Note 37 — ETHICAL FRAGMENTS OF HIEROCLES,
Thomas Taylor translation
Iliad IX. v. 493. Hierocles is mistaken in saying that poetry rashly asserts that the Gods are flexible. For as I have observed in my Notes to Iamblichus on the Mysteries, divine flexibility indicates in Homer, and other theological poets of antiquity, that those who through depravity become unadapted to receive the illuminations of the Gods, when they afterwards obtain pardon of their guilt through prayers and sacrifices, again become partakers of the goodness of the Gods. So that divine flexibility is a resumption of the participation of divine light and goodness, by those who through inaptitude were before deprived of it.