Timaeus

Plato · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

SOCRATES: One, two, three — and the fourth, dear Timaeus, where has he gone? Yesterday you four were my guests; today you are my hosts. TIMAEUS: Some illness came over him, Socrates — he would never have willingly stayed away from this gathering. SOCRATES: Then it falls to you and these others to fill in his part as well as your own? TIMAEUS: Certainly, and as far as we're able we won't leave anything out. It wouldn't be right, having been so generously entertained by you yesterday, for those of us who remain not to return the hospitality eagerly. SOCRATES: Well then, do you remember all that I asked you to speak about, and on what topics? TIMAEUS: Some of it we remember, and whatever we don't, you're here to remind us. Or rather, if it isn't too much trouble, run through it again briefly from the beginning, so that it will be fixed more firmly in our minds. SOCRATES: I'll do that. Yesterday my speech about the constitution came, I think, to this main point: what sort of city, and made up of what sort of men, seemed to me likely to prove the best. TIMAEUS: Yes indeed, Socrates, and it suited all of us very well. SOCRATES: Didn't we first, in that city, separate off the class of farmers and all the other craftsmen from the class of those who would fight in its defense? TIMAEUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And giving to each, according to nature, the one occupation suited to him alone, one single craft each — those whom it was necessary should fight on behalf of everyone, we said should be only guardians of the city, whether some enemy came from outside or some wrongdoer from within, judging leniently those under their rule who were by nature their friends, but becoming harsh toward the enemies they met in battle.

TIMAEUS: Quite so. SOCRATES: For we said, I believe, that the guardians' souls must have a nature that is at once spirited and, equally, exceptionally philosophic, so that they could rightly be gentle toward the one group and harsh toward the other. TIMAEUS: Yes. SOCRATES: And what about their upbringing? Weren't they to be brought up entirely in gymnastics and music, and whatever other studies were fitting for them? TIMAEUS: Certainly. SOCRATES: And we said that those raised in this way should never consider gold or silver or any other possession as their own private property, but rather, as auxiliaries receiving pay for their guardianship from those they protect — pay proportionate to what temperate people need — they should spend it in common and live together sharing their daily life, devoting themselves at all times to the care of virtue, and keeping free from all other occupations. TIMAEUS: Yes, that too was said in just that way. SOCRATES: And indeed we also spoke about the women — how their natures should be matched to be similar to the men's, and that all occupations should be shared in common between them, both in war and in the rest of life. TIMAEUS: That too was said in just that way. SOCRATES: And what about the matter of childbearing? Or is this, because of how unfamiliar the proposals were, easy to remember — that we made marriages and children common to all, arranging things so that no one would ever privately know which child was his own, and that all would consider all the rest to be their kin: brothers and sisters, those within the proper age range; and those older, going further back, parents and the ancestors of parents; and those younger, descendants and the children of descendants? TIMAEUS: Yes, and that too is easy to remember, just as you put it. SOCRATES: And in order that, as far as possible, they might be born with the best natures right away, don't we recall that we said the rulers, both men and women, must secretly arrange by a kind of lottery for the joining together in marriage, so that the bad would be paired off separately from the good, each with their like, and so that no hostility would arise among them over this, since they would believe chance was responsible for the pairing? TIMAEUS: We remember.

SOCRATES: And further, that the children of the good were to be reared, while those of the bad were to be secretly distributed among the rest of the city; and that as they grew, those overseeing them should always watch and bring back up again any who proved worthy, while those among the upper class who proved unworthy should be exchanged into the place of those coming up? TIMAEUS: Just so. SOCRATES: Have we, then, already gone through everything, as we did yesterday, summing it up again in outline, or is there something still missing that we long to hear, my dear Timaeus? TIMAEUS: Not at all — this was exactly what was said, Socrates. SOCRATES: Then you may now hear what comes next, concerning the constitution we've described, and the sort of feeling I happen to have about it. My feeling toward it is rather like this: as if someone, having seen beautiful animals somewhere, whether rendered in a painting or truly alive but at rest, should fall into a desire to see them in motion, actually doing something athletic that seemed to suit their bodies — that is just what I feel toward the city we've described. I would gladly listen to someone recounting the contests that a city like this engages in, competing against other cities — how fittingly it goes to war, and in fighting renders what is due to the education and upbringing it has given, both in its actual deeds and in its negotiations in speech with each of the other cities. Now, on this score, Critias and Hermocrates, I have judged myself incapable of ever adequately praising such men and such a city. And it's no wonder in my own case — but I have formed the same opinion about the poets, both those of former times and those living now; not that I disparage the poetic race, but it is plain to everyone that the imitative kind will most easily and best imitate whatever it has been raised among, while whatever lies outside a person's upbringing is hard to imitate well in deeds, and harder still to imitate well in words. As for the sophists' class, I consider them well versed in many fine speeches and other things, but I fear that, being wanderers from city to city and never having settled in homes of their own, they may miss the mark when it comes to the sort of things that philosophic and political men would do and say, in dealing with each other in the actual business of war and battle, whether in action or in negotiation.

SOCRATES: There remains, then, only your class — men who by both nature and upbringing partake of both qualities. For here is Timaeus, from Locri in Italy, a city with excellent laws, a man second to none there in wealth and lineage, who has held the highest offices and honors in his city, and who has, in my opinion, reached the very summit of philosophy. And Critias — all of us here know he is no amateur in any of the matters we're discussing. As for Hermocrates' nature and upbringing, we must trust, on the testimony of many, that he is equal to all of this. That is why yesterday, when you asked me to go through the account of the constitution, I gladly obliged, knowing that none of you, if willing, could give the speech that follows more adequately than you three — for you alone among people today could, having set the city on a proper footing for war, render everything fitting to it. So, having given what was asked of me, I in turn imposed upon you what I am now asking for. And you agreed among yourselves, after consulting together, that you would today repay me the hospitality of your speeches; and here I am, ready and prepared for it, most eager of all to receive it. HERMOCRATES: Indeed, Socrates, as Timaeus here said, we will not fall short in eagerness, nor is there any excuse for us not to do this. So yesterday, as soon as we left here and reached Critias' guest-house where we are staying — and even before that, along the way — we were considering just this. And Critias here introduced an account to us drawn from ancient hearsay. Tell it now to Socrates too, Critias, so he can join in judging whether or not it fits what has been asked of us. CRITIAS: We must do that, if it also seems good to our third partner, Timaeus. TIMAEUS: It does indeed. CRITIAS: Listen, then, Socrates, to an account that is quite strange, yet wholly true, as Solon, the wisest of the seven sages, once said. He was, in fact, a close kinsman and dear friend of Dropides, our great-grandfather — a fact Solon himself mentions at many points in his poetry —

