XV. ‘My most important point’, I went on, ‘may, I fear, bear hardly on Plato, just as he said that Anaxagoras “was hardly used by the name Selene”, when he had wished to appropriate the theory of her illumination, really a very old one. Are not [Sidenote: B] these Plato’s words, in the _Cratylus_?‘[68] ‘They certainly are,’ said Eustrophus, ‘but I fail to see the resemblance.’ ‘Very well then; you know, I suppose, that in the “_Sophist_”[69] he proves that the supreme principles are five: being, identity, difference, and after these, as fourth and fifth, movement and position. But in the _Philebus_[70] he divides on a different plan. He distinguishes the unlimited and the limited, from whose combination comes the origin of all being. The cause of combination he takes to be a fourth. The fifth, whereby things so mingled are again parted and distinguished, he has left to us to guess. I [Sidenote: C] conjecture that those on the one list are figures of those on the other; to being corresponds that which becomes, to motion the unlimited; to position the limited, to identity the combining principle, to difference that which distinguishes. But if the two sets are different, yet, on one view as on the other, there would be five classes, and five modes of difference. Some early inquirer, it will surely be said, saw into this before Plato, and consecrated two “E’s” to the God, as a manifestation and symbol of the number of all things. But further, having perceived that the good also takes shape under five heads, firstly [Sidenote: D] moderation, secondly symmetry, thirdly mind, fourthly the sciences and arts and true opinions which relate to soul, fifthly every pleasure which is pure and unmingled with what causes pain, he there leaves off, merely suggesting the Orphic verse, _In the sixth order let the strain be stayed!_ XVI. ‘Having said so much’, I went on, ‘to you all, I will sing one short stave to Nicander and “his cunning men”.[71] ‘On the sixth day of the new moon, when the Pythia is introduced into the Prytaneum by one person, the first of your three castings of lot is a single one, namely the five: the three [Sidenote: E] against the two.’ ‘It is so,’ said Nicander, ‘but the reason may not be disclosed to others.’ ‘Then,’ I answered with a smile, ‘until such time as we become priests, and the God allows us to know the truth, this much and no more shall be added to what we have to say about the Pempad.’ Such, so far as I remember, was the end of our account of the arithmetical or mathematical reasons for extolling the letter ‘E’.