This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
When Isis recovered Osiris and was watching
Horus grow up1 as he was being made strong by the
exhalations and mists and clouds, Typhon was vanquished but not annihilated2; for the goddess who
holds sway over the Earth would not permit the
complete annihilation of the nature opposed to moisture, but relaxed and moderated it, being desirous
that its tempering potency should persist, because it
w as not possible for a complete world to exist, if the
fiery element left it and disappeared. Even if this
story were not current among them, one would hardly
[p. 99]
be justified in rejecting that other account, to the
effect that Typhon, many ages ago, held sway over
Osiris's domain ; for Egypt used to be all a sea,3 and,
for that reason, even to-day it is found to have shells
in its mines and mountains.4 Moreover, all the
springs and wells, of which there are many, have a
saline and brackish water, as if some stale dregs of
the ancient sea had collected there.
But, in time, Horas overpowered Typhon ; that is
to say, there carne on a timely abundance of rain, and
the Nile forced out the sea and revealed the fertile
land, which it filled out with its alluvial deposits. This
has support in the testimony of our own observation ;
for we see, even to-day, as the river brings down new
silt and advances the land, that the deep waters
gradually recede and, as the bottom gains in height
by reason of the alluvial deposits, the water of the
sea runs off from these. We also note that Pharos,
which Homer5 knew as distant a day's sail from
Egypt, is now a part of it ; not that the island has
extended its area by rising, or has come nearer to the
land, but the sea that separated them was obliged to
retire before the river, as the river reshaped the land
and made it to increase.
The fact is that all this is somewhat like the doctrines promulgated by the Stoics6 about the gods ;
for they say that the creative and fostering spirit is
Dionysus, the truculent and destructive is Heracles,
the receptive is Ammon, that which pervades the
Earth and its products is Demeter and the Daughter,
[p. 101]
and that which pervades the Sea is Poseidon.7
1 Cf. 357 c-f, supra.
2 Cf. 358 d, supra.
3 Cf. Herodotus, ii. 5; Diodorus, iii. 3, and i. 39. 11.
4 Cf. Herodotus, ii. 12.
5 Od. iv. 356. Cf. also Strabo, xii. 2. 4 (p. 536), and xvii. 1. 6 (p. 791).
6 Cf. von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ii. 1093 (p. 319).
7 Cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i. 15 (40), ii. 28 (71); and Diogenes Laertius, vii. 147.
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1936. 5.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com