Preparation for the Gospel — Book XV

Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

1.1| PREFACE. Long ago, at the outset of the Preparation for the Gospel, I determined to expose the polytheistic error of all the nations, so as to establish and defend our withdrawal from them, a withdrawal we made with good reason. And so, first of all, in the first three books, I examined not only the myths about their own gods that the tribe of their theologians and poets have turned into comedy, but also the supposedly solemn and secret natural explanations of those myths, which their noble philosophy transferred somewhere up into heaven and the parts of the cosmos; and this although their theologians themselves had declared that there was nothing whatever in these myths to be spoken of with solemnity.

1.2| It must be observed, at any rate, that the very oldest of their theologians are attested to have known nothing beyond the story itself, and to have given their minds to the myths alone. Hence, naturally, in every city and village rites and mysteries of the gods have been handed down according to the narratives of the ancients and in agreement with the mythical tales of earlier times, so that even now they take up the marriages and begettings of the gods, their laments and drunken bouts, the wanderings of some, the loves of others, the angers of others, and every other kind of misfortune and plight, just as the most ancient writers record them, in their rites, in the hymns, and in the odes made in honor of the gods themselves.

1.3| Nevertheless, going beyond what was needed, I also brought into the open the high-tragic bombast of these same men's physical interpretations and the clever inventions of the sophists and philosophers. And not only that: in three further books that followed the first, I stripped bare with plain refutations both the account given of the much-trumpeted oracles and the false opinion about fate that is so widely bandied about among the many, using for their refutation not only arguments of my own but, above all, the very words of the Greek philosophers themselves.

1.4| Passing from there to the oracles of the Hebrews, I set out, again in as many books, the reasoning behind the doctrinal theology contained in them and the whole of the history they relate, a history attested even by the Greeks themselves.

1.5| Next, having exposed the Greek character, showing how they had profited from barbarians in everything and bring forward no worthy learning of their own, and having brought to light the comparison of dates at which the celebrated men of the Greeks and the prophets of the Hebrews lived, I went on in the three books after these to show the agreement of the reputable philosophers among the Greeks with the doctrines of the Hebrews, once more making the men's own words my witnesses.

1.6| Moreover, in the book before this one I caught out those Greek philosophers whose doctrines differ from ours as being at odds not only with us but with their own people as well, and overthrown by their own disciples. Through all of this I displayed to my readers the incorruptible criterion of our judgment, and furnished, by deeds, so to speak, and by the facts themselves, the proofs that it was not aimlessly, but by discerning and sober reasoning, that we chose the philosophy and piety of the Hebrews, ancient and true alike, in preference to that of the Greeks; and this was established by setting out the words of the Greeks themselves.

1.7| Of this treatise we now still have in hand the last book, the fifteenth of the present work, and in it we shall supply what is lacking to all that has been traversed. Even now we shall drag into the light the august teachings of the noble philosophy of the Greeks, and expose to the sight of all the useless learning that is in them, and, before everything else, show that it is not from ignorance of what they admire, but from disdain for their unprofitable study, that we have paid them so little heed, having given our own souls over to the pursuit of better things.

1.8| When this, with God, has been sealed for us by the truth, the Preparation will here come to its close for me; and, moving on to the fuller theme of the Gospel Demonstration, I shall attach to it the opening of the second treatise, starting from the question still left over from the charge against us.

1.9| This was the reproach brought against us: that, although we preferred the oracles of the Hebrews to our ancestral ones, we did not choose to emulate a life like that of the Jews. To this I shall try to respond, with God's help, once the present book is complete. For in this way, I believe, the second part, woven together with the first as if by a single bond, will complete one comprehensive design for the whole work.

1.10| For the present, then, since it has appeared in the earlier treatises that the philosophy of Plato sometimes agrees with the oracles of the Hebrews and sometimes stands apart from them, in which cases it has been shown also to disagree with its own tenets; and since the doctrines of the other philosophers called natural philosophers, and those of Plato's succession, and those of Xenophanes and Parmenides, and also of Pyrrho and those who introduced suspension of judgment, and all the rest in order, whose opinions the preceding discourse refuted, stand opposed alike to the teachings of the Hebrews, to those of Plato, and to truth itself, and have moreover carried off the refutation by their own missiles;

1.11| it is time to look down from above, as from a stage, on the other conceit, that of the followers of Aristotle and of the Stoic philosophers, and to observe all the remaining natural philosophy of those who lift their brows high, so that we may learn both what is solemnly asserted by them and what is said against them in turn by their own people.

1.12| For in this way our decision to depart from them would be cleared of every reasonable accusation, since it was not from ignorance of what they hold in honor, but by an examined and tested judgment, that we valued the truth and piety of those reputed barbarians to everything Greek.

1.13| I shall begin with the doctrines of Aristotle. Others have slandered the man's life, and some of them were philosophers not otherwise obscure. But it is not pleasing to me to put up even in hearing with the man being spoken of badly by his own people. Therefore I shall set out rather the defenses made on his behalf by Aristocles the Peripatetic, who in the seventh book of his work On Philosophy writes about him as follows.

2.1| "For how is it possible, as Epicurus says in his letter on pursuits, that when young he squandered his paternal estate, then went off to be a soldier, and, faring badly in this, took to selling drugs, and then, since Plato's Walk lay open to all, threw himself into it?

2.2| Or how could one accept Timaeus of Tauromenium, who says in his Histories that late in life he shut the doors of an ill-reputed doctor's office and of whatever others came his way?

2.3| Who could be persuaded by the statements of Aristoxenus the musician in his Life of Plato? For he says that during his wandering and absence abroad some men, strangers, rose up and built a Walk against him. Some think that he says this about Aristotle, although Aristoxenus always speaks well of Aristotle.

2.4| Laughable, too, one might fairly say, are the memoirs of Alexinus the quarreler. For he presents Alexander as a boy conversing with his father Philip, spitting on Aristotle's discourses and approving Nicagoras, who was called Hermes.

2.5| And Eubulides plainly lies in his book against him, first by producing frigid poems, as though others had written them, about his marriage and his intimacy with Hermeias; then by claiming that he offended Philip and was not present at Plato's death, and that he destroyed his books.

2.6| As for Demochares' accusation against the philosophers, why speak of it? For he spoke ill not of Aristotle alone but of the others also. And moreover, looking at the slanders themselves, one would call him a babbler. For he says that letters of Aristotle were seized against the city of the Athenians, and that he betrayed his native Stagira to the Macedonians; and again, that after Olynthus had been razed, he pointed out to Philip at the sale of spoils the richest of the Olynthians.

2.7| Cephisodorus too, the pupil of Isocrates, slandered him foolishly, saying that he was a dainty fellow, a gourmand, and the like.

2.8| But all is surpassed in folly by what is said by Lycon, who calls himself a Pythagorean. For he says that Aristotle, when his wife died, offered a sacrifice of the kind the Athenians offer to Demeter, and that, bathing in hot oil, he sold that very oil; and that when he was leaving for Chalcis the customs officers found in his boat seventy-four bronze dishes.

2.9| And such, roughly, are those who first slandered Aristotle; some of them lived in the same times, others a little later; all were sophists and quarrelers and rhetoricians, whose names and books have died even more than their bodies. As for those who came after them and repeat what those said, they are to be dismissed altogether, above all those who never so much as met with their books but improvise, such as those who say he had three hundred dishes. For no one of those living then could be found to have said anything of the kind about him except Lycon. And he, as I said, said that seventy-five small dishes were found.

2.10| One may conclude that all that has been said is false not merely on the evidence of the dates and the slanderers, but also from their not all slandering him with the same charges, but from each saying things of his own; if any one of these things had been true, he ought surely to have been destroyed by his contemporaries, and not just once.

2.11| It is plain, then, that it happened to Aristotle, as to many others, that on account of his friendships with kings and his superiority in argument he was envied by the sophists of his day. But sensible people should look not only at the slanderers but also at those who emulate and praise him; for these would be found far more numerous and better.

2.12| The other things, then, are plainly fabricated; but there are two charges on which some blame him and which seem to be believed: one, that he married Hermeias' sister by birth, his adopted daughter Pythias, to flatter him (Theocritus of Chios, for instance, composed this epigram: "This empty tomb of the eunuch Hermeias and the slave Eubulus the empty-minded Aristotle set up; who, because of his ungoverned belly's nature, chose to dwell at the mouths of the Borboros rather than in the Academy"); the other, that he was ungrateful to Plato.

2.13| About Hermeias and Aristotle's friendship with him many others have written, and in particular Apellicon, whose books anyone who reads will cease to slander them.

2.14| As for the marriage to Pythias, he has himself defended it sufficiently in his letters to Antipater. For when Hermeias died, he married her out of goodwill toward him, she being otherwise a modest and good woman, though unfortunate because of the calamities that had befallen her brother."

2.15| Then next: "After the death of Pythias, Hermeias' daughter, Aristotle married Herpyllis of Stagira, by whom he had a son, Nicomachus. They say that this boy was brought up as an orphan with Theophrastus and died in war while still a youth."

2.16| But let this much be set out from the writing of Aristocles mentioned; now it is time to survey Aristotle's doctrinal philosophy as well.

3.1| Moses and the prophets among the Hebrews laid down that the end of living blessedly is the knowledge and friendship of the God of the universe, accomplished through piety, and taught that true piety is pleasing God through every virtue (for this, they said, is the cause of good things, since all things depend on God alone and all things are supplied from him to those dear to God); and Plato, defining things in harmony with these, declared virtue to be the end of happiness. Aristotle, however, taking the other road, says that no one will be happy otherwise than also through the good condition of the body and an abundance of external goods, without which not even virtue is of any benefit. How the pupils of Plato stood against him, refuting his false assumption, can be learned from the following.

4.1| "For since all philosophy in common, among those who have philosophized, promises human happiness, and is split into three parts following the division of what makes up the whole, the Peripatetic will be seen to fall so far short in these matters of teaching anything of Plato's that, although there are several who differ from Plato, he himself will appear the most opposed.

4.2| And first he made his departure from Plato on the common, greatest and most authoritative point, not keeping the measure of happiness and not conceding that virtue is sufficient for it, but slipping away from the power that lies in virtue, and thinking that it needs in addition things that come from fortune, in order that with these it may attain happiness; while if virtue is taken by itself, he complained that happiness is impossible and unattainable.

4.3| The ignoble and mistaken character of his opinion, in this and in the rest, it is not the time now to show; but this I think is plain, that since the goal and the happiness are not equal or the same for Plato as for Aristotle, but the one cries out and proclaims on every occasion that the most just man is the happiest, while the other will not allow happiness to follow virtue unless one is fortunate in birth and beauty too, and in gold as well ("who went to war wearing gold, like a girl"), it must follow that, given the difference of the end, the philosophy that leads to it is different too.

4.4| For one who walks along a single road, which is by nature fitted to lead to something small and low, cannot arrive at the greater things that lie on high. "Do you see that lofty hill, rugged and hostile, where he sits making light of your fight?"

4.5| To that lofty hill that keen and crafty creature cannot climb; and for the fox to come to the same place as the eagle's young, either they must suffer some evil chance and fall to the ground when their home is destroyed, or the fox must grow what it is not made to grow, whirl swift wings, and so, lifted from the ground, fly up to the high hill. As long as each stays in its own order, there is no fellowship between the offspring of earth and those of heaven."

4.6| And after other matter he adds: This being so, and Plato trying to draw the souls of the young somewhere upward toward the divine, and in this way making them at home with virtue and the beautiful, and persuading them to look down on everything else, tell us, Peripatetic, how will you teach these things? How will you lead the lovers of Plato to them?

4.7| Where in your school is there so great a height of discourse as to acquire the mind of the Aloadae and seek the road to heaven, which they thought could be made by piling mountains, whereas it came about by removing human cares, as Plato says?

4.8| What help, then, do you offer the young against these things? And from where comes any argument that fights on virtue's side? From what writings of Aristotle? Of which of his followers? From what books? I grant you, even if you wish to lie, only let it be something spirited. But you cannot say it, and none of the leaders of the school would allow you.

4.9| At any rate Aristotle's treatises on these subjects, those entitled the Eudemian, the Nicomachean and the Great Ethics, think of virtue in a small, low and vulgar way, and only so much as any layman, unlearned person, youth or woman might. For the diadem, as it were, and the royal scepter, which virtue has received from Zeus and cannot be deprived of, since it is not to be taken back, whatever he nods with his head, this they dare to take from her.

4.10| For they will not let her make men happy, and they put her on a level with wealth and reputation and birth, health, beauty, and all the other things common to vice. For just as any of these present without virtue is not enough to show its possessor happy, so virtue, in the same way, without these is not sufficient to make her possessor happy.

4.11| How then is the dignity of virtue not pulled down and thrown to the ground? Yes, but they say that virtue far surpasses the other goods. What of that? Health also surpasses wealth. But that none of them suffices for happiness without the others is common to all.

