Page:Life of plotinus by porphyry.pdf/22

 22.

But why talk, to use Hesiod's phrase, "About Oak and Rock"? If we are to accept the evidence of the wise—who could be wiser than a God? And here the witness is the same God that said with truth:

"I have numbered the sands and taken the measure of the sea; I understand the dumb and hear where there has been no speech."

Apollo was consulted by Amelius, who desired to learn where Plotinus' soul had gone. And Apollo, who uttered of Socrates that great praise, "Of all men, Socrates the wisest"—you shall hear what a full and lofty oracle Apollo rendered upon Plotinus.

I raise an undying song, to the memory of a gentle friend, a hymn of praise woven to the honey-sweet tones of my lyre under the touch of the golden plectrum.

The Muses, too, I call to lift the voice with me in strains of many-toned exultation, in passion ranging over all the modes of song:

even as of old they raised the famous chant to the glory of Aeakides in the immortal ardours of the Homeric line.

Come, then, Sacred Chorus, let us intone with one great sound the utmost of all song, I Phoebus, Bathychaites, singing in the midst.

Celestial! Man at first but now nearing the diviner ranks ! the bonds of human necessity are loosed for you and, strong of heart, you beat your eager way from out the roaring tumult of the fleshly life to the shores of that wave-washed coast free from the thronging of the guilty, thence to take the grateful path of the sinless soul:

where glows the splendour of God, where Right is throned in the stainless place, far from the wrong that mocks at law.

Oft-times as you strove to rise above the bitter waves of this blood-drenched life, above the sickening whirl, toiling in the mid- most of the rushing flood and the unimaginable turmoil, oft-times,