering or manipulation, but in inscriptions, which are far more likely to accurately represent the responses as they were returned to their cities by the delegates sent to Delphi. In fact, the Pythia's most ambitious recorded effort, as believable as any other literary oracle, was a fifty-one-verse hymn on the fate of the soul of the Neoplatonist Plotinus, who died a century and a half after Plutarch. (This oracle is certainly a fabrication, but one that based on the assumption that, in 270 c.e., an oracle of Apollo ought to speak in hexameters.) These facts call seriously into question the nature and thrust of Plutarch's dialogue.
The dialogue has a minimal frame: an otherwise unmentioned and presumably fictional Basilocles asks Philinos, a well-attested friend of Plutarch's, to repeat to him a conversation that has just ended. Philocles agrees and re-creates a guided visit to the shrine just carried out for the benefit of a visiting philosopher, Diogenianus of Pergamon. Aside from Philinos himself and some professional guides, the party included Sarapion, the poet to whom The E at Delphi is addressed, as well as a mocking Epicurean named Boethos (who thinks prophecy is bunk and any apparent accuracy a matter of pure chance) and a character named Theon, who emerges as the principal interpreter of Delphic matters and the principal defender of the oracular shrine against the general skepticism of Boethos, as well as the specific doubts that trouble Diogenianus regarding responses delivered either in bad verse or in prose. This Theon both is and is not Plutarch. He is as much of Plutarch as the author will let us glimpse in this context. Characters with this name occur in the Table Talk, dining and conversing with Plutarch (626e, 728f), and in The Face in the Moon (where Plutarch is absent), The E at Delphi, and Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, where Theon is one of those who have listened to and now discuss Plutarch's lecture Against Colotes. There are several other references to this or other Theons as well. All of this, combined with Plutarch's own observation (Roman Questions 30, 271e) that “Dion and Theon” are names of convenience used in philosophical formulations (i.e., “Tom and Dick”) leaves us here face to face with Plutarch's thickest and least penetrable disguise, a figure deliberately situated on the margins of identity: a dissolving mask.
Philinos's account of a distinguished visitor's experience of the Delphic shrine around 100 c.e. begins with the professional guides (periegetai) who would present the site to an ordinary visitor. It is not clear just why Diogenianus, who has more expert and specialized guidance at his disposal, is initially in their hands. Philinos, Sarapion, and even Theon apparently have to wait until the guides are through, however impatient they may be with their reading the inscriptions through aloud and delivering their speeches. The inscriptions, however, are a nice touch. This passage is unique in making explicit the fact that inscriptions on sites such as the Delphic shrine were performance pieces for guides, and we must imagine much of their ancient readership experiencing them in this way.
After a sotto voce digression within the little group on the qualities of Delphic air, Diogenianus observes (apropos of a guide's reading of a verse response from an inscription) that he has often been amazed at the terrible, second-rate poetry that is the vehicle of the oracles: “We can see that most of the oracles are full of defects in meter and diction and poetically incompetent” (Oracles 396d). This, then, is the initial formulation of the problem, and Theon cuts through distracting comments by Sarapion and Boethos to formulate a solution: the voice of the response, including sound, diction, and meter, is no more the god's than the handwriting would be if the Pythia wrote the responses rather than speaking them. The god places mental images (phantasiai) in her head, a “light directed toward the future,” but from there on, the medium is human, not divine (397c). Diogenianus's rejoinder (taking his cue from Theon) shifts the question in the direction that the title anticipates: “There isn't one of us who is not looking for an explanation of how it is that the oracular shrine has stopped using epic verse and meter” (397d).
Diogenianus has to wait quite a while for an answer, in deference again to the guides. As the party climbs along the sacred way, past monument after monument, Boethos mocks prophecy and invokes chance while Sarapion and Theon defend providential prophecy. Amid general and sarcastic disapproval of the infamous golden statue of the prostitute Phryne, displayed “among generals and kings,” Theon does indeed sound like the subversive and semi-submerged moralist of the Lives:
You seem to me to want to drive from the shrine a wretched woman who made disgraceful use of her body, while you see the god and his temple surrounded by the firstfruits and tithes of murders and wars and plunder. … Praxiteles [should be praised] for putting a golden prostitute up next to those golden kings and throwing in the face of the rich the fact that what they have is nothing wonderful or deserving of reverence.
(Oracles 401c-d)
That is, it is the big crooks, who laundered the spoils of their rapacious brutalities by putting up dedicatory monuments at Delphi, who bring shame to the shrine, not the sculptor who added a portrait of his girlfriend.
But Diogenianus is not troubled by any of this so much as by the question that he keeps insisting on, which is for him “the major obstacle to faith in the oracle” (Oracles 402b): the abandonment of poetic form seems to show either that the prophetess no longer gets close to the god or that the spirit has died, the power departed.
Theon's resolution of Diogenianus's misgivings about the replacement of poetry by prose in the oracular responses is delivered in a lecture filling the final third of the dialogue. He begins with a corrective, more nuanced account of the relation of prose to verse in the history of the oracle. There were always prose oracles, he says—even the confirmation that Lycurgus sought of the validity of his constitution was delivered in prose (Oracles 403e)—and there are still oracles delivered in verse, however rarely. The issue has already been resolved in any case, and the lecture consists of elaborations and new metaphors developing Theon's earlier description of the nature of inspiration and its relation to the medium of the prophetess's language (Oracles 397c). What is envisioned is a series of analogous relationships, constructed from the bottom up: the body uses tools, the soul uses the body, and the god uses the soul (404b). Each medium aspires to transparency. The tools do the best they can to translate the craftsman's design into an object. The body does the best it can to express the intention of the soul, which in turn transmits the intention of the god, but each medium fails in a necessary way, and at each new level the medium generates an artifact whose relation to its antecedent is both intimate and remote.
