Eleven articles on Plato and Socrates

I've gathered these 11 items together, since they are scattered through the blog. The chapter extract concerning 'The Platonic Theory of Being' is from The Sacred History of Being, published in 2015. The text  of 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens', along with some others, forms a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought published by the Anshar Press in August 2017.  There are three extracts here also from J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published in 2016. 

Justice and the Harmony of the Soul

explores the idea of Justice discussed in Plato’s Republic, which argues that the pursuit of special excellences by individuals, in terms of skills, and moral and intellectual virtue, without reference to the activities of other individuals, was understood to result in a harmonious arrangement of society. They are joined together as a consequence of the fact that each of the virtues is complete and perfected. 

Plato's Point of View

Plato’s main concern was what was truly real, which remained necessarily unchanging and itself, and therefore could not be present, at least as itself, in the world of the here and now. This is not however, how Plato is understood or represented by modern philosophers. There are two main schools of thought: the first is that his position is consistent throughout his work, but his work is shaped by an unknown agrapha (unwritten esoteric doctrine). The second is that his work represents a discursive exploration of philosophical questions, which comes to no firm conclusion.

Sameness and Difference in Plato 

is a discussion of the idea of the Plenum in Plato. Philosophical writing about the divine in the west departed from the consideration of reality as something intricately bound up with a plenum during the Middle Ages, and as a result, philosophical argument about the divine, all the way up to the present day, deals poorly with certain issues, and no longer resembles the kind of argument about the divine found in ancient literature. It also makes it difficult to understand what Plato means. 

The Significance of the Chapter on The Platonic Theory of Being

Though the chapter is a difficult read, it is not that difficult to explain. In conversation with a reader recently, I provided a short explanation of the nature of the chapter, and its significance for the overall argument of The Sacred History of Being. It concerns the belief that divinity could be present in inanimate objects, and whether reality itself is necessarily one. And the consequences which necessarily follow from such discussion.

The Platonic Theory of Being (chapter extract) 

Plato argues that, by systematic dialectical enquiry, we can rise from the realms of likelihood and opinion, where we encounter only similitudes, to the realm in which certain knowledge is possible. This is to be achieved by passing through the similitudes, on account of their similitude, to their ultimate origin, the Form of the Good.

Logical Modality in Classical Athens

Though we have recognised only one logical modality for more than two millennia, there were in fact two. One of them was appropriate to earthbound existence; the other supplied a rational basis for contact with the divine.

I Go to Die (The Death of Socrates)

Written in response to Socrates speech to his accusers, on being found guilty of the charges of moral corruption and impiety to the gods. Performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. [Almeida Theatre, ‘Figures of Speech’ series, published September 25, 2017]. The text of the speech (the edit used) is available here. Bettany Hughes' populist take on Socrates, 'A Man For Our Time', is here. Hughes has also written a book on Socrates, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (review by Tom Holland). Thanks to Stephanie Papadopoulos.


Post Enlightenment Plato, and That which Cannot Move

The Plato we have we look at differently from the way he was understood in antiquity. For most of the middle ages all that was available to scholars was the first part of the Timaeus. So it is not the case that a way of understanding Plato has been handed down to us, except via the neoplatonists. But the neoplatonist understanding of Plato is deprecated as a way of understanding his work, with the consequence that modern scholars approach Plato virtually naked, with a very modern set of intellectual baggage. This can be a problem.


Excluding Parmenides

This is an extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being, published April 4, 2016. In Frazer's early essay, Plato's Parmenides is scarcely discussed at all. This is particularly surprising, for the Parmenides contains criticism of Plato's doctrine by Plato himself; criticisms not adequately answered either in that dialogue or elsewhere in the canon. The chronological position of this dialogue is thus immensely important if we consider the work of Plato as a development. The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Running Folklore to the Death

An extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being. The ultimate "disappearance" of the Ideal theory as an explanatory device of any worth is read as Plato's rejection of his own theory; lingering in his work for a time, just as the Ptolemaic account of the Cosmos lingered on (in Milton's Paradise Lost, for example) after the work of Copernicus and Galileo rendered it theoretically outmoded.The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Is Plato's Ontology False?

An extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being.If we summarise Plato's view of the nature of the ultimate reality, we might say that it is always beyond understanding, unchanging, yet participates in the world of change - a paradoxical matrix. Is this a problem of epistemology? Is there no distinction between epistemology or ontology (since the world of change is what can be known)? Plato's ontology is shown to be beyond the mere projection of the categories of knowledge, since it is known at the point where the epistemology breaks down in contradictions. It is beyond all human categorisation. The Idea of the Good in the dialogues is simply part of the armoury of likelihoods employed by Plato - one of the assumed positions on the path to knowledge of Reality. The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Thomas Yaeger, October 7, 2017.

Letter to a Student

[A response to an email from a student in New York which commented on matters discussed in an article I wrote for the Ritman Library Newsletter in December 2015, shortly after my first book was published. He has been studying the Italian renaissance, and is interested in the history of esoteric ideas, ancient and modern, and the connections between them. He is also interested in why college courses are set up in the way they are, so that they don't always address the kind of questions which a student might want to explore.] 

***

Many thanks for your mail, and for your comments on the article titled “The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World.” I was put on to the significance (and antiquity) of the Assyrian Sacred Tree by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola, who published an extensive paper on the subject in 1993 ('The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origins of Jewish Monotheism and Greek Philosophy'). There is much discussion of the Sacred Tree in The Sacred History of Being.

By ‘esoteric texts … that cite Assyrian and Sumerian sources’, I assume you mean modern books on esotericism that mention these sources. You will be aware that you have to use these with circumspection, since some of them (not all of them) use their sources cavalierly, with no real grasp of the materials they are using, or the languages in which they are written.

But there are undoubtedly strong connections between esoteric writings from Mesopotamia, and the later esoteric traditions around the Mediterranean and in Europe. When I was in my early twenties I was reading about esotericism in the Italian and English renaissances. Afterwards I began to read texts from late antiquity, largely because these were referenced by the later writers. The continuity of thought was quite striking.

I worked my way back further. I found a text from the middle of the 14^th century B.C.E. in a collection of ancient Egyptian literature which employed what appeared to be philosophical concepts, which, according to convention, were first aired in Classical Greece. That’s a difference of 900+ years

The literature of the ancient Egyptians: poems, narratives, and manuals of instruction from the third and second millenia B.C. / Adolf Erman, 1927.

From that point on I was hooked.

You will know that Plato recounts in the Timaeus that his ancestor Solon visited Egypt. As did the historian Herodotus. In college both these claims were downplayed as unlikely, as if it was difficult to undertake travel to Egypt at the time. But we were also learning of the extensive commercial connections known between Greece and the eastern Mediterranean in the same period, involving the establishment of permanent trading posts with regular and substantial traffic to and fro. How hard would it have been to get a passage from Greece to Egypt on a cargo ship?

The downplaying of connections between Egypt and Greece, has been going on for a long time – at least since the beginning of the European Enlightenment. Most college professors are following a well-travelled track, which they assume to be a rational response to the evidence. As a consequence, they aren’t much interested in counter arguments, and evidence which suggests they are on a false track. They structure their courses accordingly. They aren’t being dishonest. They are just living and working in a discipline which employs a model of the past which (they think) has more plausibility than is the case.

I’ve discussed the origin of this problem at some length in my book. In the end, this question became almost as interesting to me as the study and interpretation of ancient texts. It turns out that human beings are (generally speaking) less curious creatures than we like to think, and that there are some things out there which they would rather avoid.

Others have radar for arguments which are on a different track, as you clearly have. So yes, I would be happy to correspond with you about various matters of interest. Subject to available time of course.

I concur with your decision to read my book once you graduate. I wrote in the preface that, though it is a scholarly work, it is not a text book, and that it would be less career-threatening to read it after credit courses are safely over.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

Frazer and the Association of Ideas

[There are two articles about J. G. Frazer's work already on this site. This article combines the argument of both of these, and illustrates an approach to ancient and primitive thought which must inevitably miss the target.  Thomas Yaeger, October 3, 2017].

