Book 1
6
There are a thousand others that give us the suitable reflections of the beauty of the world. Thus Euripides: The starry splendor of the skies, The wondrous work of that most wise Creator, Time. Elsewhere quoted in a long passage from the Sisyphus of Critias. See Nauck, p 598. (G.)
6
From this the knowledge of a God is conveyed to man; that the sun, the moon, and the rest of the stars, being carried under the earth, rise again in their proper color, magnitude, place, and times. Therefore they who by tradition delivered to us the knowledge and veneration of the Gods did it by these three manner of ways:—first, from Nature; secondly, from fables; thirdly, from the testimony given by the laws of commonwealths. Philosophers taught the natural way; poets, the fabulous; and the political way is received from the constitutions of each commonwealth. All sorts of this learning are distinguished into these seven parts. The first is from things that are conspicuous, and the observation of those bodies which are in places superior to us. To men the heavenly bodies that are so visible did give the knowledge of the Deity; when they contemplated that they are the causes of so great an harmony, that they regulate day and night, winter and summer, by their rising and setting, and likewise considered those things which by their influences in the earth do receive a being and do likewise fructify. It was manifest to men that the Heaven was the father of those things, and the Earth the mother; that the Heaven was the father is clear, since from the heavens there is the pouring down of waters, which have their spermatic faculty; the Earth the mother, because she receives them and brings forth. Likewise men considering that the stars are running (θέοντες) in a perpetual motion, that the sun and moon give us the power to view and contemplate (θεωρεῖν), they call them all Gods (θεούς).
