6
Heracles, before he had released Prometheus or had conversed with the sophists that were associated with Cheiron and Atlas, when he was young and a thorough Boeotian,The Greek equivalent of Philistine. would do away with logical reasoning;. he ridiculed the if the first, then the second, and resolved to carry off the tripod by force Cf.Moralia, 413 a, 557 c, 560 d; Pausanias, x. 13. 4; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, ii. 6. 2 (with Frazer’s note in L.C.L. edition); Roscher, Lexikon der gr. und röm. Mythologie, i. p. 2213; Baumeister, Denkmäler des klassischen Altertums, i. p. 463 ff. The attempt of Heracles to carry off the tripod is represented on the treasury of the Siphnians in the Museum at Delphi. and fight it out with the god over his art; since, at any rate, as he advanced in years, he also appears to have become most skilled in prophecy and in logic.
7
When Theon ceased, Eustrophus the Athenian, I think it was, said to us in answer, Do you see how zealously Theon defends logic, all but arraying himself in the lion’s skin? Under such conditions, we who repose in the Theory of Numbers all affairs together, natures and principles of things divine and human alike, and make this theory far above all else our guide and authority in all that is beautiful and valuable, should not be likely to hold our peace, but to offer to the god the first-fruits of our beloved mathematics, believing, as we do, that, taken by itself, E is not unlike the other letters either in power or in form or as a spoken word, but that it has come to be held in honour as the symbol of a great and sovereign number, the pempad, from which the wise gave the name pempazein to counting which is done by fives. That is, by counting on the fingers: Cf. 374 a, supra, and 429 d, infra.
