so there is nothing against usage in calling it an “age of man”. You allow yourselves, I believe, that Hesiod means human life by “the age”. Is it not so?’ Demetrius agreed. ‘Well, [Sidenote: B] but this is also clear,’ said Cleombrotus, ‘that the same words are often used for the measure and the things measured, as pint, quart, gallon, bushel. As then we call unity a number, being the smallest measure of number and its origin, so he has called our first measure of human life by the same word as the thing measured—“an age”. The numbers which the others invent have none of the clarity or distinctness usual in numbers. As to the nine thousand seven hundred and twenty, it has come about by taking the sum of the first four numbers, starting with [Sidenote: C] unity, and multiplying it by four, or four by ten.[148] Thus we get forty in either way, which, when five times multiplied [triangle-wise][149] by three, gave the number proposed. But about these matters there need be no difference between us and Demetrius. Whether the time be longer or shorter, determinate or not, in which the soul of a daemon shifts and the life of a demigod, the point will have been proved, before any judge he chooses, on the evidence of wise and ancient witnesses, that there are certain natures on the borderland between Gods and men, subject to mortal affections and enforced changes, who may rightly receive our worship according to the custom of our fathers, and be thought of as daemons and called so. XIII. ‘Xenocrates, the companion of Plato, used triangles [Sidenote: D] in illustration of the doctrine; he compared the equilateral to a divine nature, the scalene to a mortal, and the isosceles to a daemonic; the first equal in all relations, the second unequal in all, the third equal in some, unequal in others, like the daemonic nature with its mortal passions and divine power. Nature has put forward images, which our sense can perceive, visible likenesses; the sun and the stars standing for Gods, flashes and comets and meteors for mortal men, an image which Euripides[150] drew in the lines: [Sidenote: E] _In all his bloom, like to a falling star His light was quenched, his spirit passed, to air._