Breathing

Use in the book

The Timaeus account begins from the absence of void: outgoing breath displaces neighboring air, and a continuous circuit fills the spaces it leaves. Heat changes the direction of this movement through the two outlets of mouth and nostrils and the bodily surface. The same oscillation later carries the fire that divides and distributes nourishment. Breathing is thus embedded in a general explanation of material movement.

Places to read

1. I.60.1.1The account starts from displacement in a world without void.
2. I.60.1.8Alternating heat and movement produce the breathing cycle.
3. I.60.1.16The cycle contributes to the distribution of food.
4. I.25.1cThe sun’s fire is described as breathing through an opening.

Translation in this edition

“Breathing” names the process; “breath” or “spirit” renders pneuma where appropriate. Difficult directional language remains explained in the edition’s notes.

Breathing out beyond physiology

Ekpnoē is an outward breath or exhalation. In the Anaximandrean solar report at I.25.1c, fire breathes through the opening of a great wheel, and closing the opening produces an eclipse. The vocabulary extends a familiar action to a cosmological model. It does not establish that the sun is an animal with lungs.

Use in the book

The first movement is blood’s withdrawal from the outer region. Aither then rushes inward through available passages. When blood returns, breath is driven outward. The surface must therefore admit one material while retaining another: the openings keep blood enclosed but provide a way through for aither. Movement and selective passage, not merely the presence of organs, explain the process.

The long clepsydra comparison allows the audience to follow the alternation in a familiar vessel. A girl closes an opening with her hand, immerses the bronze object, and releases the closure. Trapped air can stop water from entering; when the air is permitted to leave, water enters. Conversely, a closed upper passage can keep water from running out until air is admitted. The body is then revisited: blood retreats, aither comes down, blood advances, and an equal quantity of breath goes back out.

The comparison works because the constituents occupy space and their movements constrain one another. The poem does not say that air is a weightless absence. It calls the air inside the vessel a mass and gives the entering aither pressure-like, surging activity. These are legitimate observations about the ancient explanation; a modern physiological equivalence would go further. The passage neither describes oxygen uptake nor supplies a complete lung-and-heart circulation.

There is also an important anatomical caution within this edition. Its opening speaks of pipes at the outermost body, but the next lines translate the pierced ends as nostrils. A reader should not resolve that tension by silently deciding that the entire passage is exclusively cutaneous or exclusively nasal. The printed wording securely attests passages, blood containment, and alternation with aither; a fuller determination requires interpretation beyond its plain English.

B102 connects breathing with smell. That brief statement helps explain why the respiration passage matters to perception as well as bodily maintenance. It does not make the clepsydra an all-purpose model for every sense. The eye and ear receive different images appropriate to their particular activities.

The movement is also expressed through strikingly different scales of imagery. Minute bodily passages are described with the language of pipes and furrows, while incoming aither behaves like a raging surge. In the vessel, an opening becomes a gate and its narrow connection a harsh-sounding neck. These figures organize the reader's attention: the smallness of a route does not prevent a materially effective flow through it. The argument repeatedly alternates between the bounded structure and the moving constituent.

The final equality is another feature worth preserving. The outward movement of breath answers the inward movement, rather than being a second independent episode. This gives the process a balanced, reciprocal form. It does not amount to a numerical respiratory measurement, because no units, rate, or experimental series are stated. The poem instead establishes the intelligibility of recurrent exchange through a comparison whose successive states the listener can mentally follow.

Places to read

1. B 100.1–8, 22–2523The bodily mechanism frames the vessel comparison.
2. B 100.9–21The clepsydra sequence displays the reciprocal movement of air and water.
3. B 102Breathing and smells are jointly allotted to all things.
4. B 101Nostrils investigate material traces left by beasts.

Translation in this edition

The translation’s “water-catcher” identifies the illustrative vessel without treating it as a timekeeping clock. Its bodily “nostrils” also deserves notice beside the phrase “outermost body”; neither wording should be omitted to make the physiology look simpler than the source.

Use in the book

Aëtius presents respiration through reciprocal movements of moist, fiery, airy, and bloody constituents. In the account of first breathing, moisture withdraws from newborn creatures and external airy material enters opened vessels. Thereafter innate heat moving outward expels the airy constituent, while its inward retreat permits re-entry. In the account of breathing now, blood moves toward the surface and presses air out through the nostrils; as blood returns, air enters the spaces it has left. This gives the body a displacement mechanism in which one material's withdrawal is another's opportunity to enter. It is not a description of pulmonary gas exchange. Nor does it require us to declare the nostrils unimportant: the report explicitly names them as the outward route. Aëtian compression and repairs to inward/outward wording make the exact sequence less certain than the polished translation may imply. The final reminder of a clepsydra indicates an explanatory comparison; the complete experiment or simile is not reproduced in this testimony. Its cross-reference to B100 points beyond the present excerpt. The relation between primordial heat-driven breathing and current blood-driven breathing is an important internal distinction, not an inconsistency to be eliminated automatically.

Places to read

1. A 74 (testimony)Aëtius. Distinguishes first respiration from the breathing now prevailing, describes reciprocal displacement, and recalls the clepsydra.
2. A 74 (apparatus)Bernadakis and Diels, apparatus. Record repairs and deletions affecting the direction and subjects of the movements.

Translation in this edition

The inward reading entos replaces manuscript ektos at a crucial point. The edition's description of the nostrils as incidental, and its claim that B100 is the unique ancient controlled demonstration in verse, are commentary rather than conclusions established by this notice.