Early Church Fathers 10 Iliad, xx. 66 (from Lord Derby's
translation). 11 i.e., these teachers. 12 Literally, "those who
knew." 13 mona/da kai\ th\n a!riston dua/da. One, or unity, was
considered by Pythagoras as the essence of number, and also as
God. Two, or the indefinite binary, was the equivalent of evil.
So Plutarch, De placit. philosoph., c 7; from which treatise the
above opinions of the various sects are quoted, generally
verbatim. 14 ametoxa kenou: the void being that in which these
bodies move, while they themselves are of a different nature
from it. 15 Or, accord and discord, attraction and repulsion. 16
Or, "is of a fiery nature." 17 See the Republic, x.2. By the
Platonic doctrine, the ideas of things in the mind of God were
the realities; the things themselves, as seen by us, were the
images of these realities; and poetry, therefore, describing the
images of realities, was only at the third remove from nature.
As Plato puts it briefly in this same passage, "the painter, the
bed-maker, God-these