This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
They therefore who suppose that, because many
things of this sort are both related and shown unto travellers, they are but so many commemorations of the actions
and disasters of mighty kings and tyrants who, by reason
of their eminent valor or puissance, wrote the title of divinity upon their fame, and afterwards fell into great
[p. 84]
calamities and misfortunes,—these, I say, make use of the
most ready way of eluding the story, and plausibly enough
remove things of harsh and uncouth sound from Gods to
men. Nay, I will add this farther, that the arguments they
use are fairly enough deduced from the things themselves
related. For the Egyptians recount, that Mercury was, in
regard to the make of his body, with one arm longer than
the other, and that Typhon was by complexion red, Horus
white, and Osiris black, as if they had been indeed nothing
else but men. They moreover style Osiris a commander,
and Canopus a pilot, from whom they say the star of that
name was denominated. Also the ship which the Greeks
call Argo—being the image of Osiris's ark, and therefore,
in honor of it, made a constellation—they make to ride
not far from Orion and the Dog; whereof the one they
believe to be sacred to Horus, and the other to Isis.
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.
