Plato: Timaeus and Critias (RLE: Plato)

A Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136234699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Plato's Timaeus was his only cosmological dialogue and for almost thirteen hundred years it provided the basis in the West for educated people's general view of the natural world. The author provides a translation of this important work, together with the Critias – the source of the legendary tale of Atlantis. He has taken particular care to provide an accurate rendering of Plato's words and to avoid putting his own or any other interpretation on the works.

TIMAEUS

SOCRATES, TIMAEUS, HERMOCRATES, CRITIAS

St. III

SO.One, two, three … Why, my dear Timaeus, where is the fourth of our guests of yesterday, who are to be our hosts now?

TI.Overtaken by indisposition, Socrates; I promise you he would not be staying away from our present conference if he could help it.

SO.Then we may look to you and the others to discharge the absentee's part, as well as your own?

TI.With all my heart; so far as our abilities permit, you shall not be disappointed: after the elegant entertainment you provided for your visitors yesterday, it would not be common fairness that the rest of us should be backward in offering you a return banquet.

SO.You all recall the scope and topics of the discourse with which I charged you?

TI.Yes, in part, and where our recollections fail us, you will be here to refresh them. Or, stay! If it is not giving you too much trouble, you might recapitulate the matter briefly; then we shall have a securer grasp of it.

SO.Why, so I will. The main theme of my argument yesterday was my views on the best constitution for a city and the type of men from whom such a city might be fashioned.

TI.And very much to our mind we all found the description, Socrates.

SO.We began, did we not, with a sharp separation of the farmers of our city, and her craftsmen in general, from the class who were to be her fighting-men?

TI.We did.

SO.To each group, according to its natural aptitudes,¹ we gave one, and only one, occupation, one sole profession, that appropriate to it. Thus we said that the group who were to fight for all must be guardians of the city against attacks from without, or indeed from within, and must be nothing else. They were to administer a lenient justice to their subjects and natural friends, but show themselves stern to enemies encountered in the field.

TI.Precisely.

SO.A guardian's temperament, we said, must, in fact, be at once exceptionally spirited and exceptionally philosophic, if they were to prove themselves rightly lenient and rightly stern to either party.

TI.Yes.

SO.And as to their training? Were they not to be trained in gymnastic, music, and all branches of study appropriate to their calling?

TI.They were indeed.

SO.And men so trained, we said, were not to look on gold or silver, or goods of any kind, as their personal property. They were to be a garrison,² and, as such, to receive a wage for their services from those whose safety depends on them, a wage no more than would content modest men. They were to expend it on their public maintenance and to lead a corporate daily life, in unremitting practice of goodness and complete freedom from all other occupation.

TI.This was in the regulations we laid down.

SO.Then we touched on the question of women. Their native qualities were to be developed on the same lines as those of the men, with whom they were to co-operate in all the activities of war and of life generally.

TI.Yes, we made that regulation too.

SO.Then, as to the procreation of children? But the very novelty of our regulations on that head makes it hard to forget them. We appointed the marriages and children of them all to be in common, they contriving that none of them should ever recognize his own individual progeny, but that all should account of all as one family. They were to regard all who fell between appropriate limits of age as their sisters and brothers, all who fell outside and beyond these limits as parents and parents’ parents, all who fell below as children and children's children.

TI.Yes, and, as you say, it would be hard to forget it.

SO.Then, if you remember, to secure the best congenital endowments obtainable, we said that the officials of both sexes must practise some privy contrivance with lots in the pairing of the couples, such that the inferior sort of men and the better shall both obtain corresponding partners and yet no ill-feeling be occasioned, as they will fancy the allotment to be an effect of chance.

TI.Yes, so we recollect.

SO.Then further we said that the progeny of the good should be educated, but those of the worse privily distributed through the city at large. As the children grow up, they must be repeatedly inspected, and those who are found worthy restored again, while those from their own ranks who prove undeserving should be transferred to the place left vacant by these restorations.

TI.Just so.

SO.Well, then, my dear Timaeus, is this review of

yesterday's conversation now complete, as a summary of the main points? Or are we still sensible of any omissions?

TI.No, Socrates; this is the very substance of what was said.

