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"Not death they know, nor age, nor toil and pain,
And hear not Acheron's deep and solemn strain."[1]
Philosophy, too, rejects the Strifes, the Prayers, the Terrors, and the Fears, which Homeric poesy elevates to the divine rank.[2] Its teachings, moreover, are often at variance with religious practices established or recognized by Law and Prescription, as when Xenophanes chid the Egyptians for lamenting Osiris as a mortal, while yet worshipping him as a god. Poets and legislators, in their turn, refuse to recognize the metaphysical conceptions—"Ideas, Numbers, Unities, Spirits"—which philosophers—Platonists, Pythagoreans, and Stoics—have put in the place of Deity.[3](No. 4).]*
- ↑ Fragment 120 in Bergk's third edition, 144 in his fourth edition,
and 107 in Böckh's edition. W. Christ includes it in his selections—[Greek: ex
adêlôn eidôn - ↑ Iliad, ix. 498; xi. 3, 73; iv. 440.
- ↑ Amatorius, 763 C, sqq.; cf. De Placitis Philosoph., lib. i. 879-880 A. This tract cannot be quoted as authority for Plutarch's views; it is in several places distinctly, even grossly, anti-Platonic, and in other places even more distinctly Epicurean. As an example of the reverence with which Plutarch constantly alludes to Plato, the first conversation in the Eighth Book of the Symposiacs may be quoted. The conversation arises out of a celebration of Plato's birthday, and Plutarch gives a sympathetic report of the remarks of Mestrius Florus, who is of opinion that those who impute the philosopher's paternity to Apollo do not dishonour the God. Cf. this and hundreds of other similar examples with the bitterly contemptuous expressions in the De Placitis, 881 A, a section which concludes with an emphatic exposition of that Epicurean view which Plutarch exerts himself so strenuously to confute in the De Sera Numinis Vindicta. Bernardakis "stars" the De Placitis, though Zimmerman quotes it as evidence against the sincerity of Plutarch's piety (Epistola ad Nicolaum Nonnen, cap. 7: "aperte negat providentiam"). Wyttenbach says the De Placitis was "e perditis quibusdam germanis libris compilatum." Christopher Meiners (Historia Doctrinæ de Vero Deo, p. 246) attacks
