5. Next as to those who maintain that human
affairs are governed by fate, do not ask information from me, but stab
them with their own shafts of rhetoric. The question is too long
for my present infirmity. With regard to emerging in
baptism—I do not know how it came into your mind to ask such a
question, if indeed you understood immersion to fulfil the figure of
the three days. It is impossible for any one to be immersed three
times, without emerging three times. We write the word
φάγος
paroxytone.
Amphilochius’s doubt may have arisen from the fact that
φαγός,
the Doric form of φηγός, the esculent oak of
Homer, is oxytone.