And Plato, in his turn, makes no secret as to whence he got his suggestions and raw materials, _viz._ the Orphic priesthood and its literature, which, ever since the sixth century B.C., had been succeeding to and supplanting the previous Orgiastic Dionysianism.[259] Plato gives us vivid pictures of their doings in Athens, at the time of his writing, in about 380 B.C. “Mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors, and persuade these men that they have a power committed to them of making an atonement for their sins, or for those of their fathers, by sacrifices and incantations … and they persuade whole cities that expiations and purifications of sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead.”[260]--Yet from these men, thus scorned as well-nigh sheer impostors, Plato takes over certain conceptions and formulations which contribute one of the profoundest, still unexhausted elements to his teaching,--although this element is, at bottom, in conflict with that beautiful but inadequate, quite anti-Orphic, conception of his--the purely negative character of Evil. For the Orphic literary remains, fragmentary and late though they be, plainly teach that moral or ritual transgressions are a defilement of the soul, an infliction of positive stains upon it; that these single offences and “spots” produce a generally sinful and “spotted” condition; and that this condition is amenable to and requires purification by suffering,--water, or more frequently fire, which wash or burn out these stains of sin. So Plutarch (who died about 120 A.D.) still declares that the souls in Hades have stains of different colours according to the different passions; and the object of the purificatory punishment is “that, these stains having been worn away, the soul may become altogether resplendent.” And Virgil, when he declares “the guilt which infects the soul is washed out or burnt out … until a long time-span has effaced the clotted stain, and leaves the heavenly conscience pure”: is utilizing an Orphic-Pythagorean Hades-book.[261] This conception of positive stains is carefully taken over by the Alexandrian Fathers: Clement speaks of “removing, by continuous prayer, the stains (κηλίδας) contracted through former sins,” and declares that “the Gnostic,” the perfect Christian, “fears not death, having purified himself from all the spots (σπίλους) on his soul.” And Origen describes “the pure soul that is not weighed down by leaden weights of wickedness,” where the spots have turned to leaden pellets such as were fastened to fishing-nets. Hence, says Clement, “post-baptismal sins have to be purified out” of the soul; and, says Origen, “these rivers of fire are declared to be of God, who causes the evil that is mixed up with the whole soul to disappear from out of it.”[262]