long course of time, upborne [Sidenote: C] through virtue, become full partakers of divine nature. To some it happens not to have control of themselves; so they subside and again enter mortal bodies, and endure a life as dim and unillumined as an exhalation. XI. ‘Hesiod thinks that in certain periods of time the daemons die. Speaking in the person of the Naïd he darkly indicates the time: _Full ages nine of men that live their prime Lives the hoarse crow, four crows the stag outlives, Three stags the ancient raven, ravens nine The phoenix, but the phoenix, ten times told, We fair-haired nymphs, daughters of Zeus most dread._[140] [Sidenote: D] Those who take the word “age” wrong bring this to a very large total; it means a year, so that the sum comes out nine thousand seven hundred and twenty for the years of life of the daemons. Most mathematicians think it to be less; not even Pindar[141] has called it greater, when he tells us that the nymphs live _Their term appointed even as the trees_, and therefore names them Hamadryads.’ He was still [Sidenote: E] speaking when Demetrius broke in: ‘What was that, Cleombrotus? The year called an “age of man”? Human life, whether “at its prime” or, as some[142] read “in its old age” is not of that length. Those who read “at its prime”, follow Heraclitus[143] in taking “an age” to be thirty years, the time in which the parent sees his offspring a parent. Those who read “in its old age” instead of “at its prime” give a hundred and eight years to the “age”, taking the middle term of human life to be fifty-four, the number made up of unity, the two first surfaces, the two first squares and the two [Sidenote: F] first cubes,[144] the number taken by Plato[145] in his “Generation of the Soul”. Hesiod’s whole story seems to have been framed with a veiled reference to the “Conflagration”, when all things moist will probably disappear and with them the Nymphs, _Who in fair glades their habitation have By river sources and in grassy meads._‘[146] XII. Then Cleombrotus: ‘I hear of this from many, and now I see the Stoic “Conflagration”, which already spreads over the verses of Heraclitus and Orpheus, catching those of Hesiod [Sidenote: 416] too! I have no patience with this “World-Conflagration”, and then the impossibility of the thing! When one can remember the periods, as it is easiest to do with the crow and the hind, one sees how exaggeration passes in. The year has within itself the beginning and the end _Of all things which the circling seasons bear, And parent earth_,[147]