Library › Greek: Philosophy › On the Soul (Fragment)
This is a fragment of On the Soul by Severus, a Platonist philosopher of the second century AD known chiefly from later citations. The work is lost, and the passage survives because Eusebius quotes it in his Preparation for the Gospel. It raises an objection to the account of the soul's composition in Plato's Timaeus from a mixture of impassible and passible substance, claiming that such a compound would in time dissolve, like a colour blended from white and black.
The fragment is one of the few direct quotations of Severus, whose views on the Timaeus are otherwise known mainly from Proclus and Iamblichus. It illustrates the lively debates among Middle Platonists over how to interpret Plato's account of the soul, and Eusebius' use of it shows how Christian writers exploited disagreements among the philosophers.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica 13.17). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).