Oration 5

To labor over a Libyan myth and to wear away one's love of toil for words on such matters is no happy thing—for it is not among the pursuits to which the most reasonable of men incline in their emulation; yet for all that, one ought not to abstain from it through contempt for the idle chatter about such things. For perhaps it might one day afford even us no slight use, if it is drawn somehow toward what is fitting and compared with what truly is.

And such a power and undertaking seems to me like the farmers' skill with plants, if it be done sufficiently. For they sometimes, by setting and grafting the cultivated and fruit-bearing into the barren and wild stocks, render the plant useful instead of useless, and beneficial instead of unprofitable.

So too, when a useful and profitable discourse is engrafted into unprofitable fables, it does not allow even those things to be told in vain. And perhaps even those who first composed them composed them with some such end, hinting and conveying a meaning to those able to apprehend it rightly.

This, then, is the prelude, as someone said, to the law. The rest would be to tell and chant the law itself, or the myth, to whatever image we most liken the desires.

For it is said that long ago there was a certain harsh and savage race of beasts, most numerous and most prevalent in the uninhabited parts of Libya. For this country even now seems to bring forth natures of animals of every kind, both serpents and other beasts.

Among them is this race too, of which the present discourse treats, composite in the form of its body out of nearly the most widely different creatures—altogether monstrous. And it wandered as far as this sea here, to the Syrtis, for the sake of food.

For it hunted the other beasts too—the lions and leopards, as those hunt the deer and the wild asses and the sheep—but most of all it delighted in the hunting of men.

For which reason indeed it came near the inhabited places, as far as the Syrtis. The Syrtis is a gulf of the sea reaching far into the country, and a voyage of three days, they say, for those sailing unhindered.

But for those carried down into it there is no possibility of sailing out; for shoals and double seas and long reefs running out a great way make the deep altogether impracticable and troublesome. For the basin of the sea is not clean in those parts, but the place, being hollow and sandy, receives the deep, having nothing solid.

Whence, I think, great drifts and heaps of sand arise in it, just as such a thing happens on land from the winds, but there rather from the surge. And the surrounding parts too are much of the same kind—desolation and dunes.

But indeed the beasts would seize the shipwrecked men coming up from the sea, and any of the Libyans who out of necessity passed through or wandered there, appearing before them.

The nature of their body and their form was as follows: the face was that of a woman, a comely woman; the breasts and bosom were by far the fairest, and the neck, such as would belong to no mortal maiden nor to a nymph in her bloom, nor could any sculptor or painter represent the like; and the color was most radiant, and from the eyes a kindliness and a longing fell upon the souls of all who beheld it;

but the rest of the body was hard and unbreakable with scales, and all the lower part a serpent; and at the very end was the serpent's head, exceedingly shameless. These beasts are not said to have been winged, like the Sphinxes, nor to converse, as those did, nor to utter any other voice, but only to hiss, like the serpents, most shrilly;

and of all land creatures they were the swiftest, so that none could ever escape them; and the rest they mastered by force, but men by deceit, showing their bosom and their breasts, and at the same time, by their gaze, bewitching them and casting upon them a terrible longing for union; and the men would approach as to women, while the beasts stayed motionless, often looking down,

imitating a modest woman; but when a man came near, they would snatch him up. For they had also bestial hands, which until then they kept hidden. And the serpent at once, biting, killed him with its venom; and the serpent and the rest of the beast together devoured the corpse.

This, then, is the myth, framed not for a child, that it may be the less bold and unbridled, but for those who have a greater and more complete folly; transferred hither by us, it might perhaps be able sufficiently to show what the race of the desires is like—that, being irrational and bestial, and then displaying a certain pleasure, drawing on the foolish by deceit and bewitchment, they destroy them most pitiably and most miserably.

These things we ought to fear, keeping them before our eyes; and just as those nurses do with children, whenever they reach unseasonably for food or play or anything else, so we too, whenever we are in love with luxury or money or the things of love or glory or any other pleasure, ought never, approaching these crafty creatures, to be snatched up by them to a destruction and a ruin most shameful of all.

And indeed it is not hard to turn the rest of the myth too in this direction, for a man fond of talk and at leisure rather more than he should be. For they add that a certain king of the Libyans attempted to destroy this race of beasts, vexed at the destruction of his people. And many of them happened to have settled there, having occupied a wood beyond the Syrtis, dense and wild.

So, gathering a great host of an army—for the beasts were not hard to discover, both by the trails of the serpents and by a terrible smell carried from the place—he thus surrounded them on every side and threw in fire, and those that were cut off perished with their cubs; but the Libyans fled in haste from the place, resting neither night nor day, until, thinking they had gained a long lead, they encamped beside a certain river.

But as many of the beasts as were away on the hunt, as soon as they perceived that their dens were destroyed, pursued the army to the river, and catching some in sleep and the others spent with weariness, destroyed them utterly.

At that time, then, the work of destroying the race was left unfinished for him. But later Heracles, purging the whole earth of beasts and of tyrants, came there too, and burned the place, and of the creatures fleeing from the fire he slew with his club such as came against him, and with his arrows those that ran away.

Perhaps, then, the myth hints, saying that the many, if anyone ever attempted to purge his own soul, like some pathless place full of harsh beasts, having taken out and destroyed some one species of the desires, and having hoped to be rid of them and to have escaped—not having done it strongly—are a little later destroyed and ruined by the desires that remain.

But Heracles, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, went after them thoroughly and rendered his own mind pure and tamed. And this, it means, is what the taming of the earth signifies for him.

Do you wish, then, that we grace the younger men too with a little of the story? For they so utterly believe it and hold it true that they say that later on a creature of this race appeared to Greek envoys going to the temple of Ammon, with a great force of cavalry and archers escorting them.

For it seemed to them that on a certain dune a woman was lying, a hide thrown over her from above, like the Libyan women, and that she was displaying her bosom and breasts and neck, bending herself backward. And they supposed that some one of the courtesan women from a village was going there to the crowd.

And two young men, struck by the sight, went toward her, the one outstripping the other. And the beast, when it had seized him, dragged him into a hollow of the sand and devoured him.

And the other young man, coming up over the dune, beheld it and cried out, and so the rest of the throng came to the rescue. But the beast rushed upon the young man, thrusting forward its serpent, and having killed him, went off with a hiss. And the corpse was found rotted and putrid; and the Libyans, the guides of the road, would not allow them to touch the body, saying that all would perish.