Endnote 3 – What Was the Star that Guided the Magi?

Plato, in fact, contended that the entire cosmos is a living creature, see Timaeus 30B; so too the Stoics. Aristotle’s thinking on the subject of stars is inconsistent from text to text. “On the question of whether the stars themselves are empsucha [ensouled] he seems to have found it difficult to make up his mind” (W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: VI. Aristotle: An Encounter [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981], p. 256, n. 1).