***

In the 1980s, I read the two-volume version of The Golden Bough, miraculously reduced from thirteen volumes by the expedient of removing all the footnotes, and was struck by the absence of any discussion of a relationship between magical patterns of thought and ideas of divinity and Being. I knew about the existence of this relationship principally from an interest in Platonism in the European Renaissance. But there was a puzzling absence of discussion of these ideas. In The Golden Bough, patterns of magical thought are discussed in terms of the association of ideas; as a phenomenon of human thought, rather than as something which is a corollary of a model of reality.

Frazer was a disciple of John Locke, who originated the idea of the association of ideas, and he understood the functioning of the human mind in such terms. His earlier criticism of Plato is largely along the lines that, since he did not have this understanding of the nature of mind, he mistakenly converted an epistemology into an ontology. Since having the capacity to think of a thing and give it a name, does not give it reality, Plato had made a fundamental error.

Frazer also shared Locke’s interest in the progress of man, and imagined that the technical and industrial production of the British Empire represented how far the human race had come. Philosophy for Frazer was about practical things. It is clear in the text of The Golden Bough that the idea of progress was seen by him in two ways - he drew a parallel between the gulf between the ideas of the ancients and of modern man, and the social and intellectual conditions in contemporary society, where the intellectual difference between those at the top and those at the bottom was likely to be just as great. In both cases, we should find frightful things, if we dig down deep.

Finding and providing explanations for both the existence and the nature of those frightful things was a major part of his work. He wanted to put unbridgeable distance between ourselves, the inheritors of enlightenment rationalism, and the ancient cultures whose ways of understanding the world were based on intellectual error. And that intellectual error he in part explained in The Golden Bough, treating magical thought entirely in terms of ideas of sympathy and contagion, or the faulty association of ideas in the ancient mind.

Did Frazer not know about the relationship between magic and the idea of Being? He was extremely well read, as his work testifies, so this is hard to believe.

Leaving out of The Golden Bough any consideration of the idea of magic as something whose nature depended on the nature of Being was a choice he made. It was not a choice forced on him by the evidence.

In writing The Golden Bough Frazer was transforming ancient thought about the world and its underlying reality into examples of intellectual error, and by the parallels he made with ‘savage’ thought, through his definition of magic, he sealed the case against the thought of the ancient world. Frazer did this by writing a thirteen-volume implicit denial that magic had ever been an idea associated with the idea of Being. Though the elephant in the room (Being) was never directly discussed.

The agenda of the classicists from the outset of the (mainly German) professionalization of the discipline in the middle of the eighteenth century, was, in part, to recast the significance of classical Greece, and classical thought. They wanted to render Greek civilization as something distinctly European, and not something belonging to the cultural orbit of the east. This meant a purification of sorts, an alchemical transformation of the cultural realities in classical Greece.

This purification necessarily involved a degree of fabrication, a falsification of the actual nature of Classical Greece. Aspects of the history of this falsification were discussed in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena of 1987, which had the word ‘fabrication’ in the subtitle. A large number of features of classical civilization could not be outright denied, since they were very common in the body of evidence. The worship of divine statues could not be questioned or denied; sacrifice was a regular feature of importance in public and private life, performed at every important juncture. Magic likewise, was a feature of ancient life at all levels of society.

However classical civilization could be purified in part by changing the interpretation of how these things came to have significance to the ancient Greeks. The answer was plain: the Greeks were prone to a degree of irrationality in their public and private lives. So, the divine statue of a god as a place inhabited by the divine was a mistake, possibly the result of failing to distinguish between the image of a thing, and the thing itself. The idea of the reality of the plethora of gods themselves was also a mistake, where the Greeks converted ideas of natural forces and powers into personifications of these things. Likewise, all the other strange practices could be ascribed to an irrationality, a primitive stupidity, for which the Germans have a very ugly word.

Frazer was a late contributor to this process of purification. But in writing The Golden Bough, he applied Locke’s theory of the association of ideas to the relatively new subject of anthropology. So, the strange beliefs were ascribed to a failure to distinguish between things which had the appearance of similarity, but were in fact different, or to a mistaken notion of contagion, in which things which were once in contact, are understood to be still in contact (the lock of hair, the parings of fingernails, etc.)

