Miscellanies 5.14.102

And now, so to speak, in broad daylight, Democritus writes that there are a few men who, stretching out their hands toward what we Greeks now call air, say: “Zeus speaks all things, and he knows all things, and gives all things and takes them away, and he is king of all.” And more mystically the Boeotian Pindar, since he was a Pythagorean, teaches that “one is the race of men, one of gods, and from one mother we both breathe” (that is, matter), and that there is one Maker of these, whom he calls “father, supreme artificer,” who also granted advances toward divinity according to merit. I say nothing of Plato. He plainly, in the letter to Erastus and Coriscus, appears to indicate the Father and the Son, from the Hebrew Scriptures, I do not know how, exhorting them in these words: “swearing, with an earnestness that is not unrefined and with learning, the sister of earnestness, by the God of all, the cause, and by the Lord, the Father of the leader and cause, whom, if you philosophize rightly, you will know.” And the speech in the Timaeus calls the Maker Father, speaking thus: “Gods of gods, of whom I am Father and Maker of works.”