The essay entitled περὶ δεισιδαιμονίας deals with superstition in the usual Greek sense of dread or excessive fear of demons and gods. We are accustomed to think of Hellenic paganism as a cheerful faith, full of naturalism, in which the gods were humanized and made familiar. Plutarch apparently regards normal religion as of this sort, and attacks the superstitious dread of the supernatural. He contends that such fear is worse, if anything, than atheism, for it makes men more unhappy and is an equal offense against the divinity, since it is at least as bad to believe ill of the gods as not to believe in them at all. Nothing indeed encourages the growth of atheism so much as the absurd practices and beliefs of such superstitious persons, “their words and motions, their sorceries and magics, their runnings to and fro and beatings of drums, their impure rites and their purifications, their filthiness and chastity, their barbarian and illegal chastisements and abuse.”[919] Plutarch seems to be in part animated by the common prejudice against all other religions than one’s own, and speaks twice with distaste of Jewish Sabbaths. He also, however, as the passage just quoted shows, is opposed to the more extreme and debasing forms of magic, and declares that the superstitious man becomes a mere peg or post upon which all the old-wives hang any amulets and ligatures upon which they may chance.[920] He further condemns such historic instances of superstition as Nicias’s suspension of military operations during a lunar eclipse on the Sicilian expedition.[921] There was nothing terrible, says Plutarch, with his usual felicity of antithesis, in the periodic recurrence of the earth’s shadow upon the moon; but it was a terrible calamity that the shadow of superstition should thus darken the mind of a general at the very moment when a great crisis required the fullest use of his reason. In the essay upon the demon of Socrates one of the speakers, attacking faith in dreams and apparitions, commends Socrates as one who did not reject the worship of the gods but who did purify philosophy, which he had received from Pythagoras and Empedocles full of phantasms and myths and the dread of demons, and reeling like a Bacchanal, and reduced it to facts and reason and truth.[922] Another of the company, however, objects that the demon of Socrates outdid the divination of Pythagoras.[923] These conflicting opinions may be applied in some measure to Plutarch himself. His censure of dread of demons and excessive superstition is not to be taken as a sign of scepticism on his part in oracles, dreams, or the demons themselves. To these matters we next turn. [Sidenote: The oracles of Delphi and of Trophonius.]