Category:
1 Introduction
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2 Porphyry, On the Styx
Fragment 1 Castelletti = Fr. 372 Smith = Stob. 2.1.32
From Porphyry’s book On the Styx.
The opinion of the poet is not, as one might think, easy to apprehend. For the ancients all signified matters concerning the gods and daemons in symbols (ainigmoi), and Homer especially concealed matters concerning these things by not describing them directly but using what he says to convey something else. Now, of those who have attempted to expound what he has said by subtext (hyponoia), Cronius the Pythagorean seems to have done this most successfully, but nevertheless, in most cases he adds extraneous things to the subject in question, since he falls short of Homer’s (opinions), and he has not endeavored to set forth the opinions of the poet but to accommodate the poet to his own.
Fr. 2 Castelletti = Fr. 377 Smith = Stob. 1.49.53
In the same.
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Fr. 3 Castelletti = Fr. 378 Smith = Stob. 1.49.54
In the same.
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Fr. 4 Castelletti = Fr. 373 Smith = Stob. 1.49.50
From Porphyry’s books On the Styx.
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Fr. 5 Castelletti = Fr. 374 Smith = Stob. 1.49.51
In the same.
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Fr. 6 Castelletti = Fr. 375 Smith = Stob. 1.49.52
In the same.
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Fr. 7 Castelletti = Fr. 376 Smith = Stob. 1.3.56
From Porphyry’s book On the Styx.
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Fr. 8 Castelletti = Fr. 379 Smith = Stob. 4.41.57
From Porphyry’s books On the Styx.
For the poplar, as Plutarch as well as others say, is mournful and incapable of bearing fruit. This is also why Sophocles says in certain verses: […]
Fr. 9 Castelletti = Fr. 380 Smith = Stob. 4.36.23
From Porphyry’s book On the Styx.
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3 Three Fragments on the Afterlife from an Unknown Work (381–383 Smith)
Fr. 381 Smith = Stob. 1.49.59
From Porphyry.
Among the main doctrines of Pythagoras, that of the permanence and eternity of the soul in particular is famous and known to everyone. They say that, when someone told him that he thought (doxai) he saw his deceased father in his dreams, he replied: “You did not only think so, but you saw him.” They also say that one of his maxims (parangelmata) was “to tie up the bedclothes in a bag every day”, as if death were a journey, and we ought always to pack up and await the moment we are carried thence; and the one who kills justly has the same relation towards the dying as the begetter has towards the begotten, because both are a change of the soul: the coming (genesis) into the body as well as the coming out of the body, which is called death.
Fr. 382 Smith = Stob. 1.49.60
From the same.
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Fr. 383 Smith = Stob. 1.49.61
From the same.
Again, (Homer) shows symbolically (ainittomenos hypedēlōsen) that, after their death, the place around the Moon belongs to the souls of those who lived piously, as he says: “But to the Elysian field and the ends of the earth, / the immortals with send you, where fair-haired Rhadamanthys is” (Odyssey 4.563–564).
He appropriately calls the shining of the Moon, which is illuminated by the Sun, the “Elysian field”,¹ “because it is made to wax by the rays of the Sun”, as Timotheus says. And the “ends of the earth” are the farthest points of the night. The astronomers say that night is the shadow of the Earth, and which often falls upon the Moon, so that the Earth has as its limit that beyond which its shadow does not reach.
Notes
1: The connection seems to be drawn through the initial letters of Helios (Ἥλιος) and Elysium (Ἠλύσιον).
SARTRIX 