Part 8

This Perictyone is different from her who was the mother of Plato.

In this extract no mention whatever is made of the harmony of a woman; for it wholly consists of the duty of children to their parents.

και νοσῳ is omitted in the original, but ought, as it appears to me, to be inserted.

It is well observed by Olympiodorus, on the Phædo of Plato, “that the soul is not punished by divinity through anger but medicinally; and that by eternity of punishment we must understand punishment commensurate with the soul’s partial period; because souls that have committed the greatest offences cannot be sufficiently purified in one period.”

For φρονεειν in this place, which is evidently erroneous, I read φθονεειν.

The whole of this extract is to be found in the fourth book of Plato’s Laws. (See tom. viii. p. 187, and 188, of the Bipont edition.) But there is occasionally some little difference between the text of Plato and that of Aristoxenus, as the critical reader will easily discover. Neither Fabricius nor the editors of Stobæus have noticed the source of this extract.

The whole of this extract is taken from the eleventh book of Plato’s Laws, but what is there said is here somewhat amplified.

See p. 137, and 138, of my Translation of Iamblichus on the Mysteries.

Iliad IX. v. 495. 6. 7.

Iliad IX. v. 493. Hierocles is mistaken in saying that poetry rashly asserts that the Gods are flexible. For as I have observed in my Notes to Iamblichus on the Mysteries, divine flexibility indicates in Homer, and other theological poets of antiquity, that those who through depravity become unadapted to receive the illuminations of the Gods, when they afterwards obtain pardon of their guilt through prayers and sacrifices, again become partakers of the goodness of the Gods. So that divine flexibility is a resumption of the participation of divine light and goodness, by those who through inaptitude were before deprived of it.

See on this most interesting subject, that divinity is not the cause of evil, my translation of the Fragments of Proclus on the Subsistence of Evil, at the end of my translation of his six books On the Theology of Plato.

See Odyss. I. v. 32, 33, 34.

See the first book of his Republic.

i.e. Such things as are neither really good, nor really evil, but media between these.

After this last sentence, the words ταυτα χρη, follow in the original; which evidently show that something is wanting: as they are only the beginning of another sentence. This defect, however, is supplied in my copy of Stobæus, (Eclog. Ethic. lib. II. p. 207), by some one in manuscript, as follows: ταυτα χρη προνοειν, μη δια νου τυφλοτητα και αγνωμοσυνην, τα (lege ταυτα) ημιν απαντασωσι; and he has also added the following Latin translation of these words: “Hæc oportet prospicere ne per mentis cæcitatem et ignorantiam hæc nobis occurrant.” But the addition, from whatever source it was obtained, does not appear to me to be at all apposite; and therefore I conceive it to be spurious.

This is true of the whole which consists of parts, so as not to be able to subsist without them. For whole has a triple substance; viz. it is either prior to parts, or in other words, is a whole containing parts causally; or it consists of parts; or is in a part, so that a part, also, becomes a whole according to participation. A city, therefore, is a whole consisting of parts, any part of which being absent, diminishes the whole. See Prop. 67 of my translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology; and the second book of my translation of Proclus on the Timæus.

When the intelligent reader considers that Hierocles flourished about the middle of the fifth century after Christ, he will immediately understand what the recent customs are to which Hierocles, in the above passage, alludes. Needham, in his translation of this passage, either did not understand the meaning of it, or wilfully omitted to translate it.

The honours which we pay to divinity can be of no advantage to him, but benefit us; but the honours which we pay to our parents are beneficial to them. And in this sense, and in this only, the latter are to be honoured more than the former.

This reminds me of what Pope, no less piously than pathetically says, respecting his mother, in the following most beautiful lines:

“Me let the tender office long engage, To rock the cradle of reposing age, With lenient arts extend a mothers breath, Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death; Explore the thought, explain the asking eye, And keep awhile one parent from the sky.” See his Seventh Epistle, near the end.

The following extract from Sir William Jones, as given by Moor in his Hindu Pantheon, p. 421, demonstrates the great antiquity of this precept:

“Our divine religion has no need of such aids as many are willing to give it; by asserting that the wisest men of this world were ignorant of the two great maxims—that we must act in respect of others as we should wish them to act in respect of ourselves—and that, instead of returning evil for evil, we should confer benefits on those who injure us. But the first rule is implied in a speech of Lysias, and expressed in distinct phrases by Thales and Pittacus; and I have even seen it word for word, in the original of Confucius, which I carefully compared with the Latin translation. If the conversion, therefore, of the Pandits and Maulavis, in India, shall ever be attempted by protestant missionaries, they must beware of asserting, while they teach the gospel, what those Pandits and Maulavis would know to be false. The former would cite the beautiful Arya couplet, which was written at least three centuries before our era, and which pronounce the duty of a good man, even in the moment of destruction, to consist, not only in forgiving, but even in a desire of benefiting his destroyer—as the sandal tree, in the instant of its overthrow, sheds perfume on the axe which fells it. And the latter would triumph, in repeating the verse of SADI, who represents a return of good for good as a slight reciprocity; but says to the virtuous man, ‘Confer benefits on him who has injured thee:’ using an Arabic sentence, and a maxim apparently of the ancient Arabs. Nor would the Mussulmans fail to recite four distichs of Hafiz, who has illustrated that maxim with fanciful but elegant allusions:—

“Learn from yon orient shell to love thy foe, And store with pearls the hand that brings thee woe: Free, like yon rock, from base vindictive pride, Emblaze with gems the wrist that rends thy side. Mark where yon tree rewards the stony shower With fruit nectarious, or the balmy flower: All nature calls aloud—‘Shall man do less Than heal the smiter, and the railer bless?’” As. Res. Vol. IV.

viz. Such circumstances as induced Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, and many other ancient philosophers, not to engage in wedlock, because they found that they could give greater assistance to philosophy by continuing single; but Pythagoras and Socrates, though they rank among the wisest men that ever lived, did not find a married life incompatible with the cultivation of philosophy in the highest perfection possible to man. Wedlock, therefore, is never to be avoided from any sordid and selfish motives.

Hence Diogenes, in perfect conformity with that dignified independence of character which he so eminently possessed, and which is to be found more or less in the conduct of all the ancient philosophers, when a certain wealthy and ostentatious man brought him to a fine house which he had built, and desired him not to spit, as he perceived he begun to hawk, spit in the man’s face, observing at the same time, that he could not find a worse place to spit in.

Odyss. lib. 7, v. 183.

This admirable passage is so conformable to the following beautiful lines in Pope’s Essay on Man, that it is most probably the source from whence they were derived. The lines are these:

“Self love but serves the virtuous mind to wake, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake, The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads, Friend, parent, neighbour first it will embrace, His country next, and next all human race; Wide and more wide th’ o’erflowings of the mind, Take every creature in of every kind.”