“I must speak to you in enigmas, so that if the tablet [Sidenote: p. 299.] should suffer in any of its leaves on sea or land, whoso reads may not understand.[157] For things are thus. As regards the king of all, all things are his, and all are for his sake, and he is the cause of all that is fair. A second (cause exists) concerning secondary things and a third concerning those things which come third.[158] But respecting the king himself there is nothing of this kind of which I have spoken. But after this the soul seeks to learn of what quality these are, since it looks towards the things which are germane to itself, of which it has nought sufficiently. This is, O son of Dionysius and Doris, your question as to what is the cause of all evils. But it is rather that anxiety about this is inborn, and if one does not remove it, one will never hit upon the truth.[159] But what is wonderful about it, hear. For there are men who have heard these things, able to learn and able to remember,[160] and who have yet grown old while straining to form a complete judgment. They say that what (once) appeared believable is now unbelievable, and that what was then unbelievable was then the opposite. Looking therefore to [Sidenote: p. 300.] this, beware, lest you repent what has unworthily fallen from you. Wherefore I have written none of these things, nor is there anything (upon them) signed Plato, nor will there ever be. But the sayings now attributed to Socrates were (said by him)[161] when he was young and fair.”[162] (Now) Valentinus having chanced upon these (lines) conceived the king of all, of whom Plato spoke, to be Father and Bythos and the primal source of all the Aeons.[163] And when Plato spoke of the second (cause) concerning secondary things, Valentinus assumed that the secondary things were all the Aeons being within the limit of the Pleroma and the third (cause) concerning the third things, he assumed to be the whole arrangement without the limit and (outside) the Pleroma. And this Valentinus made plain in the fewest words in a psalm, beginning from below and not as Plato did from above, in these words:-- [Sidenote: p. 301.] “I behold all things hanging from air, I perceive all things upheld by spirit, Flesh hanging from soul, Soul standing forth from air, And air hanging from aether, But fruits borne away from Bythos But the embryo from the womb.”[164]