First Complete Latin Philo

For what else can time be, but the season for performing things well? Moreover, the hours of the year bring all things to completion and lead them to a favorable outcome: the sowings, the plantings, the births, and the growth of animals. The stars were also made for the measures of time; for the revolutions of the sun, the moon, and the other stars complete the days, months, and years. And soon thereafter, a most useful thing, the nature of number, appeared, with time bringing it forth. For from one day comes one, from two days two, from three three; from a month thirty; from a year a number as great as the days contained in twelve months; and from infinite time, infinite number. Such great and necessary utilities do the natures and motions of the celestial stars bring—to say nothing of things unknown to us (for not all things are known to mortals) which yet contribute to the perpetuity of the world, and which must be administered always and everywhere by laws pre-defined by God that are by no means to be violated.

After the earth and heaven were adorned with their own ornaments, the former on the third day and the latter (as has been said) on the fourth, the Maker of things set about fashioning the mortal kinds of animals, beginning with the aquatic creatures on the fifth day, judging that there was no such great kinship between any two things as that between animals and the number five. For animate beings differ from inanimate ones by nothing more than by sense; and this indeed is divided into five: into sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. To each of these God attributed certain materials and proper instruments for judging the objects presented to them: colors for sight, voices for hearing, flavors for taste, vapors for smell, and for touch, softness and hardness, as well as whatever is hot and cold, smooth and rough. Therefore, he commanded all kinds of fish and sea-monsters to exist in their proper places, differing among themselves in both quantity and quality. For in one sea there are some kinds, and in another others, and sometimes even the same. Yet they were not all fashioned everywhere, and perhaps with good reason; for some love marshy and shallow seas, some love channels and harbors, being unable either to crawl onto the land or to swim far from the shore. Some, dwelling in the deep sea, avoid promontories jutting into it, as well as islands and reefs. Others are delighted by serenity and tranquility, others by waves and tempest. For being exercised by continual tossings, and struggling with force against the onslaught, they become firmer and grow fatter.

Presently, however, he also created the kinds of birds, as if they were kin to the aquatic creatures. For both are swimmers; nor was any species of those passing through the air omitted as imperfect. And now, the water and air having received, as it were, their allotted share of the living beings suitable to them, the earth was again called forth for the remaining part of generation. Now, those remaining after the plants were the terrestrial animals, and he said: "Let the earth bring forth cattle and wild beasts and creeping things, each after its kind." She indeed immediately brought forth whatever she was commanded, and those excellently adorned, both with strength and with innate powers for harming or helping.

But last of all, man was created. I shall speak of the manner of his creation a little later, after I have first shown the most beautiful sequence in the order of the creation of animals. For a most sluggish and rude soul fell to the lot of the genus of fish; but the most perfect and by far the best to the genus of men; moreover, between the two, a middle soul fell to the genus of land animals and birds. For these [have] sharper senses...