At this point (Oracles 404d-e), Theon puts on the table a sentence he attributes to Heraclitus (fr. 93 DK) and assumes to be generally familiar: “The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs (semainei).” It is no exaggeration to say that semiotics, in the tradition of European thought, starts here, with this notorious, sententious claim, and were it not for this passage of Plutarch's, this Heraclitus fragment would be unknown. Indeed, without the passage we would have little or no evidence for articulated, analytic concern with signs, signification, and meaning among the pre-Socratics. These are matters that come into their own in Greek thought with the Stoa and then again in later Platonism, a development to which Plutarch provides the essential background. What Plutarch delivers seems to be in Heraclitus's own words, but it is nevertheless predigested. What Heraclitus was getting at remains obscure, but what Plutarch is using his words to say is quite clear. Heraclitus, according to Plutarch, used the verb semaino, “indicate by signs,” to designate the action of Apollo through the prophetess (or perhaps more properly, through her utterances). The ontological hierarchy that Plutarch projects onto this sentence can hardly have anything to do with Heraclitus, and is steeped in Platonism, but to Plutarch's mind, if Heraclitus pointed to a tertium quid for the pair “speak—conceal,” he must have meant the projection of meaning down the hierarchy, with the attendant necessary distortion introduced by the medium. Apollo “signs,” and the prophetess “speaks.” She is his tool, but he is not implicated (although his meaning may be expressed) by her utterance.
Much of what remains is a meditation on history, and one that strikes an uncharacteristically positive note. The past—along with the priestesses of the past—was more poetic than the present. Similarly, love was more poetically expressed in the past, but we do not say that love has changed (Oracles 406a), and as was pointed out earlier, philosophy over time has also made the transition from the poetic medium of the early pre-Socratics to prose. These changes all favor clarity (to saphes, sapheneia 496e-f). We have seen that the sententious obfuscation of archaic philosophers—and Pythagoreans in particular—was not to Plutarch's taste. If he approves of it (e.g., in Numa), it is justified as a legitimating pose, a means of impressing and imposing on the public. The change in oracular style is an escape from this deliberate obscurantism. The allegories (hyponoiai) and ambiguities (amphilogiai, 407e) that the priestesses used to indulge in were necessary in part because the consultations were about important matters, and the responses had to be encoded so only the inquirer would understand them (407d-e). This resulted in misinterpretations (408a).
The conclusion of the dialogue is the paean of praise for the Pax Romana evoked above (Chapter 1). These days, people generally come to ask modest, personal questions, but at least they receive clear answers (Oracles 408f), and the shrine, along with the rest of the world, has entered a period of renewed prosperity. The responses given now are not imposing, and so they provoke skepticism in people like Diogenianus, but the very prosperity of the shrine is testimony to their accuracy. Prose for a prosaic world, but one that has peace, unlike in the past, and so can be said to have been transformed “for the better” (pros to beltion, 406b).
The Disappearance of Oracles, like the dialogue just discussed, is about prophecy and history—or, better, history and prophecy—but the resemblance does not go much further than that. In overall orientation, the two are in fact so fundamentally at odds that they might be compared to Plutarch's paired rhetorical exercises that support opposite theses. Where The Delphic Oracles Not Now Given in Verse reaches an optimistic conclusion, celebrating the present and the Delphic shrine's new prosperity with its new mode of prophecy, The Disappearance of Oracles explores the decline and disappearance of oracles in a shrinking world.
Plutarch's moment in history was viewed retrospectively by the Christian West as one of transition and decay. With Christian self-satisfaction removed, the view is nicely summed up in a phrase from a letter of Flaubert's (cited in Marguerite Yourcenar's notebooks for Hadrian's Memoirs): “When the gods were no more and Christ did not yet exist, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, [there was] a unique moment when man alone existed.”
One would not have any trouble finding abundant support for this picture of dying gods (or demons) in Christian writers from the late second century to Augustine's time and beyond. What is amazing, though, is to find Plutarch, a traditional polytheist, offering primary evidence generations earlier. Platonists like Plutarch genuinely understood the world to be a living, ensouled entity inhabited or visited by complex hierarchies of other ensouled beings, ranging from plants to gods. The gods—manifest as the hypercosmic bodies and phenomena—are the only immortals. All the rest will have an end. The Disappearance of Oracles is haunted by the sublime sense of loss inherent in the spectacle of the aging and the anticipated death of that complex living being.
The dialogue is also fascinating for its mix of information and of methodologies, ranging (in our terms) from the scientific to the religious. Plutarch both does and does not respect that distinction, a fact that is even more evident in The Face in the Moon. He emerges, once again, as a pluralist in ways that make it difficult for us to take him seriously. Driven by the sheer pleasure of intellectual work and discourse, he embraces every mode of explanation and rejects none. The positive gains are few, but some modest conclusions can be reached. Much more, however, is left suspended in uncertainty, and the long, rather rambling conversation concludes with the acknowledgment of that fact.
The frame—which consists simply of the narrator Lamprias's explanatory note to the addressee—quickly establishes the cosmic scale of the discussion. The occasion of the conversation is the intersection at Delphi of the trajectories of two travelers, Demetrius, coming from Britain, and Cleombrotos, coming from Siwa, in the Libyan desert—like the Delphic eagles coming from the ill-defined ends of the earth to its ambiguous center. The first thing we learn is that Cleombrotos has brought from the priests of Ammon at Siwa the observation that their permanent sacred lamp uses less oil every year. They interpret this to mean that the years are becoming progressively shorter. Taking off from this (supposed) fact and its interpretation, the discussion turns to disparity of scale in explanation—tiny indicators of events of cosmic scale. Ammonios extrapolates (he is apparently older than in The E at Delphi and no longer as dominant in the conversation). If the priests were right, then the consequences not just for the sun but for celestial mechanics would be devastating. To save the phenomena (here, the progressively smaller annual oil measures, which Cleombrotos has actually seen), an answer can and must be sought in the conditions of combustion or in the quality of the oil. This initial exercise in explanation is very much in the tradition of Plato. It will be echoed at the end of the dialogue in the unresolved attempts to mediate between Ammonios's explanation of the disappearance of oracles as an expression of divine will and Lamprias's explanation in terms of the fluctuations of terrestrial exhalations that stimulate a capacity for prophecy that is innate in the soul.
