APPENDIX TO DE AETERNITATE MUNDI
§ 12. Ocellus. The work attributed to Ocellus consists of four chapters. The first argues the indestructibility of the Cosmos and it is in this that the analogies to the De Aet. are mostly to be found. The most striking is in the eleventh section where he argues that the destroying cause must come either from within or from without and both of these are impossible. This is to the same effect as De Aet. 20–24 and in one place there is a certain similarity of language, ὁ κόσμος ἄγει τὰ πάντα μέρη § 22, beside ἄγεται τὰ ἄλλα πάντα ὑπὸ τοῦ παντός of Ocellus. It has far less detail than Philo and in fact is more a statement than an argument. Again i. 9 makes much the same point as De Aet. 70, namely that the world causes other things to exist and therefore causes itself to exist. Thirdly, §§ 12–13 describe shortly the transmutation of elements and there is a considerable analogy to De Aet. 107–110 and in both we have the same phrase κύκλον άμείβειν. The second chapter deals with γένεσις and is largely a reproduction of Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione. The third short chapter asserts the existence from everlasting of the human race, arguing to much the same effect as Critolaus in De Aet. 55. Chapter four is ethical; the view that the generation of mankind is from the first from mankind and not from the earth is declared to demand sexual purity and continence.
A curious point about the book is that the quotations from it in Stobaeus are in Doric while our manuscripts are in ordinary Greek. The presumption is that it was originally written in Doric, probably to give it the appearance of a heritage from the early days of Pythagoreanism, and afterwards translated into ordinary Greek to make it more acceptable to the general reader.
§ 13. Gods sprung from gods, etc. Archer-Hind (who translates “Gods of gods”) and others take this as an intensive expression like κακὰ κακῶν and ἄρρητʼ ἀρρήτων in Sophocles, but these do not seem to me quite analogous. The other rendering however is also very difficult. The words which follow in the MSS. of Plato ὧν ἐγὼ δημιουργὸς πατήρ τε ἔργων ἃ διʼ ἐμοῦ γενόμενα ἄλυτα ἐμοῦ γε μὴ ἐθελόντος are rendered by Archer-Hind “whose creator am I and father of works which by me coming into being are indissoluble save by my will.” Philo omits not only ὧν but ἃ διʼ ἐμοῦ γενόμενα.
Bernays held that these words are a gloss in Plato, and I see that the Loeb edition and apparently others omit them, quoting Philo as their authority. I do not think that the omission by Philo is a strong argument for their spuriousness. The translation given above making ὧν ἔργων=ἔργων ἃ would of course be impossible with the ordinary reading.
I think it is an alternative possibility that Philo did omit ὧν but actually wrote ἃ before ἄλυτα which has fallen out. In this case he may have taken the words as “Gods, of gods I am the maker (cf. θεοπλάστην below) and father of works which,” etc.
The μὴ δεθὲν for δὴ δεθὲν is of course a mere scribe’s blunder. The same uncertainty between θέλοντος and μὴ θέλοντος is found in the MSS. both of Plato and Philo, but I cannot feel with Archer-Hind that the sense is as good with the positive as with the negative.
§ 21. Opposite extremes. The use of ἐναντιότης for a pair of opposites or for one member of such a pair, or for the condition of such a member, is too well supported by Philo’s use of it, particularly in Quis Rerum, to allow us to take the phrase ταῖς ἄλλαις ἐναντ. as=“the other hostile forces.” So too Ocellus in chapter two of his treatise taken, as stated in the last note, from Aristotle, De Gen. et Corr. Here the ἐναντιότητες or at least the primary ones are hot and cold, wet and dry. Fire is hot and dry, air hot and wet, water wet and cold, earth dry and cold. When one opposite overcomes the other, e.g. the wetness of water overcomes the dryness of fire, fire changes to air, and it is the overcoming of one opposite by the other which brings about the transmutation of the elements described by Philo, §§ 107 ff., but this conversion of one element into another is quite distinct from the causes of destruction of the world. Philo clearly has in mind the passage from the Timaeus translated in § 26. I suspect that he thought that when Plato follows “hot things and cold” by “all that have strong powers” he refers to the other ἐναντιότητες: if so I think he misunderstood Plato.
