Stobaeus, Volume I

Name: Stobaeus, Volume I
Author: John Stobaeus

Greek with an independent English translation.

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Stobaeus, Volume IBook I Chapter 49 · I.49.44.39–I.49.44.40

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Book I Chapter 49 · I.49.44.39–I.49.44.40

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Ancient Greek

p. 1276

44.39

I.49.44.39

ὅσαι τὰς δειλαίας ἡμᾶς ἁμαρτίαι περιμένουσιν· ὅσα διὰ τὰ πονηρὰ τῶν ἐλπίδων πράξομεν, ἵνα τῷ ὑδαρεῖ καὶ ταχὺ διαλύτῳ σώματι πορίζωμεν τὰ ἐπιτήδεια· ὀφθαλμοὶ τὰς οὐκέτι τοῦ θεοῦ ψυχὰς χωρήσουσιν ἄλογοι, καὶ παντελῶς μικρὸν τῷ ἐν τούτοις ὑγρῷ [καὶ] κύκλῳ τὸν ἑαυτῶν πρόγονον οὐρανὸν ὁρῶσαι στενάζομεν ἀεί, ἔστι δ᾽ ὅτε καὶ οὐ βλέψομεν [ἔνθεν Ὀρφεύς·

τῷ λαμπρῷ βλέπομεν, τοῖς δ᾽ ὄμμασιν οὐδὲν ὁρῶμεν]·

44.40

I.49.44.40

ἄθλιαι γὰρ κατεκρίθημεν καὶ τὸ βλέπειν ἡμῖν οὐκ ἀντικρὺς ἐχαρίσθη, ὅτι χωρὶς τοῦ φωτὸς ἡμῖν τὸ ὁρᾶν οὐκ ἐδόθη· πόροι τοίνυν καὶ οὐκέτι εἰσὶν ὀφθαλμοί. ὡς δὲ καὶ τῶν συγγενῶν φυσώντων ἐν ἀέρι πνευμάτων ἀκούουσαι τλημόνως οἴσομεν, ὅτι μὴ συμπνέομεν αὐτοῖς. οἶκος ἡμᾶς ἀντὶ τοῦ μεταρσίου κόσμου τούτου ὁ βραχὺς περιμένει καρδίας ὄγκος·

Stobaeus, Volume I: Book I Chapter 49

p. 1277

44.39 · The lament over bodily sight

I.49.44.39

How many errors await us wretched creatures! How much we shall do because of the wickedness of our hopes, to procure necessities for the watery body that is so quickly dissolved! Unreasoning eyes will contain souls that no longer belong to the god. Seeing our own forefather, heaven, as exceedingly small through the moist [and] circle within those eyes, we groan forever; and sometimes we shall not see at all [hence Orpheus:

We see by the bright light, but with our eyes we see nothing].¹⁵⁵⁰

44.40 · The narrow instruments of embodied life

I.49.44.40

For we have been condemned in misery, and sight has not been granted to us outright, since we have not been given the power to see without light. They are therefore passages, no longer eyes. And how painfully we shall bear hearing our kindred breaths blowing in the air, because we do not breathe together with them! Instead of this world aloft, the small bulk of a heart awaits us as our house.¹⁵⁵¹

1550.The soul’s complaint speaks of anticipated bodily limitations as well as present grief. The printed “no longer the god’s” is retained, rather than adopting proposed rearrangements. “As exceedingly small” takes mikron with heaven, describing its apparent size through the bodily eye; the moist circle is the eye’s seeing part. Both the rejected conjunction and the entire rejected Orpheus quotation remain bracketed. Wachsmuth’s parenthetical reference reads “fragm. monad. 10 p. 504 Herm.”; this editorial bibliography is recorded here, outside the Greek speech.

1551.The distinction between sight and mere poroi, passages or channels, belongs to the lament: bodily vision depends on external light. The printed phusōntōn is retained as “blowing,” without changing it to a proposed form. Pneumata can evoke both breaths and spirits; “kindred breaths” preserves its connection with “breathe together.” The heart is described as the soul’s cramped house in this account, without endorsement of a modern anatomical claim.

About This Reading Edition

Stobaeus gathered Greek philosophy and poetry for his son Septimius. Volume I presents the dedication testimony, On Arithmetic, Book I through chapter 60, and the ancient contents of all four books. This complete bilingual edition includes an introduction and 2,117 explanatory notes.

Historical Text and Translation

The Greek follows Curt Wachsmuth’s 1884 Volume I, checked against the supplied scan. Gaps, lost-chapter headings, and uncertain attributions remain visible. Chapter 2 includes a labeled proposed reconstruction. The appendix outlines Books I–IV; the full texts of Books II–IV are outside this volume. Reader pages preserve the companion PDF’s numbering.

About Diotimos Editions

Diotimos Editions prepared this independent English translation directly from the Greek. Prose and verse retain their distinct forms, with mixed passages preserving their quoted verse. Every passage is paired with its Greek and identified by the edition’s reference number. All 2,117 notes remain linked to their passages, with continuous numbering across the introduction and text.

Rights

Stobaeus’s ancient Greek work and Wachsmuth’s 1884 printing are in the public domain. The independent English translation, introduction, and explanatory notes are © 2026 Diotimos Editions. The complete supplied edition is available as PDF, EPUB, Word, and Markdown. The PDF retains the fixed page locations used by the companion lexicon.