13
Moreover, the symmetry and power of five, rather than that of any other number, has prevailed and has not permitted the animate to progress to unlimited classes of beings, but has produced five forms of all living things. For there are, as we know, gods, demigods, and heroes, and after these the fourth class, man Cf. 415 b, infra.; and fifth and last the class of unreasoning animals.
13
If you should, moreover, make divisions of the soul itself to accord with Nature, the first and least clear part of it is the nutritive, second the perceptive, then the appetitive, and, next after this, the spirited; but when it had reached the power to reason, and had completed its nature, it came to rest there at the fifth element as at the highest point. Cf. 429 e, infra.
14
Of this number, which has so many and such great powers, the origin also is fair and lovely; not that which we have expounded, that it is composed of two and three, but that which the beginning combined with the first square produces. For the beginning of all number is one, and the first square is four Cf. 429 e, infra.; and from these, as though from perfected form and matter, comes five. And if certain authorities are right, who, as we know, posit one as the first square, since it is a power of itself and its product is itself, then five, the offspring of the first two squares, does not lack a surpassing nobility of lineage.
15
But, said I, the most important matter I fear may embarrass our Plato when it is stated, just as he said that Anaxagoras was embarrassed by the name of the Moon, since he tried to claim as his own some very ancient opinion in regard to its illumination. Has not Plato said this in the Cratylus? Plato, Cratylus, 409 a.
15
Certainly, said Eustrophus, but what similarity there is I do not see.