SO.Then I may now proceed to tell you how I feel about the society we have just described. My feelings are much like those of a man who has beheld superb animals in a drawing, or, it may be, in real life, but at rest, and finds himself longing to behold them in motion, executing some feat commensurate with their physique. That is just how I feel about the city we have described. I should love to hear a narrative of her contention with other cities in some of the rivalries of public life, of her entrance upon a war in a fashion worthy of herself, or honourable achievement in that war of results answerable to her education and training, both in deeds of arms and in diplomatic intercourse with various cities. Now my judgement on myself, Critias and Hermocrates, is that I am incapable of commending such a city and her citizens as they deserve. There is nothing surprising in this personal limitation, but I have come to the same opinion about the poets both of the past and of the present. Not that I would disparage poets as a class, but it must be obvious that the tribe of imitators will imitate nothing so readily or so well as their familiar surroundings; what lies outside these surroundings it is hard for any man to imitate well in action, and still harder to do so in language. The sophists, again, I grant you, are well skilled in eloquent discourse in general,¹ but I suspect that, thanks to their perambulations from city to city and their lack of settled abodes of their own, they may be but ill acquainted with such action and speech as would be employed in the intercourse of war and battle by men who are at once philosophers and statesmen. There remains, then, the class to which you gentlemen belong, a class which unites the natural and educational advantages of both these types. Timaeus, for instance, comes from a city with most admirable laws, the Italian Locri, where he has no superior in fortune or birth, and has enjoyed the highest offices and distinctions his city has to bestow ; in philosophy, also, if I am any judge, he has attained the very highest eminence. As to Critias, of course every one in Athens knows that he is no layman in any of these matters. And that Hermocrates is competently qualified in them all by natural parts and education is attested by many witnesses, whom we must believe. Indeed this is what was in my mind yesterday, when I was so ready to gratify your request for my disquisition on constitutional principles. I knew that no group of men would be more competent to supply the appropriate sequel, if you were so disposed; you could engage my city in a war worthy of her and depict her conduct of it in its right colours, as no other living persons could. So, of course, I delivered the discourse enjoined on me, and laid on you, in return, the injunctions I am now recalling. Well, you agreed that you would consult with one another and entertain me by to-day with a return feast of discourses. And so here I am, in holiday garb and with the best of appetites for the banquet.

HERM. Indeed, Socrates, as Timaeus has said, we shall not be wanting in good will; and we can have no pretext for disappointing you. In fact, as long ago as yesterday we had our thoughts on this very point, as soon as ever we had got back to the guest-chamber of Critias, with whom we are staying, and even while we were still on the way there. Well, our friend related a story which he had heard a long, long while ago. Repeat it now, Critias, for Socrates, that he too may have the opportunity of judging whether it meets his injunctions or not.

CRI. Readily, if our remaining partner, Timaeus, approves.

TI.As I certainly do.

CRI. Here, then, Socrates, is the story; extraordinary as it is, it is absolutely true, as Solon, the wisest of the wise seven, once declared. Solon, who, you must know, was, as he says in several places in his poems, a kinsman and close friend of my great-grandfather Dropides, told my grandfather Critias (so Critias, in his turn, used to repeat the story to me in his old age), that there are great and splendid ancient exploits of our city which have been forgotten from lapse of time and decay of population, and, in particular, one, the greatest of all. To commemorate the exploit to-day would be a becoming way at once of showing our gratitude to you, and honouring our goddess, on her festival, with a true and loyal hymn of praise.

SO.Well said, indeed. But pray, of what nature was this authentic, though unrecorded, ancient exploit of our city of Athens, as described by Critias on the faith of Solon's statement?

