Letters of Julian/Letter 74

by Julian

74. To Iamblichus^[1]

I ought indeed to have obeyed the Delphic inscription "Know Thyself," and not have ventured to affront the ears of so great a man as yourself; for only to look you in the face, when one meets your eye, is no easy matter, and it is much less easy to try to rival you when you wake the harmony of your unfailing wisdom, seeing that if Pan roused the echoes with his shrill song everyone would yield him place, yes, even though it were Aristaeus^[2] himself, and when Apollo played the lyre everyone would keep silence, even though he knew the music of Orpheus. For it is right that the inferior, in so far as it is inferior, should yield to the superior, that is if it is to know what is appropriate to itself and what is not. But he who has conceived the hope of matching his mortal song with inspired music has surely never heard of the sad fate of Marsyas the Phrygian, or of the river which is named after him and bears witness to the punishment of that insane flute-player, nor has he heard of the end of Thamyris, the Thracian who, in an evil hour, strove in song against the Muses. Need I mention the Sirens, whose feathers the victorious Muses still wear on their brows?^[3] But each one of those that I have named is still even now paying in the tradition the fitting penalty for his boorishness and temerity, and I, as I said, ought to have stayed within my own boundaries and held my peace while I enjoyed my fill of the music uttered by you, like those who receive in silence the oracle of Apollo when it issues from the sacred shrine. But since you yourself furnish me with the keynote of my song, and by your words, as though with the wand of Hermes, arouse and wake me from sleep, lo now, even as when Dionysus strikes his thyrsus his followers rush riotous to the dance, so let me too in response to your plectron make answering music, like those who accompany the choirmaster, keeping time to the call of the rhythm. And in the first place let me make a first-offering to you, since this is your pleasure, of the speeches which I recently composed at the Emperor's command in honour of the glorious bridging of the strait,^[4] though what I offer you is returning small for great and in very truth bronze for gold;^[5] yet I am entertaining our Hermes with such fare as I have. Surely Theseus did not disdain the plain meal that Hecale^[6] provided, but knew how to content himself with humble fare when the need arose. Nor was Pan, the god of shepherds, too proud to set to his lips the pipe of the boy neat-herd.^[7] Then do you also in your turn accept my discourse in a gracious spirit and do not refuse to lend your mighty ear to my humble strain. But if it has any cleverness at all, then not only is my discourse itself fortunate but so too is its author, in that he has obtained the testimony of Athene's vote.^[8] And if it still needs a finishing touch to complete it as a whole, do not refuse to add to it yourself what it needs. Before now the god in answer to prayer has stood by the side of a bowman and set his hand to the arrow, and again, when a bard was playing the cithara and singing a high and stirring strain, the Pythian god, when the string failed, assumed the guise of a cicada and uttered a note of the same tone.

Footnotes

1. Letters 74-83, with the possible exception of 81, are certainly not by Julian.
2. For Aristaeus see Vergil, Georgics 4; he is a vegetation deity not usually associated with music.
3. The Muses, having defeated the Sirens in a singing competition, tore out their feathers and wore them as a symbol of victory.
4. Geffcken tries to connect this passage with the order of Constantius to Julian to send his troops across the Bosporus en route to Persia. Cumont's reading ποταμοῦ "of the river" supposes that Constantine's bridge over the Danube in 328 is meant; cf. Aurelius Victor 41. 18, pons per Danubium ductus. In my opinion the sophist who wrote this letter had composed speeches on the stock theme of Xerxes and the Hellespont.
5. See Letter 63
6. The tale is told in the brief epic of Callimachus, the Hecale, of which we have fragments; also in Plutarch, Theseus.
7. Theocritus 1. 128.
8. The suffragium Minervae; the proverb is derived from Aeschylus, Eumenides, where Athene, by breaking a tie vote, saved Orestes.