Note 173 — Chapter V

One need scarcely go so far as Professor Lewis Campbell, who says that the main result of the “Ethics” of Plutarch is to show “how difficult it was for a common-sense man of the world to form distinct and reasonable opinions on matters of religion in that strangely complicated time” (Religion in Greek Literature, 1898). But Professor Campbell is also of opinion that “the convenient distinction between gods and demons, which he (i.e. Plutarch) and others probably owed to their reading of Plato, is worth dwelling on because it was taken up for apologetic purposes by the early Christian fathers.” Surely its religious value to an age which did not anticipate the coming of “the early Christian fathers” makes the distinction worth study from a point of view quite different from that represented in Christian apologetics.