On the whole, Cleombrotos seems to have accepted the Egyptian priests' conclusion that time is shrinking, but he cannot sustain this position against Ammonios's objections. This complicates the problem of interpreting his deliberate silence when asked by Lamprias whether the Oracle of Siwa is “wasting away” (Disappearance 411e). His silence is filled, in any case, by Demetrius, who supplies a long list of local—mainly Boeotian—oracles that have been silenced since the classical period (411e-412d). This list in turn leads into the discussion—continued in the Lesche (or clubhouse) of the Cnidians at the upper end of the Delphic sanctuary—of the meaning of the failure of oracular shrines.
At this point, some others have joined the group, and the first attempt to explain the phenomenon takes the form of a harangue from a Cynic named Didymus, who chalks it all up to human wickedness, which has caused the providence of the gods to withdraw from mankind. In its violence and simplistic moralizing, Didymus's speech is a re-creation of a type of Cynic discourse familiar in Plutarch's world and often parodied (e.g., Lucian Peregrinus 4-6). Not unlike the violent Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic, Didymus seems to represent an irreconcilable position that can be neither incorporated into the analysis of the problem nor entirely ignored. Like Thrasymachus again, he hits a nerve when he proposes changing the question to “why this oracle as well has not refused to function” (Disappearance 413a), a matter clearly not on the table for debate. Lamprias's rather gentle rebuttal—the badness of mankind is constant, and if anything, there was more of it in the larger populations of the past; therefore badness cannot explain the decline of prophecy (413c-d)—is sufficient to make the Cynic stalk out in high dudgeon.
Lamprias's rebuttal contains the first mention in the dialogue of a decline in population—yet another aspect of this shrinking, dying cosmos. The passage where Ammonios takes up that theme and turns it into a sufficient explanation for the decline of oracles is often cited as social history. He claims that “now” the whole of Greece could produce only three thousand footsoldiers, the number that Megara alone sent to Plataea in 479 b.c.e. (Disappearance 414a). Avoidance of excess is essential to Ammonios's notion of the divine (413f): a diminished population needs fewer oracles, and therefore the god provides fewer. Delphi once had two alternating prophetesses as well as one in reserve, but now one is quite sufficient (414b-c). Lamprias, however, refuses to take seriously the notion of a divine efficiency expert downsizing the oracle delivery system. The divine by its nature creates and gives. Nature (i.e., the necessary condition of being in the world) causes decay and destruction. The god, however, never wills the cessation of an oracle (414d). There is an implicit competition here between Lamprias and Ammonios, and it is Lamprias, with his optimism about the gods combined with pessimism about nature and natural decay, who sounds more like a Platonist in the style of Plutarch.
The issue seems to be settled, then, that the decline in population is related to the decline in number of functional oracular shrines. The difference remaining has to do with the role of divine will and/or nature in the actual failure of the oracles. Cleombrotos steps into the breach with the most Platonic of solutions: oracles are controlled not by gods (at least directly), nor by exhalations or other functions of the natural world (physis), but by mediating daimones, the bridge between mortality and immortality, between human ignorance and divine knowledge (Disappearance 415a).
This entire section of the dialogue, dominated by Cleombrotos (414f-421e), is built on evidence that is poetic or mythic. In other words, we are in the same realm of discourse as in Plato's Timaeus, where the subject is the creation of the universe, a realm where the goal is the “most plausible” or “likely” account and where certainty will not be reached. Cleombrotos is explicit about this: we must try to “proceed in our opinions to the most probable” (Disappearance 418f). A further, less Platonic limit is set to this theological speculation. Cleombrotos opens his lecture with the ancient evidence, which shows “that there exist entities occupying, so to speak, the border area between gods and men, susceptible to mortal emotions and to the changes brought about by necessity, entities it is correct for us to revere according to ancestral custom and to designate and call daimones” (Disappearance 416c).
The deliberately vague phrase “changes brought about by necessity” designates in the broadest terms what everything in the world of nature (physis) experiences, culminating in decay and death. This is precisely the point that will not go down with one of the listeners. Heracleon accepts as plausible and theologically acceptable the notion that it is these intermediaries who speak through prophets and prophetesses in the oracular shrines: “But to take by the handful out of the verses of Empedocles crimes and violent acts and divinely imposed wanderings and attribute these to the daimones, and to postulate that they meet their end in death as humans do—this seems to me too bold (thrasuteron) and too barbarous (barbarikoteron)” (Disappearance 418e).
Theological correctness, then, is a matter of tradition, specifically, of Hellenism. There is a body of texts complemented by a history of interpretation that can be distilled into correct theology. Plutarch at this point seems considerably more optimistic than Plato had been.
