Introduction
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Proclus and Taylor, Thomas
Marinus also informs us, “that Proclus being purified in an orderly manner by the Chaldean purifications, was an inspector of the lucid Hecatic visions, as he himself somewhere mentions in one of his writings. By opportunely moving likewise a certain Hecatic sphærula,[61] he procured showers of rain, and freed Athens from an unseasonable heat. Besides this, by certain phylacteria or charms, he stopt an earthquake, and had made trial of the divining energy of the tripod, having been instructed by certain verses respecting its failure. For when he was in his fortieth year, he appeared in a dream to utter the following verses:
High above æther there with radiance bright,
A pure immortal splendor wings its flight;[62]
Whose beams divine with vivid force aspire,
And leap resounding from a fount of fire.
And in the beginning of his forty-second year he appeared to himself to pronounce with a loud voice these verses:
Lo! on my soul a sacred fire descends,
Whose vivid power the intellect extends;
From whence far beaming thro’ dull body’s night,
It soars to æther deck’d with starry light;
And with soft murmurs thro’ the azure round,
The lucid regions of the Gods resound.
Besides, he clearly perceived that he belonged to the Mercurial series; and was persuaded from a dream, that he possessed the soul of Nicomachus the Pythagorean.”[63]
In the last place, Marinus adds, “that the lovers of more elegant studies may be able to conjecture from the position of the stars under which he was born, that the condition of his life, was by no means among the last or middle, but among the first orders, we have thought fit to expose in this place the following scheme of his nativity.”
16°
26′
17
29
24
23
24
41
29
50
23