#platonist

"The gods, too, are fond of a joke."

Why is no one talking about daimons these days? People used to talk about the daimons all the time!

How to flirt badly with a platonist

For fortune can afflict us with disease, take away our money, calumniate us to people or the tyrant, but it cannot make a good and brave and high-souled man bad and cowardly and ignoble and malicious, nor deprive him of the disposition which, as long as he keeps it, is of more value to him in the conduct of his life than is a pilot to a ship at sea.

Like Kore, the soul descends into genesis, like Dionysus she is scattered by generation, like Prometheus and the Titans she is chained to the body. She frees herself by acquiring the strength of Hercules, gathers herself together through the help of Apollo and of Athena the Savior, i.e. by truly purifying philosophy, and she elevates herself to the causes of her being with Demeter.

If someone should regard it as reasonable and true that the gods are not subject to change, but is in doubt how they take joy in the good and turn away from the evil, how they are wrathful with wrongdoers and are made propitious when appeased, then we must say that a god does not ‘take joy’, because what takes joy can also feel sorrow. They also do not grow ‘wrathful’, because being wrathful is an affect. Neither are they appeased with gifts, or they would be overcome by pleasure. In all, it would not be licit for the divine to be in a good or bad condition on account of human affairs. Rather, they are always good, and only beneficial; they never cause harm, because they are always in the same state as far as these things are concerned.