4.12| So whenever someone, from these doctrines and this school, instructs the man who seeks all human good in the soul itself, he says that the happy man does not mount the wheel, and that a man held in the fortunes of Priam could not be happy and blessed.

4.13| And it is not unlikely that a man who has virtue should fall into some such things. It follows from this that happiness does not at all times accompany those who have virtue, nor, if it comes, remain always. "The wind scatters some leaves on the ground, but the flourishing wood puts forth others; so the generation of men: one grows, another ends."

4.14| Your example is still small and timid, poet: "and the season of spring comes on." Long is the time between, and for some it never comes. If you want to liken precisely the perishable and rotten state of the human race, compare the happiness of Aristotle. It sprouts and falls away more easily than leaves, not waiting for the year to come round, nor the same year, nor the same month, but on the very day, in the very hour, it comes to be and perishes.

4.15| And many things destroy it, and all from fortune. For there are the ills of the body, ten thousand of them, and poverty and dishonor, and all such things; and against none of these is the help of beloved virtue sufficient; for it is weak either to keep off unhappiness or to preserve happiness.

4.16| Brought up in these things, and pleased with these arguments, how will such a man either sing in tune with Plato himself or ever strengthen others toward Plato's views? For there is no way that anyone starting from these could accept those Heraclean and divine doctrines, that virtue is a mighty and altogether beautiful thing, never wanting for happiness and never stripped of it, but that even if poverty, even if disease, even if disgrace, even if tortures, even if pitch and the cross, even if all the evils of tragedy pour in at once, the just man is still happy and blessed.

4.17| Under the very loudest-voiced herald, then, he proclaims, as of some victorious athlete, the most just man, that this man is the happiest, who reaps the fruit of happiness from justice itself. Divide, then, if you wish, and vary the goods, distinguishing them in three ways and four and many; this has nothing to do with the matter before us. You will never bring us to Plato by these means.

4.18| What if, of goods, as you say, some are honorable, like the gods, others praiseworthy, like the virtues, others capacities, like wealth and strength, others beneficial, like treatments? What if, dividing more finely, you said that of goods some are ends and others not ends, calling ends those for the sake of which the others exist, and not ends those taken for the sake of others?

4.19| What if one learned that some are good simply, others not for everyone? Or that some goods belong to the soul, others to the body, others are external? Or once more, that among goods some are capacities, others dispositions and states, others activities, others ends, others matter, others instruments? And even if from you one learned to distribute the good among the ten categories, what have these teachings to do with Plato's thought?

4.20| For as long as you, whether speaking by homonymy or however you like, call the things of virtue goods but take certain other things as necessary for happiness, taking away the sufficiency of virtue, while Plato inquires into the others as a surplus, having an abundance for happiness from virtue itself, you would have nothing in common in this matter; you need one set of arguments, and those of Plato's school another.

4.21| For as there are no trusty oaths between lions and men, and wolves and lambs do not have like-minded hearts, so there is no friendship between Plato and Aristotle on the chief and most authoritative doctrine of happiness. For throughout, if they do not think ill of each other, they at least appear to say opposite things on matters that bear on this."

5.1| Again, when Moses and the prophets among the Hebrews, and Plato too in agreement with them in this, had set out clearly the account of providence over the universe, Aristotle, halting the divine at the moon, fences off the remaining parts of the world from God's governance; for this he is also refuted by the writer mentioned, who goes on somewhat as follows.

5.2| "Since the conviction about providence is still the greatest and most authoritative of the things that contribute to happiness, and is the one that above all sets human life straight, if we are not to be ignorant whether the race of men on earth climbs the higher wall by justice or by crooked deceits, Plato ties everything to God and derives everything from God. For he says that God, holding the beginning and middle and end of all that is, completes his course in a straight line, going round. And again he says that God is good, and that no envy arises in the good concerning anything. Being free of this, he makes everything as good as it can be, leading it out of disorder into order. Caring for all things and ordering all things as far as possible, he has taken thought for men as well."

5.3| And after a little: So Plato. But the one who removes this divine nature, cuts off the soul's hope for the life to come, and takes away our reverence in this present life before the higher powers, what fellowship does he have with Plato? Or how could he call men to what Plato wishes, or lend credit to what he has said?

5.4| On the contrary, he would appear a helper and fellow fighter of those who want to do wrong. For anyone, being a man and held by human desires, if he despises the gods and thinks they have nothing to do with himself, since while he lives he has settled far from them, and when dead no longer exists, will be ready to gratify his appetites.

5.5| For it is not impossible to gain confidence of escaping notice when doing wrong, at least if one has only to escape the notice of men; yet it is not necessary to seek by every means to escape notice, where one is able to overpower those who have caught him out. So despair of providence is a ready encouragement to injustice.

5.6| For that other man is quite a decent fellow, who, having put forward pleasure to us as the good, and offered us immunity from the gods, still thinks he provides a device against doing wrong; he is like a physician who passes by help while the patient still lives, and after death tries to devise some means for saving the dead man.

5.7| The Peripatetic is much like him. For it is not so much zeal for pleasure as disbelief that the divine cares about us that strengthens injustice. What then, someone might say, do you rank Aristotle and Epicurus together? Entirely so, as far as the point before us goes.

5.8| For what difference is there for us whether the divine is moved out of the world and leaves us no fellowship with it, or the gods are shut up in the world and kept away from affairs on earth? In both cases the gods' neglect of men is equal, and the immunity from the gods enjoyed by wrongdoers is equal; and as for our getting something good from the gods remaining in heaven, this is common even to irrational and lifeless things, and in this way, even by Epicurus' account, benefit comes to men from the gods.

5.9| At any rate they say that their better effluences become the cause of great goods to those who share in them. But it is not right to count either of them under the heading of providence. For if providence has gone even according to Epicurus, although in his view the gods bring every care to preserving their own goods, so too it would be gone according to Aristotle, even if the things in heaven are governed in a certain order and arrangement.

5.10| For the providence we seek is one that concerns us, in which he has no share who has conceded that neither demons nor heroes nor in general souls can survive.

5.11| And in my judgment Epicurus seems to have acted in this respect with the greater modesty. For as if despairing that the gods could abstain from care of men if they came to the same place with them, he moved them off as to a foreign land and placed them somewhere outside the world, thereby excusing their lack of humanity by their withdrawal and their lack of fellowship with everything.

5.12| But this extraordinary discoverer of nature for us, and exact judge of divine things, placed human affairs right under the eyes of the gods and left them uncared for and unattended, governed by nature and not by the reasoning of God. Hence he too would fairly not escape that charge which some divine against Epicurus, that it was not by conviction but out of fear of men that he assigned the gods a place in the universe, as a seat to watch from in a theater.

5.13| And they take this as proof of the man's opinion, that he removed from them their activity toward us, from which alone the existence of the gods was bound to have its just credit. For Aristotle does the very same thing. For having removed them and handed over belief to sight alone, which is too weak to judge by inquiry what lies at so great a distance, he might perhaps seem to say, out of deference, that there are gods here.

5.14| For leaving nothing outside the world, but not bringing the gods to the things on earth either, he was compelled either to confess that he was an atheist altogether, or to preserve the reputation of not abandoning the gods by settling them somewhere here. But the one who excused the higher beings from close care for us on the ground of their separation seems to disbelieve the gods in a seemly way." So Atticus against Aristotle, who writes off the account of providence as a bad debt. The same writer adds to what has been said also this, turning against the same man because he would not have the world be begotten.

6.1| Again, Moses defined the world as begotten, and set God over the whole as its creator and Maker, and Plato philosophizes the same as Moses; and Aristotle, taking the opposite road in this too, is refuted by the writer mentioned, who writes word for word as follows.

6.2| "First, then, considering the origin of the world, and thinking it necessary to examine everything about this great and most beneficial doctrine of providence, and reasoning that what has not come to be has no need of any maker or caretaker for coming to be well, he took away the world's being unbegotten, so as not to deprive the world of providence.

6.3| We ask now that those from the same hearth, who are pleased to hold according to Plato that the world is unbegotten, not stand in our way. For they ought to grant us pardon if on the opinions of Plato we trust the words in which he himself, being a Greek, spoke to us Greeks with clear and plain mouth.

6.4| For God, he says, taking over all that was visible, not at rest but moving discordantly and without order, led it from disorder into order, thinking this altogether better than that. And still more clearly, that he did not accept the begetting by way of riddles, nor for the need of clearness, he makes plain through the words that, in his work, the Father of all speaks on this subject after the making of the universe.

6.5| For since you have come to be, he says (he speaks to the gods), you are not immortal nor wholly indissoluble, yet you shall surely not be dissolved, having obtained my will.

6.6| But, as I said, with those who murmur within our house, being friends, we might part in friendly fashion and quietly with mild refutations. For Aristotle seems to have shifted these too, who could not stand against the charge against the doctrine, yet did not wish to hand over to Plato the reputation of having been caught in a falsehood.

6.7| But as for us, since Plato holds that the world came to be as the fairest work of the fairest of craftsmen, and puts into the maker of the universe a power through which he made the world, which previously did not exist, and having made it will keep it safe forever if he wishes, and thus, according to him, the world is begotten and indestructible, which of the Peripatetics confirms this for us?"

6.8| We must console the champion of these doctrines: it is not altogether necessary, if something has come to be, that it be destroyed, nor again, if something will not be destroyed, that it be unbegotten. For we must not grant that the only cause of the indestructible is the unbegotten, nor leave the begotten without help against its change to destruction.

6.9| From where then shall we get help in these matters from Aristotle, who does not conduct the argument about them in some other way or by himself, but directly opposes Plato, and puts what has come to be under the necessity of perishing, and says that the indestructible is secured only by not having come to be, nor does he leave God any power by which, using it, he could do any good? For what has not come to be before, he says, could not come to be.

6.10| So far is he from helping Plato's argument through these things that he has even frightened some of those who were devoted to Plato, by what he said, and drew them away from the doctrine, since they could not see that, so far as the nature of things themselves goes, without God's will and power one cannot conceive either that what has come to be is indestructible or that what will not be destroyed is begotten.

6.11| When one sets over all the best cause, the one that comes from God, one must take it as the leader of all and not declare it inferior to any other cause. For it is absurd that because a thing has come to be, for that reason it should perish, even if God wills that it not perish; and that because a thing is unbegotten it should have strength not to perish, while the will of God should fall short of keeping any of the things that have come to be indestructible.

6.12| The builder is able to make a house that did not exist, and another man is able to make a statue where none existed before, and another, framing a ship out of idle timber, supplies it to those who need it; and each of the other craftsmen, all who practice the productive arts, have this power to bring something that is not into being. Will then the king of all and best of craftsmen not share even as much as a human craftsman's power, and will he, in our account, have no share in any act of generation? Not so, if we are able even in a small degree to reckon up the divine cause.

6.13| But is he able to make and to will what is beautiful (for he is good, and no envy arises in the good concerning anything), and yet unable to keep and preserve what has come to be? Indeed the other craftsmen are capable of both. The builder and the shipwright not only construct new ships and houses, but are able to help those that are decaying with time, putting in new parts in place of those worn out;

6.14| so that this much at least must be conceded to God as well. For one who is able to make the whole, how could he be unable to make a part? And so something new must come to be, if one is to be a maker at all, and the beautiful work must be preserved forever; for to wish to undo what has come to be well is the mark of evil.

6.15| And there is no greater bond for the preservation of what has come to be than the will of God. Or shall it be that many things that have shared in human zeal and will, nations and cities and works, remain an incalculable time after they came to be, though the one who willed them is no more, but things that have shared in God's purpose and came to be through him and by him shall go and not abide, while the one who made them is present?

6.16| What cause compelled the purpose of God? Was it a necessity arising from the things made themselves? But that, by accepting being put in order by God, has already confessed its defeat. Or some cause from outside contending with God? But there is none, nor is it fitting, in the things where God has first prevailed and set in order, that he should be found wanting in any respect, unless we are quite unaware of ourselves as we discourse about the greatest and most divine power.

6.17| But we seem to be carried off by eagerness into the discussion of the truth. What we proposed is clear: that those who have not even left the world a beginning of coming to be could not be teachers about its coming to be." And concerning the fifth essence of bodies, which Aristotle introduced, the following also must be set beside it.

7.1| "Concerning the so-called elements, from which bodies are first composed, Plato, following the evidence about them, as those before him did, said that there are these four, by common agreement: fire, earth, air and water, and that from these combined all the rest come to be. Aristotle, however, hoping, it seems, to appear more extraordinary in his thinking if he added some body over and above, added to the four visible bodies a fifth essence, using nature very splendidly and generously, but failing to see that one who studies nature should not lay down the law but inquire into what belongs to nature itself.