CRITIAS: — and he told our grandfather Critias, as the old man in turn recounted to us, that this city had performed great and wonderful deeds long ago, which had been forgotten through time and the destruction of those who did them; and one deed above all was the greatest, which it would now be fitting for us to recall, both to repay you for your account and, at the same time, at the festival, to praise the goddess truly and justly, as if singing a hymn in her honor. SOCRATES: Well said. But what was this deed, Critias — not merely spoken of, but which Critias related, on Solon's testimony, as having actually been performed by this city long ago? CRITIAS: I will tell it — an ancient account I heard from a man who was himself not young. For at that time Critias was, as he said, close to ninety years old already, and I was about ten. It happened to be the Kourotis day of the Apatouria festival for us. The customary event of the festival took place for the children as always: our fathers set prizes for us in recitation. Many poems by many poets were recited, and since Solon's verses were still new at that time, many of us boys sang them. Then one of our clan-members — whether he really thought so at the time or wished to do Critias a favor — said that he considered Solon not only the wisest of men in other respects but also, in his poetry, the most nobly free of all poets. The old man — I remember it well — was greatly pleased and said with a smile: 'If only, Amynander, he had not treated poetry as a mere pastime but had taken it seriously, as others do, and had completed the account he brought back here from Egypt, instead of being forced to neglect it because of the civil strife and other troubles he found here upon his return — in my opinion, neither Hesiod nor Homer nor any other poet would ever have become more celebrated than he.' 'And what was this account?' the man asked. 'It concerned,' he said, 'what would most justly be called the greatest and most renowned of all deeds, one which this city actually performed, but which, through time and the destruction of those who did it, has not survived down to us.' 'Tell it from the beginning,' the man said, 'what it was, and how, and from whom Solon heard it as true.' 'There is a place in Egypt,' he said, 'in the Delta, where the stream of the Nile splits at its head, called the Saitic district. The greatest city of this district is Sais — the home, too, of King Amasis — whose city has a goddess as its founder, called in Egyptian Neith, and in Greek, as they themselves say, Athena. They are great lovers of Athens and claim to be in some way akin to us.'

CRITIAS: Solon said that when he arrived there he was held in the highest honor among them, and that once, when he was questioning the priests most versed in such matters about antiquity, he discovered that neither he himself nor any other Greek, so to speak, knew anything at all about these things. And once, wanting to draw them into discussion of ancient times, he tried to tell them the oldest stories we have here—about Phoroneus, said to be the first man, and Niobe, and how, after the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha survived, weaving in their genealogy, and trying to reckon the years of all he mentioned by counting up the generations. Then one of the priests, a very old man, said: 'Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children—there is no such thing as an old Greek.' Hearing this, Solon asked, 'What do you mean by that?' 'You are all young in your souls,' the priest said, 'for you have in them no belief grown old through ancient tradition, no learning hoary with time. And the reason is this: humanity has perished many times over, in many different fashions, and will perish again—the greatest by fire and water, but others, lesser ones, by countless other means. For even the story told among you, that Phaethon, son of Helios, once yoked his father's chariot and, being unable to drive it along his father's course, scorched everything upon the earth before a thunderbolt struck him down and killed him—this is told in the form of a myth, but the truth behind it is a shifting of the bodies that move around the earth in the heavens, and a destruction, occurring at long intervals, of the things on earth by a great fire. At such times all those who live in the mountains and in high, dry places perish more than those who dwell near rivers or the sea; but for us the Nile is our savior in this as in other respects, since it releases us from this very difficulty by its flooding. But whenever the gods cleanse the earth by drowning it under water, those in the mountains—herdsmen and shepherds—survive, while those in your cities are swept down to the sea by the rivers. But here in our country, water never streams down onto the fields from above, not on those occasions nor on any other; on the contrary, everything here naturally rises up from below.'

CRITIAS: 'This is the reason, and the cause, why what is preserved here is said to be the oldest. The truth is that in all places where excessive cold or heat does not prevent it, there is always a race of human beings, now more, now fewer. And whatever notable or great deeds have occurred, whether among you or here or in any other place we have heard of, all of these have been written down here in our temples from of old and preserved, whereas among you and the others, records have only just been put together each time, using writing and all the other things cities need, and then again, after the usual cycle of years, a flood from heaven comes upon them like a plague, and leaves only the illiterate and uncultured among you, so that you become young again, as it were, from the beginning, ignorant of all that took place in ancient days, whether here or in your own land. Certainly, Solon, the genealogies you just recounted about your own people differ little from children's tales—first, because you remember only one flood of the earth, though there were many before it; and second, because you do not know that the finest and best race of all mankind once lived in your land, from whom you yourself and your whole present city are descended, a small seed having been left over; but this has escaped you, because for many generations the survivors passed away without setting anything down in writing. There was once an age, Solon — prior to the greatest of the destructions by water — when the city that is now Athens was the best in war and in every way surpassingly well-governed; it is said to have accomplished the finest deeds and had the finest constitutions of any we have heard report of under heaven.' Hearing this, Solon said he was astonished, and was altogether eager to ask the priests to relate to him in full detail, in order, everything about the ancient citizens. The priest said: 'I begrudge you nothing, Solon; I will tell it for your sake and your city's, but chiefly to honor the goddess who received both your land and this one as her portion and reared and educated them—yours a thousand years earlier, when she received the seed of you from Earth and Hephaestus, and this one later. The number of years since the establishment of order here is written in our sacred records as eight thousand. I will show you briefly the laws of the citizens who lived nine thousand years ago, and the finest of their deeds.'

CRITIAS: 'The exact details of all of it, in order, we will go through another time at leisure, taking up the actual writings themselves. For now, consider the laws in comparison with those here; for you will find many examples here now of things that existed among you then—first, the class of priests, set apart from the others; then, next, the class of craftsmen, each working at its own trade without mixing with another—the herdsmen, the hunters, and the farmers. And you have surely noticed that the warrior class here is kept separate from all the other classes, forbidden by law to concern themselves with anything except matters of war. Consider too the style of their armament, shields and spears, with which we were the first in Asia to arm ourselves, the goddess having shown this to us just as she did to you first in those regions. As for wisdom, you see how much care the law here took from the very beginning, concerning the ordering of the cosmos, discovering all the way down to divination and medicine for the sake of health—deriving human arts from these divine things—and acquiring all the other branches of learning that follow from them. This whole system and order the goddess established when she founded you first, choosing the place in which you were born, having observed the temperate climate there, that it would produce the wisest men; being herself a lover of both war and wisdom, the goddess chose the region likely to produce men most like herself, and settled it first. So you lived under such laws, and governed even better, surpassing all mankind in every virtue, as befits those who are the offspring and pupils of gods. Many great deeds of your city are recorded here and admired, but one surpasses all others in greatness and excellence: the records tell how great a power your city once halted as it marched in insolence against the whole of Europe and Asia at once, setting out from beyond, from the Atlantic Ocean.'

