Chapter 22: The Ordering of the World

On the ordering of the world; ⟨whether the all is one.⟩⁶⁷⁰

1a ⟨Aëtius⟩: Parmenides’ rings

Parmenides held that there are rings wound one about another in succession, one made of the rarefied and another of the dense, with others between them mixed ⟨from⟩ light and darkness. What encloses them all, like a wall, is solid, and beneath it lies a fiery ring; the region at the very center of them all is likewise solid, with another fiery ring around it.⁶⁷¹

1a ⟨Aëtius⟩: The governing goddess

Of the mixed rings, the middlemost is the cause of all motion and generation for them all. He also names it the governing goddess and key-holder, Justice and Necessity.⁶⁷²

1a ⟨Aëtius⟩: Air, fire, and the moon

Air is a separation from earth, vaporized through its more violent compression, while the sun and the circle of the Milky Way are an exhalation of fire. The moon is a mixture of both, air and fire. Aether stands around everything at the highest level; beneath it is arranged the fiery region that we have called heaven, and beneath this lie the regions about earth.⁶⁷³

1b ⟨Aëtius⟩: Aristotle’s five bodies

Aristotle places first aether, unaffected by change, a certain fifth body; after it come the changeable bodies, fire, air, water, and last of all earth.⁶⁷⁴

1c ⟨Arius Didymus⟩: The celestial spheres

These bodies are enclosed by aether, where the divine bodies are established, distributed among the spheres of the so-called fixed and wandering stars. There are as many gods moving these spheres as there are spheres. Greatest among them is the one enclosing them all, a rational and blessed living being, holding the heavenly things together and exercising providence over them.⁶⁷⁵ The stars and heaven are constituted from aether. This is neither heavy nor light, neither generated nor perishable, neither increasing nor diminishing; it remains forever unchanging and unaltered, bounded, spherical, and endowed with soul, moving in a circle around the center.⁶⁷⁶

1d ⟨Aëtius⟩: Philolaus’s central fire

Philolaus places fire in the middle, about the center, calling it the hearth of the all, the house of Zeus, the mother of the gods, and nature’s altar, bond, and measure. There is also another fire at the highest level, enclosing everything.⁶⁷⁷

1d ⟨Aëtius⟩: Ten bodies in their dance

The center is first by nature, and ten divine bodies dance around it: heaven, the five planets, after them the sun, beneath it the moon, beneath that the earth, and beneath earth the counter-earth. After all these comes the fire, occupying the position of a hearth about the central points.⁶⁷⁸

1d ⟨Aëtius⟩: Three regions and two excellences

He calls the highest part of the enclosure Olympus, where the elements have their purity; the region beneath Olympus’s revolution, in which the five planets are arranged together with sun and moon, he calls the world. The region beneath these, below the moon and around earth, where the processes of ever-changing generation take place, he calls heaven. Wisdom concerns the ordered things aloft, while virtue concerns the disorder of things coming into being: the former is complete, the latter incomplete.⁶⁷⁹

1e ⟨Aëtius⟩: The boundaries of worlds

Leucippus and Democritus stretch a covering and membrane all around the world, interwoven from hook-shaped atoms.

Epicurus holds that some worlds have a rarefied boundary and others a dense one; some of these boundaries move, while others are motionless.⁶⁸⁰

1f ⟨Aëtius and Plato⟩: Soul before body

Plato held that the visible world came into being as a copy of the intelligible world. Of the visible world, soul is prior, and after it comes the bodily part, constituted first from fire and earth, and second from water and air.⁶⁸¹

1f ⟨Aëtius and Plato⟩: No remainder outside

Thus he says in the Timaeus: The world’s constitution has taken each of the four in its entirety. For the one who composed it composed it from all fire, water, air, and earth, leaving outside no part or power of any of them. His intention was, first, that it should be, so far as possible, a whole and perfect living being made of complete parts; and, further, that it should be one, since nothing remained from which another such being could arise.⁶⁸²

2 ⟨Plutarch⟩: Aether above air

Homer says that aether is higher than air, expressing it thus:

Climbing a towering fir, which then on Ida had grown tallest, reaching through air into aether.⁶⁸³

2 ⟨Plutarch⟩: Heaven beyond aether

He declared that heaven lies beyond aether, for he says this:

So they fought, and the iron din reached the bronze heaven through the unharvested aether.⁶⁸⁴

2 ⟨Plutarch⟩: Olympus above all

Olympus lies above all, with a certain eminence and divinity; for he says:

At dawn she ascended great heaven and Olympus.

For the ancients named the region farthest from earth, which receives neither its shadow nor its exhalations, Olympus, as being ever-bright and wholly bright.⁶⁸⁵

2 ⟨Plutarch⟩: The gods’ secure dwelling

This is also shown by the very words in which he speaks as follows:

To Olympus, where they say the gods’ dwelling stands forever secure, never shaken by winds, nor ever drenched with rain; no snow spreads over it, but cloudless clear sky opens wide, and white radiance plays across it.⁶⁸⁶