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For my part, however, I would have given a higher price for those six of the Sibyl's books which Tarquin refused to purchase, and which the virtuoso informed me he had himself found in the cave of Trophonius. Doubtless these old volumes contain prophecies of the fate of Rome, both as respects the decline and fall of her temporal empire and the rise of her spiritual one.
No one fares so ill in a crowd as the man who is wedged in the middle. A fourth, looking wild and dreamy, as if he had come out of the cave of Trophonius, and who is a mesmerizer and a mystic, thinks Enlightenment is in full career towards the good old days of alchemists and necromancers.
They might be consulted by such as chose to sleep on tombs, or to visit the cavern of Trophonius, or other chasms which were thought to communicate with the under world.
XIX. Thus was the battle divided into two parts. The Lacedæmonians were the first to rout the Persians. A Spartan, named Arimnestus, killed Mardonius by a blow on the head with a stone, as the oracle in the temple of Amphiaraus had foretold to him. For Mardonius sent a Lydian thither, and another man, a Karian, to the oracle in the cave of Trophonius.
Colonel Poyntz. We might have sat together five minutes, side by side in silence as complete as if in the cave of Trophonius when without looking up from her work, Mrs. Poyntz said abruptly, "I am thinking about you, Dr. Fenwick. And you are thinking about some other woman. Ungrateful man!" "Unjust accusation!
Plutarch says, that, on the cessation of oracles, a Pythoness was so excessively tormented by the vapour, and suffered such violent convulsions, that all the priests ran away, and she died soon after. Pausanias describes the ceremonies that were practiced for consulting the oracle of Trophonius. Every man that went down into his cave, never laughed his whole life after.
So speaking, Phoebus Apollo marked out the foundations, right long and wide, and thereon Trophonius and Agamedes laid the threshold of stone, the sons of Erginus, dear to the deathless Gods. But round all the countless tribes of men built a temple with wrought stones to be famous for ever in song.
In the cave of Trophonius, after various terrifying performances, they pulled you through a hole the wrong way of the feathers, and then back again, and then stuck you upon a seat, and made you write down your own oracle, being what you had seen, which would, I imagine, usually be "the elephant." And so-forth, and so on. Humbug ad libitum!
Trophonius and Agamedes are said to have put up the same petition, for they, having built a temple to Apollo at Delphi, offered supplications to the God, and desired of him some extraordinary reward for their care and labor, particularizing nothing, but asking for whatever was best for men.
At Eleusis his application for admittance to the Mysteries was unsuccessful; as was a similar attempt at the Cave of Trophonius at a later date. In both places his reputation for magical powers was the cause of his exclusion. Hitherto our memoir has only set before us the life of an ordinary Pythagorean, which may be comprehended in three words, mysticism, travel, and disputation.
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