(τὰ πολλὰ); _Ieius_ (ἵος = εἶς) because he is Unity and Solitude; and _Phœbus_, of course, was the name given by the ancients to anything that was pure and unsullied.... Now Unity is pure and unsullied; defilement comes by being mixed with other elements, as Homer says that ivory dipped in purple dye ‘is defiled,’ and dyers say that colours mixed are colours ‘corrupted,’ the process being called ‘corruption.’ A pure and incorruptible substance must therefore be one and whole.”[177]—“The Inscription εἶ seems to me to be, as it were, at once the antithesis and the completion of the inscription, ‘Know thyself.’ The one is addressed in reverence and wonder to the God as eternally existent, the other is a reminder to mortality of the frail nature that encompasseth it.”[178] Nowhere is the necessity which Plutarch feels for believing in one supreme ruler of all the imaginable universe more apparent than in a passage in which he is seeking a regulating Intelligence for an admitted plurality of worlds, to account for whose administration a Greek of almost any period would have been constrained to resort to the hypothesis of a plurality of gods, supreme as each individual god might be in his own individual world. The passage in question initiates a discussion on this subject somewhat episodical to the main argument of the “De Defectu Oraculorum.” Plutarch himself is the speaker, though he represents his interlocutors as addressing him by the name of Lamprias.[179] He is inclined to agree that there may be more worlds than one, though repudiating an infinity of worlds. “It is more consonant with reason to assert that God has made more than one world. For He is perfectly good, and deficient in no virtue whatsoever, least of all in those virtues that are associated with Justice and Friendship, which are the fairest of all virtues, and those most appropriate to the divine nature. And as God is not wanting in any respect, so also He possesses no redundant or superfluous characteristics. There must exist, therefore, other gods and other worlds than ours, whose companionship furnishes a sphere for the exercise of these social virtues. For it is not upon Himself, nor upon a part of Himself, but upon others, that He discharges the claims of justice, kindliness, goodness. Hence it is not probable that He is unneighboured and unfriended, or that this world of ours floats alone in the emptiness of infinite space.”[180] Plutarch, however, is merely on tentative ground here; the plurality of worlds was an abstract academic question no less in those days than in these. Admitting a plurality of worlds, it does not necessarily follow that each should be under the dominion of a separate Deity. “What objection,” he asks, in answer to the Stoics, “what objection is there to our asserting that all the worlds are beneath the sway of the Fate and Providence of Zeus, and that He bestows His superintendence and direction among them all, implanting in