Plut. _de Exilio_, 607 f. The words merely mean that he used to draw
mathematical figures relating to the quadrature of the circle on the
prison floor.
Footnote 680:
_Apol._ 26 d-e. The expression βιβλία perhaps implies that it filled
more than one roll.
Footnote 681:
Simplicius also speaks of βιβλία.
[Sidenote: The Fragments.]
126. I give the fragments according to the text and arrangement of
Diels, who has made some of them completely intelligible for the first
time.
(1) All things were together infinite both in number and in smallness;
for the small too was infinite. And, when all things were together,
none of them could be distinguished for their smallness. For air and
aether prevailed over all things, being both of them infinite; for
amongst all things these are the greatest both in quantity and
size.[682] R. P. 151.
(2) For air and aether are separated off from the mass that surrounds
the world, and the surrounding mass is infinite in quantity. R. P.
_ib._
(3) Nor is there a least of what is small, but there is always a
smaller; for it cannot be that what is should cease to be by being
cut.[683] But there is also always something greater than what is
great, and it is equal to the small in amount, and, compared with
itself, each thing is both great and small. R. P. 159 a.
(4) And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are
contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting,
seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours
(R. P. _ib._), and that men have been formed in them, and the other
animals that have life, and that these men have inhabited cities and
cultivated fields as with us; and that they have a sun and a moon and
the rest as with us; and that their earth brings forth for them many
things of all kinds of which they gather the best together into their
dwellings, and use them (R. P. 160 b). Thus much have I said with
regard to separating off, to show that it will not be only with us
that things are separated off, but elsewhere too.
But before they were separated off, when all things were together, not
even was any colour distinguishable; for the mixture of all things
prevented it—of the moist and the dry, and the warm and the cold, and
the light and the dark, and of much earth that was in it, and of a
multitude of innumerable seeds in no way like each other. For none of
the other things either is like any other. And these things being so,
we must hold that all things are in the whole. R. P. 151.[684]
(5) And those things having been thus decided, we must know that all
of them are neither more nor less; for it is not possible for them to
be more than all, and all are always equal. R. P. 151.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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