Cleombrotos does not have much trouble disposing of Heracleon's objection. He has already invoked a beautiful (and otherwise unknown) passage from Hesiod to the effect that the Naiad nymphs, though extremely long-lived, eventually die (Disappearance 415c). Now, in his support and in response to Heracleon, another speaker calls to witness the father of a respected rhetor, the teacher of some of those present. This mediated first-person account (by one Epitherses) is among the most characteristically Plutarchan of myths:
[Epitherses] told the story that once he got on board a ship for Italy, packed with cargo and passengers. In the evening, among the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped, and the ship drifted toward the island of Paxi. Most of the passengers were still awake, and some were still drinking after-dinner wine. Suddenly a voice was heard coming from Paxi, someone shouting for Thamous, and everyone was both amazed and confused. This Thamous was the Egyptian pilot of the ship, and not many of the passengers knew him by name. He did not respond to the first two calls, but the third time he answered, and the other shouted still louder and said: “When you reach Palodes, report that the great Pan is dead.” When they heard this, as Epitherses reported, they were all astounded and discussed whether it was better to carry out the order or not to get involved and just let it be. Thamous decided that if there was a breeze when they passed the island of Palodes, he would just sail by and keep quiet, but if they were becalmed on a flat sea, he would repeat what the voice had said to him. When they arrived and there was no wind or wave, Thamous climbed up on the elevated stern of the boat and spoke the words he had heard, in the direction of the shore: “Great Pan is dead.” Before he could finish, a great sighing groan was heard, composed of many voices and full of wonder. There were many witnesses to this, and the story spread quickly in Rome. Tiberius Caesar sent for Thamous and was so convinced by his story that he had an inquiry undertaken concerning Pan. The numerous literary scholars he employed reached the conclusion that this must be Pan the son of Hermes and Penelope. [This odd genealogy is confirmed by Herodotus.]
(Disappearance 419b-d)
The story is known to some of the others present, presumably by way of their teacher, Epitherses' son. Demetrius has a further story, gathered during his recent travels in Britain, of the deaths of daimones. The locals there attribute atmospheric disturbances to “the death of one of the greater ones” (Disappearance 419e-f). Plutarch has a better use in store for the best part of this story, however: the prophetic, sleeping Kronos attended by daimones on an island at the end of the world will return in The Face in the Moon (941a-f).
There is no need for us to follow this long and digressive dialogue through in detail to its aporetic end. Cleombrotos reports his conversations with an Arabian prophetic sage, who confirmed and elaborated a great deal of demonic lore (Disappearance 421a-e). The lore made some odd claims about the plurality of worlds, a subject that takes hold of the conversation (421f-431a). When the speakers return to the metaphysical hierarchy of souls, daimones, and gods, Lamprias has the opportunity to expand on his exhalation theory, locating the agency of prophecy in exhalations from the Earth (Gaia, Apollo's predecessor at Delphi, according to the myth), which act on a natural capacity in souls—now equated with embodied daimones—analogous to memory but directed toward the future. We are back to Lamprias's original differences with Ammonios and to a problem of causality that will not admit of resolution.
The Disappearance of Oracles, like the other dialogues, is best understood as a protreptic piece, seducing the reader or listener into a predisposition to delve deeper into philosophy, particularly speculation about metaphysics and psychology. With its vertiginous scale and unforgettable myth, it responds to the demands we have seen Plutarch make on literature that will serve the young as a propaedeutic to philosophy, incorporating “ideas about souls mixed up with mythology.”
A brief look at two more dialogues, still more ambitious, will indicate how he further implemented this program.
THE FACE IN THE MOON
If the dialogue particularly suited Plutarch because it clothes philosophy in the imaginatively engaging trappings of drama, the genre also offered him the opportunity to juxtapose incompatible modes of explanation without sacrificing one to the other. Nowhere is this aspect of his cultivation of the dialogue more apparent than in The Face in the Moon. The subject before the speakers is stated in the title, and although they proceed with characteristically Plutarchan circumambulation, they do in fact address it repeatedly and insistently. Starting from the question of why we see what looks like a face on the lunar disk—our “Old Man in the Moon,” although the Greeks apparently saw a girl's face—they go on to the larger question of which this forms a part: What is the moon? What is it made of, and what keeps it up there in the sky? The striking thing about the answers offered is that they are so nearly equally divided between what we might call science (Face 920-938) and exotic, metaphysical mythmaking (Face 938-943).
The opening of the dialogue seems to be mutilated. There is no indication of where the discussion is taking place, and we are given even less of an account of the interlocutors than we might expect from Plutarch. Particularly elusive is the “I” of the dialogue, who will turn out much later (Face 937d) to be not Plutarch himself but his brother Lamprias. The loss of the opening sentences—perhaps more—leaves us unable to say whether this is another instance of authorial hide-and-seek like the one played out in The Disappearance of Oracles. The opening as we have it immediately directs our attention forward to Sulla the Carthaginian's “story” (mythos), the most elaborate and ambitious of Plutarch's myths, which will clearly be the explicit payoff of the conversation. In other words, the “scientific” portion of the dialogue is bracketed between Sulla's promise of more imaginatively and esthetically rewarding fare and its delivery much later. (Also missing here is some account of the “stranger,” who, we find out belatedly at 942b, was Sulla's source for the fabulous tale.)
The narrative cultivates the tension between rational or scientific explanation on the one hand and sublime storytelling on the other, and out of that tension emerges the richest presentation we have of Plutarch's teleological Platonist cosmology. The myth will take over and prevail, but once again, nothing is lost. There are many ways of apprehending the world and giving an account of it.
The “scientific” portion is a recapitulation, orchestrated by Lamprias, of an earlier conversation, itself apparently dominated by a figure designated only as “our friend” (hetairos). Many readers of the dialogue have claimed to see Plutarch himself lurking behind the anonymity of this distanced, mediated persona. The slippage between ill-defined past and featureless present is constant and serves to throw into relief the arguments themselves (or reports of arguments). The positions of various schools are crystallized around speakers who act as their spokesmen—including an Aristotelian curiously labeled simply “Aristotle” and a Stoic with the exotic Persian (or Pontic) name Pharnaces.