7.2| Now for the proof that there are four primary natures of bodies, which the Platonists need, not only would the Peripatetic contribute nothing, but he would almost alone oppose it. For whenever we say that every body is hot or else cold, moist or else dry, soft or else hard, heavy or light, rare or dense, and find that there could be nothing else that shares in any of these besides the four (for if hot, it is fire or air; if cold, water or earth; if dry, fire or earth; if moist, water or air; if soft, air or fire; if hard, water or earth; light and rare, like fire and air; heavy and dense, water and earth), and observing from all the other simple qualities that there could not be any other body besides these, he alone stands against us, claiming that there can be a body with no share in these: a body neither heavy nor light, nor soft, nor hard, nor moist, nor even dry, all but saying that it is a body which is not a body. For he has left it the name, but has taken away all the qualities through which a body naturally comes to be.

7.3| So either he will persuade us of what he says and take us away from Plato's view, or in confirming Plato's views he will abandon his own; so he is of no use at all for Plato's cause.

7.4| Again, Plato wants all bodies, since they are observed in one and the same matter, to change and be transformed into one another; but Aristotle, in the case of the others, claims an essence that is altogether impassible, indestructible and unchangeable, so as not to seem the begetter of some contemptible thing; saying nothing extraordinary or properly his own, but transferring what was well observed by Plato in other cases to things that do not suit, like some of the later sculptors.

7.5| For they, copying the head of one man, the chest of another, the belt of a third, and putting together into one piece things that do not belong to one another, sometimes persuaded themselves that they had made something of their own; and truly the whole, which one might find fault with as ill-proportioned, is theirs, but the parts gathered into it, and whatever beauty it has, are not theirs.

7.6| In the same way Aristotle, hearing from Plato that there is an intelligible essence in itself, bodiless, colorless and intangible, neither coming to be nor perishing nor changing nor altering, but always remaining the same and in the same way, and again hearing about the things in heaven that they are divine, indestructible and impassible bodies, put together and glued from the two things that do not agree. From one he took being a body, from the other being impassible, and fashioned an impassible body.

7.7| In the case of statues, even if what is made from different things is not beautiful, it is at any rate not impossible. Homer also teaches such things: "In eyes and head like Zeus who delights in thunder, in the belt like Ares, in the chest like Poseidon." But an impassible body could never come to be. For being bound to a passible and changeable nature, it must suffer along with that to which it is yoked. If anything is impassible, it must be released and free from what suffers; so it would be apart from matter, and being separate from it would of necessity be agreed to be bodiless." Let us give attention also to these other points in which he shows Aristotle to differ from Plato.

8.1| "Next, there are many things that follow from these in which they differ. For the one says that the heavenly bodies have most of their form from fire, the other that the heavenly bodies have no share in fire at all. And the one says that God kindled a light in the second circuit from the earth, so that it might shine as much as possible on the whole heaven, declaring this about the sun; the other, as he does not wish the sun to be fire, but knows that light is pure fire or some portion of fire, does not permit a light to have been kindled around it.

8.2| Again, the one, while granting imperishability in kind to all the heavenly bodies, says that certain proportionate departures and additions occur in them; and what compels him to say this is, on the side of the departures, the rays and heat of the sun, which arise by an outflow from it; and on the side of the additions, the equal appearance of its size; for it would not seem to remain equal if it received nothing in exchange for what it gives off.

8.3| But Aristotle wants them to remain in every respect in the same essence, with nothing departing from them and nothing coming to them.

8.4| Again, besides the common motion of the stars, by which all the stars, fixed and wandering, move bound in their spheres, the one assigns them another motion, which is also in other ways most beautiful and suited to the nature of their body (for being spherical, each would reasonably move with some spherical motion, revolving); but the other takes away from them even this motion, with which they move as living beings, and leaves only the one produced by the surrounding bodies, as happens to lifeless things.

8.5| And indeed he says that the appearance we have of the stars as moving is an affection of our sight, which is weak and as it were shaken, and not the truth; as if Plato took his confidence about the motion from this, and not from the argument which teaches that each of these, being a living creature and having soul and body, must move with its own motion (for every body that has its motion from outside is lifeless, and that which has it from within and from itself is living); and that, moving, being divine, it moves with the most beautiful motion; and since circular motion is the most beautiful, it moves in this way.

8.6| Sensation would be attested as true in some respects by the argument, but it did not itself supply the confidence in the motion. As to the motion of the whole, he was beaten by the evidence and could not contradict Plato by saying that it does not take place in a circle; but here too this fine discovery of the body gave him a point of difference.

8.7| For Plato, there being four bodies, all moving by nature with a simple and straight motion, fire outward, earth toward the center, and the others to the space between, assigned the circular motion to the soul; but he, as he gave a different motion to each other body, so he assigned the circular motion, as if it were something bodily, to a fifth body, deceiving himself quite easily on every point.

8.8| For in the things that move in a straight line, heaviness and lightness supplied the origin of the motion, whereas the fifth body, sharing in neither weight nor lightness, is rather suited to immobility;

8.9| [….] not of circular motion; for in things that move in a straight line it is not their shape that holds the cause of their motion, but their inclination; a body not only set in the middle will have nowhere to incline, being among like things, but also set around in a circle it will have no cause of inclination toward any point, whether they go toward dawn and the sun, or to the left, or forward or back.

8.10| Further, for the other bodies thrust out of their proper places, their reference back to these places supplies the motion that takes them back by themselves; but for that fifth body, which never leaves its own places, it would be fitting to remain still.

8.11| And concerning the other bodies, setting the fifth aside, Aristotle appears contentious in not saying the same as Plato. For when Plato inquired whether there is by nature a heavy body or a light body, and since these seemed to be spoken of in relation to up and down, examined whether there is anything by nature down and up or not, and showed exactly that in accordance with the affinities of bodies to places, down is said for each of them to be that toward which they are borne, and up for each the foreign place from which they withdraw, and on the same relation distributed the heavy and the light, and besides this showed that it is not reasonable to call either the center or the circumference of them up or down,

8.12| this man objects, thinking he must overthrow his views from every side, and he insists on calling what is borne to the center heavy, and what is borne to the circumference light; and he says that the place at the center is down and the place around is up."

8.13| So concerning the world, and what it is made of, and the heavenly bodies, these two stand so far apart from one another. So much for these men. But Moses and the Hebrew oracles meddle with none of this, and reasonably so, since they judged that it brings no profit to those occupied with it toward the right ordering of life.

9.1| "And about the soul, what need we say? For it is clear, not only to philosophers but now almost to all laymen, that Plato leaves the soul immortal, and has made many arguments about this, showing in varied and every way that the soul is immortal.

9.2| Great has been the zeal, too, of those devoted to Plato's teaching, fighting on the side of the doctrine and of Plato. For this is almost what holds together the man's whole school.

9.3| For the foundation of the ethical doctrines followed upon the immortality of the soul, the great and brilliant and vigorous character of virtue being able to be preserved on account of the soul's divinity; and all the things of nature were able to be well governed through the government of the soul.

9.4| For every soul, he says, takes care of all that is soulless, and ranges through the whole heaven, assuming now one form and now another. Moreover, in Plato the matters of knowledge and wisdom hang upon the immortality of the soul. For all learning is recollection, and he does not think that inquiry and learning, from which knowledge comes, could be preserved otherwise.

9.5| If the soul is not immortal, there is no recollection; if not this, no learning. Since, then, all of Plato's doctrines are quite simply hung and suspended from the soul's divinity and immortality, whoever does not grant this overturns the whole philosophy of Plato.

9.6| Who then was the first to undertake to set himself against the proofs and to rob the soul of immortality and of all its other power? Who else before Aristotle? For of the others, some conceded that it survives, and others, if not that, at least assigned to the soul a power in the body and some motion and works and actions.

9.7| But he, in proportion as Plato exalted the matter of the soul, declaring it the beginning of generation, the child of God's training, and the governor of all things, so much the more strove to bring it down and dishonor it and all but make the soul nothing.

9.8| For it is neither breath nor fire nor body at all, but neither is it bodiless, such as to exist by itself and move, but [….], as far as the body is concerned, immobile and, so to speak, soulless. For how bold, or how constrained, was he, as even to take away from the soul its primary motions: deliberating, thinking, expecting, remembering, reckoning?

9.9| For these movements, he says, the scribe of nature, as they call him, does not ascribe to the soul. This man is quite trustworthy, to have some understanding about external things, who has so missed the mark about his own soul that he does not even follow that he is thinking. For he says it is not the soul but the man who carries out each of these, while the soul is immobile.

9.10| Following him, then, Dicaearchus, who was able to see the consequence, did away with the whole subsistence of the soul. For it is clear that the soul is something invisible and unseen, so that we would not grant that there is a soul from the activity of the senses; but its motions, though it is unseen, seem to compel us to admit that the soul is something.

9.11| For everyone seems to understand these to belong to the soul: deliberating and considering and thinking in whatever way. For when we look at the body and at its powers, and reflect that such activities do not belong to the body, we grant that there is something else in us that deliberates, and this is the soul. For from what else did we come to believe in a soul?

9.12| If, then, someone takes away from the soul the things by which it most appears, and attaches them to some other thing, he has left neither the ground from which it is shown to exist nor anything for which it might seem useful. What help then does the man who wants the soul to be immortal get from the man who kills the soul? And what teaching about the manner of its motion, by which we say that it moves itself, from those who assign it no motion at all?

9.13| Yes; but one might say that in the immortality of the intellect he does share something with Plato. For even if he does not want every soul to be immortal, he does agree that the intellect, at least, is divine and imperishable. What the essence and nature of the intellect is, where it comes from, how it is brought in among human beings, and where it departs to again, he himself may know, if he understands anything of what he says about the intellect, and is not wrapping the difficulty of the subject in the obscurity of his account so as to avoid refutation, like cuttlefish making themselves hard to catch by means of the darkness they emit.

9.14| In these matters too he certainly differs from Plato. For Plato says that intellect cannot exist without soul, whereas Aristotle separates intellect from soul. Plato gives immortality to intellect together with the soul, as something that could not be otherwise; Aristotle says that this remains to the intellect alone, when it is separated from the soul. And he did not think it right for the soul to go out of the body, because that pleased Plato, but he compelled the intellect to be torn away from the soul, because Plato had judged such a thing impossible." So Atticus. I shall join to this what Plotinus has to say, which runs as follows:

10.1| "As for entelechy, one might examine how it is said of the soul. The soul, in the composite, holds the position of form in relation to matter, namely the ensouled body; but it is not the form of every body, nor of body as body, but of a natural, organic body that has life in potentiality.

10.2| Now if the soul is likened to the body to which it is compared, as the shape of a statue is to the bronze, then when the body is divided the soul would be divided with it, and when some part is cut off, a portion of soul would be with the part cut off; and the withdrawal of the soul in sleep would not occur, if the entelechy has to be attached to that of which it is the entelechy; whereas in truth there would be no sleep at all.

10.3| Moreover, if the soul were an entelechy, there would be no opposition of reason to desires; the whole would be affected as one and the same throughout, and would not be at odds with itself. Perceptions, perhaps, might occur in this way, but acts of intellection could not. This is why these people themselves introduce another soul, the intellect, which they posit as immortal.

10.4| The reasoning soul, then, must be an entelechy in some way other than this, if this name is to be used at all. Nor will the perceptive soul be one, if it too retains the impressions of sensible things when they are absent; it will not have them together with the body. Otherwise they would be present in it like shapes and images; but it would be impossible for it to receive them in any other way, if they were present like that. So it is not an inseparable entelechy.

10.5| And again, the part that desires things other than food and drink, things beyond those of the body, is not an inseparable entelechy either. What remains is the vegetative part, which might seem open to dispute, as to whether it could be an inseparable entelechy in this way.

10.6| But this does not appear to be so either. For if every plant has its origin at the root, and if, when the rest of the body […], it stays about the root and, in many plants, the lower parts, then the soul has evidently left the other parts and contracted into one place. So it was not in the whole as an inseparable entelechy. And indeed, before the plant has grown, it is in a small mass.

10.7| If, then, it comes into a small space from a larger plant, and from a small one extends to the whole, what prevents it from being altogether separated? And how, being without parts, could it become divisible as the entelechy of a divisible body? Moreover, the same soul passes from one animal into another; in that case, how could that former animal's soul belong to the next one, were it the entelechy of one only?

10.8| This is plain from animals that change into other animals. So the soul does not have its being by being the form of something, but is an essence, not receiving its being from being lodged in a body, but existing even before it becomes the soul of this or that, of an animal for instance; the body will not generate the soul.

10.9| What, then, is its essence? If it is not a body, nor a condition of body, but action and making, with many things both in it and issuing from it, being an essence apart from bodies, what sort of thing is it? Or is it clear that it is what we say is truly essence? For all that is bodily would be called coming-to-be, not essence, since it comes into being and perishes, and never truly is, but is preserved by participation in what is, to the extent that it participates in it." Since we have gone through the words of Plotinus as well, it is not out of place to look also at what Porphyry said about the soul in his books Against Boethus:

11.1| "Against the man who says that the soul is an entelechy and, though altogether unmoved, supposes that it moves things, we must ask: whence come the inspired frenzies of the living creature, which understands nothing of what it sees and says, while the soul sees what is to come and what is not present, and is moved accordingly? And whence, in the very constitution of the living creature, come the soul's counsels, deliberations and wishes, these being inclinations belonging to the soul and not to the body?"

