But whatever may have been the views explicitly maintained by Plutarch in this connexion, it is his constant practice to shift on to the shoulders of the Dæmons the responsibility for all those legends, ceremonies, and practices, which, however appropriate and necessary parts of the national faith they may be, are yet inconsistent with the qualities rightly attributable to Deity.[261] We have already noticed his unwillingness to impugn the immutability of the Creator by regarding His essence as capable of metamorphosis into the phenomena of the created world.[262] “It is,” says Ammonius, “the function of some other god to do and suffer these changes—or, rather, of some Dæmon appointed to direct Nature in the processes of generation and destruction.” This relationship of the Dæmons to the supreme power as conceived by philosophy is more completely stated in the short tract, “De Fato,”[263] where we are told that (1) there is a first and supreme Providence which is the intelligence of the First Deity, or, as one may regard it, His benevolent will towards all creatures, in accordance with which all _divine_ things universally received the most admirable and perfect order; (2) the second Providence is that of the second gods, who move through the sky, by which _human_ affairs are duly ordered, including those relating to the permanence and preservation of the various species; (3) the third Providence may properly be regarded as the superintendence of the Dæmons who are situated near the earth, observing and directing the actions of men. But, as we have already noted, this formal distinction between (2) and (3) is not maintained in practice. Cleombrotus, who knows more about these things than most people, insists that it is not possible that the gods could have been pleased with festivals and sacrifices, “at which there are banquets of raw flesh and victims torn in pieces, as well as fastings and loud lamentations, and often ‘foul language, mad shrieks, and tossing of dishevelled hair,’” but that all such dread observances must have had the object of pacifying the anger of the mischievous Dæmons.[264] It was not to the gods that human sacrifices were welcome; it was not Artemis who demanded the slaughter of Iphigenia;[265] these were the deeds of “fierce and violent Dæmons,” who also perpetrated those many rapes, and inflicted those pestilences and famines which are anciently attributed to the gods. “All the rapes here, and the wanderings there, that are celebrated in legends and sacred hymns, all the hidings and flights and servitudes, _do not belong to the gods_, but represent the chances and changes incident to the careers of Dæmons.” It was not “holy Apollo” who was banished from Heaven to serve Admetus;—but here the speech comes to an end with a rapid change of subject, as if Cleombrotus shrinks from the assertion that a Dæmon was the real hero of an episode with which so many beautiful and famous legends of the “hereditary Faith” were