ΤΙΜΑΙΟΣ
R.G. Bury (Loeb, 1929)
Plato · R.G. Bury (Loeb, 1929)
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
One, two, three,—but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of our guests of yesterday, our hosts of today?
Some sickness has befallen him, Socrates; for he would never have stayed away from our gathering of his own free will.
Then the task of filling the place of the absent one falls upon you and our friends here, does it not?
Undoubtedly, and we shall do our best not to come short; for indeed it would not be at all right, after the splendid hospitality we received from you yesterday, if we—that is, those who are left of us—failed to entertain you cordially in return.
Well, then, do you remember the extent and character of the subjects which I proposed for your discussion?
In part we do remember them; and of what we have forgotten you are present to remind us. Or rather, if it is not a trouble, recount them again briefly from the beginning, so as to fix them more firmly in our minds.
It shall be done. The main part of the discourse I delivered yesterday was concerned with the kind of constitution which seemed to me likely to prove the best, and the character of its citizens.
And in truth, Socrates, the polity you described was highly approved by us all.
Did we not begin by dividing off the class of land-workers in it, and all other crafts, from the class of its defenders?
Yes.
And when, in accordance with Nature, we had assigned to each citizen his one proper and peculiar occupation, we declared that those whose duty it is to fight in defence of all must act solely as guardians of the State, in case anyone from without or any of those within should go about to molest it; and that they should judge leniently such as are under their authority and their natural friends, but show themselves stern in battle towards all the enemies they encounter.
Very true.
For we said, as I think, that the soul of the Guardians ought to be of a nature at once spirited and philosophic in a superlative degree, so that they might be able to treat their friends rightly with leniency and their foes with sternness.
Yes.
And what of their training? Did we not say that they were trained in gymnastic, in music, and in all the studies proper for such men?
Certainly.
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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.
Plato · R.G. Bury (Loeb, 1929). Each edition has its page, the reader and a plain-text file:
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