It is difficult to see how the Gods could maintain their existence under this twofold tendency of deprivation, supported as they might be by formal classifications which assigned them a superior place. Even the Father of Gods and Men—the Zeus of Homer—turns his eyes "no very great way ahead from Troy to Thrace and the nomads of the Danube, but the true Zeus gazes upon beauteous and becoming transformations in many worlds."[1] To contrast the Zeus "of Homer" with the "true" Zeus is to do little else than to place the former in that subordinate rank proper not to the Divine, but to the Dæmonic character. Plutarch is perfectly consistent in applying this method of interpretation to the gods of other nations no less than to the gods of Greece. In the "Isis and Osiris," he inclines to the belief that these great Egyptian Deities are themselves only Dæmons, although he refuses to dogmatize on the point, and gives a series of more or less recognized explanations of the Egyptian myth. He cannot refrain, however, from using so appropriate an occasion of denouncing the absurdity of the Greeks in imputing so many terrible actions and qualities to their gods—"For the legends of Giants and Titans, handed down among the Greeks, the monstrous deeds of Cronus, the battle between Pytho and Apollo, the flight of Dionysus, the wanderings of Demeter, fall not behind the stories told of Osiris and Typhon, and other legends that one may hear recounted by mythologists without restraint."[2]
Page:The religion of Plutarch, a pagan creed of apostolic times; an essay (IA religionofplutar00oakeiala).pdf/165
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