Plutarch, De E apud Delphos
Frank Cole Babbitt, Ed.

“What, then, really is Being? It is that which is eternal, without beginning and without end, to which no length of time brings change. For time is something that is in motion, appearing in connexion with moving matter, ever flowing, retaining nothing, a receptacle, as it were, of birth and decay, whose familiar ‘afterwards’ and ‘before,’ ‘shall be’ and ‘has been,’ when they are uttered, are of themselves a confession of Not Being. For to speak of that which has not yet occurred in terms of Being, or to say of what has already ceased to be, that it is, is silly and absurd. And as for that on which we most rely to [p. 245] support our conception of time, as we utter the words, ‘it is here,’ ‘it is at hand,’ and ‘now’ — all this again reason, entering in, demolishes utterly. For ‘now’ is crowded out into the future and the past, when we would look upon it as a culmination ; for of necessity it suffers division. And if Nature, when it is measured, is subject to the same processes as is the agent that measures it, then there is nothing in Nature that has permanence or even existence, but all things are in the process of creation or destruction according to their relative distribution with respect to time. Wherefore it is irreverent in the case of that which is to say even that it was or shall be; for these are certain deviations, transitions, and alterations, belonging to that which by its nature has no permanence in Being.