Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/431

Rh commend the answer of Antisthenes to one who said unto him; Thy mother is a Phrygian: So was (quoth he) the mother of the gods: why answer you not likewise when you are reproached with your banishment? even so was the father of that victorious conqueror Hercules: the grandsire likewise of Bacchus, who being sent out for to seek Lady Europa, never returned back into his native country:

For being a Phœnician bom, At Thebes he after did arrive, Far from his native soil beforn. And there begat a son belive. Who Bacchus did engender tho'. That moves to fury women, hight Mad Bacchæs, running to and fro, In service, such is his delight.

As for that which the poet Æschylus would seem covertly by these dark words to insinuate, or rather to shew afar off, when he saith thus:

And chaste Apollo, sacred though he were. Yet banished a time, heaven did forbear,

I am content to pass over in silence, and will forbear to utter according as Herodotus saith: and whereas Empedocles in the very beginning of his philosophy maketh this preface:

An ancient law there stands in force. Decreed by gods above, Grounded upon necessity. And never to remove: That after man hath stain'd his hands In bloodshed horrible, And in remorse of sin is vext With horror terrible, The long-liv'd angels which attend In heaven, shall chase him quite. For many thousand years from view Of every blessed wight: By virtue of this law, am I From gods exiled now. And wander here and there throughout The world I know not how.

This he meaneth not of himself alone, but of all us after him, whom he declareth and sheweth by these words to be mere strangers, passengers, foreigners and banished persons in this world. For it is not blood (quoth he), O men, nor vital spirit contemperate together, that hath given unto us the substance of our soul and beginning of our life; but hereof is the body only composed and framed, which is earthly and mortal; but the generation of the soul which cometh another way, and