Complete Works (257 page)

Then our messenger from the other world reported that the Speaker spoke as follows: “There is a satisfactory life rather than a bad one available even for the one who comes last, provided that he chooses it rationally and lives it seriously. Therefore, let not the first be careless in his choice nor the last discouraged.”

He said that when the Speaker had told them this, the one who came up first chose the greatest tyranny. In his folly and greed he chose it without adequate examination and didn’t notice that, among other evils, he was fated to eat his own children as a part of it. When he examined at [c] leisure, the life he had chosen, however, he beat his breast and bemoaned his choice. And, ignoring the warning of the Speaker, he blamed chance, daemons, or guardian spirits, and everything else for these evils but himself. He was one of those who had come down from heaven, having lived his previous life under an orderly constitution, where he had participated in virtue through habit and without philosophy. Broadly speaking, indeed, [d] most of those who were caught out in this way were souls who had come down from heaven and who were untrained in suffering as a result. The majority of those who had come up from the earth, on the other hand, having suffered themselves and seen others suffer, were in no rush to make their choices. Because of this and because of the chance of the lottery, there was an interchange of goods and evils for most of the souls. However, if someone pursues philosophy in a sound manner when he comes to live [e] here on earth and if the lottery doesn’t make him one of the last to choose, then, given what Er has reported about the next world, it looks as though not only will he be happy here, but his journey from here to there and back again won’t be along the rough underground path, but along the smooth heavenly one.

Er said that the way in which the souls chose their lives was a sight
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worth seeing, since it was pitiful, funny, and surprising to watch. For the most part, their choice depended upon the character of their former life. For example, he said that he saw the soul that had once belonged to Orpheus choosing a swan’s life, because he hated the female sex because of his death at their hands, and so was unwilling to have a woman conceive and give birth to him. Er saw the soul of Thamyris
¹³
choosing the life of a nightingale, a swan choosing to change over to a human life, and other musical animals doing the same thing. The twentieth soul chose the life [b] of a lion. This was the soul of Ajax, son of Telamon.
¹⁴
He avoided human life because he remembered the judgment about the armor. The next soul was that of Agamemnon, whose sufferings also had made him hate the human race, so he changed to the life of an eagle. Atalanta
¹⁵
had been assigned a place near the middle, and when she saw great honors being given to a male athlete, she chose his life, unable to pass them by. After her, he saw the soul of Epeius, the son of Panopeus, taking on the nature [c] of a craftswoman.
¹⁶
And very close to last, he saw the soul of the ridiculous Thersites clothing itself as a monkey.
¹⁷
Now, it chanced that the soul of Odysseus got to make its choice last of all, and since memory of its former sufferings had relieved its love of honor, it went around for a long time, looking for the life of a private individual who did his own work, and with difficulty it found one lying off somewhere neglected by the others. He chose it gladly and said that he’d have made the same choice even if he’d been first. Still other souls changed from animals into human beings, [d] or from one kind of animal into another, with unjust people changing into wild animals, and just people into tame ones, and all sorts of mixtures occurred.

After all the souls had chosen their lives, they went forward to Lachesis in the same order in which they had made their choices, and she assigned to each the daemon it had chosen as guardian of its life and fulfiller of its choice. This daemon first led the soul under the hand of Clotho as it turned [e] the revolving spindle to confirm the fate that the lottery and its own choice had given it. After receiving her touch, he led the soul to the spinning of Atropos, to make what had been spun irreversible. Then, without turning around, they went from there under the throne of Necessity and, when all of them had passed through, they travelled to the Plain of Forgetfulness in burning, choking, terrible heat, for it was empty of trees and earthly
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vegetation. And there, beside the River of Unheeding, whose water no vessel can hold, they camped, for night was coming on. All of them had to drink a certain measure of this water, but those who weren’t saved by reason drank more than that, and as each of them drank, he forgot everything and went to sleep. But around midnight there was a clap of thunder and an earthquake, and they were suddenly carried away from there, this [b] way and that, up to their births, like shooting stars. Er himself was forbidden to drink from the water. All the same, he didn’t know how he had come back to his body, except that waking up suddenly he saw himself lying on the pyre at dawn.

