Plato: Timaeus

Socrates counts his guests and asks Timaeus where the fourth is; Timaeus says he has fallen ill. Socrates asks the remaining three to fill his place, and Timaeus agrees. Socrates recapitulates his previous day's discourse on the State: separating husbandmen and artisans from the guardians; the guardians' passionate and philosophical temperament; their education in gymnastic and music; their lack of private property; the assimilation of women to men; the community of wives and children; the secret use of lots for breeding; and the handling of children of good and bad parents. Timaeus confirms each point. Socrates expresses a wish to see the State in motion, at war, and praises Timaeus of Locris, Critias, and Hermocrates as fit for the task. Hermocrates mentions an ancient tradition Critias told them and asks Critias to repeat it. Critias, with Timaeus's approval, recounts a tale attested by Solon, wisest of the seven sages and friend of his great-grandfather Dropides. He describes the Apaturia festival and Amynander questioning old Critias about Solon's tale from Egypt. Solon, at Sais, questions the priests; the goddess Neith is identified with Athene. An aged priest tells Solon that the Hellenes are always children, explains destructions by fire and water, cites the Phaethon myth, and says the Nile preserves Egypt. The priest describes ancient Athens, founded by the goddess a thousand years before Egypt, and recounts the war against Atlantis, which Athens defeated before earthquakes and floods sank both the Athenian warriors and Atlantis. Critias notes the coincidence with Socrates's city and proposes transferring the imagined citizens to ancient Athens. Socrates approves. Critias arranges that Timaeus speak first, on the universe down to man. Timaeus invokes the Gods before beginning.

Timaeus distinguishes what always is and never becomes, apprehended by intelligence, from what always becomes and never is, conceived by opinion and sensation. Everything created requires a cause. A creator working from an unchangeable pattern makes fair work. He asks whether the world was created; he answers created, being visible and tangible. The father and maker is past finding out. The artificer looked to the eternal, so the world is a copy. Words describing the copy need only be probable; Timaeus asks Socrates not to be surprised if accounts are inexact, since they are mortal. Socrates approves the prelude and bids him proceed. Timaeus explains the creator, being good and free from jealousy, desired all things like himself, bringing order from disorder, placing intelligence in soul and soul in body, making the world a living creature. It is fashioned after the perfect animal that contains all animals, and is one only. He makes its body from fire and earth, binding them with water and air by proportion, using all four elements. He shapes it as a smooth globe, without eyes, ears, or limbs, self-sufficient, revolving in place. He puts soul in the centre, diffused throughout. He makes the soul prior to the body, from the same, the other, and essence, dividing it by numerical portions and intervals, then into two circles, the same and the other, giving dominion to the same and dividing the other into seven. He creates time as a moving image of eternity, with days, months, years. He makes the sun, moon, and five planets to mark time, assigning their orbits. He then fashions four kinds of creatures: heavenly gods, birds, water creatures, and land creatures. The heavenly gods are made from fire, circular. Earth is guardian of night and day. The account of the visible gods ends.

The text states the origin of the other divinities lies beyond knowledge and that the traditions of the men of old, who claim descent from the gods, must be accepted. It sets out the genealogy: Oceanus and Tethys from Earth and Heaven, then Phorcys, Cronos, Rhea, then Zeus, Here and their brethren. The creator addresses these gods as his works, declaring them not immortal by nature but indissoluble by his will, and instructs them to create three mortal tribes, while he sows the immortal seed. He mixes the remains of the elements in the cup, divides souls equal to the stars, assigns each a star, and declares the laws of destiny, including transmigration into woman and brute for those conquered by passions, and return to one's star for the righteous. He sows souls and commits mortal bodies to the younger gods. The younger gods weld elements into bodies, fastening the soul's courses, which are disturbed by influx, efflux, and sensations, twisting the mathematical intervals until reason later corrects them. The gods enclose the courses in the spherical head, add limbs, a face, and eyes; vision arises when inner fire meets daylight. Night, sleep, dreams, and mirror-images are explained, including reversal of right and left. Second co-operative causes are distinguished from causes with mind. Sight's purpose is to yield number, time, and philosophy; speech, hearing, music, and rhythm correct the soul's discord. The discourse turns to necessity alongside mind, requiring a new beginning and a third kind: the receptacle and nurse of all generation. Elements transform in a circle; things should be called "such," not "this." Using the gold analogy, the receptacle is likened to a mother, the source to a father, the generated to a child, and must itself be formless.

The text states that what receives resemblances of eternal beings must be devoid of form, and terms the mother and receptacle of all sensible things an invisible, formless being partaking of the intelligible. Fire, water, earth, and air are described as impressions the mother substance receives. The speaker asks whether self-existent fire exists, then distinguishes mind from true opinion, arguing they are distinct in origin and nature, mind belonging to the gods and few men. Three natures are set out: being (uncreated, apprehended by intelligence), the sensible (created, apprehended by opinion and sense), and space (eternal, apprehended by spurious reason). The speaker declares being, space, and generation existed before the heaven, and that the nurse of generation, shaken like a winnowing machine, separated the elements. God fashioned them by form and number out of things not fair. Fire, earth, water, and air are bodies composed of triangles, of two kinds; the speaker selects the isosceles and a scalene triangle, naming the equilateral-forming one most beautiful. Four solids are constructed—pyramid, octahedron, icosahedron from the scalene, and cube from the isosceles—and a fifth combination God used for the universe. The speaker considers whether the worlds are one or five, favoring one. The cube is assigned to earth, and the remaining forms to water, air, and fire by mobility, size, and acuteness; the pyramid is fire's seed. Transformations among elements by division and combination are described. Rest is assigned to uniformity, motion to non-uniformity. The revolution of the universe compresses everything, thrusting smaller particles into interstices, generating perpetual motion. The text turns to divers kinds of fire.

