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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 40

53 · Underground rumbling

There are also bellowing earthquakes, which shake the earth with a roar. Often the earth bellows without an earthquake, when the wind is insufficient to shake it but, confined within it, is battered with a violent rushing noise. The winds that cause the shaking are also formed into compact masses by the mingled liquids within the earth.¹⁰³⁷

54 · Disturbances of the sea

Analogous disturbances occur in the sea as well. ⟨For⟩ the sea often opens into gaps or withdraws, and waves rush in, sometimes with a returning recoil and sometimes only with a forward thrust, as is reported of Helice and Bura. Often there are also eruptions of fire in the sea, upwellings of springs, outlets of rivers, growths of trees, and currents and eddies analogous to ⟨those⟩ of winds, some in the open seas and others in narrow channels and straits.¹⁰³⁸

55 · Tides and the enduring whole

Many ebbings and risings of the waves are said continually to follow the moon’s circuit at certain fixed times. To state the matter generally, because the elements are mingled with one another in air, earth, and sea, similar disturbances naturally occur, bringing destruction and generation to particular things while preserving the whole as ungenerated and indestructible.¹⁰³⁹

56 · The city as a comparison

⟨Chapter 5⟩ Yet someone might wonder how the cosmos, composed of contrary principles, dry and moist, cold and hot, has not long since been destroyed and perished. It would be as if people wondered how a city endures when composed of the most opposed groups: poor and rich, young and old, weak and strong, bad and good. They fail to understand that this is the most remarkable feature of civic concord: it produces one disposition from many, and a common disposition from unlike ones, embracing every nature and condition of fortune.¹⁰⁴⁰

57 · Nature’s joining of opposites

Perhaps nature seeks opposites and produces concord from them, rather than from things alike. Thus, for example, it has brought male together with female, not each with its own sex, and joined the first concord through opposites rather than through likenesses.¹⁰⁴¹

58 · Painting, music, and letters

Art, too, seems to imitate nature in doing the same. Painting mixes the qualities of white and black, yellow and red colors, and produces images in agreement with their originals. Music mixes high and low, long and short notes in different sounds and produces a single harmony. The art of letters combines vowels and consonants and constructs its entire craft from them.¹⁰⁴²

59 · Heraclitus on combination

This very thing was said by Heraclitus the obscure: “You could join wholes and not-wholes, what converges and what diverges, what sings together ⟨and⟩ what sings apart; from all things one, and from one all things.”¹⁰⁴³

60 · One harmony of the whole

In this way a single harmony has ordered the constitution of all things, heaven and earth and the entire cosmos, through the blending of the most contrary principles. Dry is mixed with moist, cold with hot, light with heavy, and straight with curved. The whole earth … and aether, sun, moon, and all heaven have been ordered by one power extending through everything,¹⁰⁴⁴

61 · Agreement and preservation

fashioning the entire cosmos from unmixing and unlike things, air, earth, fire, and water, enclosing it within a single spherical surface, compelling the most contrary natures within it to agree with one another, and through them securing the preservation of the whole.¹⁰⁴⁵

62 · Equal powers

The cause of this preservation ⟨on the one hand⟩ is the ⟨agreement of the elements⟩; the cause of agreement ⟨in turn⟩ is their equal share and the fact that no ⟨one⟩ of them has greater power than another. Heavy things offer an equal counter-tension to light things, and hot things to their opposites. Nature thus teaches in the greater things that equality in some way preserves concord, and concord preserves the cosmos, begetter of all things and supremely beautiful.¹⁰⁴⁶

63 · Order and beauty

For what nature could be better than this? Whatever anyone might name is a part of it. Everything beautiful and orderly bears its name, being called “ordered” from the word “cosmos.”¹⁰⁴⁷

64 · Celestial measure and the seasons

What particular thing could equal the order in heaven and the motion of the stars, sun, and moon, moving ⟨in⟩ the most exact measures from age to age? What reliability could match that which the beautiful and fruitful seasons of the universe maintain, bringing summers and winters in due order, ⟨both⟩ days and nights to complete month and year?¹⁰⁴⁸

65 · The cosmos and living things

The cosmos is unsurpassed in magnitude, swiftest in motion, most far-shining in brightness, and ageless and imperishable in power. It has distinguished the natures of creatures of sea, land, and air, and measured their lives by its own motions. From it all living creatures receive breath and possess life.¹⁰⁴⁹

66 · Extraordinary events within order

From it, too, extraordinary changes are accomplished in an orderly way, as winds of every kind collide, thunderbolts fall from heaven, and exceptional storms break out. Through these processes moisture is squeezed out and the fiery element is vented, bringing the whole into concord and establishing it there.¹⁰⁵⁰

