Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride
Frank Cole Babbitt, Ed.

The Chaldeans declare that of the planets, which they call tutelary gods,¹ two are beneficent, two maleficent, and the other three are median and partake of both qualities. The beliefs of the Greeks are well known to all; they make the good part to belong to Olympian Zeus and the abominated part to Hades, and they rehearse a legend that Concord is sprung from Aphroditê and Ares,² the one of whom is harsh and contentious, and the other mild and tutelary. Observe also that the philosophers are in agreement with these ; for Heracleitus³ without reservation styles War ‘the Father and King and Lord of All,’ and he says that when Homer⁴ prays that

Strife may vanish away from the ranks of the gods and of mortals,

lie fails to note that he is invoking a curse on the origin of all things, since all things originate from strife and antagonism; also Heracleitus says that the Sun will not transgress his appropriate bounds, otherwise the stern-eyed maidens, ministers of Justice, will find him out.⁵

Empedocles⁶ calls the beneficent principle ‘friendship’ or ‘friendliness,’ and oftentimes he calls Concord [p. 119] ‘sedate of countenance’; the worse principle he calls ‘accursed quarrelling’ and ‘blood-stained strife.’

The adherents of Pythagoras⁷ include a variety of terms under these categories : under the good they set Unity, the Determinate, the Permanent, the Straight, the Odd, the Square, the Equal, the Righthanded, the Bright; under the bad they set Duality, the Indeterminate, the Moving, the Curved, the Even, the Oblong, the Unequal, the Left-handed, the Dark, on the supposition that these are the underlying principles of creation. For these, however, Anaxagoras postulates Mind and Infinitude, Aristotle⁸ Form and Privation, and Plato,⁹ in many passages, as though obscuring and veiling his opinion, names the one of the opposing principles ‘Identity’ and the other ‘Difference’ ; but in his Laws,¹⁰ when he had grown considerably older, he asserts, not in circumlocution or symbolically, but. in specific words, that the movement of the Universe is actuated not by one soul, but perhaps by several, and certainly by not less than two, and of these the one is beneficent, and the other is opposed to it and the artificer of things opposed. Between these he leaves a certain third nature, not inanimate nor irrational nor without the power to move of itself,¹¹ as some think, but with dependence on both those others, and desiring the better always and yearning after it and pursuing it, as the succeeding portion of the treatise will make clear, in the [p. 121] endeavour to reconcile the religious beliefs of the Egyptians with this philosophy.¹²