The three ‘myths’ which are found in these Dialogues are all avowedly Platonic; they are introduced and dismissed in Platonic formulae, and much of the imagery is drawn from Plato. Yet the treatment is Plutarch’s own, and the style, though dignified and elevated after his fashion, never suggests an imitation of Plato which could only be parody. New matter is brought in, mostly gleaned from the astronomy of his day. The movements of the heavenly bodies have been an inspiration to later poets of verse and prose:

To Plutarch the subject was rather one of earnest curiosity, as he turns to account the details and their theological application, read by him in the philosophers of, or nearly of, his own age.

The purpose of the Platonic myth is to carry the argument beyond and above the region of logic and analysis, into that of poetry and constructive truth, upon matters where strict proof was impossible. The reader may be referred to Bishop Westcott’s Essay on Religious Thought in the West, and to Professor J. A. Stewart’s book on The Myths of Plato.

(1) It will be convenient to look first into the myth of Thespesius in Plutarch’s Dialogue On the Instances of Delay in Divine Punishment (see pp. 205-13 of this book). The motive is identical with that of the myth of Er in the Republic, yet with a difference. Plato gives us an experience from the world beyond death, granted to one who had been taken for dead during several days, in order to carry to a higher plane his argument for the victory here and hereafter of Justice over Injustice. Plutarch, as a moral teacher and ‘physician of souls’, concerned to restore individuals who have fallen, and to keep the falling on their feet, gives us the picture of ‘The Rake Reformed’, taking an extreme instance of a vicious character restored to sanity by glimpses of penalties and of bliss beyond this life, in order to deter and encourage others under temptation. The name Aridaeus, changed to Thespesius, ‘The Divine’, as an earnest of the reformation, reminds us of Ardiaeus the tyrant, in Plato. The language naturally falls into that of the Judgement-myth in the Gorgias. It is introduced by a similar form of words:

‘Now listen while I tell you a very beautiful story (?????) which you I think will call a myth (????), for all that I am about to say I wish to be regarded as true’ (Plato).

‘I can tell you a story which I have lately heard, yet I hesitate lest it may appear to you a myth.... Let me first make good the “probability” of my view, then we will start the myth, if myth indeed it be’ (Plutarch).

The details in Plutarch are fuller and grimmer, and the language, though solemn, lacks the stately reticence of Plato. We are often reminded of words and thoughts in the Eumenides of Aeschylus. The celestial imagery is vague, and does not seem to suggest any special source more modern than Plato. It has a general resemblance to a passage in the Phaedo (c. 58, p. 109 D, E).

‘We, dwelling in a hollow of the Earth, think that we dwell upon the Earth itself; and the air we call Heaven, and think that it is that Heaven wherein are the courses of the stars: whereas, by reason of weakness and sluggishness, we cannot go forth out of the air; but if a man could journey to the edge thereof, or having gotten wings could fly up, it would come to pass that even as fishes here which rise out of the sea do behold the things here, he, looking out, would behold the things there, and if his strength could endure the sight thereof, would see that there are the True Heaven, and the True Light, and the True Earth’ (Tr. J. A. Stewart).

The daemons are only mentioned as Ministers or Ushers in the after-world; there is no threefold division of the man into body, soul, and mind, only one into body and soul; there is one reference to Delphi and its oracle, where a popular belief that Night and Apollo were partners is corrected. An attentive reading will bring out a resemblance of words and phrases to those familiar to us in the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, the subject of E. Norden’s fruitful and convincing study.

(2) The beautiful story of Timarchus, the young friend of Socrates’ son, who passed into a trance in the cave of Trophonius, and saw things of the unseen world which were to be fully revealed to him three months later, i. e. in actual death, comes into the Dialogue On the Genius of Socrates (pp. 36-40) to explain the special correspondence during life between the God and those gifted souls who possess mind, and become daemons or spirits after death. Here the three-fold division into body, soul, and mind (see p. 303) is maintained. A practical application of the myth is drawn by Theanor, the young Pythagorean visitor.

