Miscellanies 5.8.48

But these have not read Cleanthes the philosopher, who plainly calls the sun plēktron; for, striking its rays at its rising, as though striking the world, it leads the light on its harmonious course; and from the sun he indicates the other stars too. And sphinx is not the binding together of the universe and the revolution of the world, according to the poet Aratus, but perhaps it would be the spiritual tension that pervades and holds together the world; better to take it as the ether, which holds together and binds (sphingōn) all things, as Empedocles too says: “Come, I will tell you first … the beginning, from which all things now seen became clear, earth and the many-waved sea and moist air, Titan and ether binding all things round in a circle.” And Apollodorus of Corcyra says that these lines were chanted by Branchus the seer when purifying the Milesians from plague. For he, sprinkling the crowd with laurel branches, began the hymn thus: “Sing, O children, of the Far-Darter and the Far-Darting goddess”; and the people, so to speak, sang in response: “Bedy, zaps, chthōn, plēktron, sphinx; knaxzbich, thyptēs, phlegmo, drōps.” Callimachus too mentions the story in his Iambi. Knaxzbich is disease, by derivation from knaiein (“to wear away”) and destroy; and thypsai is to burn with a thunderbolt. Thespis the tragic poet, however, says that something else is signified by these, writing thus: “See, I pour for you knaxzbich, pressing the white from the nursing goats; see, mixing thyptēs, cheese, with red honey, I set it for you, two-horned Pan, on your holy altars; see, I pour for you the fiery phlegmos of Bromius.” He hints, I think, at the first, milky food of the soul from the twenty-four letters, after which comes solid milk, the food, and last the blood of the vine of the Word, the fiery wine, the joy that perfects the training. And drōps is the active Word, who from the first instruction to growth into a man, to the measure of stature, kindles and enlightens the man.