11.2| Then he goes on: "To liken the soul to heaviness, or to uniform and immovable bodily qualities, by which the underlying thing is either moved or qualified, is the mark of one who has wholly fallen away, willingly or unwillingly, from the dignity of the soul, and who has not at all observed that through the soul's presence the body of the living creature has become alive, just as, with fire present, the water beside it becomes hot, though cold in itself, and as, when the sun rises, the air is lit, though dark without its shining.

11.3| But neither is the heat in the water the heat of the fire, nor the fire itself; nor is the light in the air the light innate to the sun. Likewise the animation of the body, which is like heaviness and a quality about the body, is not the soul that has been set in the body, through which the body also shared in some vital breath."

11.4| Then, after some other matters, he continues: "As for the other things that others have said about it, they bring us shame. For how is the argument that makes the soul an entelechy, the form of a natural, organic body, not shameful? And how is the one who assigns it some kind of breath, or an intelligent fire kindled or tempered by cooling and, so to speak, dipping in the air, not full of shame, as is the one who posits a heap of atoms, or declares that it is altogether generated from body?" This argument Plato in the Laws declared to be the impiety of the impious. All these arguments, then, are full of shame. But one who says that the soul is a self-moving essence, he says, need not be ashamed.

12.1| "Again, Plato says that the soul orders all things, passing through all, and that it is this by which, as the other philosophers too would grant, each thing is governed; that nature is nothing other than soul, and evidently a soul that is not irrational; and from this he concludes that all things happen according to providence, if indeed they happen according to nature. With none of this does Aristotle agree.

12.2| For he says that nature is not soul, and that things about the earth are governed by nature, since for each thing there are different causes as well. Of […] he posits fate as the cause, of the things beneath the moon nature, and to human affairs prudence, providence and soul. In such divisions he offers elegance, but fails to see what is necessary.

12.3| For unless there is one ensouled power passing through the whole, binding and holding together all things, the universe could be neither reasonably nor well governed. It would be equal blindness to expect that a city could ever continue well without unity, and to think that one could keep this whole, in one's account, as wholly beautiful as it appears, without binding and fitting it together through the fellowship of some one like principle.

12.4| He says that what governs each thing is something of this kind, a sort of origin of motion, but he does not want this to be soul; and yet Plato himself shows that for all things that move, the origin and source of motion is the soul. And what would be the task of a rational and prudent soul, to do nothing in vain, this he ascribes to nature, yet he does not grant it the name of soul, as though taking things from their names and not from their powers."

13.1| "But the chief point and the authority of Plato's school, the arrangement concerning the intelligible things, has been dishonored, defiled and insulted in every way, to the extent Aristotle was able. For he could not grasp that great, divine and extraordinary realities require a faculty of like kind for their apprehension; instead he trusted his own thin and lowly sharpness, which could penetrate the things on earth and see the truth in them, but could not look out over the plain of the truth that truly is. Making himself the rule and judge of what is above him, he denied that there are any such separate natures as Plato recognized, and dared to name the highest of all realities nonsense, twittering and idle talk.

13.2| Now the summit and furthest reach of Plato's philosophy is the intelligible and eternal essence of the Ideas, where the soul faces its last toil and struggle. For the one who shares in it and attains it is altogether happy, while the one who falls short of it and is unable to become its spectator is left altogether without share in happiness.

13.3| And for this reason Plato contends everywhere, showing the power of these natures. He says, indeed, that it is not possible to give a proper account of anything at all without a share in them, nor to have knowledge of anything true except by reference to them, and that people will not even have any argument unless they acknowledge the essence of these things.

13.4| Those, too, who have undertaken to establish Plato's teaching place the greatest part of their struggle in the argument on this point, quite necessarily. For nothing of Plato's system is left unless someone grants them, on Plato's behalf, these first and most ruling natures. For these are what chiefly raise him above the others.

13.5| For Plato conceived of God as the Father, Maker, Master and Guardian of all things, and recognized that the craftsman first conceives what he is going to make, and only then brings the likeness to what has been conceived, in the works that follow. In the same way, the thoughts of God are older than the things; they are the patterns of what comes to be, bodiless and intelligible, always the same and in the same state, most truly and primarily existing, and co-responsible for the other things being each such as it is, according to their likeness to them. Plato saw that these are not at all easy to behold, nor can they be shown clearly in words; so he himself said and thought what could be said about them, and prepared those who would follow by working at these matters, and having directed his whole philosophy toward this end, he says that wisdom and the understanding of these things, and the knowledge through which the human end and blessed life come, are concerned with them."

13.6| So much from Atticus. It would have been possible to quote still more of this from the man's book mentioned; but we shall be content with what has been set out, and move on to the school of the Stoics.

13.7| Antisthenes, then, became a hearer of Socrates, a man of Heracleote spirit, who said that madness is better than pleasure; for which reason he also urged his acquaintances never to lift a finger for the sake of pleasure.

13.8| His hearer was Diogenes the Dog, who, himself reputed to hold the most beastly views, drew many followers. Crates succeeded him, and Crates' pupil was Zeno of Citium, who became the founder of the school of the Stoic philosophers.

13.9| Zeno was succeeded by Cleanthes, Cleanthes by Chrysippus, he by the second Zeno, and those after him in order. All of these are said to have devoted themselves especially to a rigorous way of life and to dialectic. The doctrines of their philosophy run something like this:

14.1| "They say that the element of existing things is fire, as Heraclitus did, and that the principles of this are matter and God, as Plato held. But the Stoic says that both are bodies, both the active and the passive, whereas Plato says that the first active cause is bodiless.

14.2| Then, at certain fated times, the whole world is consumed in fire, and afterward is ordered again. The first fire is like a kind of seed, containing the rational principles and causes of all things that have come to be, are coming to be, and will be; and the interweaving and sequence of these is fate, and knowledge, and truth, and an inescapable, unavoidable law of existing things. By this all things in the world are governed superbly, as in the best-governed of states."

15.1| "They call the whole world, with its parts, God; and they say that this is one alone, finite, a living creature, eternal and God. For in it all bodies are contained, and there is no void in it. For what is qualified out of the whole of substance is so called, being that which holds such an arrangement in the ordering of the world.

15.2| Therefore they say that according to the former account the world is eternal, but according to its ordering it is generated and subject to change through endless cycles, past and to come.

15.3| And the world qualified out of the whole of substance is eternal and God. But 'world' is also used of the system made up of heaven, air, earth, sea and the natures in them; and 'world' is also said of the abode of gods and men and of the things made for their sake.

15.4| For just as a city is spoken of in two ways, as the dwelling-place and as the system of its inhabitants together with the citizens, so the world is, so to speak, a city made up of gods and men, the gods holding the leadership and men being subordinate.

15.5| They have fellowship with one another through sharing in reason, which is law by nature; and all other things have come to be for their sake. Accordingly one must believe that the God who administers the whole has forethought for human beings, being beneficent, kind and humane, just, and possessing all the virtues.

15.6| For this reason the world is also called Zeus, since it is the cause of our living. Insofar as it governs all things inviolably in a continuous chain from eternity, it is named Fate; it is called Adrasteia because there is no escaping it; and Providence, because it arranges each thing for what is useful.

15.7| As the ruling part of the world, Cleanthes held that it is the sun, because it is the greatest of the stars and contributes most to the governance of the whole, making day, year and the other seasons.

15.8| Some of the school thought that the ruling part of the world is the earth. Chrysippus held that it is the aether, the purest and most unmixed, being the most easily moved of all things and carrying round the entire motion of the world."

15.9| Let this much be set out from the Epitome of Areius Didymus. As for the Stoic opinion about God, it suffices to cite the words of Porphyry in the work On the Soul, written in reply to Boethus, which run as follows:

16.1| "They do not shrink from calling God an intelligent fire, and from leaving him eternal, yet to say that he destroys and consumes all things, as being fire of the kind we are familiar with; and they contradict Aristotle, who declines to say that the aether is made of such a fire.

16.2| When they are asked how such a fire survives, they do not say it is a different sort of fire; having said it is of that kind and thought it right to be believed when they say it, they attach to this unreasoning faith the claim that it is also an eternal fire, while supposing that the aetherial fire is partly quenched and partly kindled. But why should one go on at greater length about their blindness toward their own doctrines and their carelessness and contempt toward those of the ancients?"

17.1| "But what, then, is that which is? Are these the four elements, earth and fire and the two natures between? Are these, then, the things that are, either all together or one of them? And how can they be, when they are generated and revocable, since one can see them coming from one another and changing places, and being neither elements nor syllables?

17.2| So these bodies, at any rate, could not be what is. Well then, not these, but could matter be what is? Yet this is more impossible than anything, from its weakness in staying put. For matter is a flowing river, quick to turn, indefinite and endless in depth, breadth and length."

17.3| And after a few lines he adds: "So the argument was right in saying that if matter is infinite, it is indefinite; if indefinite, irrational; if irrational, unknowable. And being unknowable, it must be disordered, since ordered things would surely be quite easy to know; and what is disordered does not stand fixed; and what does not stand fixed could not be what is.

17.4| This was what we ourselves agreed to earlier: that for all of this to be brought together with what is, is unlawful. Let it seem so to all, if possible, and if not, to me. I say, then, that neither matter itself nor bodies are what is.

17.5| What then? Do we have something else besides these in the nature of the whole? Yes; it is no complicated thing to say, if we first make trial of it together in ourselves as we converse.

17.6| Since bodies are by nature dead and lifeless, swept along and not remaining in the same place, do they not need something to hold them? Beyond anything.

17.7| And if they do not get it, would they remain? Least of all. What is it, then, that holds them? If it too were a body, it would need, it seems to me, Zeus the Savior, itself being dissolved and scattered.

17.8| But if it must be free of the condition of bodies, so that it can ward off destruction from those things too, which have been begotten, and hold them fast, then it seems to me to be nothing else than the bodiless alone; for this alone of all natures stands fixed, and is firmly set and in no way bodily. It neither comes to be nor grows nor undergoes any other movement, and for these reasons it appeared right that the bodiless should be honored as the elder."

18.1| “It is the opinion of the oldest of this school that all things are turned to aether, all being dissolved at certain very great cycles into aetherial fire.” And next he adds:

18.2| "From this it is clear that Chrysippus, in speaking of substance, did not adopt 'confusion' in this sense, for that is impossible, but in the sense in which it is used in place of 'change'. For those who teach the dissolution of everything into fire, which they call conflagration, do not take 'destruction' in the strict sense of the world's destruction occurring at the greatest cycles, but they use the name of destruction in place of change according to nature.

18.3| For the Stoic philosophers hold that the entire substance is converted into fire, as it were into seed, and that from this the ordering is brought to completion again, such as it was before. And the first and oldest of the school, Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, accepted this doctrine. They say, however, that the pupil of the latter and his successor in the school, Zeno, held back concerning the conflagration of the whole."

19.1| "The common reason and the common nature, having advanced this far and become greater and more abundant, at last dry up all things and take them up into itself, and come to be in the whole substance, returning to the first-mentioned principle and to that restoration which makes the greatest year, in which from itself alone the restoration back into itself takes place.

19.2| And having returned in due order to the state from which it began to order the world in the same way, it again carries through, according to reason, the same course of events, such cycles occurring from eternity without ceasing. For it is not possible for there to be a cause of beginning for all things, nor a cause of the one who governs them.

19.3| For a substance must underlie the things that come to be, naturally able to receive all the changes, and what fashions things out of it. For as in our case there is a creative nature of some sort, so of necessity something of that kind exists in the world, ungenerated; for there cannot be a beginning of generation in this nature. And just as it is ungenerated, so it is impossible for it to be destroyed, there being none to destroy it, neither from itself nor from outside."

20.1| "Zeno says that the seed is what a human being emits, breath together with moisture, a part and fragment of the soul, a blend and mixture of the seed of the forebears with the parts of the soul come together. For having the same rational principles as the whole, when it is released into the womb it is taken up by another breath, a part of the soul of the female, and becomes joined with it; and hidden there, it grows, moved and fanned by that breath, always taking in more of the moisture and increasing from itself."

20.2| And after a few lines he adds: "Concerning the soul, Cleanthes, setting out Zeno's doctrines for comparison with the other natural philosophers, says that Zeno calls the soul perception, or an exhalation, as Heraclitus did. For wishing to show that souls when exhaled always become intelligent, he likened them to rivers, saying: 'On those who step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow; and souls too are exhaled from the moist.'