All ritual action throughout history could thus be explained as intellectual error, along with the very idea of the sacred. Even now, patterns of behaviour and belief are understood by anthropologists in terms of the product of intellectual associations, which may be the outcome of local cultural social dynamics, or even some kind of pathological response to the world. They aren’t looking for a rational explanation for ritual and sacred phenomena arising from an idea of Being.

By the process of purification, it became possible to argue that the real achievement of the Greeks could be understood in terms of the quality of their philosophical thought; and the interpretation of their sculpture, along with their architecture, in terms of aesthetics and proportion. Their literature and language could be appreciated in terms of style. All of which could be approached with minimal taint from the irrationality of other aspects of Greek culture.

Most readers of Frazer read The Golden Bough, and none of his other writings. At the time, I knew of no other works. I wondered what else he had written, and if he had perhaps discussed the idea in another book. In which case, the omission of a discussion of Being in The Golden Bough might be explained. Since I’m discussing thoughts about Frazer which occurred to me in 1987, there was no internet to search, so I did a trawl through his publications in the catalogue of the National Library of Scotland (I was living in Edinburgh at the time).

And there it was in the catalogue: The Growth of Plato’s Ideal Theory. A slim book emerged shortly afterwards from the stacks, first published in 1930, close to the end of his long career.

Frazer wrote this text as an essay in 1879, to compete for a fellowship at Cambridge. He won, and it is not surprising that he did. The essay is an extraordinary piece of work, and a tour-de-force by a twenty-four year old. It was clear from a cursory study of it that he knew the texts of Plato inside out.

Plato of course represents the nominal beginning of the articulate discussion of Being in the western tradition. Frazer certainly did know something of the history of the idea of Being, and the importance it formerly had in the ancient world. And long before he began to write The Golden Bough.

The mystery had deepened. He knew Plato’s arguments about Being and the importance of these for a philosophical understanding of the world. And he also knew, or should have known, that Plato had defined two different kinds of magic in the Laws, one of which was explicitly drawn from the idea of Being itself. He ought to have noticed the crucial passage (XI, 933), where Plato clearly distinguishes between two levels of magic, and the penalties for each:

...it is not easy to know the nature of all these things; nor if a man do know can he readily persuade others to believe him. And when men are disturbed in their minds at the sight of waxen images fixed either at their doors, or in a place where three ways meet, or upon the sepulchres of parents, there is no use trying to persuade them that they should despise all such things because they have no certain knowledge about them... he who attempts to... enchant others knows not what he is doing... unless he happens to be a prophet or diviner.

There are three major themes in Frazer’s essay. The first of these themes is how the human mind understands objects and ideas which are presented to it. As already noted, he understood human thought in terms of the association of ideas, which was one of Locke’s major contributions to philosophy. As a consequence, when Plato spoke of ‘Being’ and related concepts, Frazer understood him to be falsely imagining that, what he could conceive of, therefore had some kind of objective reality; he was converting a discursive epistemology into a false ontology. Plato made this ‘mistake’ over and over again.

A second major theme of Frazer’s essay is the notion that Plato did not have a logically coherent and doctrinal definition of Being at the time he was writing his dialogues. Hence, the apparent changes in Plato’s point of view when dealing with questions concerning ultimate reality, can be explained in terms of a process of development. In short, he changed his mind, according to where he was in terms of his intellectual progress. As a result, much of Frazer’s essay is critically concerned with the contemporary discussion of the order in which the dialogues were composed. This order was supposed to be established on the basis of style, and the sequence in which various questions in the dialogues were discussed and apparently dismissed. One of these questions involved the plausibility or otherwise of what Frazer called ‘Plato’s Ideal Theory’ (his theory of the Forms). Then as now this procedure was inconclusive, and the order of dialogues proposed by Frazer is as problematic and unconvincing as any other which has been proposed.

The third theme does not occupy much space in his essay, since his conclusion is that the whole subject of the idea of Being is not worth discussing, since, as he says, ‘nothing can be predicated of Being’.

