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phetic mania contracts into one the extension and infinity of time, and sees, as in one present now, all things, the past, the future, and the existing time. Hence it predicts what will be, which it sees as present to itself. It causes us, therefore, to pass through life in an irreprehensible manner; just as the internal prophetic mania contracts and elevates all the multiplied and many powers and lives of the soul to the one, in order that it may in a greater degree be preserved and connected. But the amatory mania converts young persons to us, and causes them to become our friends, being instructive of youth, and leading them from sensible beauty to our psychical beauty, and from this sending them to intelligible beauty; in the same manner as the internal amatory mania conjoins the one of the soul to the Gods.
"All the above mentioned manias, therefore, are superior to the prudent and temperate energies of the soul. Nevertheless, there is a mania which is coordinate with temperance, and which we say has in a certain respect a prerogative above[1] it. For certain inspirations are produced, according to the middle and also according to the doxastic reasons of the soul, conformably to which artists effect certain things, and discover theorems beyond expectation, as Asclepius, for instance, in medicine, and Hercules in the practic[2] life."
Afterwards, in commenting on what Plato says of the mania from the Muses, viz. "that it adorns the infinite deeds of the ancients," Hermeas observes, "that the inward energy in the soul of the poetic mania, by applying itself to superior and intelligible natures, imparts to subordinate natures harmony and order; but that the external divinely-inspired poetry celebrates the deeds of the ancients, and instructs both its contemporaries and posterity, extending its energies every where." But Plato says, "that he who without the divinely-inspired mania of the Muses expects to become a divine poet, will, by thus fancying, become himself imperfect, and his poetry will be vanquished and concealed by the poetry which is the progeny of mania."
Hermeas adds, "For what similitude is there between the poetry of Chærilus and Callimachus, and that of Homer and Pindar? For the divinely-inspired poets, as being filled
- ↑ For υπο here, it is necessary to read υπερ.
- ↑ The German editor of these Scholia, instead of πρακτικῃ, which is the true reading in this place, and which he found in the manuscript, absurdly substitutes for it πυκτικῃ, as if Hercules was a pugilist. See my translation of the Dissertation at Maximus Tyrius, on the Practic and Theoretic Life.