The initial accounts rejected out of hand include a subjectivist one (the “face” is an artifact of glare and our weak vision) as well as a simplistic hypothesis contradicted by the phenomena (the moon is a mirror, the image the reflection of the terrestrial continent with its internal sea and surrounding ocean). This discussion provides a bridge from the issue of the face to the broader one of the nature and substance of the moon. The arguments raised and refuted or endorsed by Lamprias are complex in their claims, sometimes easily shown to lack logical coherence but more often simply inaccessible to any available mode of testing or refutation. As we saw in Chapter 1, Lamprias's principal target is the formulation attributed to the Stoa (Face 921f) that the moon is a mixture of congealed mist and soft fire, maintained in its position by ineluctable laws that draw heavier, solid bodies down to an earth that attracts them by virtue of its centrality in the universe.
Lamprias dismantles this supposed web of necessity piece by piece (Face 924-925), exposing absurd consequences even of some cosmological principles that he apparently embraces (e.g., the sphericity of the earth, 924a-c). His rhetoric becomes vertiginous as he dismisses the notion that an infinite universe has, in any meaningful sense, a center (925e-926b), claiming that such a center would in any case be “an immaterial point,” which by the Stoics' own account could not act or exert force on material things. The orderly Stoic system, intolerant of anomaly, is shown to crumble when confronted by the task of explaining the phenomena. The Stoics have got it backwards. They assert the existence of divine providence (pronoia, 927a), but their claims that everything is as and where it is “according to nature” (kata physin) leave no room for that providence to be active. They should realize that the rational and beneficial order imposed by divine mind (to kata logon) is prior to the merely “natural.” Lamprias deconstructs the notion of nature, along with “natural order, position, or motion” (927d), quickly filling the void with teleology: “Rather, it is when each component makes its contribution usefully and appropriately to that whole for whose sake it has come into existence and in terms of which it develops or is shaped, and when each by its action, reaction, and disposition contributes to the preservation, beauty, or capacities of that whole—that is precisely when it seems to have its “natural” place, motion, and disposition” (Face 927e).
What follows is an exemplary elaboration of the microcosm/macrocosm analogy so dear to Plutarch and other Platonists. Look at man: the fire in his eyes is not up there “naturally,” nor that in his guts situated below “unnaturally.” “Rather, each is located where it is appropriate and useful” (927f; cf. the discussion in Chapter 1). The same is true of the living organism that is the kosmos, where benevolent reason (to kata logon) determines that everything is where it is “because that is the better way” (928b). That is why the solid moon is suspended in the ether between the solid earth and the sun: there is no better place for it to be.
At this point, Lucius takes over to relate how “our friend” explained the relation of the sun's light to the moon, conceding that the issue of the nature and motion of the other celestial bodies is a separate one, from which the problem of the moon can fruitfully be isolated. Throughout this “scientific” discussion the moon again and again turns out to be a tertium quid, belonging neither to this world nor to the more durable and remote realm of the stars. It will be no surprise to see this role transformed in the myth into one of mediation between the unchanging superlunary realm and this sublunary sphere of coming-to-be and passing away. For the present, though, it is enough to show that the moon's phases and eclipses mark it as a solid, earthy thing (Face 930-933). The Stoics are still not ready to give in, and they try to turn this discussion to their advantage (933f) and reassert the fiery nature of the moon, but Lamprias gets the final word, coming full circle back to the relation of the moon's light to the visual ray emitted by the eye. The moon does reflect the sun's light to us, but that light has become featureless, like a reflection in milk rather than water—whether because of the nature of the reflective surface or the nature of the visual ray is a question left unresolved.
Lamprias now demands Sulla's mythos (Face 937c), but the telling of it is again deferred when Theon interjects the question of the habitability of the moon. Lamprias's reply focuses on Theon's false corollary that an uninhabitable moon would be a useless thing, infertile and incapable of supporting human life, and in no sense an “earth” (937d-e). Even such a moon, Lamprias asserts, could mediate between the fiery sun and stars on the one hand and the earth on the other. In any case, we must remain agnostic concerning the habitability of the moon. We have sufficiently established that it is earthy, not fiery—and to deny that it could support life, based on our imperfect knowledge, would be to fail to acknowledge the amazing diversity of life forms and habitable environments right here on earth (940b-c). When Lamprias invokes the sublime perspectives of Homeric cosmology to reinforce the notion that the earth might well appear a Hades or a Tartaros from a lunar perspective, Sulla the Carthaginian intervenes to lay claim to this mode of explanation of lunar phenomena (940f). The transition is carefully orchestrated. The “scientific” discussion has in any case been larded with poetic citations and arguments invoking the poets. This last one carries the dialogue into a new realm, as mediated analytical discourse yields to mediated poetic fiction.
The heart of this fiction, as we shall see, is a discourse on the nature of the moon that Sulla reports as the teaching of a “stranger/foreigner” (ksenos), a devotee of Kronos whom he met in Carthage. The tale that grounds and validates the stranger's claim to privileged knowledge is unforgettable. It is a story set in a fabulous geography of the limits of the world and an account of oracular mediation as beautiful as any in the corpus of Plutarch.
The stranger told Sulla of a population of Greeks, worshipers of Heracles and of Kronos, who live at the limits of the world, somewhere in the vicinity of Britain. The text is lacunose, and much is unclear, perhaps by design. Is the stranger one of those Greeks, or was he a stranger among them as well—as later among the Carthaginians? He joined them, in any case, in an astrologically regulated thirty-year expedition to an oracular shrine in a faraway archipelago associated with Ortygia (Calypso's island in the Odyssey), five thousand stades (more than five hundred miles) from the mainland, across a “congealed” sea. The goal of the delegation is an island where Kronos sleeps deep in a golden cave—this is how Zeus keeps his superseded but immortal father out of mischief—attended by various unidentified daimones. The members of the delegation, themselves “servants of Kronos,” converse with these oracular daimones and study philosophy for the duration of their thirty-year vocation, most (unlike the stranger) choosing to remain on the island when the time is up. The crowning motif in this sublime conceit is the source of the deepest insights of the oracular daimones: they tap and report the dreams of the sleeping Kronos, which in turn are visions of the content of the mind of Zeus (Face 942a).