§ 23. (Transposition of the text.) Between ἄδεκτον ἔσται and κατὰ τὸ παντελὲς the MSS. insert a mass of sections from § 53 ὑποστῆναι καθʼ ἑαυτὸν to § 77 νέος ἦν συνεπιγραψὰμενος. This no doubt happened because the leaves containing these sections were torn off and then replaced wrongly. The result was confusion at all three places, §§ 23, 53, 77. ἄδεκτον ἔσται ὑποστῆναι καθʼ ἑαυτὸν, κτλ., τὸ μηδὲ χρόνον τῷ δόγματι, κτλ. and αυνεπιγραψὰμενος κοτὸ τὸ παντελὲς, κτλ. are all equally unintelligible. Mangey of course perceived this but supposed that at each place words had dropped out which would have supplied the necessary connexion. Bernays’ discovery that the confusion was caused by the displacement of these sections was a brilliant feat of scholarship and is incontrovertible. The words fit in exactly where they are now placed and nothing needs to be added. In this way the transposition stands on a different footing from that made by Cohn in De Vit. Cont. p. 144 of this volume, where several words have to be added to make the passage coherent.
§§ 25 and 38. (Text of quotations from Plato.) In § 25 besides a few minor differences there are as stated in the footnotes three departures of some importance in the MSS. of Philo from the accepted text of Plato. In the first, ὡς τὰ τῷ for ὡς συστάτῳ, it must be noted that συστάτῳ though accepted by recent editors is a correction. The MSS. for the most part have συνιστὰς (-ὰν) τῷ σώματι, out of which Stallbaum produced ἃ συνιστᾷ τὰ σώματα. If συστάτῳ is accepted the accommodation of τὰ τῷ to this is justifiable, since that makes no sense and cannot have been written by Philo. The second case of λυπεῖ for λύει is different, for λυπεῖ makes good sense. But there is no reason to doubt that Plato wrote λύει or that Philo meant to reproduce Plato’s words as exactly as possible. He often indeed does not reproduce quotations exactly, but the substitution of λυπεῖ for λύει is as likely to be due to a scribe as to him, and it seems to me a doubtful point whether we should not make the correction here as Mangey and the earlier editions did. Bernays indeed supports λυπεῖ on the grounds that it gives a preferable meaning, but surely that is irrelevant unless he means that the text of Plato should be emended accordingly. In the third case of θεὸς for ἓν we have in θεὸς an interpolation which Philo might naturally make by mistake, and though ἓν is of some importance as echoing πρὸς δὲ τόυτοις ἓν above this might easily escape notice, and the text is best left as it stands. In § 38 the change of the three masculines, αὐτὸς … παρέχων … πάσχων, to the corresponding neuters is necessitated by the neuters in the last sentence. But the addition of ἄλλων is perhaps unnecessary and is not accepted by Cumont and Bernays.
§ 48. ἰδίως ποιόν, etc. Zeller, Stoics and Epicureans, p. 100, says of ποιόν that it “comprises all those essential attributes by means of which a definite character is impressed on otherwise indeterminate matter. If the definite character belongs to a group or class it is called a common form κοινῶς ποιόν, or if it be something peculiar and distinctive it is called a distinctive form ἰδίως ποιόν.” There are a good many passages quoted in S.V.F. which contain the phrase, though they do not I think throw much light on the meaning. To them we may add Diog. Laert. vii. 138, where one definition of the Cosmos is ὁ ἰδίως ποιὸς τῆς τῶν ὅλων οὐσίας, which Hicks translates the “individual being qualifying the whole of substance” (perhaps rather “the substance of the all”). I do not feel that either this or Zeller’s “distinctive form” conveys to me any clear meaning. On the formula stated here that “two ἰδίως ποιοί or ποιά cannot exist on the same substratum,” Zeller says that it follows as a matter of course since ἰδίως ποιός distinguishes a thing from every other. As to the argument based on it Bernays in the dissertation which precedes his commentary says frankly that we cannot expect to understand it, but in the commentary itself he does give an explanation which I do not understand. We can see however that, assuming as in the typical case that Theon is destroyed when Dion’s foot is amputated, the application which Philo makes is logical or at least intelligible. The Cosmos is a composite being with body and soul, the soul being Providence. In the conflagration when the Cosmos loses its bodily part it is on the same analogy not the Cosmos which is destroyed but its soul.