Timaeus distinguishes three kinds of fire—flame, light-giving emanations, and embers—and differences in air: aether, mist, darkness, and nameless kinds from unequal triangles. Water divides into liquid and fusile; fire dissolving the fusile produces melting and flowing, and its retreat produces cooling and congealment. Among fusile kinds he names gold, adamant, copper, and rust. He remarks that setting aside eternal things for probable truths is a moderate pastime, and asks leave to continue. He treats water mingled with fire yielding hail, ice, snow, hoarfrost; juices distilled through plants, naming wine, the oily nature, honey, and opos. Earth filtered through water becomes rock; he describes pottery, a black stone, soda, and salt, called dear to the gods. He explains what dissolves earth, water, and air, and names glass, wax, and incense. Turning to affections, he presupposes body and soul. Fire is hot through its cutting pyramid; cold arises from compression, producing shivering. He defines hard and soft relative to flesh. He argues the spherical universe has no true above or below, illustrating light and heavy by weighing fire. Smooth and rough follow from uniformity and irregularity. Pleasure and pain depend on easily or hardly moved bodies; sudden violent impressions pain, returns please, with perfumes and burnings as examples. He describes affections of the tongue—astringent, harsh, bitter, salt, pungent, acid, sweet. Smell admits no kinds, only vapour and mist, painful or pleasant. Hearing is a blow transmitted to the soul, acute or grave, smooth or harsh, loud or small; harmonies are deferred. Colours are flame from bodies: transparent, white, black, dazzling, red, auburn, purple, umber.

Flame colour arises from auburn and dun, dun from black and white, pale yellow from white and auburn; white and bright on black make dark blue, dark blue with white light blue, flame-colour with black leek green. Only God can combine many into one and resolve one into many; no man can. The creator associated these necessary elements with himself; two causes are distinguished, divine and necessary. Reverting to the beginning, God ordered all things and made the universe a single animal; he created the divine, committing mortal creation to his offspring. They fashioned a mortal soul with pleasure, pain, rashness, fear, anger, hope, and love. The neck bounds head from thorax; the courageous part is placed near the head, the heart as guard, the lung to cool it; the desiring part sits between midriff and navel, bound like an animal. The liver is placed to receive images and give divination, granted to man's foolishness; interpreters judge prophecy; the liver goes blind after death. The spleen keeps the liver clean. After summarizing the soul, the text describes the lower belly and bowels made against gluttony. Marrow is generated as seed; brain and marrow are formed, then bone by kneading earth with marrow through fire and water. Sinews and flesh follow; the head is given thin bone for a shorter, better life. The mouth, teeth, tongue, lips are framed; skin, hair, sutures, and nails form, since women and animals would later be framed from men. Trees and plants are created as food, partaking of the third kind of soul. The gods cut channels and veins through the body, and construct a weel of fire and air for breathing, named inspiration and expiration, distributing nourishment.

Timaeus reconsiders respiration, explaining that since there is no vacuum, expelled breath pushes neighbouring air round in a circular motion like a wheel, replenishing the breast and lungs through the pores. He locates an internal fountain of fire around the blood and veins, and describes heat exiting through the body and through mouth and nostrils, producing inspiration and expiration. He applies the same principle to cupping-glasses, swallowing, projectiles, and to swift and slow sounds that become discordant or harmonical, yielding pleasure imitating divine harmony. He treats the flowing of water, the thunderbolt, and amber and the Heraclean stones as involving no attraction but the absence of vacuum and the pushing and changing of places. He explains how fire cuts food, filling the veins; how blood, coloured red, nourishes the body; and how repletion and evacuation follow the universal motion. He describes youth, growth, and old age through the triangles, and death by disease as painful, death by old age as pleasant. Timaeus then details diseases: those from excess, defect, or displacement of earth, fire, water, air; a second class from wrong generation of marrow, bone, flesh, sinews, and blood, producing bile, serum, and white phlegm. A third class arises from wind, phlegm, and bile, causing tetanus, opisthotonus, leprous eruptions, the sacred disease, catarrhs, inflammations, and fevers—continuous, quotidian, tertian, quartan. He turns to diseases of the soul—madness and ignorance—arguing no man is voluntarily bad, blaming body and education. He discusses proportion between soul and body, and prescribes balancing both through gymnastic, music, and philosophy, keeping the body always in motion in imitation of the universe, and ranks self-produced motion as best.

The text states gymnastic is the best mode of purifying the body, surging motion next, and purgative medicine only in extreme necessity, since each individual has a fixed span and medicines aggravate disease; diseases should be managed by regimen. It affirms three kinds of soul, whose movements should be proportioned, and that God gave the sovereign part as each man's divinity at the top of the body. Those occupied with desire become mortal; lovers of wisdom become immortal and happy by following the universe's revolutions. The discourse then treats other animals: cowardly men became women, and the text describes sexual generation; light-minded men became birds, the unphilosophical became land animals, and the most senseless became water creatures. It closes stating the world is a visible animal, the one only begotten heaven.