This is why, Sulla tells Lamprias and the others, they should take seriously the story he is about to retell: its source is those remote servants of Kronos who report the content of his dreams. What remains of the dialogue (942c-945d) is the stranger's account of the moon. The gist of it has already been summarized in Chapter 1: the moon mediates between life and death, between the sublunary realm of birth and decay and the eternal heavens with their “visible gods.” This mediation is obscurely communicated in the story of Demeter and Persephone, the former presiding over the “first death,” when bodies are left behind to decay into the earth, while Persephone receives the souls, still united to mind, into the lunar realm, where the stories about the fate of souls in Hades in fact have their origin. Some souls are excluded, others punished. Some return to earth intact as daimones to preside over oracular and other shrines. The ultimate fate of all the purified dead is nevertheless the same: they leave behind their souls to decay into moon-stuff and ascend as pure mind to union with the sun, into which they are absorbed. There are variants on this scenario. When souls from the lunar realm, already devoid of mind and reason, occasionally escape back to earth and take control of bodies, they become monsters like the Tityus and Typhoeus of myth (945b). The moon can ultimately absorb even these violent spirits, however, and becomes in turn the source of souls for new earthly bodies when the sun provides a spark of mind.
Viewed in this perspective, the three Fates represent the three phases of birth, initiated in the sun by Atropos. Klotho in the lunar realm adds soul to the mind sent by Atropos, and on earth, Lachesis seals the union of spirit and (previously inanimate) matter.
The inanimate is feeble and acted upon from outside, whereas mind is free of outside influence and self-determining—but soul is a mixed, intermediate thing, like the moon, which the god brought into being as a mixture and compound of things from above and things from below, and moon is to sun as earth is to moon.
(Face 945c-d)
SOCRATES' SIGN
The Face in the Moon is an extreme instance of Plutarch's determined program to have his cake and eat it, too. As the metaphor implies, he spends a great deal of time savoring his subject, slicing it up in different ways and nibbling at it. The frosting is the myth, reveling in the pure pleasure of discourse, where the imagination asserts its rights alongside (and, finally, at the expense of) rational, analytical discourse.
We have seen how Plutarch weaves his seductive discourse around matters of theology and physics. In perhaps his most ambitious single work, the dialogue Socrates' Sign, he presents the reader with a yet more complex and eclectic interweaving of philosophy with myth and with history.
Plutarch's other dialogues (The Symposium of the Seven Sages and Gryllus aside) are set in his own era and represent his own intellectual and social world (albeit idealized), his relatives and friends, and sometimes himself. In Socrates' Sign, Plutarch turns back in time to the source of his genre, the dialogues of Plato, and writes as a belated Socratic. The dramatic date of the dialogue, 379 b.c.e., falls twenty years after the death of Socrates—a characteristically ingenious Plutarchan variation on Plato's own distancing of his dialogues. Twenty years after their teacher's death, Socrates' students are seen still trying to figure out what he meant when he spoke of a spirit or sign—a daimonion—that warned him when he was in danger of doing something he should not (Plato, Apology 40a). There is no question now of asking Socrates—although he, unlike the poets whose inspired but uncomprehended utterances are evoked in the Ion and Republic, could presumably have supplied a reasoned, rational answer to such a request. Leaving no mode of apprehension (and its failure) untapped, however, Plutarch does incorporate direct interrogation into his fiction: Simmias, the Theban Pythagorean whom Plutarch borrows from Plato's Phaedo, did in fact put the question to Socrates, over twenty years ago, only to be met with silence (Socrates' Sign 588c). So now, older and convalescent, Simmias and others who knew or knew of Socrates can only try to reconstruct what his answer to that question might have been, had he chosen to give one. That the dramatic date of the dialogue is nearly a half millennium in the past, from Plutarch's perspective, is also significant. Plutarch's dialogue takes on qualities of a historical novel that marks its distance from its models.
The question of the nature of Socrates' daimonion was one whose time had arrived. In an age when demonology was of intellectual and literary interest, we have treatments of the same subject from two more philosopher-rhetors of Plutarch's stamp—Maximus of Tyre and Apuleius—within a generation or so of Plutarch's death. Plutarch's version, however, mixing praise of famous Thebans with the dramatized inquiry (itself a pretext for unlawful and conspiratorial assembly) is unique. He narrated the same historical moment—the liberation of Thebes from an occupying Spartan garrison in December 379—rather differently in Pelopidas, and no doubt in the lost Epaminondas as well, but here, dramatized and elaborated with a myth in the manner of Heraclides, these events provide the vivid and heroic context for the inquiry. The result is, admittedly, something of a two-ring circus, with history and the present repeatedly impinging on philosophy and the interrogation of the past.
Socrates' Sign is a dialogue framed within a dialogue, much like its principal model, Plato's Phaedo. The framing narrative is set in Athens, presumably in the house of the pre-Boeotian Archedamos (Socrates' Sign 575d), where a group of prominent Athenians provide the audience for a narrative of recent events in Thebes, delivered by a Theban ambassador named Caphisias, said to be a brother of Epaminondas but otherwise unknown. What this audience wants to hear about is, presumably, the events themselves, although Archedamos insists that they will relish “the specifics” (ta kath'hekasta, 575c), and Caphisias warns them from the start that an account of both the deeds and the discussions (prakseis kai logoi, 575e) will not be short.
