ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 48 Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch; served verbatim
Such then is the mythology of the Magi. But the Chaldaeans say, there are Gods of the planets also, two whereof they style benefics, and two malefics; the other three they pronounce to be common and indifferent. As for the Grecians, their opinions are obvious and well known to every one; to wit, that they make the good part of the world to appertain to Jupiter Olympius, and the hateful part to Pluto; and likewise, that they fable Harmonia to have been begotten by Venus and Mars, the one whereof is rough and quarrelsome, and the other sweet and generative. In the next place consider we the great agreement of the philosophers with these people. For Heraclitus doth in plain and naked terms call war the father, the king, and the lord of all things; and saith that Homer, when he first prayed, Discord be damned from Gods and human race, little thought he was then cursing the origination of all things, they owing their rise to aversation and quarrel. He also saith, that the sun will never exceed his proper bounds; and if he should, that Tongues, aids of justice, soon will find him out. Empedocles also calls the benefic principle love and friendship, and very often sweet-looked harmony; and the evil principle Pernicious enmity and bloody hate. The Pythagoreans use a great number of terms as attributes of these two principles; of the good, they use the unit, the terminate, the permanent, the straight, the odd, the square, the equal, the dexter, and the lucid; and again of the bad, the two, the interminate, the fluent, the crooked, the even, the oblong, the unequal, the sinister, and the dark; insomuch that all these are looked upon as principles of generation. But Anaxagoras made but two, the intelligence and the interminate; and Aristotle called the first of these form, and the latter privation. But Plato in many places, as it were shading and veiling over his opinion, names the first of these opposite principles the Same, and the second the Other. But in his book of Laws, when he was now grown old, he affirmed, not in riddles and emblems but in plain and proper words, that the world is not moved by one soul, but perhaps by a great many, but not by fewer than two; the one of which is beneficent, and the other contrary to it and the author of things contrary. He also leaves a certain third nature in the midst between, which is neither without soul nor without reason, nor void of a self-moving power (as some suppose), but rests upon both of the preceding principles, but yet so as still to affect, desire, and pursue the better of them; as I shall make out in the ensuing part of this discourse, in which I design to reconcile the theology of the Egyptians principally with this sort of philosophy.

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

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Anaxagoras — a life Aristotle — a life Heraclitus — a candidate entry Homer — a life Jupiter — a candidate entry Mars — a candidate entry Plato — a life

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)