This is a staggering assertion, given the amount of words which have been written on the idea of Being over the past two and a half thousand years. Frazer takes his cue for this both from Locke’s doctrine of the association of ideas, and from the apparently unresolved questions about Being which appear in the Platonic dialogues. For Frazer, there is simply nothing to say on the question of the reality of Being.

This nearly clears up the mystery. But it leaves us with another mystery. It is one thing to come to the conclusion that nothing sensible can be said about the nature of Being; it is another to then entirely ignore the discussions about Being which had been taking place across the entire period of time covered by The Golden Bough, and also to ignore the fact that the nature of Being had in the past been understood to underpin ideas about magic and religion.

Not only did he not engage with these ideas, he wrote about the human race as if there never had been an idea of Being in support of the phenomenal aspects of human culture.

The consequence of this is that, for more than forty years, what Frazer was writing was a species of literary fiction, resulting from a Lockean reinterpretation of the evidence. Thus, The Golden Bough is essentially a study of human culture, with one of its most important and perennial features written out, and replaced with another understanding of how things came to have meaning: the idea that the vastness of human experience was, for the most part, built on mistaken notions of sympathy and contagion.

My first book, The Sacred History of Being, is in part a response to the writing out of this important aspect of human culture by Frazer, and those who came after, and focusses on the role of the idea of Being, or Reality itself, and what could be said of it; in Classical Athens, in archaic Greece, in Israel, and also in Ancient Assyria. The arguments were similar in each of these places, though beyond the culture of Greece, we often know this only indirectly, through literary themes, images, tropes, ritual texts, and iconography. It is a critical reconstruction of our intellectual history since the middle of the 2nd Millennium B.C.E.

[This article can be read as a prelude to Logical Modality in Classical Athens. Both of these are annotated chapters in Understanding Ancient Thought, which was published in August 2017.  Logical Modality in Classical Athens discusses a second logical modality present in the ancient world, in addition to the one discussed in Aristotle's writings. For one reason and another, it has remained invisible to modern scholarship, despite having been discussed (if a little enigmatically) in several ancient texts. TY, October 6, 2017]

I Go To Die (The Death of Socrates)

Written in response to Socrates speech to his accusers, on being found guilty of the charges of moral corruption and impiety to the gods. Performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. [Almeida Theatre, ‘Figures of Speech’ series, published September 25, 2017].

The text of the speech (the edit used) is available here. Bettany Hughes' populist take on Socrates, 'A Man For Our Time', is here. Hughes has also written a book on Socrates, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (review by Tom Holland).

Thanks to Stephanie Papadopoulos.

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This is one of the most famous speeches in the world. But is also one of the most difficult to comprehend fully, since two and half thousand years stand between ourselves and its original cultural context.

We do not know for sure what Socrates said when he was condemned to death: what we have is mediated through the writing of his pupil Plato. And it reads very much as the sort of speech he might have given if he had been unfortunate enough to find himself in similar circumstances. Socrates was also written about by Xenophon, but the Socrates who appears in his pages is sometimes difficult to recognise as the Socrates that Plato writes about. So there is an element of fiction in the portrait which Plato gives. This is not uncommon in ancient writing: Thucydides relates many speeches in his history of the Peloponnesian War which he could not have heard, and which were mostly not recorded in any detail. Instead, he relates what should have been said on the occasion, by those historical figures he was writing about. Plato was present at the time of Socrates’ trial, and did know what Socrates actually said. But unlike Socrates, he was often greatly circumspect, and by that means avoided conflict with the civic authorities in Athens. He is being circumspect here, and so the speech requires some decoding. 

In replying to his judges, Socrates does not explicitly refer to the content of the charges, which were that he showed disrespect for the gods, and that through his conversations with the young, which were sometimes about the gods, he corrupted them. His objection to their judgement is based on two things – their misunderstanding of what Socrates was doing with his life, and their lack of regard for truth.

Socrates does refer to God however, at the end of his speech, and without irony. Only God himself knows whether what Socrates says about being dead and living forever in eternity is true, or not. His impiety was to the gods of the Greeks, whose existence and reality he sometimes doubted in public, rather than ‘God’ in the singular. Plato likewise sometimes spoke of the Divine in the singular (ho theos) in his dialogues, but when talking about the plurality of the gods, he defers all questions of whether or not they are real to members of those Athenian families who claim to be descended from them, on the grounds that they should know the truth or otherwise of the claim better than anyone else.

