Plut. Mor., The E at Delphi 7 — Of the Word EI Engraven Over the Gate of Apollo's Temple at Delphi

Plut. Mor., The E at Delphi 7 — Of the Word EI Engraven Over the Gate of Apollo's Temple at Delphi, Plutarch; served verbatim

Theon having ended his speech, I think it was Eustrophus the Athenian who said to us: Do you not see how valiantly Theon vindicates logic, having, in a manner, got on the lion’s skin? So it is not right even for us—who comprehensively place all the affairs, nature, and principles of things both divine and human in number, and make it most especially the author and lord of honest and estimable things—to be at quiet, but we must willingly offer the first-fruits of our dear mathematics to the God; since we think that this letter E does not of itself differ from the other letters either in power, figure, or expression, but that it has been preferred as being the sign of that great number which has an influence over all things, called the Quinary (or Pemptas), from which the Sages have expressed the art of numbering by the verb πεμπτάζειν (signifying to account by fives). Now Eustrophus spake these things to us, not in jest, but because I did at that time studiously apply myself to the mathematics, and perhaps also in every thing to honor that saying, Nothing too much, as having been conversant in the Academy.

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

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

Theon — 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)