into an argument on the nature of Dæmons, and certain considerations have been introduced which indicate a liability to vice and death as inherent in their nature. This conclusion shocks one of the speakers, but the pious Cleombrotus wants to know in what respect Dæmons will differ from gods if they are endowed with immortality and immunity from sin.[1] It is most significant, however, that the famous and beautiful story which Cleombrotus tells in support of his belief in the mortality of Dæmons, the story of the death of "the great Pan," is actually concerned with an announcement of the death of one whom the popular faith accepted as a deity.[2] Demetrius, who had just come from Britain, near which were many scattered desert islands, some of them named after Dæmons and heroes, gives an authentic account of the death of a Dæmon in the island of Anglesea.[3] Cleombrotus then shows how
- ↑ De Defectu Orac., 419 A.
- ↑ 419.—Mrs. Browning could hardly have read the De Defectu when she stated that her fine poem "The Dead Pan" was "partly founded on a well-known tradition mentioned in a treatise of Plutarch (De Oraculorum Defectu), according to which, at the hour of the Saviour's agony, a cry of 'Great Pan is dead!' swept across the waves in the hearing of certain mariners,—and the oracles ceased." (It was one of the mariners who uttered the cry, "The great Pan is dead!" having been thrice requested by a supernatural voice to do so. But such errors of detail are unimportant in view of the fact that the whole spirit of the story is misunderstood by the poetess.)
- ↑ So one may conjecture from the description given by Demetrius, who "sailed to the least distant of these lonely islands, which had few inhabitants, and these all held sacred and inviolable by the Britons." Plutarch's Demetrius has been identified with "Demetrius the Clerk" who dedicated, "to the gods of the imperial Palace," a bronze tablet now in the Museum at York.—See King's translation of the Theosophical Essays in the "Bohn" series, p. 22.