It may possibly help us to compare the similar argument in Plutarch Comm. Not. chapter 36, 1077 B where we have the Cosmos, identified with Zeus, as the whole man with Providence for its soul. What happens at the conflagration according to the Stoics is that Zeus alone among the gods is not destroyed, cf. De Aet. 81, and passes over or withdraws (ἀναχωρεῖ = ἀνέδραμε here) into Providence and they (i.e. the Cosmos and Providence) being brought together (ὁμοῦ γενομένους) both continue to exist on the single οὐσία of ether (does this mean that as in the διακόσμηοις the Cosmos was the ἰδίως … ποιὸς τῆς οὐσίας τῶν ὅλων now that τὰ ὅλα are resolved into ether, this has both Zeus and Providence for its ἰδίως ποιός?), and this is supposed to contradict the doctrine of δύο ἰδίως ποιά, etc. The only thing I can claim to gather with certainty from the two passages is that the Peripatetics argued that the Stoic doctrine of the ἐκπύρωσις contradicted their own doctrine of δύο ἰδίως ποιά, etc.
Two minor points are: (1) the MSS. reading εἰδοποιοὺς is retained by Bernays though he clearly takes it as equal to ἰδίως ποιούς. He curiously says that this is not to be put down to the scribes, but shows that the source is Peripatetic, since Aristotle uses the term as=“specific.” (2) The treatise Περὶ αὐξανομένων is not mentioned in Diogenes Laertius’s catalogue of Chrysippus’s writings. The subject no doubt is what Plutarch 1083 B calls ὁ λόγος περὶ αὐξήσεως and deals with the relation of increases and diminutions to identity of personality. Plutarch represents the Stoics as holding that these changes are wrongly called in familiar language increase and diminution and are rather γενέσεις and φθοραί.
§ 127. Fire … lame. This allegorical interpretation of the post-Homeric story that Hephaestus became lame when thrown from heaven to earth comes originally from Heracleitus according to a scholiast on Il. i. 590. It is also alluded to by Plutarch, De facie in orbe lunae 922 A and Cornutus 19, who says that fire cannot advance ἄνευ ξύλων nor a lame man ἄνευ ξυλώδους βάκτρου (see quotations in Cohn). Cumont’s emendation given in the footnotes is ingenious in the sense that Ἥφαιστος might easily have been lost before ᾗ φασι, and Διὸς σκηρ. corrupted to διὸ σκηρ., but is surely impossible. He cites the passage from the scholiast to support it, but this only mentions Zeus to equate him with the heavenly fire which is contrasted with the earthly. He also declares that ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ would be καθʼ ἑαυτὸν if taken as Bernays and the translation take it, but see § 20 above, and De Vit. Cont. 4 and 5. νομήν (“feeding on”) for μονήν is also unnecessary and indeed less suitable to the context.
§ 129. Free their heads. So I think rather than “lift their heads.” ἀνακύπτω in the common sense of emerging from water suggests coming up to breathe, cf. ἀνανήξασθαι Spec. Leg. iii. 3. The snakes might conceivably, even though crushed by the elephants, still have their heads free, and it is this that is negatived here.
§ 143. (ἐρωτάω=“state a proposition.”) Another example of this use, which may be much commoner than the lexicon suggests, occurs in the passage of Plutarch mentioned in the note on ἰδίως ποιόν above, ὁ περὶ αὐξήσεως λόγος … ἠρώτηται ὑπʼ Ἐπιχάρμου.
Sections 147 ff. I take the opportunity of pointing out a serious omission in the notes in vol. vi. In De Abr. 1 Philo says that the Book of Genesis tells how fire and water wrought the greatest destructions on what is on the earth. In Mos. ii. 53, speaking of the punishment of the wicked, he says that the most forceful elements in the universe, fire and water, fell upon them, so that as the times revolved some perished by water, others by conflagration. He then mentions the deluge itself and continues “at a later time when the race sprung from the remnant had again become very populous, he determined to destroy them by fire,” and we then have a short account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. I did not at the time perceive the close connexion of these passages with the Timaeus and the Laws. The connexion is clearer still in Mos. ii. 263, where we are told that the men had lost count of the sabbath by reason of the constant destructions by fire and water. Philo evidently considers the deluge and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as examples of the destructions described by Plato. Whether he supposed that they were only examples, as the last passage suggests, and that other unrecorded visitations had occurred, we cannot tell. At any rate he would hold that what truth there was in Plato’s story came from Moses.