Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)

"For aether's rush doth chase them seawards; sea spews them on land's flat ; and earth into the beams of tireless sun ; and he casts [them again] into the swirls of aether. One takes them from another, and all abhor [them] " 6 — until after being thus chastened and purified they regain their natural place and rank.

XXVII. 1. Born from the self-same womb as these and things like them, they say, are the legends about Typhon : how that he wrought dire deeds through envy and ill-will, and after throwing all things into confusion and filling the whole earth and sea as well with ills, he afterwards did make amends.

1 The air or ether that surrounds the earth.

2 Op, et Dies, 126. 3 Symp., 202 E.
4 That is, " interpretative and ministering."

6 E. flourished 494-434 B.c.

6 Stein, 377 S. ; Karsten, 16 ff. ; Fairbanks, p. 204. The quotation appears to me inapposite, for Empedocles seems to be speaking of " any who defile their bodies sinfully " and not of daimones ; but perhaps the " received " recombination of the fragments is at fault.

2. But the sister- wife1 of Osiris who upheld his honour, after she had quenched and laid to rest Typhon's frenzy and fury, did not allow forgetfulness and silence to overtake the struggles and trials he had endured, and her own wanderings and many [deeds] of wisdom, and many [feats] of manliness ; but intermingling with the most chaste perfectionings images and under-meanings and copies of the passion she then endured, she hallowed at one and the same time a lesson of religion and a consolation to men and women placed in like circumstances/'

3. And she and Osiris, being changed through virtue from good daimones into gods 2 — as [were] subsequently Heracles and Dionysus — possess the dignities of gods and daimones at one and the same time, fitly combined everywhere indeed but with the greatest power among those above earth and under earth.

CONCERNING SARAPIS

4. For they say that Sarapis is no other than Pluto, and Isis Persephassa, as Archemachus of Eubrea has said,3 and Heracleides of Pontus, when he supposes that the seat of the oracle at Canopus is Pluto's.

XXVIII. 1. And Ptolemy the Saviour4 saw in a dream the gigantic statue of Pluto — though he had not previously seen or known what form it was — ordering him to bring it to Alexandria.

1 See the note on " sister- wife " in comment on Mariamne (Hipp., Philos. — Introd.) in chapter on " Myth of Man." — Prolegg., p. 147, n. 7.

2 That is to say, according to this theory the myth represented the degree of initiation by which a man passed from the stage of daimon into the state of god, or from super-man to christ.

3 Muller, iv. 315.

4 The first Greek King of Egypt, 324-285 B.C.

2. And when he did not know and had no idea where [the statue] was set up even after he had described his vision to his friends, there was found a man, a great traveller, by name Sosibius, who said he had seen at Sinope just such a colossus as the King seemed to have seen.

3. He [Ptolemy] accordingly sent Soteles and Dionysius, who, after expending much time and pains, not, however, without the help of God's providence, removed it secretly and brought it away.

4. And when it had been brought [to Alexandria] and set up publicly, the assistants of Timotheus, the intrepreter, and of Manethos, the Sebennyte, coming to the conclusion that it was a statue of Pluto — judging by its cerberus and huge serpent — convinced Ptolemy that it was that of no other of the Gods than Sarapis ; for it did not come from Sinope with this designation, but after it had been brought to Alexandria it received the Egyptian name for Pluto, namely, Sarapis.

5. And yet people sink into the opinion of Heracleitus the physicist, when he says : " Hades l and Dionysus are the same, for whomsoever they rage and riot."

For those who postulate that Hades means the body, because the soul is as it were deranged and drunken in it, put forward a [too] meagre interpretation.