Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 52

20.10 · Divine and human capacities

“But if someone sought to test these matters by investigating them in practice, he would have failed to understand the difference between human and divine nature: a god both knows adequately and has the power to blend the many into one [indeed] and again dissolve the one into many; but no human being is capable of either of these, either now or at any time hereafter.”²⁰¹²

21.1 · Sight, light, and air

Aristombrotus, On Sight.

“Sight, light, and air have a natural commingling and kinship with one another * * sees clearly; and all air is seen through by means of brightness. Both sight and air happen to be * * but the eye is dark and moist, the air dark and rarefied.”²⁰¹³

21.2 · The eye’s own light

“Underlying both the eye and the air is [also] what is potentially transparent; but in the eye there is its kindred light, and in the air the light from the sun.”²⁰¹⁴

21.3 · Pressure, rubbing, and light

“That the eye, though moist, possesses its own kindred light could be shown from the following: first, from its being transparent and bright; for everything transparent and bright is not without some light * * from the eye, either through some pressure upon it or through rubbing.”²⁰¹⁵

2012.This conclusion continues beyond the parallel selection in I.16. The rejected second men remains bracketed, represented loosely by indeed because the duplicated Greek particle has no natural independent English equivalent. The claim concerns the powers of combination and dissolution in this cosmological account; it is not expanded into a general statement about every kind of practical inquiry.

2013.The passage preserves Doric forms, including opsios, phaos, poti, and eimen. Both pairs of asterisks mark gaps in the edition. The subject of sees clearly is lost or uncertain and is not invented. Opsis moves between sight and the eye; the physical description favors eye in the final contrast. The apparatus proposes transparent in the second gap, but the proposal is not inserted.

2014.The extra kai is rejected in the edition and remains marked. The contrast between potential transparency and the light associated with each medium is compressed and its precise syntax uncertain. The English preserves the printed order; it does not supply a missing explanation of how light actualizes transparency.

2015.The last gap is preserved. The apparatus suggests supplying a verb and a statement that rays issue forth, but no reconstruction is adopted. The surviving words appeal to pressure or rubbing in connection with light from the eye; they are translated as an ancient explanatory claim. Chapter 52 ends at printed p. 491 line 4; the next chapter concerns hearing.