20.3| Zeno, then, declares the soul an exhalation, as Heraclitus did, and says that it is perceptive because its ruling part can be impressed, through the sense organs, by things that are and exist, and can receive the impressions. For these are proper to the soul."

20.4| And after other matters: "They say that there is soul in the whole, which they call aether, and in the air around the earth and sea, and exhalations from these; and that the remaining souls, both those in living creatures and those in the surrounding air, are attached to this one; for the souls of the dead survive.

20.5| Some say that the soul of the whole is eternal, while the rest are mingled with it at their end. Every soul has within it a ruling element, which is life, perception and impulse."

20.6| And again, a little later: "They say that the soul is generated and perishable; yet it is not destroyed immediately on leaving the body, but remains by itself for certain periods, the soul of the good until the dissolution of all things into fire, that of the foolish for some limited times.

20.7| They speak of the souls' survival in this sense, that we survive as souls when the body has been separated and we have changed into a lesser substance, that of the soul. As for the souls of fools and of animals without reason, these perish along with the bodies."

20.8| Such are the doctrines of Stoic philosophy, gathered from the Epitomes of Areius Didymus. Against the men's absurd opinion about the soul, it is enough to give what Longinus, our contemporary, has briefly said in reply, in these words:

21.1| "To put it briefly, all those, one after another, who declared the soul a body seem to me far from reasoning as they should. For how is it possible at all to suppose that its nature is like any of the elements? And where can one trace it back to mixtures and blendings? These, arising in many ways, are naturally productive of the forms of innumerable other bodies, in which, if not continuously, yet from afar, one can discern the cause of the elements and the starting point from the first things toward the second and third. But of what concerns the soul no trace or evidence is found in bodies, even if someone, like Epicurus and Chrysippus, were ambitious to move every stone and search out every power of body toward the generation of the soul's activities.

21.2| For what use to us would the fineness of breath be for imaginations and reasonings? And again, does the shape of atoms have such power and capacity for turning, in comparison with other things, as to produce intelligence when it is mixed into the molding of another body? I think that not even if it were one of the tripods or handmaidens of Hephaestus (of which Homer says that the tripods go of themselves to the assembly, while the maidens work alongside their master, and lack none of the advantages the living have), still less if it were made of chance scrapings that look like the pebbles on the beaches, could it do anything beyond perception.

21.3| One might justly be indignant at Zeno and Cleanthes for speaking so insolently about it, and for both saying that the soul is an exhalation from solid body. For what, by the gods, has an exhalation in common with a soul? And how can they think that our substance and that of other living creatures resembles this, which is able to preserve imaginations and memories lastingly, and impulses and wishes for things profitable to understanding? Or shall we then put the gods too, and the one who extends through all things alike on earth and in heaven, down to exhalation and smoke and such nonsense? And are we not ashamed before the poets, who, though they have no exact understanding of the gods, yet, partly from mankind's common conception and partly from the inspiration of the Muses, which naturally moves them to this, have spoken of them more reverently, and not of exhalations, nor airs, nor breaths and drivel?" So much Longinus offers you. Listen also to what Plotinus says against the same people, of this kind:

22.1| "Whether each of us is immortal, or perishes entire, or part of him goes off to dispersion and destruction while part remains forever what it is, one might learn by examining it according to nature, as follows.

22.2| A human being is not something simple; there is a soul in him, and he also has a body, whether it is attached to us as an instrument or in some other way. Let him be divided in this way, then, and the nature and essence of each be examined.

22.3| The body, being itself composite, cannot remain, as reason shows, and perception sees it dissolving and melting and suffering destruction of every kind, each of its components being carried toward its own, one destroying another and changing it into something else and ruining it, and most of all when the soul that makes them friendly is not present to the masses.

22.4| And even if each thing is taken singly, it is not one, but admits dissolution into form and matter, from which even the simple bodies must have their constitution. And having magnitude, as bodies, they can be cut and broken into small pieces, and in this way would undergo destruction.

22.5| So if this is a part of us, we are not wholly immortal; and if it is an instrument, it must have been given to us for a time, being of such a nature. But what is most authoritative, the human being himself, would be either the form in relation to matter, the body, or the user in relation to an instrument. In either way, the soul is the man himself."

22.6| "What nature, then, does this have? If it is a body, it must altogether be resolved, for every body is composite; if it is not a body but of another nature, that too must be examined, in the same way or in another. First we must consider into what we must resolve this body which they call soul.

22.7| For since life is necessarily present to the soul, then this body that is the soul, if it is made of two or more bodies, must either have an innate life in each of them, or in one and not in the other, or in neither. If, now, life belongs to one of them, that one would itself be the soul.

22.8| What body, then, could there be that has life from itself? Fire, air, water and earth are lifeless in themselves; and whichever of them has a soul present uses a life brought in from outside, and there are no other bodies besides these. And those who hold that there are bodies other than these elements have spoken of them as bodies, not as souls, nor as having life. And if none of them has life, and their coming together has produced life, that is absurd.

22.9| If each of them has life, one is enough; or rather, it is impossible that a heaping together of bodies should produce life and that mindless things should beget mind. And they will say that these things did not come about by being mixed in any chance way. So there must be something that orders and is the cause of the mixture; and this would hold the rank of soul.

22.10| For not only would no composite body exist among beings without soul being in the universe, but not even a simple one, if it is a rational principle coming to matter that makes body, and a rational principle could come from nowhere other than soul."

22.11| "But if someone says otherwise, that atoms or partless things come together and make the soul, he would be refuted by the unity and common feeling, and by their mere juxtaposition: for juxtaposition does not go through the whole, so no single thing arises, nor anything with common feeling out of things without feeling, since bodies cannot be unified; but the soul has fellow-feeling with itself. And from partless things no body, not even a magnitude, could result.

22.12| And again, if the body is simple, they will not say that the material part of it has life from itself, for matter is without quality; but that what is ordered by the form brings the life. If they say that this form is a substance, then the soul will be not the compound but the other of the two, the form; and that is no longer a body, since it is not itself made of matter; or else we shall resolve it again in the same way.

22.13| But if it is an affection of matter, and they say it is not a substance, they must say from what the affection and the life came into matter. For matter does not form itself, nor put a soul into itself. So there must be something that supplies life, whether the supply is to matter or to any of the bodies, existing outside and beyond bodily nature, since no body at all could exist if psychic power did not exist.

22.14| For its nature flows and is in motion, and it would perish very quickly if all things were bodies, even if someone gave the name of soul to one of them. For it would suffer the same as the other bodies, since they have one matter. Or rather, nothing would come to be, but all would stand still in matter, there being nothing to give it form.

22.15| Perhaps matter itself would not exist at all. And this universe too will be dissolved, if someone entrusts it to the confinement of body, giving it the rank of soul in name only, to air and breath, most easily scattered, which does not have its unity from itself. For if all bodies can be cut up, how will anyone who assigns this whole to any of them not make it mindless and borne along at random?

22.16| For what order is there in a breath that itself needs order from soul, or reason, or mind? But if soul exists, all these serve it for the constitution of each living creature, each power contributing in its own way to the whole; and if soul is not present in the wholes, these things would be nothing, let alone in order."

22.17| "They themselves also testify, led by the truth, that there must be before bodies something better than they are, a form of soul, when they posit intelligent breath and intellectual fire, as if the better portion could not exist among beings without fire or breath, and as though it sought a place to be established, when they ought to ask where they will establish the bodies, since these must be established in the powers of soul.

22.18| And if they set down life and soul as nothing apart from breath, what about their much-repeated phrase, in which they take refuge, compelled to posit another active nature besides bodies? If, then, not every breath is soul, since there are countless breaths without soul, and they say it is breath in a certain state, they will say that this 'state', this relation, is either one of the things that are, or nothing.

22.19| But if nothing, there would be only breath, and 'in a certain state' only a name; and so they will end by saying that there is nothing else but matter, and that soul, God, and everything are names, and that this alone is. But if the relation is among the things that are, and is something other than the substrate and the matter, in matter yet itself immaterial, since it is not in turn composed of matter, it would be a rational principle and not a body, and another nature.

22.20| Moreover, from the following it appears no less impossible for the soul to be any body whatever. For it is either hot or cold, hard or soft, moist or solid, black or white, and all the other qualities that bodies have, different ones in different bodies. Now if it is hot, it will only heat; if cold, only chill; the light thing will make things light when it is added and present, the heavy will weigh down, the black will blacken, and the white make white.

22.21| For to chill is not the property of fire, nor to make things hot that of the cold. But the soul makes different things in different living creatures, and contrary things in the same one, solidifying some parts and melting others, making some dense and others rare, black, white, light, heavy; whereas it ought to make one thing, according to the quality of body and the color it has, and now it makes many."

22.22| "And how are the movements different, and not one, when the movement of every body is one? If […], yet choice does not belong to body, nor do the rational principles, which differ, since the body is single and simple, with no share in such a principle beyond what was given it by its maker, to be hot or cold.

22.23| And whence would the body itself get the power to grow, in due times, and up to such a measure? It belongs to it to be made to grow, but it has itself no share in making things grow, except as far as it might be taken up into the bulk of matter, serving the one who works the growth through it; for if the soul, being a body, were to grow, it too must necessarily be increased, evidently by the addition of a like body, if it is to keep pace with what it makes grow. And what is added will either be soul, or a soulless body.

22.24| And if it is soul, from where, and how, does it enter, and how is it added? But if what is added is soulless, how will it become ensouled, and agree with the earlier part, and be one, and share the same opinions as the first? Will it not rather be like a foreign soul, ignorant of what the other one knows? And just as the rest of our bulk is partly flowing away and partly arriving, will nothing remain the same?

22.25| How, then, do we have memories? And how do we know our own, if we never use the same soul? Moreover, if it is a body, and it is the nature of a body, when divided into several parts, that no part be the same as the whole, then if the soul is of a certain size, whatever is smaller will not be soul, just as every quantity, by subtraction, changes from what it was before.

22.26| But if some of the things that have magnitude, when reduced in bulk, remain the same in quality, then insofar as it is body and insofar as it is a quantity it has become different; but through a quality, which is other than quantity, it can preserve the same thing.

22.27| What, then, will those say who claim that the soul is a body? First, concerning each part of the soul within the same body: is each part soul, such as the whole is? And again the part of the part?

22.28| Then magnitude added nothing to its essence (though it should, if it were some quantity); and it is whole in many places, which cannot be the case for a body, to be the same whole in several places, and for the part to be the same as the whole.

22.29| But if they claim that each part is not soul, then soul will arise for them out of soulless things. Besides, if each soul is to have a fixed size, then beyond it in either direction, toward the smaller or toward the greater, it will not be soul.

22.30| Whenever, then, from one union and one seed twins are born, or, as in other animals, very many, the seed being divided among many places, in each of which it is whole, how does this not teach those who are ready to learn that, where the part is identical to the whole, there the quantitative has been transcended in its own essence, and that it is of necessity without quantity? For so it would remain the same even with quantity taken away, since quantity and bulk are no concern of it, its essence being something else. The soul, therefore, and the rational principles are without quantity."

22.31| "That if the soul were a body there would be neither perception, nor thinking, nor knowing, nor virtues, nor anything of the beautiful, is clear from the following. If something is to perceive anything, it must be one, and grasp everything with the same part; and this holds whether several things come in through many sense organs, or many qualities about one thing, or something varied through one organ, such as a face.

22.32| For it is not that one part belongs to the nose and another to the eye, but the same part to all at once. And if one thing arrives by way of the eyes and another by way of hearing, there must be some one thing to which both come; otherwise how could it say that these are different, if the perceptions did not come together to the same place? This, then, must be like a center, with lines meeting from the circumference of a circle, and the perceptions from every side must end at this, and that which grasps them must be truly one.

22.33| But if this were divided, and the perceptions, as at the two ends of a line, struck on it, either they will run together into one and the same thing again, such as the middle or something else, or else each of the two will have the perception of one of them, as if I perceived one thing and you another.

22.34| And if the object of perception is one, such as a face, it will be gathered into one, and so it evidently is; for it is gathered even in the pupils themselves (or how could the greatest things be seen through them?), so that, even more, on reaching the ruling faculty the impressions become, as it were, partless thoughts. And this faculty will be partless, or, if it has magnitude, it will be divided with it, so that one of us has the grasp of one part and none of us of the whole object of perception.

22.35| But the whole is one; for how could it be split up? Equal will not fit to equal, because the ruling faculty is not equal to every object of perception. According to what measure, then, is the division made? Will it be separated into as many parts as the perception coming in has number in its variety?

22.36| And will each of those parts of the soul then perceive with its own subdivisions as well? Or will the parts of the subdivisions be without perception? That is impossible. But if each thing is to perceive the whole, since magnitude is by nature divisible without limit, there will come to be endless perceptions for each object of perception, as, for the same thing, endless images in our ruling faculty.