CRI. I will tell you, though it is a long while since I heard the story, and the narrator himself was far from a young man. In fact, Critias was, at the time, by his own account, on the verge of ninety, and I myself some ten years old. We were keeping the Apaturia, and the day was the Cureotis. Well, we boys celebrated the festival in the regular customary way; our fathers set us to recite verses against one another for a prize. Of course, various compositions of different poets were repeated, and, in particular, a good many of us boys sang Solon's verses, which were novelties at the time. So one of the confraternity observed—it may have been his real opinion, or he may only have meant a compliment to Critias—that Solon had been, in his judgement, not merely one of the wisest of men, but, in his verse, the most free-spoken of all poets. The old man—how well I recall the scene!—broke into a delighted smile. ‘Ah, Amynander,’ he replied, ‘if he had given himself to verse seriously, like others, and not made a mere pastime of it; if he had completed his treatment of the story he brought home from Egypt but was forced to lay aside by the faction-feuds and other disorders which he found here on his return; then, in my judgement, no poet's reputation—not that of Hesiod or Homer—would have stood higher than his.’ ‘And what story was that?’ says the other. ‘That of a mighty achievement, worthy of superlative renown, once accomplished by our city, though, owing to lapse of time and the destruction of those who accomplished it, the tale of it has not lasted down to our own age.’ ‘Let us have the whole,’ says the other. ‘What was the story Solon related as true? How did he come to hear it, and on whose testimony did he tell it?’ ‘In the Egyptian Delta, ‘said Critias, where the Nile splits into its several mouths, there is a region called the Saitic nome, of which the principal city is Sais, the native place, as you know, of King Amasis. The goddess who presides over this city is called Neith in the Egyptian language; in Greek, as the inhabitants say, her name is Athene; the citizens profess to be warmly attached to Athens and, in some sense, connections of ours. Well, Solon said that he visited this city and was received there with great honours. In especial, he made inquiries about ancient times from such of the priests as were most conversant with them, and so discovered that neither he nor any other Greek knew anything to boast of about such matters. Once, being minded to lead them into talk about antiquities, he began to tell them the most venerable of our legends, those of Phoroneus, the reputed first man, and Niobe; then he went on to tell the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, how they fared after the deluge, to trace the pedigrees of their descendants, and to try to compute the years which had elapsed since these events by a reckoning of the times. “Ah, Solon, Solon,” says one of the priests, an exceeding old man, “you Greeks are always children ; there is no Greek that is a greybeard.” “How do you mean that?” says Solon when he caught the remark. “You have all boys’ minds,” says the priest, “ancient tradition has stored them with no venerable belief nor any hoary lore. And the cause is this. Many and divers are the destructions of mankind which have been and shall yet be; the greatest are wrought by fire and water, but there are others, slighter, wrought by countless causes. Thus the report which is current even among yourselves that Phaethon the Sun-child once harnessed his father's car, but being unable to guide it on his father's track, scorched the face of the earth and was himself consumed by the thunderbolt, has indeed the semblance of a mere fable, but the fact of it is a deviation of the bodies which revolve in heaven about the earth and a destruction, coming at long intervals, of things on the earth in much fire. Hence, at such times, those who dwell among mountains and in highlands and dry places perish more completely than dwellers by rivers or the sea. As for us, the Nile, our universal preserver, then preserves us from this peril also by his rising.¹ On the other side, when the gods cleanse the earth with a flood of waters, while the herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains come safe off, dwellers in your cities are swept by the rivers into the sea. But in this land of ours, neither then nor at other times does water descend on the fields from above; its way is ever to ascend from beneath. These are the causes and reasons for which the traditions preserved here are reputed the most ancient of any, though in true fact, in all regions where excessive rains or heats do not forbid it, there are always men to be found, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. And whatever has come to pass that is heroic or grand or in any way memorable, in your own land, or here in Egypt, or in any other region that has come to our ears, the records of all this have from old times been written down here, in our temples, and are there kept safe; whereas, with you and the rest of mankind, life has but just been furnished with the art of writing and the other requisites of cities, when the torrents come down on you from heaven again, at the usual period, like a pestilence, and leave behind them only the rude and unlettered. Thus you revert, so to say, to your childhood and know nothing of all that has befallen in ancient times, in our country or in your own. Why, Solon, the story you have just related of past generations in your own land is not much better than a tale of the nursery. Your people can recall but one deluge, though there were many before it, and, what is more, you do not know that the bravest and noblest men of all history once existed in your own land. You and all your fellow-citizens are sprung from a scanty remnant of them, though you never suspect this, because their survivors for many generations passed away without utterance in writing. Yes, Solon, once on a time, before the great Deluge, what is now Athens was a city right valiant in war and with laws in all things exceeding excellent. Her exploits and her polities are said to have been the noblest of all under heaven whereof any report has come to our ears.” When Solon heard this, he was amazed and besought the priests with much earnestness to tell him the full tale of those our citizens of old in order. So the priest made answer: “Solon, I will not stint you; the tale shall be told, for love of you and your city, but, chiefly, of the goddess, your patron, foster-mother and tutress, and ours. Yours she was first, taking over the seed of you from Earth and Hephaestus, ours later by a thousand years. Now the age of our native institutions is recorded in our sacred writings as eight thousand years. So I will unfold to you in few the laws of your citizens of nine thousand years ago, and the noblest of their exploits; the full and precise story shall be related some other time, at our leisure, with the very texts before us. First, then, compare your laws with ours here in Sais; you will still find among us many an illustration of those you then had. There is, first, the sharp separation of the priesthood from other classes; next, the rule for the craftsmen: each craft, herdsmen, hunters, farmers, plies its own calling, meddling with no other. The soldiery, in especial, as you must have observed, are a class apart from all others, forbidden by the law to concern themselves with any calling but war. Moreover, the fashion of their equipment...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• INTRODUCTION TO THE ‘TIMAEUS’
• SYNOPSIS OF THE ‘TIMAEUS’
• ‘TIMAEUS’
• INTRODUCTION TO THE ‘CRITIAS’
• ‘CRITIAS’
• APPENDIX I.
• APPENDIX II.
• INDEX