the virtuous and the vicious. In one place, as we have seen, he admits that Homer does not distinguish between the terms "Gods" and "Dæmons," and in his historical résumé of Dæmonology in the "Isis and Osiris,"[1] he is compelled to make a parallel admission that the Homeric epithet derived from Dæmons is indiscriminately applied to good and bad actions. He makes this admission, however, the basis of a subtle conclusion to the effect that Homer wished to imply that the Dæmons had a confused and ill-defined character, involving the existence of both good and bad specimens of the race. Nothing definitely distinguishing between the two sorts of Dæmons is to be obtained from Plato,[2] and Plutarch accordingly dwells with special emphasis upon the views of Empedocles and Xenocrates, who maintained, the one, that Dæmons who had been guilty of sins of commission or omission were driven about between earth and sky and sea and sun, until this purifying chastisement restored them to their natural position in the dæmonic hierarchy;[3] the*
- ↑ 361 A. sqq.
- ↑ The author of the De Placitis (882 B.) gives a very vague and slight account of the history of Dæmonology, probably from motives of Epicurean contempt, if one may judge from the curt sentence which concludes his brief note:—"Epicurus admits none of these things."—He merely says that Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, and the Stoics asserted the existence of spirits called "Dæmons," and adds that the same philosophers also maintained the existence of Heroes some good, some bad. The distinction between good and bad does not apply to the Dæmons. The identical words of this passage in the De Placitis are used by Athenagoras (Legat: pro Christ., cap. 21) to express a definite statement about Thales, who is asserted to have been the first who made the division into God, dæmons, heroes.
- ↑ Plutarch has here preserved some very beautiful verses of
