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.49.41.4–I.49.41.5

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Book I Chapter 49 · I.49.41.4–I.49.41.5

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Ancient Greek

p. 1222

41.4

I.49.41.4

ἡ δὲ κατ᾽ ἀνάγκην εἰσδύνειν ποιεῖ ⟨αὐ⟩τὴν αὐτοκίνητον εἰς τὸ ὀργανικὸν σῶμα ἤτοι ἀπὸ τοῦ παντός, ἢ τῆς ὅλης ψυχῆς, ἢ τῆς δημιουργίας πάσης.

41.5

I.49.41.5

Ἤδη τοίνυν καὶ ἡ χρῆσις τοῦ σώματος πολλῆς δεῖται διακρίσεως. Οἱ μὲν γὰρ προσεοικέναι αὐτὴν λέγουσι νεὼς κυβερνήσει, ἧς καὶ ἀπολελύσθαι χωρὶς δύναται ὁ κυβερνήτης· οἱ δὲ ὀχήματος ἐπιβάσει κοινὴν πορείαν καὶ διακομιδὴν ἡνιοχούσῃ προσοικειοῦσιν αὐτήν·

Stobaeus, Volume I: Book I Chapter 49

p. 1223

41.4 · Entry under necessity

I.49.41.4

another opinion makes ⟨it⟩, self-moving, enter the organic body under a necessity deriving either from the universe, from the universal soul, or from creation as a whole.¹⁴⁹⁶

41.5 · Using the body: helmsman and rider

I.49.41.5

The use of the body, moreover, requires careful distinctions. Some say that it resembles the steering of a ship, from which the helmsman can also be released and stand apart. Others compare it to mounting a vehicle and guiding a journey and conveyance shared with it;¹⁴⁹⁷

1496.The source supplies only the first two letters of autēn, correcting the transmitted article tēn into a pronoun referring to soul. English marks the resulting pronoun as a whole and records the partial-word restoration here. Both necessity and self-movement remain in the sentence; the translation does not remove their tension. Organikon means a body equipped with organs or instruments. The three alternatives are taken here as sources of the necessity; the compressed wording could also connect them with soul’s entry.

1497.The analogies describe different degrees of association between soul as user and body as instrument or vehicle. The first stresses the helmsman’s separability; the second stresses shared travel. The feminine participle “guiding” belongs grammatically to the act of mounting in the compressed Greek, which the English unfolds into coordinated actions.

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.