Complete Works (73 page)

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: It certainly seems that everything you have gone [b] through is very reasonable.

V
ISITOR
: Then drawing on what’s just been said, let’s reflect on the state of affairs we said was responsible for all those astonishing things. In fact it’s just this very thing.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: What’s that?

V
ISITOR
: That the movement of the universe is now in the direction of its present rotation, now in the opposite direction.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: How do you mean?

[c] V
ISITOR
: We must suppose that this change is, of the turnings that occur in the heavens, the greatest and the most complete turning of all.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: Yes, it certainly seems so.

V
ISITOR
: We must suppose, then, that at that time the greatest changes also occur for us who live within the universe?

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: That too seems likely.

V
ISITOR
: And don’t we recognize that living creatures by their nature have difficulty in tolerating changes that are at once large, great in number, and of all different sorts?

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: Certainly we do.

V
ISITOR
: Necessarily, then, there occur at that time cases of destruction [d] of other living creatures on a very large scale, and humankind itself survives only in small numbers. Many new and astonishing things happen to them, but the greatest is the one I shall describe, one that is in accordance with the retrogradation of the universe, at the time when its turning becomes the opposite of the one that now obtains.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: What kind of thing do you mean?

V
ISITOR
: First, the visible age of each and every creature, whatever it was, stopped increasing, and everything that was mortal ceased moving [e] in the direction of looking older; instead it changed back in the opposite direction, and grew as it were younger, more tender. The white hairs of the older men became black, and in turn the cheeks of those who had their beards became smooth again, returning each to his past bloom; the bodies of those in their puberty, becoming smoother and smaller each day and night, went back to the form of new-born children, which they came to resemble both in mind and in body, and from then on they proceeded to waste away until they simply disappeared altogether. As for those who
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died a violent death at that time, the body of the dead person underwent the same effects and quickly dissolved to nothing in a few days.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: But, visitor, how did living creatures come into being in that time? And in what way were they produced from each other?

V
ISITOR
: Clearly, Socrates, reproduction from one another was not part of the nature of things then. It was the earth-born race, the one said to have existed once, that existed then, returning to life again from the earth; it was remembered by our first ancestors, who lived in the succeeding [b] time but bordered on the ending of the previous period, growing up at the beginning of this one. They became our messengers for the accounts of the earth-born, which are nowadays wrongly disbelieved by many people. For I think we must reflect on what is implied by what we have said. If old men went back to being children, it follows that people should be put together again from the dead, there in the earth, and come back to life; they would be following the reversal of things, with coming-into-being turning round with it to the opposite direction, and since they would [c] according to this argument necessarily come into existence as earth-born, they would thus acquire that name and have that account given of them—all those of them, that is, whom god did not take off to another destiny.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: Yes, quite; this does seem to follow on what went before. But as for the life which you say there was in the time of Cronus’ power—was it in that period of rotation or in this one? For it clearly turns out that the change affecting the stars and the sun occurs in each period.
³¹

V
ISITOR
: You have been keeping up with the argument well. As for what you asked, about everything’s springing up of its own accord for [d] human beings, it belongs least to the period that now obtains; it too belonged to the one before. For then the god began to rule and take care of the rotation itself as a whole, and as for
³²
the regions, in their turn, it was just the same, the parts of the world-order having everywhere
³³
been divided up by gods ruling over them. As for living things, divine spirits had divided them between themselves, like herdsmen, by kind and by herd, each by himself providing independently for all the needs of those [e] he tended, so that none of them was savage, nor did they eat each other, and there was no war or internal dissent at all; and as for all the other things that belong as consequences to such an arrangement, there would be tens of thousands of them to report. But to return to what we have been told about a human life without toil, the origin of the report is something like this. A god tended them, taking charge of them himself, just as now human beings, themselves living creatures, but different and more divine, pasture other kinds of living creatures more lowly than themselves; and given his tendance, they had no political constitutions,
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nor acquired wives and children, for all of them came back to life from the earth, remembering nothing of the past.
³⁴
While they lacked things of this sort, they had an abundance of fruits from trees and many other plants, which grew not through cultivation but because the earth sent them up of its own accord. For the most part they would feed outdoors, naked and without bedding; for the blend of the seasons was without painful extremes, [b] and they had soft beds from abundant grass that sprang from the earth. What you are hearing about, then, Socrates, is the life of those who lived in the time of Cronus; as for this one, which they say is in the time of Zeus, the present one, you are familiar with it from personal experience. Would you be able and willing to judge which of the two is the more fortunate?

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: Not at all.

V
ISITOR
: Then do you want me to make some sort of decision for you?

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: Absolutely.

