In the fourth place, Porphyry, in his treatise On the Cave of the Nymphs, having informed us, that Numenius, the Pythagorean, considered the person of Ulysses, in the Odyssey, as the image of a man who passes in a regular manner over the stormy sea of generation, or a sensible life, and thus at length arrives at a region where tempest and seas are unknown, and finds a nation “Who ne’er knew salt, or heard the billows roar:” I have endeavoured, by the assistance of this intimation, to unfold, in the Appendix which concludes the work, the secret meaning of the allegory; and, I trust, in a way which will not be deemed by the intelligent reader either visionary or vain. With respect to the translation of the treatises, I have endeavoured faithfully to preserve both the matter and manner of the author; and have availed myself of the best editions of them, and, likewise, of all the information which appeared to me to be most important, and most appropriate, from the remarks of critics and philologists, but especially from the elucidations of philosophers. This, I trust, will be evident from a perusal of the notes which accompany the translation. Of all the other writings of Porphyry, besides those translated in this volume, few unfortunately have been preserved entire[11], the greater part of what remains of them being fragments. Among these fragments, however, there is one very important, lately found by Angelus Maius, and published by him, Mediol. 1816, 8vo. It is nearly the whole of the Epistle of Porphyry to his wife Marcella, in which I have discovered the original of many of the Sentences of the celebrated Sextus Pythagoricus[12], which have been hitherto supposed to be alone extant in the fraudulent Latin version of the Presbyter Ruffinus. And for an account of the other entire works and fragments that are extant, and also of the lost writings of Porphyry, I refer the reader to the Bibliotheca Græca of Fabricius, and to my before-mentioned History of the Restoration of the Platonic Theology; in which latter work, in speaking of Porphyry’s lost treatise on the Reascent of the Soul, I have given a long and most interesting extract relative to that treatise, from Synesius on Dreams. FOOTNOTES: [1] In Vit. Plotin. [2] See the 2d book of my translation of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, and the Introduction to my translation of Plato, and notes on the 3d volume of that translation. [3] See my translation of his Life of Pythagoras, and also of his treatise on the Mysteries. The Emperor Julian says of Iamblichus, “that he was posterior in time, but not in genius, to Plato himself.”