Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life: Accompanied by Fragments of the Ethical Writings of certain Pythagoreans in the Doric dialect; and a collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobaeus and others, which are omitted by Gale in his Opuscula Mythologica, and have not been noticed by any editorIamblichus
Philosophy
Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras, or Pythagoric Life: Accompanied by Fragments of the Ethical Writings of certain Pythagoreans in the Doric dialect; and a collection of Pythagoric Sentences from Stobaeus and others, which are omitted by Gale in his Opuscula Mythologica, and have not been noticed by any editor
Iamblichus
Ethics, Ancient; Philosophers -- Greece -- Biography; Philosophy, Ancient; Pythagoras; Pythagoras and Pythagorean school
This is the 14th Symbol in the Protreptics of Iamblichus, whose
explanation of it is as follows: “This symbol exhorts us to the exercise
of justice, to the honoring equality and moderation in an admirable
degree, and to the knowledge of justice as the most perfect virtue, to
which the other virtues give completion, and without which none of the
rest are of any advantage. It also admonishes us, that it is proper to
know this virtue not in a careless manner, but through theorems and
scientific demonstrations. But this knowledge is the business of no
other art and science than the Pythagoric philosophy alone, which in a
transcendent degree honors disciplines before every thing else.”
The following extract also from my Theoretic Arithmetic, (p. 194.), will
in a still greater degree elucidate this symbol. The information
contained in it is derived from the anonymous author of a very valuable
work entitled Θεολογουμενα Αριθμητικης _Theologumena Arithmeticæ_, and
which has lately been reprinted at Leipsic, “The Pythagoreans called the
pentad providence and justice, because it equalizes things unequal,
justice being a medium between excess and defect, just as 5 is the
middle of all the numbers that are equally distant from it on both sides
as far as to the decad, some of which it surpasses, and by others is
surpassed, as may be seen in the following arrangement:
1. 4. 7.
2. 5. 8.
3. 6. 9.
“For here, as in the middle of the beam of a balance, 5 does not depart
from the line of the equilibrium, while one scale is raised, and the
other is depressed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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