XXI. ‘There are those who think that Apollo and the sun are the same; we hail them and love them for the fair name they give, and it is fitting to do so; for they associate their idea of the God with that which they honour and desire more than all other things which they know. But now that we see them dreaming of the God in the fairest of nightly visions, let us rise and encourage them to mount yet higher, to contemplate him in a dream of the day, and to see his own being. Let them pay honour also to the image of him and worship the principle of increase which is about it; so far as what is of sense can lead to what is of mind, a moving body to that which abides, it allows presentments and appearances of his kind and blessed [Sidenote: E] self to shine through after a fashion. But as to transitions and changes in himself, that he now discharges fire, and so is drawn up, as they put it, or again presses down and strains himself into earth and sea, winds and animals, and all the strange passages into animals and also plants, piety forbids us so much as to hear them. Otherwise the God will be a greater trifler than the boy in Homer,[77] for ever playing with the universe the game which the boy plays with a pile of sand, which is heaped together and sucked away under his hand; moulding the universe when there is none, and again destroying it when it has come into being. The opposite principle which we find in the [Sidenote: F] universe, whatever its origin, is that which binds being together and prevails over the corporeal weakness tending to destruction. To my thinking the word “EI” is confronted with this false view, and testifies to the God that THOU ART, meaning that no shift or change has place in him, but that such things belong [Sidenote: 394] to some other God, or rather to some Spirit set over Nature in its perishing and becoming, whether to effect either process or to undergo it. This appears from the names, in themselves opposite and contradictory. He is called Apollo, another is called Pluto; he is Delius, the other Aidoneus; he is Phoebus, the other “Skotios”; by his side are the Muses, and Memory, with the other are Oblivion and Silence; he is Theorius and Phanaeus, the other is “King of dim Night and ineffectual Sleep”.[78] The other is [Sidenote: B] _Of all the Gods to men the direst foe._[79] Whereas of him Pindar[80] has pleasantly said: _Well tried and mildest found, to men who live and die._ so Euripides[81] was right: _Draughts to the dead out-poured, Songs which our bright-haired lord Apollo hath abhorred._ And still earlier Stesichorus:[82] _Jest and song Apollo owns, Let Hades keep his woes and groans._ Sophocles again,[83] in his actual assignment of instruments to each, is quite clear, thus: _Nor harp nor lyre to wailing strains is dear_,