XLVIII. 1. Moreover, Chaldaeans declare that of the

planets — which thej call birth-presiding gods — two are good workers, two ill-doers, while three are inter- mediates and common.
2. As for the dogmas of tiie Greeks, they are, I take it, plain to all, ascribing as they do the good allotment to Olympian SSeus, and that which has to be averted to Hades.
3. Moreover, they have a myth that Harmony is the child of Aphrodite and Ares, the latter of whom is harsh and strife-loving, while the former is gentle and a lover of love-striving.
4. For Heracleitos plainly calls ** War " — " father and king and lord of all," ^ and says that Homer, when he prays " that strife and hatred cease from gods as well," ^ forgets that he is imprecating the means of birth of all, in that they have their genesis from conflict and antipathy; that:
" Sun will not o'erstep his proper bounds, for if he do. Furies, Sight's bodyguard, will find him out."'
5. The Pythagorics [also], in a list of names, set down the predicates of Good as — One, Finite, Abiding, Straight, Odd, Square, Equal, Bight, light; and of Bad as — ^Two, Infinite, Moving, Curved, Even, Oblong, Unequal, Left, Dark, — on the ground that these are tiie underlying principles of genesia
6. Aristotle [also predicates] the former as Form and the latter as Privation.
7. While Plato, though in many passages disguising himself and hiding his face, calls the former of the opposite principles Same and the latter Other.
1 Fairbanks, (44) pp. 34, 35.
« Cf. R, xviii. 107 ; Fairbanka, (43) pp. 34, 35.
s Fairbanks, (29) pp. 32, 33.
328 THRICE-GREATEST HERMKS
8. But in his Laxos, being now older, no longor in riddles and in Bymbols, bnt with authentic nameB, he says ^ coamos is moved not bj one soul, but probaUj by several, in any case not less than two, — ^whereof tfaa one is good-doing, the other the opposite to this and maker of things opposite.
9. He leaves out, however, a certain third inter- mediate nature, neither soul-less nor reaaon-less nor motion-less of itself, as some think,^ but depending on both of them, and for ever longing for and desiring and following after the better, as the following [passages] of the argument Qogo$\^ combining as it does for the most part the theology of the EJgyptians with their philosophy, show.