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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 41

7.4 · Growth prepared for thought

Since, then, the breath in the womb did not possess the movement of animal life but the movement of growth, harmony fitted this movement together as a receptacle for the life of thought. This is without parts and unchangeable, never departing from its unchangeability. Through numbers it brings to birth and midwives what is in the womb, leading it into the outer air.¹¹²¹

7.5 · The soul’s fated association

And the soul, being very near, becomes associated with it, not through a characteristic of natural kinship but through one assigned by fate; for it has no desire to be with a body. For this reason it gives the creature coming to be, according to fate, the movement of thought and the intellectual substance of life itself. For it slips into the breath and sets it in living motion.¹¹²²

8.1 · Hermes: everlasting bodies

From Hermes, from the writings To Ammon, to Tat.¹¹²³

The lord and maker of all everlasting bodies, Tat, having made them once, made them no more and does not make them now. For he entrusted them to themselves, united them with one another, and let them move, lacking nothing, since they are everlasting. If they need anything, they will need one another, but no supply from outside, since they are immortal. For bodies that came to be through him had to possess a corresponding nature.

8.2 · The maker of mortal bodies

Our maker, however, being in a body, made us, continually makes us, and will make us as bodies that can dissolve and die. For it was not lawful for him to imitate his own maker, besides its ⟨being⟩ impossible. The one made things from the first substance, which is incorporeal; the other made us from the embodiment that gave birth. Thus, according to sound reason, those bodies are immortal, having been born from incorporeal substance; ours are dissoluble and mortal, since our matter is constituted from bodies, and they are weak and need much assistance.¹¹²⁴

8.3 · Food renews the body

How could the binding of our bodies endure even for a little while, unless it received incoming nourishment from like elements and replenished our bodies each day? For an influx of earth, water, fire, and air comes to us, renewing our bodies and holding together their dwelling. Thus we are also weak in relation to movement, unable to endure even a single day’s movements.¹¹²⁵

8.4 · Sleep and rest

Know well, my child, that if our bodies did not rest at night, we could not hold out for a single day. Hence the maker, being good and knowing all things beforehand, made sleep for the creature’s preservation, [which] greatest ... for the weariness of movement, and assigned equal time to each - or rather, more to rest.¹¹²⁶

8.5 · Sleep as an activity

Understand, my child, that the activity of sleep is very great, opposed to the soul’s activity ⟨but⟩ no less than it. For just as the soul is an activity of motion, so bodies cannot live without sleep. Sleep is a relaxation and release of the joined limbs; it acts from within, turning incoming matter into body and allocating to each part what belongs to it: water to blood, earth to ⟨the⟩ bones and marrow, air to sinews and veins, and fire to sight. That is why the body takes such great pleasure when sleep produces this pleasure.¹¹²⁷

9.1 · Plato: body as tomb and sign

From Plato’s Cratylus.

Do you mean “body”? It seems to me that this can be explained in many ways; with even a small alteration, very readily indeed. Some say that it is the soul’s “tomb,” as though the soul were buried in its present condition. Again, because the soul uses it to signify whatever it signifies, on this account too it is rightly called a “sign.”¹¹²⁸

9.2 · The body as a place of keeping

But it seems especially to have been the followers of Orpheus who gave it this name: the soul is paying a penalty for whatever it is paying a penalty for, and has this enclosure, like a prison, so that it may be kept safe. Thus this is, as its name says, ⟨the⟩ “keeping-place” of the soul until it has paid what it owes; and there is no need to alter a single letter.¹¹²⁹

10.1 · Attributed to Plutarch: Homer’s words for body

⟨From Plutarch.⟩¹¹³⁰

Homer too indicated this in the same way. He always calls the body of the living demas, as in these lines:

“For she is no worse than her

in build or stature.”

But what has lost its soul he calls sōma:

“Give my body back to my home, so that the Trojans

and the Trojans’ wives may grant me fire when I am dead.”¹¹³¹

10.2 · Bond, body, and trace

For the same thing was the soul’s bond and bodily frame while it was held fast; when it has departed, a body remains - that is, a sign and trace.¹¹³²

11.1 · Hermes: prior being and sensible nature

From Hermes.

