Plutarch Lives

Plutarch, Life of Numa, xix-xx, seventh century bc. It was accounted not simply unlawful, but a positive sacrilege, to pull down the wooden bridge. An oracle had required it to be made entirely of timber without iron fixings. It was eventually replaced in stone in the time of Aemilius Quaestor (AD 126). 

It often takes long periods of time until the lower Animal-Soul is dissolved in the Interregnum (in-between Region). By contrast, a purified and advanced Soul that led a philosophical Life, her dissolution is at a much faster pace. Plutarch compared this "Process of Dissolution," the "Shadow of Hades" with putrefaction, and he indicates with this already the occurrence of the alchemistical putrefaction. 

Plutarch, The Life of Marcus Antonius, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans., Thomas North (London, 1579), 987. 

Plutarch, at the beginning of the Life of Phocion. I am using Amyot s version. Cicero, Pro Planck, 39.94. See also Epistulae ad familiares [Letters to his... 

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