ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 47 Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch; served verbatim
These men moreover tell us a great many romantic things about these Gods, whereof these are some. They say that, Horomazes springing from purest light, and Arimanius on the other hand from pitchy darkness, these two are therefore at war with one another; and that Horomazes made six Gods, whereof the first was the author of benevolence, the second of truth, the third of law and order; and the rest, one of wisdom, another of wealth, and a third of that pleasure which accrues from good actions; and that Arimanius likewise made the like number of contrary Gods to confront them. After this, Horomazes, having first trebled his own magnitude, mounted up aloft, as far above the sun as the sun itself above the earth, and so bespangled the heavens with stars. But one star (called Sirius, or the Dog) he set as a kind of sentinel or scout before all the rest. And after he had made four and twenty Gods more, he placed them all in an egg-shell. But those that were made by Arimanius (being themselves also of the like number) breaking a hole in this beauteous and glazed egg-shell, bad things came by this means to be intermixed with good. But the fatal time is now approaching, in which Arimanius, who by means of this brings plagues and famines upon the earth, must of necessity be himself utterly extinguished and destroyed; at which time, the earth being made plain and level, there will be one life and one society of mankind, made all happy and of one speech. But Theopompus saith, that, according to the opinion of the Magi, each of these Gods subdues and is subdued by turns for the space of three thousand years apiece, and that for three thousand years more they quarrel and fight, and destroy each other’s works; but that at last Pluto shall fail, and mankind shall be happy, and neither need food nor yield a shadow. And that the God who has projected these things shall then for some time take his repose and rest; but yet this time is not so much to him, although it seem so to man, whose sleep is but short.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 46 contents Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 48 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Horomazes — a candidate entry Sirius — a candidate entry Theopompus — a candidate entry

Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch — translated by William Baxter (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)