Why, indeed, juxtapose these disparate sorts of information at all? We have seen Plutarch the educator, philosopher, and scholar repeatedly singing the praises of the active life, and we have noticed the tension between that commitment and the life he in fact led. In this unique dialogue, Plutarch comes as close as he ever does to confronting that paradox. History invades and interrupts philosophy as deliberately and discordantly as farce invades opera seria in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos—the esthetic gain lies in the outrageousness of the juxtaposition, in the sheer daring of forcing the two genres into the same space. But there is something more. The assembled Athenian aristocrats who listen, with patient fascination with detail, to this mix of history and ideas mirror the Theban aristocrats, assembled in Simmias's house a few weeks or months earlier, on the evening of the coup. Collectively, these groups—simultaneously men of action and intellectuals—represent a genuine Plutarchan ideal. The world in which they are the ones in control, who steer their cities on paths mapped out by philosophy, is one that by Plutarch's standards is a well-ordered world. That it finds its richest expression in a relentlessly literary and self-referential dialogue retrojected half a millennium into the past is a strong indication of Plutarch's relation to his own historical present and to that ideal.
Even if the events leading up to that evening in December 379 were familiar to Caphisias's audience, they are unlikely to be known to Plutarch's modern readers. The ancient sources, aside from Plutarch himself, are Xenophon (a contemporary) and Cornelius Nepos and Diodorus Siculus centuries later. Archedamos does provide Caphisias (and so the reader) with a general outline of what the Athenians know of recent events in Thebes (Socrates' Sign 575f-576b), and Caphisias's account contains a few references to the background of the situation on the night he re-creates for his listeners. Briefly, in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, the Thebans joined Argos and Corinth, all disillusioned Spartan allies, and along with the Athenians went to war against Sparta. This is known as the Corinthian War (395-386 b.c.e.), and in its aftermath the victorious Spartans burdened their fractious onetime ally with an occupying Spartan garrison and a pro-Spartan oligarchy (in 382). Many prominent Thebans went into exile, some of them to Athens. In December 379, on the day Caphisias describes, a conspiracy of some thirty Thebans (Socrates' Sign 586c), along with the returning exiles, killed the oligarchs and some of their associates. Then Epaminondas, who had refused to participate in the killing of the oligarchs because they were fellow citizens, led a victorious army to drive the garrison from the citadel. It was eight years later that the same Epaminondas defeated a Spartan army at Leuctra (371) and effectively put an end to Spartan military dominance in Greece.
Within the dialogue, Epaminondas is the figure who comes closest to uniting the threads of philosophy and military-political action. His refusal to kill countrymen without trial—even quislings—is three times at issue, first when Caphisias defends his brother's position (Socrates' Sign 576d-577a), later, implicitly, when Epaminondas himself holds forth in Socratic fashion on the subject of profiting from injustice (585b-d), and finally when the crisis is at hand (594b-c). But for the most part, the philosopher-conspirators talk of matters remote from the present situation while events draw them into the thick of history.
As if the plot were not sufficiently cluttered, much of Caphisias's narrative concerns a Pythagorean from Italy named Theanor, who has chosen this particular day to arrive in Thebes to collect the bones of a Pythagorean teacher named Lysis and to offer Epaminondas money to compensate for the costs of Lysis's support during his old age. It is the report of this stranger's arrival and incubation at Lysis's grave in search of a divine sign that ushers in the issue of Socrates' daimonion. Galaxidoros, an admirer of Socrates, reacts to the news of the incubation with a tirade against superstition (deisidaimonia) and pompous obscurantism (typhos, 579f). When accused of lending credence to the charges of impiety that the Athenians brought against Socrates, he responds with a eulogy that says a great deal about Socrates' position in the history of philosophy:
[Socrates did not dismiss] the truly divine, but philosophy as it came to him from Pythagoras and his followers was full of phantoms and fables and superstitions, and Empedocles in particular had left it babbling ecstatically. Socrates taught philosophy wisdom in the face of the facts and taught it to go after the truth with sober reason.
(Socrates' Sign 580c)
Galaxidoros's portrait of Socrates the rationalist is vulnerable on one point, the daimonion. Theocritos—described as a “seer” (mantis) both here (595f) and in Pelopidas 22 and portrayed below as a dubious, if correct, dream interpreter—jumps on this, calling on first-person reminiscences. Theocritos was present one day when the sign stopped Socrates in his tracks, and those present who foolishly went on ahead were met by a herd of pigs that left them covered with mud and excrement (borboros, 580f). This starts the debate, and Galaxidoros counters that the “sign” had no supernatural power, but, like an ominous sneeze, allowed Socrates to arbitrarily resolve equally balanced dilemmas. Polymnis, the father of Epaminondas and Caphisias, intervenes with the claim (supported by second-hand anecdote) that Socrates' daimonion was, in fact, a sneeze—that it was sneezes that Socrates took as warnings and guides—but Polymnis himself is reluctant to give credence to the story, because Socrates is said often to have proved prescient. Further, why would the unpretentious, straightforward Socrates indulge in the pompous theatricality of calling a sneeze a daimonion? Simmias, whose firsthand knowledge of Socrates should throw light on the issue, is about to speak when Epaminondas and the Italian Pythagorean enter, and the topic is dropped (582c-d).
Meanwhile, tension is growing in the tangled plot of the conspiracy. There is fear of exposure. Alarmed by an ominous dream, one Hippostheneidas has taken it upon himself to send a messenger to the exiles nearby on Mt. Cithaeron to warn them to delay their return (586c). This report of a rash action that threatened the success of the coup will turn out to have been a false alarm—the messenger never set out because his wife had lent out an essential part of his harness (587f). It is at this point that Theocritos jumps in to counter Hippostheneidas's interpretation of his own dream and turn it into a divine promise of victory. Predictive dreams, it seems, are at best ambiguous, like sneezes.
