ABSTRACT
“Now the story of Isis and Osiris, its most significant and I superfluous parts omitted, is thus briefly related:—Rhea, they say, having accompanied with Kronos by stealth, was discovered by Helios, who hereupon denounced a curse upon her, ‘that she should not be delivered in any month or year.’ Hermes however, being likewise in love with the same Goddess, in recompence of the favours which he had received from her, plays at tables with Selene, and wins from her the seventieth part of each of her illuminations; these several parts, making in the whole five new days, he afterwards joined together, and added to the three hundred and sixty, of which the year formerly consisted: which days therefore are even yet called by the Egyptians the ‘Epact’ or ‘superadded,’ and observed by them as the birth-days of their Gods. For upon the first of them, say they, was OSIRIS born, just at whose entrance into the world a voice was heard, saying, ‘the lord of all the earth is born.’ There are some indeed who relate this circumstance in a different manner, as that a certain person named Pamyles, as he was fetching water from the temple of Jupiter at Thebes, heard a voice commanding him to proclaim aloud, that ‘the good and great king Osiris was then born’; and for this reason Kronos committed the education of the child to him, and that in memory of this event the Pamylia were afterwards instituted, a festival much resembling the Phallephoria or Priapeia of the Greeks.
