Miscellanies 5.14.98

Let these things stand so. That we are brothers, as belonging to the one God and one Teacher, Plato too seems to say, calling us so in these words: “For you are all brothers in the city,” as we shall say to them in telling the myth, “but God, in fashioning you, mixed gold into the birth of those of you who are fit to rule, which is why they are most honored; silver into the auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other craftsmen.” Hence, he says, it must be that the first welcome and love the things in which there is knowledge, and the others the things in which there is opinion. For perhaps he divines this chosen nature that longs for knowledge; unless, positing three natures, he describes three polities, as some have supposed: the silver one of the Jews, the third of the Greeks, and that of the Christians, into which the royal gold has been mixed, the Holy Spirit. And depicting the life of the Christians he writes word for word in the Theaetetus: “Let us speak, then, of the leaders; for why would anyone speak of those who spend their time in philosophy poorly? These, I suppose, do not know the way to the marketplace, nor where the law court is, or the council chamber, or any other public assembly of the city; written laws and decrees they neither see nor hear. The eager pursuits of political clubs, and meetings, and revels with flute girls, do not occur to them to engage in even in a dream. Whether anyone in the city is well or badly born, or what evil has come to anyone from his ancestors, escapes them more than, as the saying goes, the pints of the sea. And he does not even know that he does not know these things; but in truth only his body lies and resides in the city, while he himself flies, according to Pindar, measuring the stars beneath the earth and above the heaven, and searching out every nature everywhere.”