And so, Glaucon, his story wasn’t lost but preserved, and it would save us, if we were persuaded by it, for we would then make a good crossing of the River of Forgetfulness, and our souls wouldn’t be defiled. But if we [c] are persuaded by me, we’ll believe that the soul is immortal and able to endure every evil and every good, and we’ll always hold to the upward path, practicing justice with reason in every way. That way we’ll be friends both to ourselves and to the gods while we remain here on earth and afterwards—like victors in the games who go around collecting their [d] prizes—we’ll receive our rewards. Hence, both in this life and on the thousand-year journey we’ve described, we’ll do well and be happy.

1
. The Homeridae were the rhapsodes and poets who recited and expounded Homer throughout the Greek world.

2
. Thales of Miletus is the first philosopher we know of in ancient Greece. He is said to have predicted the solar eclipse of 585
B.C.
Anacharsis, who lived around 600
B.C.
, is credited with beginning Greek geometry and with being able to calculate the distance of ships at sea.

3
. Creophylus is said to have been an epic poet from Chios. His name comes from two words meaning “meat” and “race” or “kind.” A modern equivalent would be “meathead.”

4
. Protagoras and Prodicus were two of the most famous fifth-century sophists.

5
. See 436b–c.

6
. See 439c ff.

7
. See 387d–e.

8
. Reading
Dia soph
ō
n
in c1.

9
. See 357–367e.

10
. The ring of Gyges is discussed at 359d–360a. The cap of Hades also made its wearer invisible.

11
. Books ix–xi of the
Odyssey
were traditionally referred to as the tales of Alcinous.

12
. A whorl is the weight that twirls a spindle.

13
. Thamyris was a legendary poet and singer, who boasted that he could defeat the Muses in a song contest. For this they blinded him and took away his voice. He is mentioned at
Iliad
ii.596–600.

14
. Ajax is a great Homeric hero. He thought that he deserved to be awarded the armor of the dead Achilles, but instead it went to Odysseus. Ajax was maddened by this injustice and finally killed himself because of the terrible things he had done while mad. See Sophocles,
Ajax
.

15
. Atalanta was a mythical huntress, who would marry only a man who could beat her at running. In most versions of the myth, losers were killed.

16
. Epeius is mentioned at
Odyssey
viii.493 as the man who helped Athena make the Trojan Horse.

17
. Thersites is an ordinary soldier who criticizes Agamemnon at
Iliad
ii.211–77. Odysseus beats him for his presumption and is widely approved for doing so.

TIMAEUS

Translated by Donald J. Zeyl.

Timaeus
offers the reader a rhetorical display, not a philosophical dialogue. In a stage-setting conversation, Socrates reviews his own previous day’s exposition of the institutions of the ideal city (apparently those of the
Republic),
but the remainder of the work is taken up by Timaeus’ very long speech describing the creation of the world. Other works in the Platonic corpus similarly consist of a single speech: not to mention the
Apology,
the same is true of
Critias (Timaeus
’ incomplete companion piece) and
Menexenus.
But
Timaeus
’ speech is unique among them in having extensive philosophical content: here we get philosophy, but grandiose and rhetorically elaborate cosmic theorizing, not the down-to-earth dialectical investigation of most of Plato’s philosophical works. For a parallel one has to look to
Phaedrus,
where Socrates’ two speeches on erotic love, especially the second, similarly deck out philosophical theses in brilliant, image-studded rhetorical dress.

