In the second place, if nothing can be done for the myth or the rite--if it is really an extreme case--Plutarch falls back upon the daemons. There are differences among them as there are among men, and the elements of passion and unreason are strong in some of them; and traces of these are to be found in rites and initiations and myths here and there. Rituals in which there is the eating of raw flesh, or the rending asunder of animals, fasting or beating of the breast, or again the narration of obscene legends, are to be attributed to no god but to evil daemons. How many such rituals survived, Plutarch does not say and perhaps he did not know; but the Christian apologists were less reticent, and Clement of Alexandria and Firmicus Maternus and the rest have abundant evidence about them. Some of these rites, Plutarch says, must have been practised to avert the attention of the daemons. "The human sacrifices that used to be performed," could not have been welcome to the gods, nor would kings and generals have been willing to sacrifice their own children unless they had been appeasing the anger of ugly, ill-tempered, and vengeful spirits, who would bring pestilence and war upon a people till they obtained what they sought. "Moreover as for all they say and sing in myth and hymn, of rapes and wanderings of the gods, of their hiding, of their exile and of their servitude, these are not the experiences of gods but of daemons." It is not right to say that Apollo fought a dragon for the Delphic shrine.[120] But some such tales were to be found in the finest literature of the Greeks, and they were there told of the gods.[121] In reply to this, one of Plutarch's characters quotes the narrative of a hermit by the Red Sea.[122] This holy man conversed with men once a year, and the rest of the time he consorted with {108} wandering nymphs and daemons--"the most beautiful man I ever saw, and quite free from all disease." He lived on a bitter fruit which he ate once a month. This sage declared that the legends told of Dionysus and the rites performed in his honour at Delphi really pertained to a daemon. "If we call some daemons by the names that belong to gods,--no wonder," said this stranger, "for a daemon is constantly called after the god, to whom he is assigned, and from whom he has his honour and his power"--just as men are called Athenaeus or Dionysius--and many of them have no sort of title to the gods' names they bear.[123] [Sidenote: Superstition]