Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​A body is, as Apollodorus says in his Physics, that which is extended in three ways—in length, in breadth, in depth; and this is also called a solid body. A surface is the limit of a body, or that which has length and breadth only, but not depth; and Posidonius in the third book of On Meteorology leaves it as existing both in thought and in subsistence. A line is the limit of a surface, or length without breadth, or that which has length only. A point is the limit of a line, which is a minimal mark. God, intellect, fate, and Zeus are one; and he is designated by many other names as well.

​In the beginning, then, being by himself, he transforms all substance through air into water; and just as the seed is contained in the seminal fluid, so he too, being the seminal reason of the cosmos, is left behind in such a state in the moisture, making matter readily workable for himself with a view to the generation of subsequent things; then he first engenders the four elements: fire, water, air, earth. Zeno speaks about them in On the Whole, Chrysippus in the first book of the Physics, and Archedemus in a certain On Elements. An element is that from which generated things first come to be and into which they are finally resolved.

​Now the four elements together are the qualityless substance, namely matter; and fire is the hot, water the moist, air the cold, and earth the dry. Not but that the same portion is still in the air as well. Fire, then, is highest, which indeed is called aether, in which first the sphere of the fixed stars is engendered, then that of the planets; after which comes air, then water, and as the sediment of them all is earth, which lies at the center of all. They speak of the cosmos in three ways: god himself, the individually qualified being consisting of all substance, who is imperishable and ungenerated, being the demiurge of the cosmic arrangement, consuming all substance into himself according to certain cycles of time and engendering it again from himself;

​and they also say that the cosmic arrangement of the stars itself is the cosmos; and thirdly, that which is composed of both. And cosmos is the individually qualified being of the substance of all things, or, as Posidonius says in the Meteorological Elements, a system consisting of heaven and earth and the natures in them, or a system consisting of gods and men and the things that have come to be for their sake. And heaven is the outermost circumference in which all the divine is situated. The cosmos, then, is administered according to intellect and providence, as Chrysippus says in the fifth book of On Providence and Posidonius in the third book of On the Gods, intellect pervading every part of it, just as the soul does in our case; yet through some parts more, through others less.

​For through some it has passed as cohesion, as through the bones and the sinews; but through others as intellect, as through the governing principle. In this way, then, the whole cosmos, being an animal and animate and rational, has the aether as its governing principle, as Antipater of Tyre says in the eighth book of On the Cosmos. But Chrysippus in the first book of On Providence and Posidonius in On the Gods say that the heaven is the governing principle of the cosmos, while Cleanthes says it is the sun. Chrysippus, however, somewhat differently again, in the same work, holds the purer part of the aether—which they also call the primary god—to have passed, as it were, perceptually through the things in the air and through all animals and plants; but through the earth itself in the manner of cohesion.