Proclus, Theologia Platonica; Michael Psellos

The mathematical [theologian], however, [finds] the truth concerning the gods to be manifest in itself, being most clearly evident among the very highest of generated beings. For these do not see fit to learn the divine unities through images [external] to themselves, nor to assign their properties to their own objects of knowledge; rather, they announce both the powers and [the gods themselves] by means of the numbers within them, under the guidance of the leading gods. But the [mode] according to science, in turn, is the special distinction of Plato’s philosophy; for in its discourse [he treats] the procession of the divine kinds and their difference from one another, as well as both the common properties of the total arrangements and those divided among each. Plato alone, as it seems to me, of those whose writings have come down to us, has both distinguished and ordered these, as well as the very extent of their existence. This, then, will be manifest when we provide the aforementioned demonstrations concerning the method and all the divisions within it.

But now let us say that, even of mythical fictions, Plato did not accept the entire dramatic composition, but only so much of it as aims at the beautiful and the good, and is not unsuited to the divine substance. For if the mode of mythology indicates divine things through hidden meanings, and—having put forward many fabrications as a screen for the truth, and representing nature—it offers sensible fictions of the intelligible, material [fictions] of the immaterial, and divided ones of the indivisible, and images of the true, and constructs things that exist falsely; and as for the ancient poets, who name things openly while hinting at secret theologies concerning the gods, and for this reason [recount] wanderings of gods, and castrations and wars, and dismemberments and rapes and adulteries—insofar as they, in turn, make many such things symbols of the truth about the gods hidden among them, Plato rejects such a mode of mythology, both as [an instrument of] education