22.37| Moreover, if the perceiver were a body, perceiving could happen in no other way than as seals from rings are stamped in wax, whether the impressions of perceptions are stamped into blood or into air. If, then, it is as in moist bodies, as is reasonable, as in water, they will be confused together, and there will be no memory;

22.38| and if the impressions remain, either it is not possible for others to be stamped while those occupy the place, with the result that there will be no further perceptions, or, when others arise, the earlier ones will be destroyed, so that there will be no remembering. But if there is both remembering and perceiving of other things after others, the earlier ones not hindering, the soul cannot possibly be a body."

22.39| "One could also see this same thing from the perception of pain. When a person is said to feel pain in a finger, the pain is surely in the finger, but the perception of the pain, as they will agree, clearly takes place in the ruling faculty. Though the part of the breath that suffers is a different one, the ruling faculty perceives, and the whole soul is affected in the same way.

22.40| How, then, does this happen? By transmission, they will say: the psychic breath in the finger is affected first, and passes it to the next, and that to another, until it reaches the ruling faculty.

22.41| It follows, then, that if the first part felt the pain, the perception of the second is different, and if perception is by transmission, the third has yet another, and many, indeed endless perceptions arise from one pain, and after all of these the ruling faculty perceives, and its own is apart from these.

22.42| But in truth, none of those perceives the pain in the finger: [rather, the next one after the finger perceives that the flat of the hand is in pain, the third that something else is, toward the upper part, and there are many pains; the ruling faculty does not feel the pain at the finger itself] but the pain near itself, and knows only this, letting the others go, not knowing that the finger hurts.

22.43| If, then, perception is by transmission, the body being a mass, one part is affected and another has the knowledge […]. For of any magnitude, if one part is one thing and another part another, the perceiver must be posited as something that is everywhere the same as itself. And this it befits something other than a body to do."

22.44| "That thinking too is impossible if the soul were any body at all must be shown from the following. If perceiving is the soul's grasping of perceptible things by using the body, then thinking would not be grasping through the body, or it will be the same as perceiving.

22.45| If, then, thinking is grasping without body, much more must the thinker not be a body, since perception is of perceptible things and thought of intelligible ones. And if they do not wish this, there will still be thoughts of certain intelligible things and graspings of things without magnitude.

22.46| How then will a magnitude think what is not magnitude, and the divisible think the indivisible? Or does it do so by some partless part of itself? If so, the thinker will not be a body. For the whole is not needed for touching; one part suffices.

22.47| If, then, they concede that the first thoughts, as is true, are of the things wholly purest of body, each by itself, then the thinking subject too must know them while being, or becoming, pure of body. But if they say that the thoughts are of forms in matter, still they arise only as the forms are separated from the bodies, the intellect doing the separating.

22.48| For the separation of circle, triangle, line and point does not take place with flesh, or with matter at all. The soul too, then, must separate itself from body in such an act. It must therefore not itself be a body. And I think that the beautiful and the just are without magnitude, and so is the thought of them. So when these approach, the soul will receive them with what is partless in it, and they will lie in it partless."

22.49| "And how, if the soul were a body, could its virtues be temperance and justice, courage and the rest? Temperance or justice or courage would be some breath or some blood, unless courage were the resistance of the breath to affection, and temperance good mixture, and beauty a certain good form in the outlines, according to which we call bodies beautiful and in their prime when we see them.

22.50| It would be fitting, then, for a breath to be strong and beautiful in its outlines, but what need has a breath of temperance? On the contrary, would it not welcome embraces and touches, where it will be warmed, or moderately yearn for cold, or draw near to soft, simple and smooth things? And what would it care about distributing according to worth?

22.51| Again, are the objects of contemplation of virtue, and the other intelligibles, eternal, and does the soul lay hold of them? Or does virtue come to be in someone, and benefit him, and perish again? But who makes it, and from where? For so that very thing would remain again. They must therefore be eternal and abiding, like the things in geometry. And if they are eternal and abiding, they are not bodies. That in which they will be must also be of this kind, and so not a body. For the nature of body does not abide, but flows entirely."

22.52| "If, seeing the actions of bodies, which warm, chill, push and weigh down, they place the soul among these, establishing it in a kind of active place, they are ignorant, first, that these bodies too accomplish this by bodiless powers in them; and second, that we do not claim that these powers are about the soul, but rather thinking, perceiving, reasoning, desiring, and taking care of everything with good sense and beauty, which seek another essence.

22.53| By transferring the powers of bodiless things to bodies they leave nothing to the former. That bodies too can do what they can by bodiless powers is clear from the following. They will agree that quality and quantity differ, and that every body is a quantity, and further that not every body […], as matter does not. Agreeing to this, they will agree that quality, since it differs from quantity, differs also from body.

22.54| For how will what is not a quantity be a body, if every body is a quantity? And indeed, as was said above, every body when divided loses what it was; but when a body is broken up, in each part the whole quality remains, as, for instance, the sweetness of honey is no less sweetness in each piece; sweetness, then, would not be a body. So too with the other qualities.

22.55| Then again, were the powers bodies, the strong ones would have to be large masses and the ones able to do little would have to be small masses. But if small powers belong to large masses, and very small masses have the greatest powers, the doing must be assigned to something other than magnitude; therefore to something without magnitude.

22.56| As for matter being, as they say, the same body, yet producing different things when it has taken on qualities: how does this not make it plain that what is added are rational principles, and bodiless? Nor should they say that living creatures die when breath or blood departs. For it is not possible to be without these, nor without many other things, none of which would be the soul. And indeed it is neither breath nor blood that goes through everything, but soul."

22.57| "Furthermore, if the soul, being a body, passed through the whole, it would be blended, in the way that other bodies are blended. But if the blending of bodies leaves nothing of the blended things in actuality, then the soul would no longer be in actuality in the bodies but only in potentiality, having lost its being soul, as when sweet and bitter are blended, the sweet is no longer sweet. So we have no soul.

22.58| As for a body being blended with a body wholly throughout, wherever the other is, with the bulk of both equal and each occupying the whole, and no increase occurring when the second is thrown in, it will leave nothing that it does not cut. For the blending is not by large parts alternately (for then, they say, there would be juxtaposition); the thing thrown in has passed through the whole while being smaller, which is impossible, that the lesser become equal to the greater; but at any rate, having passed through the whole, it cuts it everywhere.

22.59| It follows, then, that if the cut is at every point, and there is to be no body in between that has not been cut, the division of the body must have been carried to points, which is impossible. And since the cutting is without limit (for any body you take is divisible), the infinite will exist not merely in potentiality but in actuality. It is not possible, therefore, for a body to pass whole through a whole, but the soul does pass through wholes; so it is bodiless."

22.60| "As for saying that this same breath was first nature, and that, coming to be in the cold and being tempered, it becomes soul, becoming finer by coming to be in the cold: this too is absurd. For many animals come to be in heat, and their soul has never been chilled. Still, they do say that nature is prior to soul, and that soul comes about through external chance events.

22.61| It follows for them that they make the worse first, and before it something else still lesser, which they call 'state'. And intellect comes last, evidently arising from the soul; or if intellect were before all, it would have had to make soul next, then nature, and the later would always be worse, if that is its nature.

22.62| If, then, their God too, in respect of intellect, is later and generated and has his thinking brought in from outside, it would be possible that there is neither soul, nor intellect, nor God. For if what is in potentiality could come to be without the actual and intellect being prior, it would never come to actuality. What would lead it, if nothing else existed before it? And if it will lead itself into actuality, which is absurd, it will lead itself by looking to something that is not in potentiality but in actuality.

22.63| Yet if what always stays the same is to have the potential, it will come into actuality by itself, and it will be better than what has potentiality, being the object of its desire. What is better, then, is prior, having a nature other than body and being always in actuality; therefore intellect and soul are prior to nature. So the soul is not breath, nor body. That it is not a body might be said, and has been said, in other ways by others; but these arguments suffice."

22.64| "Since it is of another nature, we must inquire what this is. Is it then something other than body, yet something of body, like a harmony? For since those around Pythagoras called it a harmony in another sense, some supposed it to be something like the harmony on strings.

22.65| For as in the one case, when the strings are stretched, a kind of affection arises upon them, which is called harmony, so, they say, in our body, when dissimilar things are blended, the particular blend produces life and soul, which is the affection arising upon the blend. But that this is impossible has already been argued at length against this opinion.

22.66| For the soul is prior and the harmony later; the soul rules and presides over the body and fights it in many ways, whereas a harmony could not do these things; the soul is an essence, a harmony is not an essence; the blend of the bodies of which we are composed, being in due proportion, would be health; each part, blended differently, would be another soul, so that souls would be many; and this is greatest: that before this soul there must be another soul that produces this harmony, as with instruments the musician is prior, the one who sets the harmony in the strings, having the rational principle in himself, according to which he will tune them.

22.67| For neither there can the strings bring themselves into harmony of themselves, nor here can the bodies. In general, these men make the ensouled out of the soulless, and what is ordered by chance out of the disordered, and say that the order did not come from the soul, but that the soul itself took its existence from spontaneous order. But this is possible neither in particulars nor in anything else. The soul, therefore, is not a harmony."

22.68| So much from Plotinus against the Stoic opinion about the soul, which says it is bodily. But since I have set out, in sufficient summary, the arguments against Aristotle and the whole Peripatetic school, and against the school of the Stoics, it is time to turn back and examine the wonderful natural philosophies of all the noble philosophers together, especially since all the Greeks in common regarded and revered, as visible gods, the sun, the moon and the remaining stars, and the other parts of the world, and transferred their mythical and nonsensical tales about their polytheistic error to the elements and parts of the whole world, by more dignified, natural interpretations.

22.69| For this reason it seems to me necessary to gather together the opinions about these things too, and to examine their disagreements and the vanity of their arrogance. I shall take these also from Plutarch's writing, in which he gathered the opinions of both older and younger authors about all these matters together, writing as follows: "On the sun.

23.1| Anaximander: a circle twenty-eight times the size of the earth, its rim resembling the wheel of a chariot, hollow and filled with fire, and at one place letting the fire show through an aperture, as through the nozzle of a bellows; and this is the sun.

23.2| Xenophanes: made of little fires gathered together from the moist exhalation, which gather the sun together out of ignited clouds.

23.3| The Stoics: an intelligent kindling from the sea.

23.4| Plato: made mostly of fire.

23.5| Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus: a red-hot mass of metal or a fiery rock.

23.6| Aristotle: a sphere of the fifth body.

23.7| Philolaus the Pythagorean: a glassy disk, receiving the reflection of the fire in the world and filtering the light to us; so that the fiery part of the sun in the heavens resembles the beam scattered toward us by reflection from a mirror; for this too we call the sun, a kind of image of an image.

23.8| Empedocles: two suns; one the archetype, fire in one hemisphere of the world, which fills the hemisphere and is always opposite its own reflection; the other, the visible one, a reflection in the other hemisphere, the one filled with air mingled with heat, arising by reflection from the round earth upon the crystalline sun, and carried around with the motion of the fiery one. To put it briefly, the sun is a reflection of the fire around the earth.

23.9| Epicurus: an earthy condensation, like pumice and spongy with its perforations, kindled by fire."

24.1| "On the size of the sun. Anaximander: the sun is equal to the earth, and the circle from which it has its vent, and by which it is carried, is twenty-seven times the earth.

24.2| Anaxagoras: many times the size of the Peloponnese.

24.3| Heraclitus: the breadth of a human foot.

24.4| Epicurus again says that all the above is possible: it is either as large as it appears, or a little larger, or smaller."

25.1| "On the shape of the sun. Anaximenes: flat like a leaf.

25.2| Heraclitus: bowl-shaped, somewhat curved.

25.3| The Stoics: spherical, like the world and the stars.

25.4| Epicurus: all the above is possible." Such is the great god of the visible heavens for them, the sun. Moses, however, and the oracles of the Hebrews concern themselves with none of this.

26.1| "On the moon. Anaximander: a circle nineteen times the size of the earth, as with the sun, full of fire, and it is eclipsed according to the turnings of the wheel. It is like a chariot wheel, having a hollow rim full of fire, with one breathing-hole.

26.2| Xenophanes: a compressed cloud.

26.3| The Stoics: compounded of fire and air.

26.4| Plato: made mostly of earthy matter.

26.5| Anaxagoras, Democritus: a fiery solid body, with plains, mountains and ravines in itself.

26.6| Heraclitus: earth enveloped in mist.

26.7| Pythagoras: it is of fiery body."

27.1| "On the size of the moon. The Stoics declare it larger than the earth, as they do the sun.

27.2| Parmenides: equal to the sun, since it is illuminated by it."

28.1| "On the shape of the moon. The Stoics: spherical like the sun. Heraclitus: bowl-shaped. Empedocles: disk-shaped. Others: cylindrical."

29.1| "On the lighting of the moon. Anaximander: it has its own light, though somewhat thinner.