CRITIAS: 'For at that time that ocean was navigable, since it had an island in front of the mouth which you call, as you say, the Pillars of Heracles; and this island exceeded Libya and Asia together in size, and from it travelers of that time could pass to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole opposite continent that surrounds that true sea. For what lies within the mouth we speak of appears to be a harbor with a narrow entrance, but that other is truly a sea, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called a continent in the full sense. On this island of Atlantis there arose a great and marvelous power of kings, ruling the whole island and many other islands as well as parts of the mainland; and besides this, of the lands within our region, they ruled Libya as far as Egypt, and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This entire power, gathered into one, once attempted to enslave in a single assault the whole region within the strait, both yours and ours. It was then, Solon, that the power of your city became manifest to all mankind for its excellence and its strength; for surpassing all others in courage of spirit and in the arts of war, leading the Greeks at one point, and at another standing alone of necessity when the others withdrew, having come to the utmost dangers, it overcame the invaders and set up a trophy, prevented those not yet enslaved from being enslaved, and ungrudgingly set free everyone else living inside the boundaries of Heracles. But in later time there came earthquakes of extraordinary violence, and floods with them; one terrible day and night arrived, and the whole of your warrior class was swallowed beneath the ground, while the island of Atlantis went down in the same way under the sea and vanished. That is why even now that sea is impassable and unexplored, blocked by a great quantity of shoal mud which the island left as it settled. You have now heard, Socrates, in brief, what was told by old Critias on the report of Solon; and when you were speaking yesterday about the constitution and the men you described, I was amazed, recalling to myself these very things I am telling now, realizing how by some marvelous chance, not at all by accident, you had matched much of what Solon said.'

CRITIAS: 'I did not want to say so at once, however, for after so long a time my memory of it was not sufficient. So I thought that I ought first to recall everything to myself thoroughly before speaking. That is why I so quickly agreed yesterday to what you asked, thinking that, as is the greatest task in all such matters, we would be reasonably well supplied with an account suited to your intentions. And so, as this man said, as soon as I left here yesterday I began recalling it and going over it with these two, and after I left I went over nearly everything again in my mind during the night. How true it is, as they say, that what we learn as children makes a marvelous impression! For as for what I heard yesterday, I do not know whether I could recover all of it again in memory; but as for these things I heard so very long ago, I would be altogether astonished if any of them has slipped away from me. It was heard then with great pleasure and as a kind of game, with the old man teaching me eagerly, since I kept asking him questions again and again, so that it has stayed with me like an indelible dye burned into a picture; and indeed I told these very things to our friends here first thing this morning, so that they might be well supplied with material along with me. Now then, Socrates, for the very purpose all this has been said, I am ready to tell it, not merely in outline but in every detail, just as I heard it; and the citizens and the city which you described to us yesterday as if in a myth, we shall now transfer here and set down as being this very city, and we shall say that the citizens you had in mind are those true ancestors of ours whom the priest spoke of. They will fit perfectly, and we shall not be out of tune in saying they are the very people who lived at that time. Working together, all of us will try to render, as far as we can, what is fitting to the task you set us. So we must consider, Socrates, whether this account is to our mind, or whether we should look for some other in its place.'

SOCRATES: And what could we take up instead of that, Critias, that would suit the goddess's present festival better, given its kinship to it, and would also have the immense merit of being a true account rather than an invented myth? How and where could we find others, if we let this one go? There's no way—no, with good luck on our side, you three should speak, and I, in return for yesterday's speeches, should now sit quietly and listen in turn. CRITIAS: Well, consider, Socrates, the arrangement of hospitality we've made for you. We decided that Timaeus, since he's the most versed in astronomy among us and has made it his particular business to know about the nature of the universe, should speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending with the nature of man. I should come after him, taking over from him human beings already brought into existence by his account, and some of them, in your account, given an outstanding education; and then, bringing them in according to Solon's story and law, I should make them citizens of this city here before us as judges, treating them as those Athenians of old whose existence, though hidden from us, was revealed by the report in the sacred writings—and from there on I should speak of them as citizens, as actual Athenians already. SOCRATES: It seems I'm going to receive a complete and splendid feast of speeches in return. So it would be your task now, Timaeus, to speak next, it seems—once you've called on the gods as custom requires. TIMAEUS: Well, Socrates, that much at least everyone does who has even a small share of good sense: at the outset of any undertaking, small or great, they always call upon a god. And we, who are about to give an account of the universe—how it came to be, or perhaps has no becoming at all—must, unless we're altogether off course, invoke gods and goddesses and pray that everything we say will be above all to their liking, and follow from that to ours as well. So much, then, for the invocation of the gods; but we must also invoke what belongs to us, so that you may most easily learn, and I may best set forth what I have in mind concerning the matters before us.

TIMAEUS: In my view, then, we must begin by distinguishing this: what is the thing that exists forever and never comes to be, and what is the thing forever coming to be yet never truly existing? The one is grasped by understanding, with the aid of reasoning, since it is always the same; the other is the object of opinion, aided by unreasoning perception, since it comes to be and passes away and never really is at all. Now everything that comes to be must of necessity come to be through some cause; for it is impossible for anything to come into being without a cause. So whenever the craftsman, in fashioning something's look and character, keeps his gaze fixed on what is always the same, using a model of that kind, the result must of necessity turn out beautiful; but whenever he looks instead to something that has come to be, using a generated model, the result is not beautiful. As for the whole heaven—or cosmos, or whatever other name it would most readily accept, let it be called by that name for us—we must first examine concerning it what one is supposed to examine first about anything: whether it has always existed, having no beginning of its becoming, or whether it has come to be, starting from some beginning. It has come to be; for it is visible and tangible and has a body, and all things of that kind are perceptible, and perceptible things, grasped by opinion together with perception, have shown themselves to be things that come to be and are generated. And of that which has come to be, we say it is necessary that it came to be through some cause.