It may seem slightly puzzling that, in the midst of a thoroughly polytheistic culture in Athens, with its plethora of gods, its many cults and priesthoods in the service of those gods, that both Socrates and Plato could speak of ‘god’ in the singular. Our difficulty here is the result of a modern understanding of the significance of polytheism, which sees the phenomenon as the inevitable precursor to monotheistic belief, which excludes other gods from consideration, or credibility. For modern scholars, polytheistic belief in ancient Greece was something which developed, higgeldy-piggeldy, out of a plethora of local and tribal deities, much embellished with myths about their lives and actions, which served important social functions, but which had no universal meaning, and were not rooted in a model of reality which embraced consideration of what the nature of reality itself might be, or what constitutes ‘truth’.

In this modern model of what polytheism was in Greece, gods could be moved from place to place because their functions and significances were adaptable to local social, ideological and political circumstances, and changes of fortune among noble families. They also could have many birthplaces, as Zeus did.

Yet a close reading of several of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates makes several appearances, often as the main protagonist, shows that two of the main concerns in these dialogues is the nature of reality itself, and what constitutes ‘truth’. The routes taken in each of the dialogues, and the language used to discuss these subjects, is different, but the same underlying theme is present. Socrates is addressing both of these issues in his final speech.

What is the nature of ‘reality itself’ as discussed in Plato’s dialogues? Scholars often represent Plato as having no doctrinal and unchanging beliefs in the course of his writing: however, we are told of the nature of reality in several places, and reality itself is described by Plato as the goal of those who ‘love wisdom’ (which is of course the literal translation of the term ‘philosophy’). It is given a name, ‘The Good.’ It is to be approached very gradually, in the mind alone, through many imperfect representations of what it is, until eventually it becomes possible to apprehend its nature. The philosopher then descends via the same chain of imperfect images, which possess less reality than reality itself (since they are by definition imperfect). Only by approaching what is ultimately real, and what is ultimately true, can true knowledge be acquired.

This is the ultimate source of the charge of impiety: for Socrates, the plethora of gods simply were imperfect representations of the singularity of the transcendent God. They might serve as approaches to the Divine, but he would be guilty of untruthfulness if he accorded them the same honour as he gave to the transcendent God.

We are told by Socrates himself, in one of Plato’s dialogues. that the nature of that ultimate reality has ‘no size, colour or form’, and is beyond all physical representation. It is not located anywhere in the physical world. Despite the inevitable difficulty in accessing it, Plato refers to it several times as ‘the one thing’ which should be the focus of human attention. By characterising it in this way, Plato is making an equation between death, the afterlife, the nature of reality, God, and eternity. They all transcend the world of the here and now.

When Socrates speaks of ‘eternity’, we read the use of the word as a literary convention, and as a metaphor, because we have no real understanding of the meaning of eternity in modern times. It is based on the concept of the plenum, which was once an important idea in philosophy.  It is the idea that behind the world of appearances, there exists a primordial fullness, which transcends day to day reality, and which is the ultimate source of all kinds of abundance, and all good things.

Scholars for the most part don’t associate this idea with Plato and Socrates, though they concede it is a key idea in later forms of Platonism.  But it is there. The concept of eternity used to have this technical substratum, which sees the physical world as being drawn from a level of reality where all things are possible, and all things which might exist, already exist as possibilities.

So when Socrates speaks of future conversations with the great men and the heroes of Greece, he is talking about travelling to a place where these heroes always live, because everything which can come to be is already present in eternity. Socrates does not know whether this understanding of eternity is true, but in any case, once he is dead he will be beyond the travails of earthly existence. 

The hardest thing for us to understand about this is that Socrates thought of his death in terms of a return to health, and consequently, that he regarded his physical existence as a form of ill-health.  For him, real existence is something which is elsewhere, and not here. Return to that transcendent existence he understood as a form of release from the tribulations of physical life. This is why he asked his followers to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, to mark his passing. 

Thomas Yaeger, September 30, 2017.