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Benjamin Jowett
Plato · Benjamin Jowett
Narrator: TIMAEUS from Locri Epizephyrii, South Italy
Scene: house of Critias during the Panathenaea
The Timaeus is Plato's great dialogue on the origin and structure of the cosmos, and for many centuries it was the most influential of all his works — for long stretches of the Middle Ages, through a partial Latin version, almost the only one known in the West. In it the Pythagorean astronomer Timaeus delivers a long, sustained speech, what he modestly calls a 'likely story', describing how the visible world came to be.
A divine craftsman, the Demiurge, good and free of envy, brings order out of a primordial disorder by looking to the eternal Forms as his model. He fashions the World Soul from a blend of sameness and difference, dividing it by harmonic ratios, and sets the heavens turning; he makes time as 'a moving image of eternity'; he forms the four elements from elementary triangles, in a kind of mathematical chemistry; and he delegates to lesser gods the making of mortal bodies. The cosmos that results is a single, living, intelligent being, as good as a thing of becoming can be.
The Timaeus fixed the framework within which the tradition thought about nature, creation, the soul, and the divine, and its puzzles — above all whether the 'making' is an event in time or an eternal dependence — drove debate from Plutarch to Proclus, whose enormous commentary survives in part.
In the library: the complete Timaeus, with the cosmology of the Demiurge and World Soul.
From the Plato Scroll Encyclopedia · open this entry in the reader
Socrates: One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of those who were yesterday my guests and are to be my entertainers to-day?
Timaeus: He has been taken ill, Socrates; for he would not willingly have been absent from this gathering.
Socrates: Then, if he is not coming, you and the two others must supply his place.
Timaeus: Certainly, and we will do all that we can; having been handsomely entertained by you yesterday, those of us who remain should be only too glad to return your hospitality.
Socrates: Do you remember what were the points of which I required you to speak?
Timaeus: We remember some of them, and you will be here to remind us of anything which we have forgotten: or rather, if we are not troubling you, will you briefly recapitulate the whole, and then the particulars will be more firmly fixed in our memories?
Socrates: To be sure I will: the chief theme of my yesterday’s discourse was the State — how constituted and of what citizens composed it would seem likely to be most perfect.
Timaeus: Yes, Socrates; and what you said of it was very much to our mind.
Socrates: Did we not begin by separating the husbandmen and the artisans from the class of defenders of the State?
Timaeus: Yes.
Socrates: And when we had given to each one that single employment and particular art which was suited to his nature, we spoke of those who were intended to be our warriors, and said that they were to be guardians of the city against attacks from within as well as from without, and to have no other employment; they were to be merciful in judging their subjects, of whom they were by nature friends, but fierce to their enemies, when they came across them in battle.
Timaeus: Exactly.
Socrates: We said, if I am not mistaken, that the guardians should be gifted with a temperament in a high degree both passionate and philosophical; and that then they would be as they ought to be, gentle to their friends and fierce with their enemies.
Timaeus: Certainly.
Socrates: And what did we say of their education? Were they not to be trained in gymnastic, and music, and all other sorts of knowledge which were proper for them?
Timaeus: Very true.
Socrates: And being thus trained they were not to consider gold or silver or anything else to be their own private property; they were to be like hired troops, receiving pay for keeping guard from those who were protected by them — the pay was to be no more than would suffice for men of simple life; and they were to spend in common, and to live together in the continual practice of virtue, which was to be their sole pursuit.
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The Athenian who turned Socratic conversation into a written philosophy and founded the Academy.
Plato was born around 428 BCE into a wealthy and politically prominent Athenian family; through his mother Perictione the family traced kinship to the lawgiver Solon, and his relatives Critias and Charmides were among the oligarchs of the Thirty. A late tradition says his given name was Aristocles and that 'Plato' — from the word for 'broad' — was a nickname. He grew up during the long agony of the Peloponnesian War and came of age amid the violence and disillusion that followed Athens' defeat.
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