29.2| Antiphon: the moon shines with its own light; the part about it that is hidden is dimmed by the impact of the sun, since the stronger fire naturally dims the weaker, which happens with the other stars too.

29.3| Thales and his followers: the moon is lit by the sun.

29.4| Heraclitus: the sun and the moon are affected alike; for the stars, being bowl-shaped in form and receiving the moist exhalations, are lit so as to appear; the sun […], for it travels in purer air, while the moon travels in murky air, and for this reason looks dimmer."

30.1| "What is the essence of the wandering and the fixed stars. Thales: earthy, but on fire.

30.2| Empedocles: fiery, made of the fiery element which the air, containing it in itself, squeezed out at the first separation.

30.3| Anaxagoras: the surrounding air is fiery in its essence, and by the force of its whirling it snatched rocks from the earth and set them ablaze, and these have become stars.

30.4| Diogenes: the stars are pumice-like; he considers them the breathing-pores of the world. And again the same man says that there are invisible stones, which often fall to earth and are extinguished, like the fiery stone star that fell at Aegospotami.

30.5| Empedocles: the fixed stars are bound to the crystal, while the planets are let loose.

30.6| Plato: mostly fiery, but sharing in the other elements, like glue.

30.7| Xenophanes: made of ignited clouds, which are extinguished each day and rekindled at night, like coals; for risings and settings are kindlings and quenchings.

30.8| Heraclides and the Pythagoreans: each of the stars is a world, with earth, air and aether in the infinite. These doctrines are found in the Orphic writings; for they make worlds of the stars.

30.9| Epicurus rules none of these out, holding to what is possible."

31.1| "On the shape of stars. The Stoics hold that the stars are sphere-shaped, as are the cosmos and the sun and moon.

31.2| Cleanthes: cone-shaped.

31.3| Anaximenes: like nails fixed in the crystalline. Some say they are fiery leaves, as it were in a crystalline." These are the discoveries of the wonderful philosophers about the gods they say are visible. What they have concluded about the universe, learn from the same voice of Plutarch:

32.1| "How the world came to be. The world was formed with a bent shape in this manner. Since the atomic bodies have a motion without forethought and by chance, moving continuously and very swiftly, many bodies gathered together in the same place, having on this account a variety of shapes and sizes.

32.2| As these gathered in the same place, those which were larger and heaviest of all settled down, while those which were small, round, smooth and slippery were squeezed out in the coming together of the bodies, and were carried up on high.

32.3| When the force of impact that lifted them failed, and the blow no longer drove them upward, but they were prevented from being carried down, they were pressed toward the places able to receive them. These were the surrounding ones.

32.4| And toward these the mass of bodies was bent around; and intertwining with one another in the bending, they generated the heaven. The atoms of the same nature, being varied as has been said, pushed out to the heights, completed the nature of the stars.

32.5| The multitude of exhaled bodies struck the air and squeezed it out. This, becoming breath in the motion and enclosing the stars, carried them around with it, and kept their present revolution on high. Then from those that settled down the earth came to be, and from those that were lifted up, the heaven, fire, air.

32.6| As much matter was still enclosed in the earth, and this was condensed by the blows of the winds and the breezes of the stars, all its fine-grained configuration was pressed together and generated the moist nature.

32.7| This, being fluid in condition, was carried down toward the hollow places able to hold and contain it; or else the water, settling of itself, hollowed out the places beneath it."

32.8| Such is their marvelous cosmogony. Joined to this is a great deal of further wrangling, as they were at a loss over every kind of proposition: whether the universe should be thought one or many; whether the world is one or several; whether it is ensouled and governed by the providence of God, or the opposite; whether it is imperishable or perishable; from where it is nourished; from what point God began to make the world; about the order of the world; what caused it to tilt; about what lies outside the circumference of the world; which are the right and the left parts of the world; about heaven; and besides all these, about daemons and heroes; about matter and about Ideas; about the order of the whole; further, about the motion and course of the stars; and in addition, from where the stars get their light; about the so-called Dioscuri; about eclipses of the sun and moon; about the moon's appearance, and why it looks earthy; about its distances; and further, about years.

32.9| Now all these matters have been elaborated by those concerned with them through endless arguments, but since Plutarch has cut them down and condensed them briefly, gathering their declarations and disagreements together, I think it will not be useless for us to set them side by side, as a reasonable justification for our declining them. For when they have stood in diametrical opposition to one another, and have kindled battles and wars against themselves, and nothing more, each refuting the views of his neighbors in rivalry of argument, would anyone at all not agree that our suspension of judgment on these matters has been well founded?

32.10| I shall add, next after what has been said, what they were in doubt about concerning matters nearer the earth: the shape of the earth, its position and inclination, and also the sea; so that you may know that these noble men were not divided only about things high and aloft, but have disagreed also about things on the earth. And so that you may admire the wisdom of the wise still more, I shall add also what they fought over concerning the soul and its ruling part, not having been able even to recognize what their own nature is. But let us return to the first of the matters mentioned.

33.1| "Whether the universe is one. The Stoics declared one world, which they said is both the universe and the bodily things.

33.2| Empedocles said there is one world, but that the world is not the universe, only a small part of the universe, the rest being idle matter.

33.3| Plato infers what seems right, that the world is one and the universe one, from three points: that it would not be perfect unless it embraced everything; that it would not be like its model unless it were only-begotten; and that it would not be imperishable if anything were outside it.

33.4| Against Plato one must say that the world is not perfect, since it does not contain everything; indeed a human being is perfect, yet does not contain everything; and there are many models, as in statues, houses and paintings. And how is it perfect, if something of it can whirl round? It is not imperishable, nor can it be, being generated.

33.5| Metrodorus says it is absurd for one ear of grain to be born in a large plain, and one world in the infinite. That it is infinite in number is clear from the causes being infinite. For if the world is finite, but all the causes from which the world came to be are infinite, the worlds must be infinite. For where all the causes have come to be, there also are the effects. And the causes are either the atoms or the elements."

34.1| "Whether the world is ensouled and governed by providence. [All the others say it is ensouled and governed.]

34.2| Democritus and Epicurus, who introduce atoms and the void, say that it is neither ensouled nor governed by providence, but by a certain irrational nature.

34.3| Aristotle: it is not ensouled throughout, nor perceptive, nor rational, nor intelligent, nor governed by providence. For the heavenly bodies share in all of these (for they contain ensouled and living spheres), but the terrestrial things share in none of them; and they have a share in good order incidentally, not primarily."

35.1| "Whether the world is imperishable. Pythagoras, Plato and the Stoics: the world was generated by God; perishable as far as its nature goes (for it is perceptible, because bodily), but not going to perish, through the providence and holding-together of God.

35.2| Epicurus: perishable, because generated, like an animal, like a plant.

35.3| Xenophanes: the world is ungenerated, eternal and imperishable.

35.4| Aristotle: the part of the world below the moon is subject to change, and in it the things about the earth are wasted."

36.1| "From where the world is nourished. Aristotle: if the world is nourished, it will also perish; but it needs no nourishment, and for this reason is also eternal.

36.2| Plato: the world supplies its own nourishment to itself, from what wastes away by change.

36.3| Philolaus: destruction is twofold, sometimes by fire flowing from heaven, sometimes by water from the moon poured out by the whirling of the air; and the exhalations of these are the nourishment of the world."

37.1| "From what first God began to make the world. The natural philosophers say the generation of the world began from the earth, as from a center; and the center is the beginning of a sphere.

37.2| Pythagoras: from fire and the fifth element.

37.3| Empedocles: the aether was separated out first, second the fire, and after it the earth, from which, as it was squeezed too tightly by the sphere's rush, the water gushed up, and from this the air was vaporized; and the heaven came to be from the aether, the sun from the fire; and the things about the earth were compacted from the others.

37.4| Plato: the visible world came to be after the pattern of the intelligible world; and prior to the visible world is the soul, and after it the bodily part, first of fire and earth, second of water and air.

37.5| Pythagoras: there being five solid figures, which are also called the mathematical ones, he says that from the cube came the earth; from the pyramid, fire; from the octahedron, air; from the icosahedron, water; and from the dodecahedron, the sphere of the whole.

37.6| Plato follows the Pythagoreans in this too."

38.1| "On the order of the world. Parmenides: there are rings wound round one upon another, one of the rare, another of the dense; and others, mixed of light and darkness, between these; and what surrounds them all is solid, like a wall.

38.2| Leucippus and Democritus stretch a tunic and membrane round the world.

38.3| Epicurus: in some worlds the boundary is rare, in others dense; and of these some are in motion, others motionless.

38.4| Plato: fire first, then aether, after it air, then water, and last earth; sometimes he joins the aether to the fire.

38.5| Aristotle: first the aether, unaffected, the fifth body; after it the affectable ones: fire, air, water, and last earth. Of these, circular motion is assigned to the heavenly bodies; and of those ranked below, the upward motion to the light ones, and the downward to the heavy.

38.6| Empedocles: the elements are not fixed throughout, nor are their places defined, but all share in one another somehow."

39.1| "What caused the world to tilt. Diogenes and Anaxagoras: after the world was put together and had brought living creatures out of the earth, the world somehow tilted spontaneously toward its southern part, perhaps by providence, so that some parts of the world would be uninhabitable and others inhabitable, through cold, burning heat and temperate climate.

39.2| Empedocles: when the air yielded to the thrust of the sun, the Bears were tilted and the northern parts raised, the southern lowered, as with the whole world."

40.1| "On what is outside the world, whether there is void. The Pythagoreans: there is a void outside the world, into which and out of which the world breathes.

40.2| The Stoics: the infinite into which it is dissolved in the conflagration.

40.3| Posidonius: not infinite, but as much as suffices for the dissolution, in the first book On the Void.

40.4| Plato, Aristotle: there is no void either outside the world or inside."

41.1| "Which are the right parts of the world and which the left. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle: the world's right parts are the eastern parts, from which the beginning of motion comes, and the left are the western.

41.2| Empedocles: the right are those toward the summer tropic, the left those toward the winter.

42.1| "On heaven, what it is. Anaximenes: the revolution of the outermost zone.

42.2| Empedocles: heaven is solid, made of air congealed by fire in the manner of crystal, enclosing the fiery and the airy in each of its hemispheres.

42.3| Aristotle: of the fifth body, or of a mixture of hot and cold."

43.1| "On daemons and heroes. Following the discussion of the gods, the account of daemons and heroes must be told.

43.2| Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, the Stoics: daemons are psychic essences; and heroes are the souls separated from bodies; good ones are the good souls, evil ones the base.

43.3| Epicurus accepts none of this."

44.1| "On matter. Matter is the substrate for coming-to-be and destruction and the other changes.

44.2| The school of Thales and of Pythagoras, and the Stoics: matter is changeable, alterable and fluid, throughout the whole.

44.3| The school of Democritus: the first things are unaffected: the atom, the void and the bodiless.

44.4| Aristotle and Plato: matter is body-like, formless, shapeless, without figure, without quality as far as its own nature goes, but a receptacle of forms, as it were a nurse, a mold and a mother. Those who say that matter is water, fire, air or earth no longer call it formless but body; those who say partless things and atoms call it formless."

45.1| "On Ideas. An Idea is a bodiless essence, itself subsisting and by itself, giving shape to formless matter and becoming the cause of its being displayed.

45.2| Socrates and Plato hold the Ideas to be essences separate from matter, subsisting in the thoughts and imaginings of God, that is, of the Mind.

45.3| Aristotle left forms and Ideas, but not separated from matter, […].

45.4| The Stoics of Zeno: the Ideas are concepts."

46.1| "On order. Xenocrates thinks the stars move on a single surface.

46.2| The other Stoics: some before others, in height and depth.

46.3| Democritus: the fixed stars first, after these the planets, and after these the sun, Phosphorus and the moon.

46.4| Plato: after the position of the fixed stars, first the one called Phaenon, that of Cronus; second Phaethon, that of Zeus; third Pyroeis, that of Ares; fourth Eosphorus, that of Aphrodite; fifth Stilbon, that of Hermes; sixth the sun; seventh the moon.

46.5| Of the mathematicians, some hold as Plato does, others place the sun in the middle of all.

46.6| Anaximander, Metrodorus of Chios and Crates: the sun has been placed highest of all; after it the moon; beneath them the fixed stars and the planets."

47.1| "On the stars' course and motion. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Cleanthes: all the stars are carried from east to west.

47.2| Alcmaeon and the mathematicians: the planets move opposite to the fixed stars; for they are carried from west to east.

47.3| Anaximander: they are carried by the circles and spheres on which each one rides. Anaximenes: the stars do not turn under the earth, but around it.

47.4| Plato and the mathematicians: the sun, Phosphorus and Stilbon have equal courses."

48.1| "From where the stars get their light. Metrodorus: all the fixed stars are lit by the sun.

48.2| Heraclitus and the Stoics: the stars are nourished from the exhalation of the earth.