As the supposed Dialogue takes place in B. C. 378, we do not expect to find in it the astronomy of Plutarch’s day, though he would not have shrunk from any anachronism. The general imagery is again that of the Phaedo, but there is a sea on which circular bodies, the stars which are men’s souls, float. The current which bears them is circular, yet not completely circular, not ending in the point where it started, but describing a continuous spiral (just as the moon does with reference to the earth’s path). This sea is inclined to the middle and highest point of the firmament by ‘a little less than eight-ninths of the whole’. This is puzzling; it may suggest the inclination of the ecliptic to the equator, or, again, that of the Milky Way to the ecliptic. Doubtless some explanation will be forthcoming. An interesting detail is ‘Styx, a way to Hades’, clearly the shadow in a lunar eclipse, since the moon ‘only avoids Styx by a slight elevation, and is caught once in one hundred and seventy-seven secondary measures’, the exact number of periods of twenty-four hours contained in six lunar months, the normal interval between two eclipses (see p. 286). ‘Secondary measures’ is a curious expression, since Plutarch elsewhere (Plat. Quaest. 3, p. 1006 E) calls periods of a day and a night ‘the primary measures’. It seems not impossible that de?t????? here has replaced some word which the scribe could not make out, such as ??????????. We have the four principles of birth and death, as in the Face in the Moon; only there Clotho takes the moon for her sphere of office, and Lachesis the earth, here Lachesis takes the moon, Clotho the sun, Atropus the ‘unseen’. Neither list agrees with the assignment of functions by Xenocrates (see the end of Dr. M. Adler’s Dissertation mentioned below).

(3) Sylla’s tale in the Face in the Moon (pp. 299-308), a traveller’s story picked up in Carthage from one of those curious characters found on the outer margin of the Greek world in whom Plutarch delighted, is brought in with admirable dramatic fitness, shown in Sylla’s eagerness to produce it at the very outset, in the preparation for it by the skirmish between Theon and Lamprias, and in the vivacity of the narrative. It is dismissed with a Platonic formula:

‘Such is the story which I heard the stranger relate.... But you and your friends, Lamprias, may take the story in what way you will.’ Compare: ‘I am persuaded, O Callicles, that these things that are told are true.... Perchance this shall seem to you an old wife’s fable, and thou wilt despise it: well mightest thou despise it, if by searching we could find out aught better and truer’ (Gorgias, 526 D, 527 A). The astronomy of the myth is in the main that of the preceding Dialogue, and Sylla shows considerable familiarity with Plato and also with Xenocrates. It is perhaps noticeable how little interest Plutarch shows in geographical detail, contenting himself with such vague and antiquated views as sufficed for a setting to the story. He appears not to name Pytheas at all in the Lives, and only once (on a question of the tides) in the Moralia.

The whole Dialogue has been the subject of a careful study by Dr. Max Adler of Vienna (Dissertationes Vindobonenses, 1910). Without entering into his general view of the structure, we may observe that Dr. Adler seems to be very successful in establishing the close connexion between it and the Dialogue On the Cessation of the Oracles, which he is probably right—though he reserves the proofs—in regarding as based upon it, and later in date. This comes out especially in the passages about the captivity of Cronus (cp. p. 301 with pp. 135-6), and the argument about ‘the Middle’ (cp. p. 270 with p. 144). He produces a happy quotation from Maximus Tyrius to establish beyond doubt that the source of an important passage about mind (pp. 271-2) was in Posidonius. His general conclusion as to the myth, is that it too is in the main from Posidonius, and that when Plutarch draws upon Xenocrates, it is through Posidonius. The latter appears to have been a writer of great industry and encyclopaedic learning, quoted as an authority on matters of history, physical geography, and what we should now call anthropology; not an original force in Philosophy, but successful in reconciling systems and making them available for human needs; one the aim of whose life-work was, in the words of one of his most recent exponents, to make men at home in the universe (Stoics and Sceptics, by Edwyn Bevan, p. 98).

Any one who will read Sylla’s myth, with a good map of the moon’s surface before him, will be able to locate for himself the ‘Gulf of Hecate’, and the long valleys leading to the Elysian plains, which, on her side remote from earth, enjoy diffused sunlight. There need be no idea of shafts or tunnels driven through the solid body of the moon.

Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, written more than a century before Plutarch’s Dialogue, and also drawn from Posidonius, will be found an admirable companion piece, enforcing, in language of singular beauty and elevation, those duties to country and ancestors which find inadequate expression in the Greek thought of the first century of our era.