[Footnote 189: ἑλίκη. A pun quite in Hippolytus’ manner.]
[Footnote 190: πρὸς ἣν ... ναυτίλλονται. Cruice and Macmahon alike translate this “towards which,” but Aratus clearly means “steer by” both here and earlier.]
[Footnote 191: Herodotus I, 1. He does not say, however, that the Greeks were Phœnicians.]
[Footnote 192: Rather the conceiver, from κύω, to conceive. γεννάω is used of the mother by Aristotle, _De Gen. Animal._, 3, 5, 6.]
[Footnote 194: Reading Ιάσαδος for Cruice’s Ἰασίδαο. The text is said to have εἰς ἀΐδαο.]
[Footnote 195: γράμματα, elementa, Cr. But I think the allusion is to the story they contain for those who can read them.]
[Footnote 198: If Hippolytus’ words are here correctly transcribed, the “heretic” quoted seems to have two inconsistent ideas about the stars. One is that the constellations are types or allegories of what takes place in man’s soul; the other, that they are the patterns after which the creatures of this world were made. This last is Mithraic rather than Christian.]
[Footnote 199: τῆς τούτων ὑπολήψεως, _ab horum cogitationibus_, Cr.]
[Footnote 200: ἀγαπητοί. The word generally used in a _sermon_.]
[Footnote 201: This also reads like a peroration.]
[Footnote 202: In this chapter Hippolytus for the first time sets himself seriously to prove the thesis which he has before asserted, _i. e._, that all the Gnostic systems are derived from the teachings of the Greek philosophers. His mode of doing so is to compare the elaborate systems of Aeons or emanations of deity imagined by heresiarchs like Simon Magus and Valentinus to the views attributed by him to Pythagoras which make all nature to spring from one indivisible point. Whether Pythagoras ever held such views may be doubted and we have no means of checking Hippolytus’ always loose statements on this point; but something like them appears in the _Theaetetus_ of Plato where arithmetic and geometry seem to be connected by talk about oblong as well as square numbers and the construction of solids from them. If we imagine with the Greeks (see n. on p. 37 _supra_) that numbers are not abstract things, but actual portions of space, there is indeed a strong likeness between the ideas of the later Platonists as to the construction of the world by means of numbers and those attributed to the Gnostic teachers as to its emanation from God. Whether these last really held the views thus attributed to them is another matter. Cf. _Forerunners_, II, pp. 99, 100.]