This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
These men moreover tell us a great many romantic
things about these Gods, whereof these are some. They
say that, Horomazes springing from purest light, and Arimanius on the other hand from pitchy darkness, these two
are therefore at war with one another; and that Horomazes made six Gods, whereof the first was the author of
benevolence, the second of truth, the third of law and
order; and the rest, one of wisdom, another of wealth,
and a third of that pleasure which accrues from good
actions; and that Arimanius likewise made the like number of contrary Gods to confront them. After this, Horomazes, having first trebled his own magnitude, mounted
up aloft, as far above the sun as the sun itself above the
earth, and so bespangled the heavens with stars. But one
star (called Sirius, or the Dog) he set as a kind of sentinel
or scout before all the rest. And after he had made four
and twenty Gods more, he placed them all in an egg-shell.
But those that were made by Arimanius (being themselves
also of the like number) breaking a hole in this beauteous
and glazed egg-shell, bad things came by this means to be
intermixed with good. But the fatal time is now approaching, in which Arimanius, who by means of this brings
plagues and famines upon the earth, must of necessity be
himself utterly extinguished and destroyed; at which time,
the earth being made plain and level, there will be one
life and one society of mankind, made all happy and of
one speech. But Theopompus saith, that, according to
the opinion of the Magi, each of these Gods subdues and
[p. 108]
is subdued by turns for the space of three thousand years
apiece, and that for three thousand years more they quarrel
and fight, and destroy each other's works; but that at last
Pluto shall fail, and mankind shall be happy, and neither
need food nor yield a shadow. And that the God who has
projected these things shall then for some time take his
repose and rest; but yet this time is not so much to him,
although it seem so to man, whose sleep is but short.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 4.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.