TIMAEUS: Now to discover the maker and father of this universe is a task, and having discovered him, to speak of him to everyone is impossible. But we must go back and examine this further question about him: after which of the two models did the builder construct it—the one that is always the same and unchanging, or the one that has come to be? Well, if this cosmos is beautiful and its craftsman good, clearly he looked to the eternal model; but if what cannot even be said without impiety were the case, he looked to the one that has come to be. It is clear to everyone that he looked to the eternal one; for the cosmos is the most beautiful of things that have come to be, and he is the best of causes. Having come to be in this way, it has been fashioned after the model graspable by reason and understanding, the one that is always the same. Given this, it follows of necessity that this cosmos is an image of something. Now it is of the greatest importance, in every matter, to begin at the point nature intends. So concerning both the image and its model, we must make this distinction: that accounts are akin to the very things they set forth. Accounts of what is stable and secure and evident to understanding should themselves be stable and unshifting—so far as it is possible and fitting for accounts to be irrefutable and unassailable, nothing of that should be lacking; but accounts of what is merely made in the likeness of that other, being itself only an image, should be merely likely, standing in the same proportion to the former as becoming stands to being. So if, Socrates, in speaking about many things concerning gods and the coming-to-be of the universe, we turn out unable to give an account in every way consistent with itself and exact, do not be surprised. Rather, if we furnish an account no less likely than anyone else's, we should be content, remembering that both I who speak and you who judge are only human by nature, so that it is fitting to accept the likely story about these things and not search further beyond it. SOCRATES: Excellent, Timaeus—we must accept it entirely on your own terms. We have received your prelude admirably; go on now and complete the main performance for us. TIMAEUS: Let us then say for what reason the one who framed becoming and this universe framed them. He was good, and in one who is good no envy of anything ever arises. Being free of envy, he wished all things to come to be as much like himself as possible.

TIMAEUS: This principle, above all, one would be most right to accept from wise men as the most authoritative source of becoming and of the cosmos. For the god, wishing that all things should be good and, so far as possible, nothing bad, took over all that was visible—not at rest, but moving in a discordant and disorderly way—and brought it from disorder into order, judging that order was in every way better than disorder. It neither was nor is permissible for the best to do anything other than what is most beautiful. So, reasoning it out, he found that among things visible by nature, no work devoid of intelligence could ever, as a whole, be more beautiful than one endowed with intelligence, taken as a whole; and further, that intelligence could not come to be present in anything apart from soul. For this reason, reasoning thus, he constructed the whole by placing intelligence in soul and soul in body, so as to bring to completion a work that would be by nature as beautiful and as good as possible. In this way, then, following the likely account, we must say that this cosmos came to be, through the god's providence, a living creature possessing soul and intelligence in very truth. Given this, we must next say to which of the living creatures he made it resemble when he framed it. Let us not judge it worthy to resemble any of those creatures that exist as parts—for nothing resembling something incomplete could ever come to be beautiful—but let us posit that it resembles, more than anything, that of which the other living creatures, individually and by kind, are parts. For that living creature contains within itself all the intelligible living creatures, just as this cosmos contains us and all the other creatures that have been formed and are visible.

TIMAEUS: For the god, wishing to make it resemble as closely as possible the most beautiful of intelligible things and the most complete in every way, constructed it as a single visible living creature, containing within itself all the living creatures that are by nature akin to it. Have we then been right to speak of a single heaven, or would it have been more correct to speak of many, indeed infinitely many? It must be one, if it is to have been fashioned after its model. For that which encompasses all the intelligible living creatures there are could never be one of a pair together with another; for then there would have to be yet another living creature encompassing those two, of which they would be parts, and it would then be more correct to say that this world was made in the likeness not of those two but of that encompassing third. So, in order that this world should resemble the all-complete living creature in respect of its uniqueness, the maker made not two worlds, nor an infinite number, but this single, uniquely-begotten heaven has come to be and continues to exist. Now what has come to be must be bodily, and so visible and tangible; and yet nothing could ever become visible apart from fire, nor tangible without something solid, nor solid without earth. Hence the god, beginning to construct the body of the universe, made it out of fire and earth. But two things by themselves cannot be beautifully joined in the absence of a third; some bond has to stand between them, drawing the pair together. And the most beautiful of bonds is one that makes itself and the things it binds as fully one as possible—and this is naturally best accomplished by proportion.

TIMAEUS: For whenever, among three numbers—whether they are volumes or powers of any kind—the middle one stands to the last as the first stands to it, and again the last stands to the middle as the middle stands to the first, then, since the middle becomes both first and last, and the last and the first in turn both become middles, all of them will, of necessity, turn out to be the same in relation to one another; and being the same relative to one another, they will all be one. Now if the body of the universe had needed to be a plane surface, with no depth at all, one mean alone would have been enough to link it with its companion terms; but as it is, it was fitting for it to be solid in form, and solids are never joined by one mean alone, but always require two means working together. So the god set water and air between fire and earth, and made them, so far as possible, proportionate to one another—so that fire stands to air as air stands to water, and air stands to water as water stands to earth; binding them in this way, he framed the heaven, visible and tangible. On this account the body of the cosmos was generated out of elements of this kind, four in number, brought into harmony by proportion, and from this it acquired friendship, so that, having come together into unity with itself, it is indissoluble by anything other than the one who bound it. And of the four elements, the constitution of the cosmos has taken up each one whole. For the one who constructed it made it out of all the fire, water, air, and earth there is, leaving no part or power of any of them outside, with this intention: first, that it might be as complete a living whole as possible, made of complete parts,

TIMAEUS: and further, one—since nothing was left over from which another such creature might come to be—and moreover, so that it might be free from old age and disease, observing how heat and cold and all things that have strong powers, when they surround a compound body and fall upon it out of season, dissolve it, and bring on diseases and old age, causing it to waste away. For this reason and by this reasoning, he fashioned it as a single whole, made of all wholes, complete, free from old age and disease. And he gave it the shape that was fitting and akin to it. For a living creature meant to contain within itself all living creatures, the fitting shape would be the one that encompasses within itself all the shapes there are; therefore he turned it, spherical in form, equidistant in every direction from the center to the extremities—a round shape, the most complete of all shapes and the most like itself, since he judged the like unimaginably more beautiful than the unlike. And all around, on the outside, he made it smooth all over, for many reasons. It had no need of eyes, since nothing visible was left outside it; nor of hearing, since there was nothing to be heard either; there was no air surrounding it requiring breath, nor again did it need any organ by which to take in nourishment into itself and afterward expel what had already been drained of its use. For nothing departed from it and nothing came to it from anywhere—there was nowhere for anything to come from—since it was made by design to furnish its own waste as its own nourishment, and to act and be acted upon entirely within and by itself; for its maker judged that it would be better self-sufficient than dependent on anything else. And since it had no need to grasp anything with hands, nor to fend anything off, he thought it pointless to attach hands to it in vain, or feet either, or any other apparatus for standing and walking.