V
ISITOR
: Well then, if, with so much leisure available to them, and so much opportunity to get together in conversation not only with human [c] beings but also with animals—if the nurslings of Cronus used all these advantages to do philosophy, talking both with animals and with each other, and inquiring from all sorts of creatures whether any one of them had some capacity of its own that enabled it to see better in some way than the rest with respect to the gathering of wisdom, the judgment is easy, that those who lived then were far, far more fortunate than those who live now. But if they spent their time gorging themselves with food and drink and exchanging stories with each other and with the animals [d] of the sort that
³⁵
even now are told about them, this too, if I may reveal how it seems to me, at least, is a matter that is easily judged. But however that may be, let us leave it to one side, until such time as someone appears who is qualified to inform us in which of these two ways the desires of men of that time were directed in relation to the different varieties of knowledge and the need for talk; we must now state the point of our rousing our story into action, in order to move forward and bring what follows to its end. When the time of all these things had been completed [e] and the hour for change had come, and in particular all the earth-born race had been used up, each soul having rendered its sum of births, falling to the earth as seed as many times as had been laid down for each, at that point the steersman of the universe, let go—as it were—of the bar of the steering-oars and retired to his observation-post; and as for the cosmos, its allotted and innate desire turned it back again in the opposite direction. So all the gods who ruled over the regions together with the greatest divinity, seeing immediately what was happening, let go in their turn the parts of the cosmos that belonged to their charge; and as it turned about
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and came together with itself, impelled with opposing movements, both the one that was beginning and the one that was now ending, it produced a great tremor in itself, which in its turn brought about another destruction of all sorts of living things. After this, when sufficient time had elapsed, it began to cease from noise and confusion and attained calm from its tremors; it set itself in order, into the accustomed course that belongs to [b] it, itself taking charge of and mastering both the things within it and itself, because it remembered so far as it could the teaching of its craftsman and father. At the beginning it fulfilled his teaching more accurately, but in the end less keenly; the cause of this was the bodily element in its mixture, its companion since its origins long in the past, because this element was marked by a great disorder before it entered into the present world-order. For from the one who put it together the world possesses all fine things; from its previous condition, on the other hand, it both has for itself from [c] that source everything that is bad and unjust in the heavens, and produces it in its turn in living things. So while it reared living things in itself in company with the steersman, it created only slight evils, and great goods; but in separation from him, during all the time closest to the moment of his letting go, it manages everything very well, but as time moves on and forgetfulness increases in it, the condition of its original disharmony also [d] takes greater control of it, and, as this time ends, comes to full flower. Then the goods it mixes in are slight, but the admixture it causes of the opposite is great, and it reaches the point where it is in danger of destroying both itself and the things in it. It is for this reason that now the god who ordered it, seeing it in difficulties, and concerned that it should not, storm-tossed as it is, be broken apart in confusion and sink into the boundless sea of unlikeness, takes his position again at its steering-oars, and having [e] turned round what had become diseased and been broken apart in the previous rotation, when the world was left to itself, orders it and by setting it straight renders it immortal and ageless. What has been described, then, is the end-point of everything; as for what is relevant to our showing the nature of the king, it is sufficient if we take up the account from what went before. When the cosmos had been turned back again on the course that leads to the sort of coming-into-being which obtains now, the movement of the ages of living creatures once again stopped and produced new effects which were the opposite of what previously occurred. For those living creatures that were close to disappearing through smallness began to increase in size, while those bodies that had just been born from the earth already gray-haired began to die again and return into the earth. And everything else changed, imitating and following on the condition of
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the universe, and in particular, there was a change to the mode of conception, birth and rearing, which necessarily imitated and kept pace with the change to everything; for it was no longer possible for a living creature to grow within the earth under the agency of others’ putting it together, but just as the world-order had been instructed to be master of its own motion, so too in the same way its parts were instructed themselves to perform the functions of begetting, birth and rearing so far as possible by [b] themselves, under the agency of a similar impulse. We are now at the point that our account has all along been designed to reach. To go through the changes that have occurred in relation to the other animals, and from what causes, would involve a description of considerable length; those that relate to human beings will be shorter to relate and more to the point. Since we had been deprived of the god who possessed and pastured us, and since for their part the majority of animals—all those who had an aggressive nature—had gone wild, human beings, by themselves weak [c] and defenseless, were preyed on by them, and in those first times were still without resources and without expertise of any sort; their spontaneous supply of food was no longer available to them, and they did not yet know how to provide for themselves, having had no shortage to force them to do so before. As a result of all of this they were in great difficulties. This is why the gifts from the gods, of which we have ancient reports, have been given to us, along with an indispensable requirement for teaching [d] and education: fire from Prometheus, crafts from Hephaestus and his fellow craftworker, seeds and plants from others. Everything that has helped to establish human life has come about from these things, once care from the gods, as has just been said, ceased to be available to human beings, and they had to live their lives through their own resources and take care for themselves, just like the cosmos as a whole, which we imitate [e] and follow for all time, now living and growing in this way, now in the way we did then. As for the matter of our story, let it now be ended, and we shall put it to use in order to see how great our mistake was when we gave our account of the expert in kingship and statesmanship in our preceding argument.

Y
OUNG
S
OCRATES
: So how do you say we made a mistake, and how great was it?

V
ISITOR
: In one way it was lesser, in another it was very high-minded, and much greater and more extensive than in the other case.