POEMANDRES. I. 7 



of the brethren who were enamoured of Him j 1 but each 

 made Him participate of his own order(a), and having 

 learnt the essence (b) of these, and partaken of their / 

 nature, He willed to break through the circumference of 

 the circles, and to depress (c) the force of Him resting (d) 

 on the fire. 2 



14 And He having all dominion (e) over the mortal 

 living things of the world, and over the irrational, looked 

 obliquely (/) through the Harmony, 3 breaking through the 



(a) [AtrsblliQV filets rd^ta; (b) ovaiotv. (c) xscTotz-ovsjaflC/. 



(d) tvtxtiftfvov. (e) e%ovfftotv. (/) vctptwj/tv. 



1 " The first born among many brethren." 



" It behoved Him in all things to be made like unto his brethren" 

 (Heb. ii. 17). Lactantius (Divin. Instit. iv. 6) quotes nearly the whole 

 of this passage, together with another similar one from " Asclepius," 

 applying it to Christ, and again (vii. 1), applying it to Man in general. 

 See post, ch. iii. and xiii. , 



2 An internal Fire was part of the cosmogony of the Platonists. 



3 Plato, in Timaeus (53) (in the main according to the Pythagorean 

 system), writes (after saying that God arranged the thin and light 

 elements above and the thick and heavy below), " When God put forth 

 His hand to order the Universe, Fire and Water and Earth and Air 

 having been produced (-Trspvx&r*), He fashioned them according to 

 forms and numbers, to put them together as far as was possible, as 

 should be most beautiful and best." 



The Harmony of Heaven is described in the Timseus (35 and 36) : 

 " Heaven revolves round a centre once in 24 hours ; the orbits of 

 the Fixed Stars in a different direction from the Planets. The inner 

 and outer sphere cross one another, and meet again at a point oppo- 

 site to that of their first contact. The first moves in a circle from 

 left to right, along the side of a parallelogram supposed to be inscribed 

 in it, the second also moving in a circle along the diagonal of the 

 same parallelogram from right to left ; the first describing the path 

 of the Equator, the second that of the Ecliptic. To the sphere of 

 the undivided He gave dominion, but the sphere of the other or 

 manifold was distributed into seven unequal orbits, having intervals 

 in ratios of twos and threes, three of either sort. He bade them 

 move in opposite directions to one another ; three of them, the Sun, 

 Mercury, and Venus, with equal swiftness, the remaining four with 

 unequal swiftness to the three and to one another, but all in due 

 course. The Moon is represented by 1, the Sun by 2, Venus by 

 3, Mercury by 4, Jupiter by 9, Saturn by 27, being the compound of 

 the two Pythagorean ratios (as to which see ch. iv. post), having the 



