This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Table of Contents:
But in our time, not long before the celebration of
the Pythian games during the magistracy of Callistratus,
there were two holy men who, coming as it were from
the two opposite ends of the world, met together at the
city of Delphi. The one was Demetrius the grammarian,
who came from England to return to Tarsus in Cilicia,
where he was born; the other, Cleombrotus the Lacedaemonian, who had been long conversant in Egypt and the
Troglodytic country, and had made several voyages, as well
on the Red Sea as other parts,—not as a merchant, to get
[p. 4]
money, but to improve his knowledge and enrich his mind;
for he had enough to live upon, and cared for no more
And he was collecting history, as the material for philosophy, the end whereof (as he called it) is theology. He,
having been lately at the temple and oracle of Jupiter Ammon, seemed not much to marvel at any thing he there saw;
yet he mentioned to us one particular (which he said was
told him by the priest of the temple) touching the lamp
that is never extinguished and spendeth less every year
than the former. Whence they conjectured an inequality
of years, whereby each year was shorter than the preceding.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 4.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.