| Contents > Just What Are Perceptions? by Marian Rhydderch |
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In Socrates’ opinion, Apollo had shaped his life. From the time his friend, Chaerephon had received an oracle at Delphi telling him that there was no man wiser than Socrates, Socrates had made it his mission to understand this strange divine wisdom (Plato, Apology, trans. Fowler, 1917). His mission had infuriated his fellow Athenians and finally brought him before the court on charges of impiety and corrupting the city’s youth. His mission, over time, structured Socrates’ sense of reality and that reality was Apollo’s magnanimity. Apollo had propelled this inquisitive man forward to the point where he knew the god of prophecy had been right. The god had shared his wisdom about the future course of Socrates’ life, for this god could not lie (Plato, Apology, trans. Fowler, 1917). Socrates offered Apollo as a witness to his own honesty, as a witness to his own perception that the god’s interaction with human beings was a reality (Plato, Apology, trans. Fowler, 1917). Such an offer is of course little different from the modern practice in a court of law where we too claim god as a witness to our honesty, by placing a hand on a book of divine words. In ancient Athens, divine words were spoken words. Spoken words articulated the god’s business and that business, Socrates says, was throughout his life, “of the highest importance.” (Plato, Apology, trans. Fowler, 1917). The god’s wisdom was a reality for Socrates, an empowering reality, and yet not so for many of his contemporaries who found him guilty of the charges laid. Socrates’ reality was too difficult to accommodate in a city struggling with the destruction of it own identity and devastating losses.
Devastating losses were to continue for hundreds of years. The Athens, of Herodotos, Euripides and Socrates, indeed the world they had known had changed irrevocably by the second century of our own era, a century which saw the culmination of a life’s work for another Greek, Plutarch, also known as L. Mestrius Plutarchus (Lamberton, 2001). Greece, even by the mid first century when he was born, had been ‘re-badged’ as the Roman province of Achaea. Towards the end of his life, possibly when he was over seventy, Emperor Hadrian had appointed him procurator of his homeland (Lamberton, 2001).4 However it is to Plutarch, priest of Apollo at Delphi, (Lamberton, 2001). 5 We now turn to complete this examination of an ancient perception - Apollo’s magnanimity. Apart from his famous Parallel Lives, Plutarch wrote many dialogues, the literary genre invented by Plato (Lamberton, 2001). 6
Plutarch, priest of Apollo, wrote his essay The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse to promote a particular perception (Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Babbitt, 2003). The perception was this: Apollo still shared his wisdom with mankind at Delphi, as he had always done. The fact that his wisdom was no longer couched in hexameter verse was a fact that told of Apollo’s ability to speak the language appropriate to the times. The world was now more straightforward than it had been in the past. Peace, by the second decade of the second century CE, was a reality of life (Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Babbitt, 2003). Oracles in prose were well suited to a more prosaic world. To Plutarch’s way of thinking, Apollo knew this. Apollo’s magnanimity was a reality, a reality that had been overlooked, perhaps even forgotten, during Delphi’s earlier dismal days of “desolation and poverty”, during days when people like Strabo and Lucan had written about Delphi, without even visiting Apollo’s sanctuary (Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Babbitt, 2003). Their writings had helped to corrupt human knowledge. While Plutarch confidently recorded his own priestly zeal, while he recognized human benefaction had contributed to Delphi’s renaissance, he nonetheless felt compelled to acknowledge that it would not have been possible without Apollo’s presence (Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Babbitt, 2003). Apollo’s presence, Apollo’s magnanimity was a reality that Plutarch felt he had to promote and reinvigorate. Over the years, erroneous perceptions had been shaped by pernicious rumours that Apollo had left the building, had left the temple (Plutarch, Moralia, trans. Babbitt, 2003).
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| Contents > Just What Are Perceptions? by Marian Rhydderch |