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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

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Book I Chapter 1

29b ⟨Aëtius⟩ (2)

Diogenes, Cleanthes, and Oenopides identify God with the soul of the cosmos.

Of the first principles, Pythagoras identifies the monad with God and the good: it is the nature of the One and mind itself. ⟨But⟩ the indefinite dyad he identifies with ⟨a divine spirit⟩ and evil; material plurality belongs to it.⁶⁷

Posidonius identifies God with an intelligent, fiery breath, having no form but changing into whatever it wishes and assimilating itself to all things.

Speusippus holds that mind is identical neither with the One nor with the good, but has a nature of its own.

Critolaus and Diodorus of Tyre identify God with mind derived from aether that is unaffected by change.⁶⁸

29b ⟨Aëtius⟩ (3)

Heraclitus identifies God with eternal fire moving in cycles, and fate with reason that produces existing things through the movement of opposites.

Zeno the Stoic identifies God with the fiery mind of the cosmos.

Mnesagoras identifies God with the cosmos, whose primary substance comes from breath.

Boethus declared aether to be God.

Parmenides identifies God with what is motionless, bounded, and spherical.

Melissus and Zeno identify God with the One that is all, alone eternal and unlimited.⁶⁹

29b ⟨Aëtius⟩ (4)

⟨Empedocles identifies God with the Sphere and⟩ the One; the One he identifies with necessity, its matter with the four elements, and its forms with strife and friendship. He also calls the elements gods and their mixture the cosmos, and says that the uniform whole will be further dissolved. He considers souls divine, and also regards as divine those who, themselves pure, partake of them purely.⁷⁰

Polemo declared the cosmos to be God.

29b ⟨Aëtius⟩ (5)

Xenocrates of Chalcedon, son of Agathenor, identifies the monad and the dyad as gods. The monad is male, occupies the rank of father, and reigns in heaven; he also calls it Zeus, the odd, and mind, which for him is the first god. The dyad is female, like a mother of gods, and presides over the region beneath heaven; for him it is the soul of the universe. Heaven too is a god, the stars are fiery Olympian gods, and there are other invisible divine spirits beneath the moon.

He also holds that … and that they pervade the material elements. Of these powers, he calls the one ⟨through the air near the earth⟩ Hades; the one through moisture, Poseidon; and the seed-bearing one through earth, Demeter. Having furnished these notions to the Stoics, he has restated the earlier ones from Plato.⁷¹

29b ⟨Aëtius⟩ (6)

Plato identifies God with the One, the single-natured, the unitary, what truly is, and the good. All such names point toward mind. God, then, is mind, a separate form; “separate” is to be understood as unmixed with any matter, entangled with nothing bodily, and sharing none of the affections of mutable nature.

The other divine offspring of this father and maker are intelligible: the so-called intelligible cosmos ⟨and the Forms⟩, which are patterns of the visible cosmos. Besides these there are certain powers in the aether (they are incorporeal rational principles), and powers ⟨in fire and⟩ in air and water. Perceptible, however, are [offspring of the first god] the sun, moon, stars, earth, and the cosmos that encompasses all.⁷²

29b ⟨Aëtius⟩ (7)

Aristotle holds that the highest god is a ⟨separate⟩ form, as in Plato, set over the sphere of the universe, which is an aetherial body, what he calls the fifth body.

The Stoics declare God to be intelligent: a craftsmanlike fire proceeding methodically toward the generation of the cosmos, containing all the seminal rational principles in accordance with which everything comes to be according to fate.⁷³ He is a breath pervading the whole cosmos, taking different names as it varies throughout all the matter it has penetrated. They also hold that the cosmos, the stars, and the earth are gods, and that the highest god of all is mind in the aether.⁷⁴

29b ⟨Aëtius⟩ (8)

Epicurus holds that the gods have human form, but all are apprehensible by reason because of the extreme fineness of the images’ nature. He also recognizes these four other natures as imperishable in kind: atoms, void, the unlimited, and likenesses. These last are called “like-parted constituents” and elements.⁷⁵

30 ⟨Hermes, from The Mixing Bowl⟩

For such is his body: neither tangible nor visible, neither measurable nor extended, nor like any other body. It is neither fire nor water nor air nor breath; rather, all things come from him. For, being good, he wished to reserve this for himself alone, and to order the earth.⁷⁶

31a ⟨An unidentified poet⟩

To remember mighty Heracles, who cleansed the whole earth, and the rock-walking god, powerful Pan of the pastures, and the divine healer Asclepius, giver of prosperity, and most august Hygieia, the goddess of gentle gifts, and the Dioscuri, appearing over swift-sailing ships, and the Curetes, attendants of Rhea, the mother of Zeus, and the Graces, is of highest importance in every undertaking, and the Seasons, children of Time, who bring forth all things, and the mountain Nymphs, who tend the lovely streams.⁷⁷