TIMAEUS — He assigned to it the motion proper to its body, that one of the seven motions which belongs most to intellect and understanding. So he turned it about uniformly in the same place and within itself, and made it revolve in a circle, and took away from it all the other six motions, so that it would not wander through any of them. And since this revolution needed no feet, he brought it into being without legs and without feet. This whole plan, then—conceived by a god who always is, concerning a god who was to be—produced a body smooth and even all over, equal from the center in every direction, whole and complete, made of complete bodies. And placing soul in its center, he stretched it through the whole and further wrapped the body round with it on the outside; and so he set it revolving in a circle, a single heaven, alone, capable through its own excellence of keeping company with itself and needing nothing else, sufficiently acquainted with and friendly to itself. On all these accounts he begot it a blessed god. As for the soul, he did not, as we are now attempting to describe, contrive it later than the body—we speak of it that way largely because we share so much in what is haphazard and random—but the god constructed the soul prior to the body and older than it, both in birth and in excellence, to be the body's mistress and ruler, its ruler-to-be, and he put it together out of the following materials and in the following way.

Out of the indivisible substance that is always the same, and the substance that becomes divided among bodies, he blended a third form of substance, in between the two, from both of them—concerned with the nature of the Same, and again with that of the Different—and he set it in composition midway between their undivided element and that which is divided among bodies. Taking these three, he blended them all into a single form, forcing the nature of the Different, which resisted mixing, into union with the Same. Having mixed these together with substance and made one out of three, he then cut the whole up into however many portions were appropriate, every one of them a blend of the Same, the Different, and substance. He began the division this way. First he took away one portion from the whole; after this he took away a portion double that; a third, one and a half times the second and three times the first; a fourth, double the second; a fifth, three times the third; a sixth, eight times the first; and a seventh, twenty-seven times the first.

After this he filled up the double and triple intervals, cutting off further portions from the original mixture and placing them in between, so that within each interval there were two means, one exceeding and being exceeded by the same fraction of the extremes, the other exceeding and being exceeded by an equal number. These bonds produced intervals of three-halves, four-thirds, and nine-eighths within the previous intervals, and he filled up all the four-thirds intervals with the nine-eighths interval, leaving over in each case a fraction, the interval of this leftover fraction having its terms in the ratio of 256 to 243. And by this point the mixture from which he was cutting these portions was completely used up. He then split this whole compound lengthwise into two, and joining the two halves to each other at their middles like the letter X, he bent them round into a circle, joining each to itself and to the other at the point opposite the original juncture, and he set them revolving together in the motion that turns uniformly in the same place, making one circle the outer, the other the inner. The outer revolution he named the motion of the Same, the inner that of the Different. The circle of the Same he made revolve to the right along its side, that of the Different to the left along its diagonal, and he gave dominance to the revolution of the Same and the uniform, for he left it single and undivided, while the inner circle he split six times, making seven unequal circles, following the intervals of the double and the triple—three of each—and he directed the circles to travel counter to one another, assigning three of them an equal speed, the other four at speeds unequal both to one another and to the first three, but all moving in due proportion. Now when the whole composition of the soul had come to be according to the mind of its composer, after this he built within it the whole corporeal frame, and fitted the two together, center to center. And the soul, woven throughout from the center to the outermost heaven and enveloping it all round from outside, itself revolving within itself, began a divine, unceasing, intelligent life lasting through all time.

So the body of the heavens came to be visible, but the soul itself is invisible, sharing in reasoning and harmony, the best of things brought into being, made by the best of causes, among things that are perceptible by intellect and are always the same. Since it is blended out of the natures of the Same and of the Different, and of substance, these three ingredients, and divided and bound together in due proportion, and since it circles back upon itself, whenever it comes into contact with something whose substance is scattered, or with something undivided, it speaks, moving through the whole of itself, telling what a thing is the same as and what it is different from, and in what relation especially, and where and how and when it happens that each thing stands to each in the realm of becoming, both in being acted on and in acting, and in relation to what remains always the same. And when this account comes to be equally true both about the Different and about the Same, moving voicelessly and soundlessly within the self-moved, whenever it concerns the perceptible and the circle of the Different runs true and reports it to the whole soul, then firm and true opinions and beliefs arise; and whenever, again, its object is rational and it is the circle of the Same that runs smoothly and discloses it, then understanding and knowledge are necessarily brought to completion. And should anyone ever call the thing in which these two arise anything other than soul, he will be saying anything rather than the truth. Now when the father who had begotten it saw it set in motion and alive, a shrine brought into being for the everlasting gods, he was well pleased, and in his delight he took thought to make it still more like its model. So, just as that model happens to be an everlasting living being, he undertook to make this universe, too, so far as possible, of that same character. Now the nature of the living being was in fact eternal, and this could not be fully attached to what is generated; so he took thought to make a kind of moving image of eternity, and in the very act of ordering the heaven he made, of eternity abiding in unity, an image moving according to number—that to which we have given the name time. For days and nights and months and years did not exist before the heaven came to be; but he devised their coming-into-being together with the heaven's own composition. All these are parts of time, and 'was' and 'will be' are forms of time that have come to be, which we mistakenly, without noticing, apply to the everlasting substance.

For we say that it was, is, and will be, but strictly speaking only 'is' truly belongs to it, while 'was' and 'will be' are properly said of the becoming that proceeds in time—for these are motions—whereas that which is always the same, unmoving, is not fitting to become either older or younger through time, nor ever to have become so, nor to be now become, nor to be about to become hereafter, nor in general to be subject to anything which becoming has attached to things that move in the realm of sense; rather, these are forms of time that have come to be in imitation of eternity and circling according to number. And besides these there are further expressions of the same kind, such as that what has become is what has become, and what is becoming is what is becoming, and again that what is to become is what is to become, and that what is not is what is not—none of which we speak with any precision. But perhaps this is not the proper occasion to go into these matters with exactness. Time, then, came into being together with the heaven, so that, having been generated together, they might also be dissolved together, should a dissolution of them ever come to pass; and it was made after the pattern of the eternal nature, so that it might be as like that pattern as possible. For the pattern is a being for all eternity, while the heaven, throughout the whole of time, has been and is and will be. Out of this reasoning and design of god for the generation of time, in order that time might be born, the sun, the moon, and five further stars — the ones nicknamed wanderers — came into being for marking and preserving the numbers of time; and having made bodies for each of them, the god set them into the orbits along which the revolution of the Different was passing, seven bodies in seven orbits: the moon in the one nearest the earth, the sun in the second above the earth; the morning star and the one called sacred to Hermes he set moving in the circle that keeps pace in speed with the sun's, though endowed with a power opposite to it—which is why the sun and the star of Hermes and the morning star overtake and are overtaken by one another in turn. As for the rest, where and for what reasons he set each one, were one to go through them all, the account, being a digression, would give more trouble than the matters for whose sake it is told; these things may perhaps later, at leisure, receive the treatment they deserve.

