Tiresias: The Ancient Mediterranean Religions Source Database

9561

Plutarch, On Superstition, 166c

nan But to the superstitious man it is possible to say, "The gift of sleep which the gods bestow on us as a time of forgetfulness and respite from our ills; why do you make this an everlastingly painful torture-chamber for yourself, since your unhappy soul cannot run away to some other sleep?" Heracleitus says that people awake enjoy one world in common, but of those who are fallen asleep each roams about in a world of his own. But the superstitious man enjoys no world in common with the rest of mankind; for neither when awake does he use his intelligence, nor when fallen asleep is he freed from his agitation, but his reasoning power is sunk in dreams, his fear is ever wakeful, and there is no way of escape or removal. Adespot much feared in Samos was Polycrates, as was Periander in Corinth, but nobody feared these men

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subject	book bibliographic info
daimonic cycle	Neusner Green and Avery-Peck (2022) 160
plutarch	Neusner Green and Avery-Peck (2022) 160
superstition'	Neusner Green and Avery-Peck (2022) 160
world soul	Neusner Green and Avery-Peck (2022) 160