31b ⟨An unidentified lyric poet⟩

Let us hymn the blessed gods, Muses born of Zeus, with voices perfectly attuned.⁷⁸

32 ⟨Philemon⟩

No one has escaped me in a single deed, nor in what he will do, nor in what he did long ago, neither god nor man. I am that watcher, Air, whom one might also call Zeus. I do what ⟨belongs to a god⟩: I am everywhere, ⟨here in Athens, in Patrae, in Sicily,⟩ in every city, in every house, in every one of you. There is no place where air is absent; whoever is present everywhere must necessarily know everything [being present everywhere].⁷⁹

33 Arrian’s Epictetus: On Providence (1)

It is easy to praise providence on the evidence of anything that happens in the cosmos, provided one has these two things within oneself: the ability to see each event in its connections, and a grateful disposition. Otherwise one person will fail to see the usefulness of what has happened, while another will fail to be grateful for it even if he does see.⁸⁰

If God had made colors and, generally, everything visible, but had not made a capacity to see them, what use would there have been? “None at all.” Conversely, if he had made the capacity but had not made existing things such as could fall within its scope, what use would that have been? “None.” And if he had made both of these, ⟨but had not made light⟩? “Even then there would have been no use.”

67.“Monad” and “dyad” designate unity and the twofold principle, here opposed as definite unity and indefinite plurality. This is the survey’s attribution to Pythagoras. It should not erase the differences between the several accounts of number already encountered in On Arithmetic.

68.Pneuma, rendered “breath” in the preceding report, can designate an active, pervasive physical principle. Aether is the celestial element. “Unaffected by change” renders apathēs, literally not subject to being acted upon.

69.The first Zeno is explicitly “the Stoic.” The Zeno paired here with Melissus belongs to the distinct Eleatic sequence. The survey places bounded and unlimited conceptions side by side; the translation retains the difference.

70.Wachsmuth supplies the opening identification with Empedocles and the Sphere. The clause about the uniform whole’s dissolution is damaged; his apparatus records several attempts to repair it. The English follows the printed wording tentatively. “Forms” translates eidē here, without replacing the report’s terminology with a reconstructed account of Empedocles.

71.The dots mark a gap in the report. “Powers” supplies the sense needed after it, while the missing subject remains visible. The words connecting Hades with the air near earth are also editorially supplied in an awkwardly transmitted sentence; the facing text follows Wachsmuth. The final judgment about Plato and the Stoics belongs to the survey.

72.This is a report about Plato, using technical distinctions between intelligible and perceptible realities. Wachsmuth brackets “offspring of the first god” as intrusive here; the English preserves those brackets. His apparatus also questions the parenthetical explanation of the powers as incorporeal logoi. These textual features should not be read as an unproblematic statement directly quoted from Plato.

73.“Seminal rational principles” translates spermatikoi logoi, the formative principles here described as contained in divine fire. “Craftsmanlike” renders technikon: fire is credited with ordered productive activity.

74.The sentence explaining the changing divine names is textually awkward. Wachsmuth retains the transmitted wording and notes a correction concerning the variations of matter. The English follows its general construction without silently substituting that correction into the Greek.

75.“Images” renders eidōla; “like-parted constituents” renders homoiomereiai. The final list is translated as the survey prints it. Its unusual combination of terms should not be normalized into a more familiar reconstruction of Epicurean doctrine.

76.Wachsmuth supplies the heading from the Hermetic treatise called The Mixing Bowl or The Monad. The description deliberately denies ordinary bodily attributes to what it calls God’s “body.” The final clause follows the wording printed here, including “earth”; its relation to the preceding statement is compressed.

77.The opening names depend on “to remember,” which occurs later in the Greek. The English brings that verb forward. Hygieia personifies health; the Dioscuri are the divine brothers associated here with aid at sea. The poem calls the Seasons children of Chronos, “Time”; this is not the name Kronos, Zeus’s father. Its Doric forms are retained in Greek.

78.The printed artipois, literally “sound-footed,” is unusual with “voices”; “perfectly attuned” is an interpretive rendering of its metrical image. The first-person form hymneōmes means “let us hymn,” not “hymn” as a command to the Muses alone.

79.Wachsmuth supplies the attribution from the excerpt’s recurrence in chapter 10; that parallel also supplies the bracketed line naming places and the words about a god’s work. The final square-bracketed repetition is treated as an intrusive marginal explanation. Air speaks as a personified, all-pervading witness.

80.Epictetus, Discourses I.6.1–11, recorded by Arrian. The argument concerns the mutual suitability of things and the capacities using them; it requires gratitude as well as understanding. The supplied article ta is absorbed into “everything visible.”