[5]
[1] In Plutarch's Essay on the Decline of the Oracles, Cleombrotus, one of
the interlocutors, describes an extraordinary man whom he had met with,
after long research, upon the banks of the Red Sea. Once in every year
this supernatural personage appeared to mortals and conversed with them;
the rest of his time he passed among the Genii and the Nymphs.
[2] The celebrated Janus Dousa, a little before his death, imagined that
he heard a strain of music in the air.
[3] Orpheus.--Paulinus, in his "_Hebdomades_, cap. 2, _lib_. iii, has
endeavored to show, after the Platonists, that man is a diapason, or
octave, made up of a diatesseron, which is his soul, and a dispente, which
is his body. Those frequent allusions to music, by which the ancient
philosophers illustrated their sublime theories, must have tended very
much to elevate the character of the art, and to enrich it with
associations of the grandest and most interesting nature.
[4] Lactantius asserts that all the truths of Christianity may be found
dispersed through the ancient philosophical sects, and that any one who
would collect these scattered fragments of orthodoxy might form a code in
no respect differing from that of the Christian.
[5] According to Pythagoras, the people of Dreams are souls collected
together in the Galaxy.
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