This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
They say that the sun and moon do not use
chariots, but boats1 in which to sail round in their
courses ; and by this they intimate that the nourishment and origin of these heavenly bodies is from
moisture. They think also that Homer,2 like Thales,
had gained his knowledge from the Egyptians, when he
postulated water as the source and origin of all things;
for, according to them, Oceanus is Osiris, and Tethys
is Isis, since she is the kindly nurse and provider for all
things. In fact, the Greeks call emission apousia
3
and coition synousia, and the son (hyios) from water
(hydor) and rain (hysai) ; Dionysus also they call
Hyes4 since he is lord of the nature of moisture ; and
he is no other than Osiris.5 In fact, Hellanicus seems
[p. 85]
to have heard Osiris pronounced Hysiris by the
priests, for he regularly spells the name in this way,
deriving it, in all probability, from the nature of
Osiris and the ceremony of finding him.6
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1936. 5.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com