THE ACADEMICS 59 THE BRACHMANS AMONG THE INDIANS 60 THE DRUIDS AMONG THE CELTS 61 HESIOD 62 BOOK II ? 65 BOOK III ? 65 BOOK IV: THE DIVINERS AND MAGICIANS 67-117 1. OF ASTROLOGERS 67 2. OF MATHEMATICIANS 83 3. OF DIVINATION BY METOPOSCOPY 87 4. THE MAGICIANS 92 5. RECAPITULATION 103 6. OF DIVINATION BY ASTRONOMY 107 7. OF THE ARITHMETICAL ART 114 BOOK V: THE OPHITE HERESIES 118-180 1. NAASSENES 118 2. PERATÆ 146 3. THE SETHIANI 160 4. JUSTINUS 169 PHILOSOPHUMENA INTRODUCTION 1. THE TEXT, ITS DISCOVERY, PUBLICATION AND EDITIONS The story of the discovery of the book here translated so resembles a romance as to appear like a flower in the dry and dusty field of patristic lore. A short treatise called _Philosophumena_, or “Philosophizings,” had long been known, four early copies of it being in existence in the Papal and other libraries of Rome, Florence and Turin. The superscriptions of these texts and a note in the margin of one of them caused the treatise to be attributed to Origen, and its _Edito princeps_ is that published in 1701 at Leipzig by Fabricius with notes by the learned Gronovius. As will be seen later, it is by itself of no great importance to modern scholars, as it throws no new light on the history or nature of Greek philosophy, while it is mainly compiled from some of those epitomes of philosophic opinion current in the early centuries of our era, of which the works of Diogenes Laertius and Aetius are the best known. In the year 1840, however, Mynoïdes Mynas, a learned Greek, was sent by Abel Villemain, then Minister of Public Instruction in the Government of Louis Philippe, on a voyage of discovery to the monasteries of Mt. Athos, whence he returned with, among other things, the MS. of the last seven books contained in these volumes. This proved on investigation to be Books IV to X inclusive of the original work of which the text published by Fabricius was Book I, and therefore left only Books II and III to be accounted for. The pagination of the MS. shows that the two missing books never formed part of it; but the author’s remarks at the end of Books I and IX, and the beginning of Books V and X[1] lead one to conclude that if they ever existed they must have dealt with the Mysteries and secret rites of the Egyptians, or rather of the Alexandrian Greeks,[2]