Plut. Mor., The E at Delphi 13 — Of the Word EI Engraven Over the Gate of Apollo's Temple at Delphi

Plut. Mor., The E at Delphi 13 — Of the Word EI Engraven Over the Gate of Apollo's Temple at Delphi, Plutarch; served verbatim

Having here stopped a little, and made a small pause between, I said: What a fault, O Eustrophus, were we like to have committed, having almost passed by Homer, as if he were not the first that distributed the world into five parts, who assigned the three which are in the midst to three Gods, and left the two extremes, Olympus and the Earth—of which one is the limit of things above, the other of things below—common and undistributed. But we must, as Euripides says, return to our discourse. For those who magnify the quaternary, or number of four, teach not amiss, that every solid body had its generation by reason of this. For since every solid consists in length and breadth, having withal a depth; and since before length there is extant a point, answerable to unity, and length without breadth is called a line and consists of two; and the motion of a line towards breadth exhibits also the procreation of a superficies in the number three; and the argumentation of this, when depth is added to it, goes on to a solid in the number four; it is manifest to every one, that the quaternary, having carried on Nature hitherto, and even to the perfecting of a body and the exhibiting it tangible, massy, and solid, has yet at last left it wanting the greatest accomplishment. For that which is inanimate is, to speak sincerely, orphan-like, imperfect, and fit for nothing at all, unless there is some soul to use it; but the motion or disposition introducing a soul, being a change made by the number five, adds the consummation to Nature, and has a reason so much more excellent than the quaternary, as an animal differs in dignity from that which is inanimate. Moreover, the symmetry and power of this number five, having obtained greater force, has not permitted the animate body to proceed to infinite sorts, but has exhibited five species of all things that have life. For there are Gods, Genii, and heroes, and then after them the fourth sort is men, and the fifth and last the irrational and brutish animal. Furthermore, if you divide the soul itself according to its nature, its first and most obscure part or faculty is the vegetative, the second the sensitive, then the concupiscible, after that the irascible; and having brought on and perfected Nature in the faculty of the rational, it rests in this fifth, as in the top of all.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Mor., The E at Delphi 12 contents Plut. Mor., The E at Delphi 14 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Euripides — a life Homer — a life Olympus — a candidate entry

Of the Word EI Engraven Over the Gate of Apollo's Temple at Delphi, Plutarch — translated by R. Kippax (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)