Page:Works of Plato his first fifty-five dialogues (vol 1 of 5) (Taylor, 1804).pdf/290

 130 INTRODUCTION TO BOOKS II. AND III. OF THE REPUBLIC:

this kind to the powers that proximately feigning that the Gods, preside over it, and thus proceeding into a material nature, and distributed about this, war with each other. Homer, to those who consider his poems with attention, will appear to speak about the former mode of divine contention when he lays. When Saturn was by Jove all-feeing thru ft Beneath the earth: and in another place 1 respecting Typhon, Earth groan’d beneath them ; as when angry Jove Hurls down the forky lightning from above, On Arime when he the thunder throws, And fires Typhaeus with redoubled blows, Where Typhon, prest beneath the burning load, Still feels the fury of th’ avenging God. For in these verses he obscurely signifies a Titanic war against Jupiter, and what the Orphic writers call precipitations into Tartarus (xctTaTccpTo.pucre i). But he particularly introduces the Gods warring with each other, and dissenting about human affairs, according to the second conception of divine battles, in which the divine and intellectual disposition of the figments adopted by the poet is worthy of the greatest admiration. For, in describing their battles (who though they are allotted a subsistence at the extremities of the divine progressions, yet are suspended from the Gods, and are proximate to the Subjects of their government, and are allied to their leaders), he indicates their sympathy with inferior natures, referring a divided life, battle, and opposition from things in subjection to the powers by which they are governed; just as Orpheus conjoins with Bacchic images compositions, divisions and lamentations, referring all these to them from presiding causes. But Homer represents the alliance of these divisible Spirits with the series from which they proceed, by the same names through which he celebrates the powers exempt from material natures, and employs numbers and 1 Iliad, lib. 2. ver. 288,

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