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This, however, has no relevance to the question under discussion; for it has been shown that there are many cold objects which are bright and many hot which are dull and dark. Yet there are qualities more closely connected that belong to coldness: heaviness, stability, solidity, and resistance to change. Air has no part at all in them, while earth has a greater share in all of them than water has. Cold, moreover, is perceptibly one of the hardest of things and it makes things hard and unyielding. Theophrastus,Frag. 184 Wimmer. for instance, tells us that when frozen fish are dropped on the ground, they are broken and smashed to bits just like objects of glass or earthenware. And at Delphi you yourself heard, in the case of those who climbed Parnassus to rescue the ThyiadesThe Thyiades were Attic women, devotees of Dionysus, who went every other year to Delphi to join in the midwinter festival. See Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods, p. 178.) The rites must have involved considerable discomfort and even risk, as Dodds says (edition of Euripides, Bacchae, p. xi). when they were trapped by a fierce gale and snowstorm, that their capes were frozen so stiff and wooden that when they were opened out, they broke and split apart. Excessive cold, because of its hardness and immobility, also stiffens the muscles and renders the tongue speechless, for it congeals the moist and tender parts of the body.
