ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Oracles Ceasing 31 Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers, Plutarch; served verbatim
Having said this, I paused. And Philippus immediately cried out: Whether this be certain or not, I will not be too positive; but if we carry God beyond one world, it would more gratify me to know why we should make him the Creator only of five worlds and no more, and what proportion this number bears to that of the worlds, than to know why the word E I was inscribed upon this temple. For this is neither a triangular, a quadrate, a perfect, nor a cubic number, neither does it yield any elegancy to such as are delighted in this kind of sciences. As to what concerns the argument dawn from the number of elements, which Plato seems to have touched upon, it is obscure and improbable, and will not afford this consequence,—that, as there are formed from matter five sorts of regular bodies, which have equal angles and equal sides, and are environed with equal superficies, so there were from the beginning five worlds, made and formed of these five bodies.

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

← Plut. Mor., Oracles Ceasing 30 contents Plut. Mor., Oracles Ceasing 32 →

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

Why the Oracles Cease to Give Answers, Plutarch — translated by Robert Midgley (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)