But when each of the bodies that needed to work together to produce time had come to the motion proper to it, and, their bodies bound by living bonds, had been born as living creatures and learned their appointed task—then, following the motion of the Different, which is oblique, and is carried through and mastered by the motion of the Same, one moving in a larger, another in a smaller circle, those in the smaller circle moving faster, those in the larger more slowly. Now because of the motion of the Same, the bodies moving fastest appeared to be overtaken by those moving more slowly, even though they were really overtaking them; for this motion, twisting all their circles into a spiral, since they move forward at once in two opposite directions, made whatever moved away from it most slowly appear nearest to it, since it itself is the fastest of all. And so that there might be some clear measure of their relative slowness and speed, by which the eight revolutions might proceed, the god kindled a light in the orbit second from the earth, which we now call the sun, so that it might shine as far as possible over the whole heaven, and so that all the living things for whom it was fitting might share in number, learning it from the revolution of the Same and uniform. So night and day came to be in this way and for this reason, being the period of the single, most intelligent revolution; a month, whenever the moon, having gone round its own circle, overtakes the sun; a year, whenever the sun has gone round its own circle. As for the periods of the others, human beings, except for a few among the many, have not taken note of them, and neither name them nor measure them against one another by numbers, so that they scarcely know that time is in fact the wanderings of these bodies, bewildering in their multitude and marvelously intricate. Nevertheless it is no less possible to grasp that the perfect number of time fulfills the perfect year at that moment when the relative speeds of all eight revolutions, having completed their courses together, reach a head, as measured by the circle of the Same and uniformly moving. It was in accordance with this plan, and for this purpose, that those of the stars which pass through the heavens and undergo turnings were begotten, so that this universe might be as like as possible to the complete and intelligible living being, in imitation of its everlasting nature. Now in other respects the work had already been carried, up to the generation of time, into likeness with that on which it was modeled; but in this respect it still fell short of likeness, that it did not yet contain within itself all the living creatures that were to come into being. This remaining task he now went on to complete, shaping the universe after the nature of the pattern. Just as intellect discerns the Forms present in the living being that truly is—of what sort and how many they are—so he judged that this universe, too, should possess the same kind and number of them.

TIMAEUS: There are four kinds of living things: one is the heavenly race of gods, another is winged and travels through the air, a third is the watery kind, and a fourth goes on foot on dry land. Of the divine kind he fashioned the greatest part out of fire, so that it might be as bright and beautiful to look at as possible, and making it resemble the universe he made it perfectly round, and set it in the understanding of that most excellent thing, to follow along with it, distributing it in a circle all around the heavens, so that it might be a true cosmos, adorned throughout its whole. And he attached two motions to each: one in the same place, turning always in the same way, always thinking the selfsame things concerning the selfsame objects; the other a forward motion,, held in check by the circuit of what is same and uniform. But from the other five motions he kept it unmoved and at rest, so that each of them might become as excellent as possible. And it is from this cause that all the fixed stars have come to be — living beings, divine and eternal, which forever remain revolving in the same place and in the same manner; while those that turn and wander in the way described earlier came to be in accordance with that account. As for the earth, our nurse, coiled as it is around the axis stretched through the whole universe, he devised it as the guardian and maker of night and day, the first and eldest of all the gods that have come to be within the heavens. To describe the dances of these gods themselves, and their approaches to one another, and the counter-revolutions and advances of their circles, and which of the gods come into conjunction with which and which stand opposite, and in what order they pass in front of one another, and at what times each is hidden from us and again reappears, sending fears and signs of what is to come to those unable to reason — to speak of all this without the aid of a visual model of these very motions would be a wasted effort. Let this, then, and what has been said about the visible and generated gods, suffice, and let it have its end here. But concerning the other divinities, to speak of their origin and to know it is beyond us, and we must trust those who spoke of it before, who were, as they claimed, offspring of gods, and surely knew their own ancestors well. It is impossible to disbelieve the children of gods, even though they speak without probable or necessary proofs; rather, since they profess to be reporting their own family history, we must believe them, in accordance with custom.

TIMAEUS: Let our account of the birth of these gods, then, stand and be told just as they told it. Earth and Heaven had as children Oceanus and Tethys; and from these came Phorcys and Cronus and Rhea and all the rest with them; and from Cronus and Rhea came Zeus and Hera and all those we know to be called their siblings, and still others descended from these. Now once all the gods had come to be, both those who visibly circle the heavens and those who appear only as far as they wish, the one who begot this whole universe spoke to them as follows: "Gods, gods of whom I am the maker and father of your works, whatever has come to be through me is indissoluble, so long as I do not will otherwise. Now everything that is bound can be dissolved, but to wish to dissolve what has been well fitted together and is in good condition would be the mark of an evil being. Therefore, since you have come into being, you are not immortal nor wholly indissoluble; yet you shall not be dissolved, nor shall you meet the fate of death, since you have been allotted a bond even greater and more sovereign than those bonds with which you were bound together when you came to be — the bond of my will. Now then, learn what I am telling you and pointing out to you. There remain still three mortal kinds not yet begotten; and if these are not brought into being, the heavens will be incomplete, for they will not contain within themselves all the kinds of living things — and they must, if the heavens are to be sufficiently complete. Yet if these came to be through me and shared in life, they would be equal to gods. So, that mortality may belong to them, and that this universe may be complete in the fullest sense, turn yourselves, according to your nature, to the crafting of living things, imitating the power I used in your own begetting. And insofar as it is fitting for a part of them to bear the same name as the immortals, called the divine part and ruling within them in those who are ever willing to follow justice and to follow you, I will sow that part and set it going, and then hand it over to you; the rest of the task is yours — weave what is mortal onto what is immortal, fashion living things, give them growth by feeding them, and receive them back again when they waste away." So he spoke; and once more into the same mixing bowl in which he had blended and mixed the soul of the universe, he poured what remained of the earlier ingredients, mixing them in much the same manner, though no longer as pure and unmixed as before, but now second and third in purity. And having composed the whole, he portioned it out into as many souls as there are stars, allotting one soul to each star; and mounting them as it were upon a vehicle, he displayed to them the universe's nature and declared to them the laws that were fated for them: that there would be a single ordained first birth appointed for all alike, so that none should be slighted by him; and that once sown, each into the instrument of time suited to it, they should grow into the most god-fearing of living things; and that since human nature is twofold, the superior kind would be that which would afterward be called man.