Prior being, then, stands over all existing things and all things that truly are. For it is prior being [being] through which what is called essential being in general is understood as common to things that truly are and to existing things conceived in themselves. What is opposed to these in another respect, again taken in itself, is nature: sensible substance, containing in itself all sensible things.¹¹³³

11.2 · The sun as an image

Between these are gods of thought and perceptible gods: ... some things sharing in the intelligibles, others objects of opinion, those sharing in the gods of thought. These are images of objects of thought; for example, the sun is an image of the heavenly creator God. Just as he fashioned the whole, so the sun fashions living creatures, brings forth ⟨the⟩ plants, and governs the breaths.¹¹³⁴

1121.The shift from growth to life capable of thought is clear, but the syntax and pronoun references are not. “This” may refer to the life of thought or to harmony; the subject of the next sentence is likewise unstated. The English preserves that uncertainty. “Movement of growth” follows the editor’s blastikēn in place of the transmitted brastikēn.

1122.Here psychē, “soul,” is explicitly nominative in the printed text. Its association with the emerging creature is attributed to fate rather than desire. The contrast with the preceding growth process explains “living motion” as the higher life supplied by soul.

1123.The source heading contains both “To Ammon” and “to Tat.” The latter agrees with the address in the text, but the double heading is retained without deciding how the excerpt acquired it.

1124.The excerpt distinguishes two makers without naming the embodied one here. The unusual expression “the embodiment that gave birth” translates the printed geinamenēs sōmatōseōs; it is not silently changed into “generated matter.”

1125.Skēnos, literally a tent or dwelling, is an image for the body. The transition “thus” is difficult after the account of nourishment; the apparatus considers a different connective or a loss of text. The printed connection is retained.

1126.The phrase containing megiston, “greatest,” is corrupt, as Wachsmuth notes. Suggested repairs supply a soothing remedy or replace the word with “relief,” but the edition adopts none. The ellipsis in the English marks the broken sense, not an additional gap printed in the Greek. “Each” refers to movement and rest.

1127.The distribution of elements is the physiology of this excerpt. Neura is translated “sinews,” avoiding an assumption that the term has the precise scope of modern nerves. The final repetition of pleasure is retained as printed.

1128.Cratylus 400b-c. The speaker is Socrates. The passage plays on sōma, “body,” and sēma, which can mean both tomb and sign; sēmainein means to signify. These wordplays are explanations offered within the dialogue, not modern historical etymologies.

1129.The last explanation connects sōma with sōzesthai, “to be kept safe” or “preserved.” “Keeping-place” conveys the pun but is not the ordinary meaning of sōma. The combination of protection and confinement is present in the Greek.

1130.Wachsmuth supplies the attribution to the work transmitted under Plutarch’s name, comparing On Homer 124; it is not a manuscript heading here. The brackets preserve that editorial status.

1131.The quotations are Iliad 1.114-115 and 7.79-80. Wachsmuth’s first reference is misnumbered 1.115-116. Demas is bodily build or frame; sōma in the second quotation is the dead body. The ensuing argument turns these usages into a philosophical wordplay.

1132.The wordplay joins desmos, “bond,” with demas, “frame,” and sōma, “body,” with sēma, “sign.” It describes the corpse as the trace left by the departed soul.

1133.This fragment is difficult and textually damaged. Proon, “prior being,” and ousiotēs, “essential being,” are kept distinct. Wachsmuth prints the correction “is understood” and rejects the redundant on, “being.” The awkward distinction between “existing things” and “things that truly are” is preserved rather than resolved into an unstated system.

1134.The ellipsis represents the gap marked in the edition. No lost connective or missing subject has been reconstructed. “Gods of thought” renders noēmatikoi theoi; the feminine “these” has no secure antecedent in the surviving wording. Pneumata, “breaths,” can also carry the senses winds or spirits. Wachsmuth notes that the manuscripts insert material from chapter 45 after this excerpt; his printed arrangement is followed.