Timaeus, who appears to be a dramatic invention of Plato’s, comes from Southern Italy, noted for its Greek mathematicians and scientists. He bases his cosmology on the Platonic division, familiar for example from
Phaedo
and
Republic,
between eternal, unchanging ‘Forms’ and their unstable ‘reflections’ in the physical, perceptible world of ‘becoming’. But he introduces a creator god, the ‘demiurge’ (Greek for ‘craftsman’), who crafts and brings order to the physical world by using the Forms as patterns—Timaeus does not conceive the Forms as themselves shaping the world. And he develops the theory of a ‘receptacle’ underlying physical things, onto which, as onto a featureless plastic stuff, the Formal patterns are imposed. In these terms, and emphasizing mathematical relationships as the basis for cosmic order, Timaeus sets out the foundations of the sciences of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and physiology, including the physiology and psychology of perception, ending with a classification of the diseases of body and soul and provisions for their treatment.
Timaeus
was a central text of Platonism in later antiquity and the Middle Ages—it was almost the only work of Plato’s available in Latin—and the subject of many controversies. Did Timaeus’ creation story mean that the world was created in time—or did it merely tell in temporal terms a story of the world’s eternal dependence on a higher reality, the Forms? Did the demiurge really stand apart from those realities in designing it, or were they in fact simply the contents of his own divine mind?
Timaeus
was central to debates on these and other questions of traditional Platonism.

Most scholars would date
Timaeus
among Plato’s last works, though a minority argue for a date in the ‘middle period’, closer to
Republic,
which it seems certainly to postdate. Plato, as author of the work, is responsible for all Timaeus’ theories. How far do they represent his own philosophical convictions at the time he wrote? Timaeus himself emphasizes—in effect, because of the great distance, literal and metaphorical, separating us from the heavens, on which the rest of the world depends—that we cannot have more than a ‘likely story’, not the full, transparent truth, about the physical details of the world’s structure. It may be instructive to work out detailed theories, but he offers them as no more than reasonable ways in which the creator might have proceeded in designing the world. Moreover, according to the
Phaedrus,
rhetorically skilled speakers will base what they say on the full philosophical truth, but will vary and embellish it as needed to attract and hold their hearers’ attention and to persuade them to accept what is essential in it. Timaeus may be Plato’s spokesman, but if Plato attended to the
Phaedrus
’s strictures on rhetoric in composing his speech, one should exercise more than ordinary caution in inferring from what Timaeus says to details of Plato’s own commitments even on matters of philosophical principle. In what Timaeus says about ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, the Forms and ‘reflections’, the ‘demiurge’ and the ‘receptacle’, and the arguments he offers on these subjects, what belongs to the rhetorical embellishment—
intended to impress Socrates and his other listeners—and what is the sober truth, as Plato now understands it? The dialogue forces these questions on us, but gives no easy answers.

J.M.C.

S
OCRATES
: One, two, three … Where’s number four, Timaeus? The four
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of you were my guests yesterday and today I’m to be yours.

T
IMAEUS
: He came down with something or other, Socrates. He wouldn’t have missed our meeting willingly.

S
OCRATES
: Well then, isn’t it for you and your companions to fill in for your absent friend?

T
IMAEUS
: You’re quite right. Anyhow, we’ll do our best not to come up [b] short. You did such a fine job yesterday hosting us visitors that now it wouldn’t be right if the three of us didn’t go all out to give you a feast in return.

S
OCRATES
: Do you remember all the subjects I assigned to you to speak on?

T
IMAEUS
: Some we do. And if there are any we don’t—well, you’re here to remind us. Better still, if it’s not too much trouble, why don’t you take a few minutes to go back through them from the beginning? That way they’ll be the more firmly fixed in our minds.

S
OCRATES
: Very well. I talked about politics yesterday and my main [c] point, I think, had to do with the kind of political structure cities should have and the kind of men that should make it up so as to be the best possible.

T
IMAEUS
: Yes, Socrates, so you did, and we were all very satisfied with your description of it.

S
OCRATES
: Didn’t we begin by separating off the class of farmers and all the other craftsmen in the city from the class of those who were to wage war on its behalf?