TIMAEUS: Once these souls were of necessity implanted in bodies, and matter flowed into and out of their bodies, it was necessary first that a single sensation, common to all, should arise in them from violent impressions; second, a desire mixed with pleasure and pain; and besides these, fear and anger, and whatever follows upon these, and whatever is naturally opposed and stands apart from them. If they were to master these, they would live justly; if mastered by them, unjustly. And whoever lived well for his appointed time would return again to dwell in his companion star, and there live a happy life in keeping with his character; but whoever failed in this would, at his second birth, pass over into a woman's nature. And if even then he did not cease from wickedness, then in the manner in which he continued to grow base, he would keep changing, according to the likeness of his character, into some such bestial nature, and there would be no release for him from these labors and changes of shape until, following along with the revolution of the same and uniform within him, he mastered by reason that great accreted mass of fire, water, air, and earth that had later attached itself to him, turbulent and irrational as it was, and thus arrived again at the form of his first and best condition. Having ordained all these things as law for them, so that he himself might be blameless for the wickedness each of them would afterward commit, he sowed some of them into the earth, some into the moon, and others into the other instruments of time; and after this sowing, he handed over to the young gods the task of molding mortal bodies, and of fashioning and governing whatever remained still needed to complete the human soul, along with all that follows from it, and of ruling and, as far as possible, guiding this mortal living being in the finest and best way, so that it might not become, through its own fault, a cause of evils to itself. And he who had arranged all these things remained, in his own fashion, within his own accustomed way of being.

TIMAEUS: While he remained, his children took note of their father's ordinance and obeyed it. Taking the immortal starting-point of a mortal living being, and imitating their own maker, they took on loan from the cosmos portions of fire, of earth, of water, and of air, on the understanding that these would be repaid again, and welded together what they took, not with the indissoluble bonds by which they themselves were held together, but fusing it with tiny, invisible rivets set close together, forming out of all the parts a single body for each; and into this body, subject to inflow and outflow, they bound the revolutions of the immortal soul. Bound as they were to this great river, these revolutions neither mastered it nor were mastered by it, but were carried along and carried it along by force, so that the whole living creature was moved, but proceeded in a disorderly and irrational way, however it happened, possessing all six motions; for it wandered forward and backward, and again rightward and leftward, downward and upward, and every which way through all six directions. For since the wave that brought in and carried off nourishment was great, it produced yet greater turmoil through the disturbances caused whenever a body collided with some foreign fire from outside, or struck a solid mass of earth, or slid upon the wet slipperiness of waters, or was overtaken by a stormy blast of winds borne by the air — and by all of these, motions carried through the body toward the soul struck upon it. It was on account of all this, indeed, that they were then called, and are still now called, collectively, sensations. And it was then, at that very moment, that they produced the greatest and most extensive motion; joining with the ceaselessly flowing stream and shaking violently the revolutions of the soul, they utterly hindered the revolution of the same, flowing against it, and checked it as it tried to rule and to proceed, while they shook up the revolution of the different so violently that the three intervals of the double and the three of the triple, and the mean terms and connecting links of the ratios of three to two, four to three, and nine to eight, since they could not be entirely dissolved except by the one who bound them together, were twisted into every kind of turn, and produced every sort of break and disruption of the circles, as far as this was possible, so that these circles, barely holding together with one another, moved indeed, but moved irrationally, sometimes in reverse, sometimes obliquely, and sometimes upside down. It is as when someone, lying on his back with his head propped against the ground and his feet thrust up and resting against something above — in this condition, both for the one undergoing it and for those looking on, right appears as left and left as right, to each in relation to the other.

TIMAEUS: This very thing, and other things like it, happen violently to the revolutions, whenever they encounter something from outside that belongs either to the kind of the same or to that of the different; and then, calling the same different and the different the same in some particular case, they contradict the truth and become false and unintelligent, and at that time there is in them no revolution that rules or leads. And whenever certain sensations, borne in from outside and striking against them, drag along with them the entire vessel of the soul, then these revolutions, though actually mastered, seem to be the masters. And it is on account of all these disturbances that the soul, now as in the beginning, becomes unintelligent at first, whenever it is bound to a mortal body. But when the stream of growth and nourishment flows in less strongly, and the revolutions, regaining themselves, proceed along their own path and settle down more, as time goes on, then at last, as each of the circles is directed toward its shape according to nature, and they call the different and the same by their right names, they render the one who possesses them intelligent. And if some correct nurture of education joins in and assists, such a person becomes whole and entirely healthy, having escaped the greatest disease; but if he is negligent, he passes through life lame, and returns again to Hades incomplete and unintelligent. This, however, happens only later on. As for what has now been proposed, we must go through it more precisely; and before that, concerning the generation of the parts of the body and concerning the soul, we must go through the causes and providences of the gods by which they came about, holding fast always to what is most probable, and proceeding accordingly. The two divine revolutions, then — imitating the shape of the universe, which is spherical — they bound into a spherical body, that which we now call the head, which is the most divine part and rules over all that is within us; to it the gods gave the whole body as its servant, having assembled it, since they understood that it would partake of all the motions there were to be. So that it might not, rolling upon the ground, which has heights and depths of every kind, be at a loss how to climb over some and descend from others, they gave it this as a vehicle and means of easy passage —

TIMAEUS: This, then, is why the body acquired length, and grew four limbs, extendable and bendable, once the god had devised a means of locomotion — limbs by which it could take hold of things and push against them, and so make its way through every region, carrying above us the dwelling place of what is most divine and most sacred in us. Legs and hands, then, grew onto all creatures for this reason and toward this end. And because the gods regarded the front as more honorable and more fit to lead than the back, they gave us, accordingly, most of our capacity for motion in that direction. So it was necessary that the front of a human being's body be marked off and made unlike the rest. That is why, first of all, around the vessel of the head, they set the face in place there, and bound into it organs for the whole forethought of the soul, and arranged that this — the part naturally in front — should be the part that shares in leadership. And of these organs, the first they fashioned together were the light-bearing eyes, binding them in for the following reason. Whatever portion of fire does not burn, but instead yields a gentle light suited to each day, they contrived to make into a body of its own. For the fire within us, being akin to that outer fire, they made pure and smooth, and caused to flow through the eyes — dense throughout, but especially compressed at the middle of the eyes — so that it holds back everything coarser, and lets only that pure kind filter through by itself. So whenever the light of day encircles the visual current, like issues forth to meet like, the two coalesce, and a single homogeneous body is formed along the straight line of sight, wherever the fire from within strikes against whatever it meets from outside. And because this whole body has become alike through likeness, whatever it touches, and whatever touches it, transmits its motions throughout the body all the way to the soul, and produces that sensation which we call seeing. But when the kindred fire departs into night, the connection is cut off; for going out toward what is unlike itself, it is altered and quenched, no longer being of one nature with the neighboring air, since that air has no fire in it. So it stops seeing, and moreover it induces sleep. For the safeguard which the gods devised for sight — the nature of the eyelids — when these close together, shuts in the power of the fire within, and this power diffuses and evens out the motions within us; and once they are evened out, stillness follows; and when the stillness is deep, a sleep with few dreams falls upon us,

