[37] Iliad IX. v. 493. Hierocles is mistaken in saying that poetry _rashly asserts that the Gods are flexible_. For as I have observed in my Notes to Iamblichus on the Mysteries, divine flexibility indicates in Homer, and other theological poets of antiquity, that those who through depravity become unadapted to receive the illuminations of the Gods, when they afterwards obtain pardon of their guilt through prayers and sacrifices, again become partakers of the goodness of the Gods. So that divine flexibility is a resumption of the participation of divine light and goodness, by those who through inaptitude were before deprived of it. [38] See on this most interesting subject, that divinity is not the cause of evil, my translation of the Fragments of Proclus on the Subsistence of Evil, at the end of my translation of his six books On the Theology of Plato. [39] See Odyss. I. v. 32, 33, 34. [40] See the first book of his Republic. [41] i.e. Such things as are neither really good, nor really evil, but media between these. [42] After this last sentence, the words ταυτα χρη, follow in the original; which evidently show that something is wanting: as they are only the beginning of another sentence. This defect, however, is supplied in my copy of Stobæus, (Eclog. Ethic. lib. II. p. 207), by some one in manuscript, as follows: ταυτα χρη προνοειν, μη δια νου τυφλοτητα και αγνωμοσυνην, τα (lege ταυτα) ημιν απαντασωσι; and he has also added the following Latin translation of these words: “Hæc oportet prospicere ne per mentis cæcitatem et ignorantiam hæc nobis occurrant.” But the addition, from whatever source it was obtained, does not appear to me to be at all apposite; and therefore I conceive it to be spurious. [43] This is true of the whole which consists of parts, so as not to be able to subsist without them. For whole has a triple substance; viz. it is either prior to parts, or in other words, is a whole containing parts causally; or it consists of parts; or is in a part, so that a part, also, becomes a whole according to participation. A city, therefore, is a whole consisting of parts, any part of which being absent, diminishes the whole. See Prop. 67 of my translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology; and the second book of my translation of Proclus on the Timæus. [44] When the intelligent reader considers that Hierocles flourished about the middle of the fifth century after Christ, he will immediately understand what the _recent customs_ are to which Hierocles, in the above passage, alludes. Needham, in his translation of this passage, either did not understand the meaning of it, or wilfully omitted to translate it. [45] The honours which we pay to divinity can be of no advantage to him, but benefit us; but the honours which we pay to our parents are beneficial to them. And in this sense, and in this only, the latter are to be honoured more than the former.