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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 43

Chapter 43: The kinds of living creatures

How many kinds of living creatures there are, and whether all are rational and perceptible.¹¹⁵⁶

⟨Aëtius⟩: four kinds

Plato and Aristotle recognize four kinds of living creatures: terrestrial, aquatic, winged, and heavenly.¹¹⁵⁷ For the stars too are said to be living creatures, and the cosmos † and the divinely inspired one, a rational, immortal living creature.¹¹⁵⁸

1156.The printed aisthēta means “perceptible,” as distinct from aisthētika, “capable of perception,” which appears in I.45.2. The heading is retained without silently substituting the latter. Wachsmuth records a longer sequence of subordinate topics in the Laurentian index, but does not print their lost contents here.

1157.Wachsmuth supplies the attribution Aëtius V.20.1 (Diels, p. 432). The names introduce a reported position; this is not a direct quotation identified with a particular work by either philosopher.

1158.The dagger marks a corrupt clause. The English deliberately leaves its disrupted syntax visible. Diels’s proposed repair, recorded in the apparatus but not adopted in the printed text, would make the cosmos itself a living creature with divinity within it. Entheos suggests the presence of a god within; the precise construction here remains uncertain.