Caphisias and Theocritos are at last able to join in the discussion of the sign, although they arrive too late to hear Simmias's response to Galaxidoros (Socrates' Sign 588b). It is at this point that we learn of Socrates' refusal to answer Simmias on the matter, along with Simmias's testimony that Socrates considered claims to have seen divine beings false and outrageous, but took reports of divine voices seriously (588c). Simmias goes on to elaborate a theory of telepathic communication—transmission of thought freed not only from the organs of speech but from grammar itself—from divinities to exceptionally receptive humans (588d-589f)—and presents this as the Socratics' own understanding of Socrates' daimonion when Socrates was still alive.
This is as close as we will get to a privileged solution to the principal question that gives the dialogue its title, but Simmias doubles that solution with a “story” (mythos, 589f, 592f), explicitly its complement: “first the reasoned account, then the story” (592f). He coyly allows Theocritos to coax him into telling it: “Even if it is not the most exact way, still myth has its way of getting at the truth” (589f).
Timarchos, Simmias explains, was a young Socratic who predeceased Socrates. This fictional young man from Chaeronea (Socrates' Sign 589f), whose name is modeled on and echoes that of Plutarch himself, is one of this author's oddest disguises. Mimicking Chaerophon's trip to Delphi to ask about Socrates' wisdom (Apology 21a), young Timarchos went to the oracle of Trophonios at Lebadeia to ask about his daimonion.
On this bizarre Boeotian oracle—Timarchos (or Ploutarchos) would have had to travel less than an hour from home to reach it—we have little beyond this wonderful account, supplemented by that of Pausanias, perhaps fifty years later. Pausanias, whose narrative is hardly less fabulous than Plutarch's myth, insists that he writes from personal experience, having himself consulted the oracle (Pausanias 9.39.14). Despite some naive or rash claims in the literature, the shrine itself continues to elude archaeologists. Plutarch's “story” of Timarchos's visit to the oracle has already been cited and paraphrased at length in Chapter 1. It is the most disorienting and vertiginous of Plutarch's soul-myths and perhaps the best example of a rhetorical mode we might call the Plutarchan sublime.
Timarchos, once he has entered the subterranean shrine and embarked on his hallucinatory journey of discovery, understandably seems to forget the question he came to ask and, in response to the disembodied voice that greets him, can only say that he wants to find out about “everything” (591a). He gets his answer anyway, spontaneous and unsummoned. The daimones are the little flames of mind-stuff of his vision, the rational or higher soul that is part of—or attached to—each of us. We either drag them down into the abyss of matter—the Styx—or they raise us up to the moon and beyond, out of the cycle of generation. The significant difference among humans is one of sensitivity—degree of docility in the hands of our little bit of mind-stuff. Although Socrates is not mentioned, we are left to conclude that he was one of the exceptionally receptive, the exceptionally docile.
The answer to the dialogue's question has been distanced from any possible human apprehension in multiple ways: by deliberate silence, by death, and by history. This does not prevent its being formulated in a variety of rhetorics, from the ironic (Galaxidoros and the sneeze) to psychological (Socrates used his intellect) to the theological (the intellect itself is divine). It is Theanor the Pythagorean who speaks up when Simmias has finished his story. Theanor calls attention to the silence of Epaminondas, as if to defer to him (as a student of Lysis and fellow Pythagorean), but that silence remains unbroken. Undaunted, Theanor picks up the theological rhetoric of the myth and delivers a stream of inflated, groundless, soteriological bombast that exemplifies everything Galaxidoros said earlier about the damage that Pythagoras had done to philosophy. This is met by a wonderfully bathetic silence and a return to the world of action. Epaminondas says nothing in response to Theanor, but turns to his brother, the narrator, and says, “It's about time for you to go and join your friends in the gymnasium” (Socrates' Sign 594a).
Socrates, daimones, and souls receive no further mention. Caphisias narrates the comings and goings of the conspirators—who begin in the palaestra by exchanging information and plans as they wrestle, one after the other, with different partners. The gymnasium joins the philosophical thiasos in the list of aristocratic institutions that lend themselves to conspiracy and political action. The plot is executed, the oligarchs killed, the garrison removed.
Once again, with a different emphasis and in a different genre, Plutarch's concern has proven to be the interaction of character, intellect, chance, and history. Intellectually, the dialogue concerns itself with foreknowledge and with the nature of judgment. History, as it impinges on the discussion, is riddled with signs, true and false, and their interpreters, as well as plans that go awry and plans that succeed. The difference is something as liminal as a sneeze, or as imponderable as divine providence.
ABBREVIATIONS
In the following …, the reader is often referred to specific passages in the corpus of Plutarch's works. Appendix 1 shows the complexity of the matter. References to the forty-eight surviving Parallel Lives are to title and section—for example, Numa 10. Any abbreviation that is not immediately clear may be sought in Appendix 1, part I.
The traditional sections (or chapters) of the Lives are respected and uniformly numbered in all editions of the Greek text and in most translations, providing a convenient system of reference that is not dependent on the pagination of a specific edition or translation. The Moralia in their diversity present even greater difficulties, solved here by the use of a title (in italics) or short title (in quotation marks) followed by page and section of the Frankfurt edition of 1599 (see Appendix 1, part II). All editions of the Greek text (as well as the Loeb translation, facing the Greek) mark these divisions, and Appendix 1, supplemented by the index, will serve as a guide.
Not all translations will provide the reader with the necessary information for locating a given reference by this system. Parenthetical numbers after Moralia titles that do not include both number and letter (as in “Oracles” 408c) designate sections of the composite pieces (e.g., Table Talk 4.6 refers to book 4, question 6). These references should be self-explanatory when the work in question is consulted.
The small number of other works, both ancient and modern, to which reference is made in the text are identified briefly in parentheses. The following standard abbreviations are used.
- CIG A. Boeckh. Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum. Berlin, 1828-38.
- DK H. Diels and W. Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Berlin, 1961.
- FGrHist F. Jacoby. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Berlin (later Leiden), 1923-.
- Il. Iliad
- Od. Odyssey
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