ΤΙΜΑΙΟΣ
Thomas Taylor (1804)
Plato · Thomas Taylor (1804)
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: I see one, two, three, but where, friend Timæus, is that fourth person, who being received by me yesterday at a banquet of disputation, ought now in his turn to repay me with a similar repast?
Timæus: He labours, Socrates, under a certain infirmity; for he would not willingly be absent from such an association as the present.
Socrates: It remains therefore for you, O Timæus, and the company present, to fill up the part of this absent guest.
Timæus: Entirely so, Socrates. And we shall endeavour, to the utmost of our ability, to leave nothing belonging to such an employment unaccomplished. For it would be by no means just that we, who were yesterday entertained by you, in such a manner as guests ought to be received, should not return the hospitality with readiness and delight.
Socrates: Do you recollect the magnitude and nature of the things which I proposed to you to explain?
Timæus: Some things, indeed, I recollect; but such as I have forgotten do you recall into my memory. Or rather, if it be not too much trouble, run over the whole in a cursory manner from the beginning, that it may be more firmly established in our memory.
Socrates: Let it be so. And to begin: The sum of yesterday’s dispute was, what kind of republic appeared to me to be the best, and from what sort of men such a republic ought to be composed.
Timæus: And by us, indeed, Socrates, all that you said was approved in the highest degree.
Socrates: Did we not, in the first place, separate husbandmen and other artificers from those whom we considered as the defenders of the city?
Timæus: Certainly.
Socrates: And when we had assigned to every one that which was accommodated to his nature, and had prescribed only one particular employment to every particular art, we likewise assigned to the military tribe one province only, I mean that of protecting the city; and this as well from the hostile incursions of internal as of external enemies; but yet in such a manner as to administer justice mildly to the subjects of their government, as being naturally friends, and to behave with warlike fierceness against their enemies in battle.
Timæus: Entirely so.
Socrates: For we asserted, I think, that the souls of the guardians should be of such a nature, as at the same time to be both irascible and philosophic in a remarkable degree; so that they might be gentle to their friends, and bold and ferocious to their enemies.
Timæus: You did so.
Socrates: But what did we assert concerning their education? Was it not that they should be instructed in gymnastic exercises, in music, and other becoming disciplines?
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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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