67 · The enduring earth

The earth, luxuriant with plants [adorned] of every kind, abounding in streams and borne about by animals,¹⁰⁵¹ bringing forth, nourishing, and receiving everything in season, bearing countless forms and grasses, likewise preserves its ageless nature, although [earth] is shaken by earthquakes, inundated by floods, and burned by fires in particular places. All these events seem to work to its good and secure its preservation through all time.¹⁰⁵²

68 · Purification and mutual restraint

For when the earth is shaken, the intrusions of wind rush out, finding vents through ⟨the⟩ fissures, as was said above. Cleansed by rains, it washes away everything unhealthy; swept by breezes, it is purified both below and above its surface. Flames warm what is frozen, and frosts abate the flames.¹⁰⁵³

69 · Generation and destruction in balance

Of particular things, some come into being, some reach their prime, and some perish. Generations counterbalance destructions, while destructions lighten the burden of generations. A single preservation achieved through them all [but], as they continually oppose one another and now prevail, now are prevailed over, keeps the whole imperishable through all time.¹⁰⁵⁴

1037.The distinction is between audible rumbling with and without perceptible shaking. “Mingled” translates the printed kekramenōn; the parallel reads a word meaning hidden. The closing claim about compacted wind belongs to the account’s physical mechanism.

1038.The comparison extends the preceding terrestrial phenomena into the sea. The reference to Helice and Bura illustrates an overwhelming incursion of water. “Growths of trees” follows dendrōn ekphyseis without specifying what organisms or appearances the author intended.

1039.This closes the physical catalogue and introduces the argument of the next section. Change and destruction affect the parts; the cosmos as a whole is said neither to come into being nor to perish. The lunar relation of tides is stated without a detailed mechanism.

1040.Ethnē here means groups or classes within a city, not separate nations. Homonoia, concord, names a unity that accommodates differences; it becomes the governing comparison for the coexistence of contrary elements.

1041.The example concerns the joining of sexes in generation as an analogy for natural composition. “Perhaps” retains the author’s qualification as he moves from civic concord to nature.

1042.The examples distinguish contrasts in color, pitch, duration, and speech sounds. “Originals” interprets proēgoumenois as the models represented. Aphōna, literally voiceless letters, is rendered “consonants” in contrast with vowels.

1043.The translation follows the printed synapseias, “you could join,” rather than the noun synapsies, “connections,” found in another reading noted in the apparatus. The supplied “and” restores the parallel pair. Wachsmuth identifies the quotation as fragment 59 in Bywater and 37 in Schleiermacher; their numbers belong to those editions. The musical verbs preserve the contrast underlying concord and discord.

1044.A gap is printed after “the whole earth.” The parallel includes the sea, but the missing words are not supplied here. The English divides the long construction to make its contrasts readable while continuing the sentence into the following unit.

1045.The apparent paradox is deliberate: what is naturally unlike or resistant to mixture contributes to a single ordered whole through the power that joins it. “Preservation” renders sōtēria in its cosmological sense.

1046.Several missing words are restored from De mundo. Isomoiria means an equal share or apportionment; the following clause explains it through the balance of powers. The argument concerns opposed forces preserving one another, not identical properties or an absence of change.

1047.The argument turns again on kosmos, order, adornment, or the universe, and the related verb kosmein, to order or adorn. English cannot reproduce the common root without retaining the Greek name.

1048.The source supplements en, the ending tina of hēntina, and te. The first and third can be shown separately in English; the supplemented relative pronoun is rendered as a whole by “that which.” Apseudeia, literally freedom from falsehood, is the unfailing reliability of the cycles.

1049.The subject throughout is the cosmos. Its motions measure living beings’ lives through the temporal cycles just praised. Psychē can mean soul or life; “possess life” fits the pairing with receiving breath here.

1050.The argument now includes violent events within cosmic order. The same storms described earlier as physical disturbances are presented as processes that restore a balance of moisture and fire.

1051.“Borne about by animals” renders the problematic printed periochoumenē zōiois. Wachsmuth asks whether the text once read perioikoumenē, “inhabited,” but does not adopt that change. The strange wording is therefore retained and identified as a textual difficulty, not explained as a doctrine that animals carry the earth.

1052.The bracketed “adorned” and repeated “earth” are rejected in the base edition. “Grasses” follows its poas, where the parallel De mundo has pathē, affections or experiences. “Receiving” balances producing and nourishing, as things return to the earth.

1053.The account presents shaking, rain, wind, heat, and cold as reciprocal remedies within nature. “Warm” follows Usener’s correction iainousin as printed; the apparatus records a different transmitted verb.

1054.The balance metaphor joins anasēkoun, counterweighing or compensating, with kouphizein, lightening. The final repeated de is rejected. The unusual to men ... to de is taken temporally, “now ... now,” in the reciprocal sequence of prevailing and yielding; the parallel explicitly has tote, “at one time.” The excerpt ends here, at the end of De mundo chapter 5.