48.3| Aristotle: the heavenly bodies need no nourishment, since they are not perishable but eternal.

48.4| Plato: the whole world and the stars in common are nourished from it."

49.1| "On the so-called Dioscuri. Xenophanes: the star-like lights that appear on ships are small clouds, gleaming because of a certain motion.

49.2| Metrodorus: they are glitterings of the eyes that see, in fear and amazement."

50.1| "Concerning the sun’s eclipse: Thales was the first to say that the sun is eclipsed when the moon, which is naturally earthy, passes beneath it in a straight line; and this is seen by reflection, when it is placed under the disk.

50.2| Anaximander: when the mouth of the fire's outlet is closed.

50.3| Heraclitus: by the turning of the bowl-shaped body, so that the hollow comes to be uppermost and the convex side downward toward our sight.

50.4| Xenophanes: by extinction; and another sun comes to be again toward the east. He has also recorded an eclipse of the sun lasting a whole month, and at another time a total eclipse, such that the day appeared as night.

50.5| Some say: a thickening of invisible clouds coming over the disk.

50.6| Aristarchus places the sun among the fixed stars, and moves the moon around the solar circle, and says the disk is shadowed according to these inclinations.

50.7| Xenophanes: there are many suns and moons, according to the regions, sections and belts of the earth; and at a certain time the disk falls into a section of the earth not inhabited by us, and so, as if stepping into empty space, shows an eclipse. The same man says that the sun goes on to infinity, and seems to circle because of the distance."

51.1| "On the eclipse of the moon. Anaximander: when the opening of the wheel is blocked.

51.2| Berossus: by the turning toward us of its unfired part.

51.3| Heraclitus: by the turning of the bowl-shaped body.

51.4| Some of the Pythagoreans: a reflection and blocking by the earth, or by the counter-earth; the younger ones: a gradual spreading of flame, kindled little by little in order until it gives the full moon, and again diminishing in proportion until the conjunction, when it is entirely extinguished.

51.5| Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the mathematicians concur that the monthly disappearances occur as the moon travels with the sun and is lit around by it; and the eclipses, as it falls into the shadow of the earth, the earth coming between the two stars, or rather the moon being blocked off."

52.1| "On its appearance, and why it looks earthy. The Pythagoreans: the moon looks earthy because it is inhabited all round, as our earth is, by larger living creatures and fairer plants. For the creatures on it are fifteen times as large, excreting nothing bodily; and the day is correspondingly long.

52.2| Anaxagoras: the unevenness comes from its composition, because it is both cold and earthy; for the gloomy is mixed with the fiery; hence the star is also called false-shining.

52.3| The Stoics: since its essence is mingled with air, its compound is not pure."

53.1| "On its distances. Empedocles: the moon is twice as far from the sun as from the earth.

53.2| Those from the mathematicians: eighteen times.

53.3| Eratosthenes: the sun is 4,080,000 stadia from the earth, and the moon 780,000 stadia from the earth."

54.1| "On years. A year: for Cronus the period is thirty years; for Zeus twelve; for Ares two; for the sun twelve months; the same for Hermes and Aphrodite, for their courses are equal. For the moon, thirty days; this is the complete month, from appearance to conjunction.

54.2| The great year some place in the eight-year cycle, others in the nineteen-year cycle, others in the fifty-nine-year cycle. Heraclitus: from 18,000 solar years. Diogenes: from three hundred and sixty-five times as many years as in Heraclitus' year; others say 777."

54.3| And concerning the heavenly and high things, so much have the men we have named quarreled with one another. Look now at the matters concerning the earth.

55.1| "On the earth. Thales and his followers: the earth is one.

55.2| Hicetas the Pythagorean: two, this one and the counter-earth.

55.3| The Stoics: the earth is single and bounded.

55.4| Xenophanes: it is rooted without limit from its lower part, and compacted out of air and fire.

55.5| Metrodorus: the earth is the sediment and dregs of the water, and the sun that of the air."

56.1| "On the shape of the earth. Thales and the Stoics: spherical.

56.2| Anaximander: like a stone column, as to its flat surfaces.

56.3| Anaximenes: table-shaped.

56.4| Leucippus: drum-shaped.

56.5| Democritus: disk-shaped in breadth, hollow in the middle."

57.1| "On the position of the earth. The school of Thales: the earth is in the middle.

57.2| Xenophanes: first, for it is rooted without limit.

57.3| Philolaus the Pythagorean: fire is in the middle (since this is the hearth of the whole); second the counter-earth; third the earth we inhabit, lying opposite and revolving around the counter-earth; for which reason those on that earth are not seen by those on this.

57.4| Parmenides first delimited the inhabited regions of the earth beneath the two tropical zones.

58.1| "On the motion of the earth. The others: the earth stays still.

58.2| Philolaus the Pythagorean: it is carried round the fire in a circle, along an oblique circle, in the same manner as the sun and moon.

58.3| Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantus the Pythagorean move the earth, not by changing place but by turning, revolving like a wheel upon its axis, from the west toward the east, around its own center.

58.4| Democritus: at the beginning the earth wandered because of its smallness and lightness, but in time, condensed and made heavy, it settled." Since these noble men disagreed even about the earth, listen also to what concerns the sea.

59.1| "On the sea, how it came to be and how it is bitter. Anaximander declares the sea to be what is left of the original moisture, whose greater part the fire dried up, while what was left changed through the burning.

59.2| Anaxagoras: the moisture lying at the beginning as a pool was scorched by the circuit of the sun, and, the oily part […], the remainder settled into saltiness and bitterness.

59.3| Empedocles: it is sweat from the earth as the sun scorches it, because it has been compressed to a greater degree.

59.4| Antiphon: the sweat of the hot, from which the enclosed moisture was separated off, becoming somewhat salty through being boiled, as happens with all sweat.

59.5| Metrodorus: because it is filtered through the earth, it has taken on some of the density around it, like things strained through ash.

59.6| The school of Plato: of the elemental water, the part that forms from air by cooling becomes sweet, while that which is exhaled from the earth by burning and heat becomes salty."

59.7| So much, then, about the sea as well. But that those who professed to give a natural account of the whole world, of heavenly and aetherial things, and of the grasp of the universe, did not even know their own affairs, you may learn from how they disagreed on these matters too, in some such way as this.

60.1| "On the parts of the soul. Pythagoras and Plato: by the highest account, the soul has two parts, one rational and the other irrational; by the nearer and more exact account, three parts, for they divide the irrational into the spirited and the appetitive.

60.2| The Stoics say it consists of eight parts: five of the senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch), a sixth of voice, a seventh of seed, and an eighth the ruling part itself, from which all these are arranged through their own organs, like the tentacles of an octopus.

60.3| Democritus, Epicurus: the soul has two parts, the rational one lodged in the chest, the irrational scattered through the whole composition of the body.

60.4| Democritus says that all things share by nature in a certain […], even dead bodies, because they share invisibly in some heat and sensation, most of it being breathed out."

61.1| "On the ruling part. Plato, Democritus: in the whole head.

61.2| Strato: between the eyebrows.

61.3| Erasistratus: around the brain's membrane, which he calls the epicranis.

61.4| Herophilus: in the brain's ventricle, which is also its base.

61.5| Parmenides: in the whole chest.

61.6| Epicurus, all the Stoics: in the whole heart.

61.7| Diogenes: in the arterial ventricle of the heart, which is the pneumatic one.

61.8| Empedocles: in the composition of the blood.

61.9| Some: in the membrane around the heart; others: in the diaphragm. Some of the younger ones: it extends from the head to the diaphragm.

61.10| Pythagoras: the vital part is about the heart, the rational and intelligent part about the head."

61.11| So much for these matters too. Do we not seem to you to have rightly withdrawn, by judgment and reasoning, from the useless, wandering and vain labor of all these things, and not to meddle with what has been described, since we see nothing in them profitable or directly tending to the benefit of human beings and the possession of the good, and to hold fast only to piety toward God, the Maker of all, and to strive, through a temperate life and the rest of a God-loving way of life in virtue, to live in a way pleasing to the God of all?

61.12| But if even you, out of malice and envy, are reluctant to grant us the true testimony, Socrates, the wisest of all the Greeks, will anticipate you again, having cast his votes for us out of love of truth. He showed those talkers about the heavens to be fools, said they were no different from madmen, and refuted them plainly as people who not only reach after the unattainable but also wear themselves out over things useless and unprofitable for life. Xenophon too, cited before, the best known of Socrates' companions, will testify to you of this, writing somewhere as follows in the Memorabilia:

62.1| "Nobody ever saw Socrates act, or listened to him speak, in any impious or unholy way. For he did not discuss the nature of all things, as most others did, examining how what the sophists call the cosmos is constituted, and by what necessities each of the heavenly bodies comes about, but he showed that those who worry about such things are fools.

62.2| And first he asked about them whether they had come to think about such matters because they supposed they already knew human affairs sufficiently, or whether they thought they were doing what was fitting while setting human affairs aside and examining divine ones.

62.3| He wondered that it was not plain to them that human beings cannot find out these things, since even those who take most pride in speaking about them do not hold the same opinions as one another, but are disposed toward one another like madmen.

62.4| For among madmen, some do not even fear what is terrible, while others fear what is not frightening; some think it no disgrace to say or do anything at all even in a crowd, while others think they should not even go out among people; some honor neither temple nor altar nor any other divine thing, while others revere chance logs and stones and wild beasts. And of those who worry about the nature of the cosmos, some think that only one thing exists, others that the number is infinite; some that all things are always in motion, others that nothing is ever moved; some that all things come to be and perish, others that nothing ever comes to be or perishes.

62.5| He examined also these questions about them: just as those who learn human affairs expect to do for themselves, or for whomever else they wish, whatever they learn, do those who seek the divine likewise suppose that, once they know by what necessities each thing comes about, they will make winds, rains, seasons, and whatever else of the kind they need, whenever they wish? Or do they not even hope for anything like this, and is it enough for them merely to know how each of these things comes about?

62.6| Such were his remarks about those who busy themselves with these matters; he himself always conversed about human things, examining what is pious and what impious; what is noble and what shameful; what is just and what unjust; what is temperance and what is madness."

62.7| So Socrates. After him, the school of Aristippus of Cyrene, and later that of Ariston of Chios, undertook to say that one should philosophize only about ethics; for these matters are possible and useful, whereas the discussions about nature are quite the opposite, neither comprehensible nor, even if they were seen, of any benefit.

62.8| For we would gain nothing more, not even if, lifted higher than Perseus, over the flood of the sea and over the Pleiades, we could see with our very eyes the whole world and the nature of things, whatever it may be.

62.9| For through this we would not be wiser, or more just, or braver, or more temperate, nor yet strong, or handsome, or rich, without which one cannot be happy.

62.10| Hence Socrates rightly said that of things that exist, some are above us and some are nothing to us. For natural matters are above us, what comes after death is nothing to us, and only human matters concern us.

62.11| In this way, bidding farewell to the natural philosophy of Anaxagoras and Archelaus, he sought to learn what evil and good have been wrought in one's halls.

62.12| And besides, the natural discussions are not only difficult and impossible, but also impious and contrary to the laws. For some hold that there are no gods at all, others that god is the infinite, or being, or the one, and anything rather than those commonly believed in.

62.13| The disagreement, too, is very great: some declare the universe infinite, others finite; some hold that all things move, others that nothing moves at all.

62.14| And indeed, if anything else, Timon of Phlius seems to me to have said best of all about these very things in his Silli, as follows: "Who brought these men to fight in deadly strife? The throng, running together with Echo. For one, angered at those who were silent, sent a talkative sickness upon men, and many perished."

62.15| You see how the noble men already mock one another? At any rate, the same man, in addition to what has been said, sketches their rivalry with one another, their battles and their dissensions, in this fashion: "Strife the bane of mortals goes about, crying emptily, sister and helper of man-slaying quarrel; she rolls blindly about all things, and then she plants her head among mortals and casts them into hope."

62.16| But the strife and battle of these men against one another has now been shown, and so has the fact that all the rest of their learning and study, in which the sons of the philosophers still pride themselves to this day, is no concern of ours, and is superfluous besides and beyond knowing, refuted not by our proofs but by their own. Moreover, the reason has been brought into the open for which we turned away from their teachings and have preferred the oracles of the Hebrews. Let the matters of the Preparation for the Gospel, then, be concluded for us here.

62.17| But the matters of the more complete treatise, the Demonstration of the Gospel, must now be taken up from another starting point of discussion, the one that still remains to the problem, as we go on to give our teaching.

62.18| It remains, then, to answer those of the circumcision who have found fault with us: why on earth, being foreigners and of another race, do we employ their books, which, as they themselves would say, are no concern of ours? Or why, if we welcome the oracles that are theirs, do we not also lead a life that follows the law that is theirs?

Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/eusebius/089-preparation-for-the-gospel-book-xv#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.

← All of Eusebius of Caesarea: The Works of Eusebius of Caesarea