Plut. Mor., Oracles Ceasing 1 — Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers

Plut. Mor., Oracles Ceasing 1 — Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers, Plutarch; served verbatim

THERE is an old story, friend Terentius Priscus, that heretofore eagles or swans, flying from the opposite bounds of the earth, met together where now stands the temple of Apollo Pythius, in the place now called the Navel; and that some while after, Epimenides the Phaestian, willing to satisfy his curiosity, enquired of the oracle of Apollo with regard to this story, but received such an answer as made him never a jot the wiser; upon which he said: No navel is there of the earth or sea: ’Tis known to Gods alone, if one there be. Thus fitly did the God chastise this bold enquirer into ancient traditions.

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

contents Plut. Mor., Oracles Ceasing 2 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Epimenides — a candidate entry

Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers, Plutarch — translated by Robert Midgley (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)