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.

The text distinguishes three forms of fire (flame, light-giving emanation, embers) and grades of air (aether, mist, darkness). Water is divided into liquid and fusile kinds; melting, flowing, cooling, and congealment are defined. Gold, adamant, copper, and rust are described as fusile varieties. The speaker commends turning from eternal things to probable truths of generation as a moderate pastime, then treats hail, ice, snow, and hoarfrost. Juices or saps are classed, with four fiery kinds named: wine, the oily nature, honey, and opos. Earth changing into stone, pottery, black stone, soda, and salt is explained, with rules for what dissolves earth, water, and air by fire, water, or air; glass, wax, and incense are cited. The speaker announces a turn to affections and sensation, presupposing body and soul. Fire's heat is traced to its cutting pyramid, and cold to compression; hard and soft, light and heavy (with discussion of above and below in a spherical universe), and smooth and rough are analyzed. Pleasure and pain are explained through easily and hardly moved bodies, using perfumes, burnings, and cuttings as examples. Affections of the tongue are set out: astringent, harsh, bitter, salt, pungent, acid, and sweet. Smell is described as a half-formed nature, either vapour or mist, distinguished only as painful or pleasant. Hearing is defined as a blow transmitted through air, brain, and blood, with acute, grave, smooth, harsh, loud, and soft sounds. Colours, called a flame from bodies, are treated: transparent, white, black, dazzling, red, auburn, purple, and umber.

The text describes how flame colour arises from auburn and dun, dun from black and white, and pale yellow from white and auburn, and how further colours like dark blue, light blue, and leek green form from mixtures. It states that only God can combine many into one and resolve one into many, no man being able to do so. It distinguishes two causes, divine and necessary. Returning to its beginning, it recalls that God set disordered things in order and constructed the universe as a single animal. God created the divine, but committed the mortal to his offspring, who fashioned a mortal soul subject to pleasure, pain, rashness, fear, anger, and hope. They housed the mortal soul in the thorax, dividing it with the midriff, placing the passionate part near the heart, and set the lung to cool the heart. The desiring part they placed near the navel. God combined the liver with it for divination, reflecting thought as in a mirror. It discusses divination given to foolishness, the need for interpreters, and the spleen keeping the liver clean. It qualifies these claims as probable. It then treats the lower belly and bowels against gluttony, the generation of marrow, brain, bone, sinews, and flesh. God covered bones with flesh, sparing the head to make life shorter but better. It describes the mouth, skin, sutures, and the growth of hair and nails. The gods created plants as food, partaking of the third soul. They cut veins through the body for irrigation, dividing veins about the head crosswise. Fire's small parts distribute moisture; God wove a net of fire and air, the weels, producing what the name-giver called inspiration and expiration, watering and nourishing the body.

Timaeus reconsiders respiration, stating that since no vacuum exists, exhaled breath pushes its neighbour, which drives out the next, coming round like a wheel; breast and lungs are replenished by air entering through the pores. He locates the movement's origin in the internal fire around blood and veins, likened to a creel, whose heat, having two exits, produces the circular motion called inspiration and expiration. He says the same principle explains cupping-glasses, swallowing, projectiles, and sounds high and low, discordant or harmonical, yielding pleasure imitating divine harmony, and also water, thunderbolts, amber, and Heraclean stones, where no attraction operates. Fire cuts food and fills the veins with blood, which reddens and nourishes the body. He describes repletion and evacuation as universal motion, growth and decay through triangles that cut food when young and weaken with age; when the marrow's bonds part, the soul flies away with joy, old-age death being easiest. He classes diseases: from disordered elements; from wrong generation of flesh, sinews, and bone, producing bile, phlegm, and serum of various colours; from wind, phlegm, and bile, causing tetanus, opisthotonus, leprous eruptions, sacred disease, catarrh, inflammations, and fevers—continuous, quotidian, tertian, quartan. He treats disorders of the soul as want of intelligence, madness and ignorance, arising from bodily causes, denying that anyone is voluntarily bad and blaming constitution, government, and education. He then discusses preserving mind and body through due proportion between soul and body, prescribing exercise, music, and philosophy, imitating the universe's motion, and ranks self-produced motion best.

The text ranks modes of purifying the body: gymnastic best, surging motion next, purgative medicine third and only for necessity, since diseases are akin to the living being, which has a fixed span. It advises managing diseases by regimen. It states three kinds of soul dwell within, and that God gave the sovereign part as each person's divinity. Those occupied with desire become mortal; those loving wisdom become immortal and happy. Men should follow the universe's revolutions. Turning to other animals, it states cowardly or unrighteous men became women in the second generation, and describes the fashioning of sexual organs and procreation. Birds came from light-minded men, pedestrian animals from those without philosophy, aquatic creatures from the most senseless. It concludes the discourse on the universe, now a visible animal, the one only begotten heaven.