Compendium of Sacred and Barbaric Names

Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laërtius, Hesiod, Iamblichus, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Plutarch, Proclus, Simon Magus, and the Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 48 pages

Excerpts and scholia gathered from Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laërtius, Hesiod, Iamblichus, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Plutarch, Proclus, Simon Magus and the Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster, with a detailed contents page mapping the whole at the front. It is one of the most heavily revised documents in the library, standing at version 70.

The backbone of the compendium is Plato's Cratylus, quoted at length across its main stretches — 386a–412c, 419d–421a, and shorter passages on ἐπιστήμη, on ἄνθρωπος and on motion. From these the compiler extracts a working table of what the individual letters were held to convey, and sets it out as a list: rho indicates motion, agitating and vibrating the tongue; iota makes words subtle and invisible; phi, psi, sigma and zeta require breath for blowing; delta and tau bind and rest; lambda makes words glide and gamma stops the gliding; nu suggests internal sound; alpha is assigned to greatness, eta gives length, and omicron suggests sphericity. The second movement applies the method to particular words, decoding philosophically significant names in paired columns with their Greek originals — abstinence and frugality, innocency and ἀβλαβεια, moderation and modesty among them. Around this core the other authors supply corroborating material, so that the document functions as a reference to be consulted at a particular entry rather than read straight through, which is what the length of the contents page implies about its intended use.

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