TIMAEUS: but when certain larger motions are left over, whatever sort they are and in whatever regions they remain, they produce, by a corresponding process, likenesses within — images which, when we are roused, are remembered as appearing outside us. As for the image-making of mirrors, and everything smooth and reflective, there is nothing difficult left to grasp. For out of the communion with one another of the fire within and the fire without — each becoming, on each occasion, a single thing around the smooth surface, and reshaped in many ways — all such appearances necessarily show themselves, whenever the fire from the face and the fire from the sight coalesce around what is smooth and bright. What is on the left appears on the right, because contact occurs between opposite parts of the visual stream and opposite parts of the object, contrary to the usual manner of encounter; whereas right appears right and left appears left when the light, in coalescing, shifts position — which happens whenever the smoothness of the mirror, rising up on this side and that, pushes the right-hand part of the vision over to the left, and the other way about. And when the mirror is turned along the length of the face, this same effect makes the whole image appear upside down, pushing what is below toward what is above in the reflected ray, and what is above back down toward what is below. Now all these are among the auxiliary causes which the god uses as servants in bringing to completion, so far as possible, the form of what is best; yet most people suppose them not auxiliary causes but the causes of everything, since they cool and heat, condense and disperse, and produce all such effects. But in truth these things are capable of no reasoning and no intelligence about anything. For among the things that exist, the one to which alone it belongs to possess intelligence must be called soul — and soul is invisible, while fire, water, earth, and air have all come into being as bodies open to sight. So the lover of intelligence and knowledge must pursue first the causes belonging to a rational nature, and only second those which, being moved by other things, in turn move still others by necessity. And we too must do the same: both kinds of causes must be spoken of, but kept distinct — those which, working with intelligence, are craftsmen of things fine and good, and those which, left alone without understanding, produce on each occasion whatever happens to come about, without order.

TIMAEUS: Let this, then, be said about the eyes and their part in the working out of the power they now possess. But now I must speak of the greatest benefit they provide, on account of which the god has bestowed them on us as a gift. Sight, in my account, has become the cause of the greatest benefit to us, because none of our present accounts about the universe could ever have been given if we had never seen the stars, the sun, or the sky. But as it is, the sight of day and night, of months and the cycles of years, of equinoxes and solstices, has enabled the invention of number, and given us the concept of time and the capacity to inquire into the nature of the whole; and from these we have derived the pursuit we call philosophy, than which no greater good has ever come, or ever will come, as a gift from the gods to mortal kind. This, I say, is the greatest benefit of the eyes. Why should we praise all the lesser benefits, which a person who lacks philosophy would only lament, blind and grieving, in vain? Let us instead say this: the reason and purpose for which the god invented and gave us sight is so that we might observe the courses of intelligence in the heavens and put them to use for the revolutions of our own thinking, which are akin to those, though ours are disturbed while theirs are undisturbed; and by learning them thoroughly and coming to share in the correctness of reasoning that accords with nature, we might, by imitating the utterly unwandering courses of the god, bring order to the wandering courses within ourselves. The same account holds again for voice and hearing — that these too were given by the gods for the same purposes and to the same end. For speech has been ordained for these very purposes, contributing the greatest share toward them; and as much of it as is useful for hearing, for the sake of harmony, has been given for the purposes of music. And harmony, whose motions are akin to the revolutions of the soul within us, has been given by the Muses — to one who makes intelligent use of them — not for irrational pleasure, as it now seems to be used, but as an ally against the discordant revolution that has arisen in our soul, to bring it into order and concord with itself; and rhythm, likewise, was given by the same gods for the same purpose, as a help against the graceless and measureless condition that prevails in most of us. Now everything said up to this point, with a few exceptions, has displayed what has been fashioned by intelligence; but we must also set alongside our account what comes about through necessity.

TIMAEUS: For the coming-to-be of this universe was a mixed result, from a combination of necessity and intelligence. Intelligence ruled over necessity by persuading it to guide most of what comes to be toward what is best, and it was in this way, through necessity yielding to intelligent persuasion, that this universe was originally put together. So if someone is to say truly how it actually came to be, in accordance with this account, he must also bring in the character of the wandering cause, in whatever way it is naturally suited to carry things along. We must go back again in this way, and taking a fresh starting point suited to these matters themselves, we must begin again from the beginning about them, just as we did before about the earlier subjects. We must consider the nature of fire, water, air, and earth in themselves, prior to the coming-to-be of the heavens, and the states they were in before that. For up to now no one has yet explained their origin; instead we speak as if we knew what fire is, and each of the others, and set them down as the elements, the letters, so to speak, of the universe — though it would not even be fitting to compare them, plausibly, to the level of syllables, by anyone with even a little sense. For now, then, let our own position on this be as follows. As to the principle, or principles, of all things, or whatever view one holds about them, I shall not speak of it now, for no other reason than that it is difficult, given the present manner of our exposition, to make clear what I think about it; so neither should you expect me to speak of it, nor could I persuade myself that I would be right to undertake so great a task. Rather, holding fast to what was said at the outset, the power of likely accounts, I shall try to give an account no less likely than any other — indeed more so — starting again from the beginning about each thing and about all things together. So invoking the god once more at the start of what is to be said, as a savior to bring us safely through a strange and unaccustomed exposition to a doctrine of likelihood, let us begin speaking again. Now this fresh beginning about the universe must be divided more fully than before; for then we distinguished two kinds, but now we must make clear to ourselves a third kind besides.

TIMAEUS: The two kinds were sufficient for what was said before: one posited as the form of a model, intelligible and always the same; and a second, the copy of the model, subject to coming-to-be and visible. A third kind we did not distinguish at that time, supposing those two would suffice; the argument now, however, appears to compel us to attempt to bring to light in words a form that is difficult and obscure. What power and nature, then, should we suppose it has? This above all: that it is the receptacle of all coming-to-be — its nurse, so to speak. Now this is true, but it must be stated more clearly, and that is difficult, especially because it requires that we first raise puzzles about fire and the things that go with fire for this very reason: it is difficult to say of any one of them which sort really deserves to be called water rather than fire, or which sort deserves any other name rather than all of them, or each of them individually, in a way that would let us use any trustworthy and stable account. How, then, and in what way, and with what likely reasoning about them should we speak, once we have raised these puzzles? First: what we have just now called water, we see, when it congeals, becoming, as we suppose, stones and earth; but when it melts and disperses, this same thing becomes vapor and air; and air, when burned together, becomes fire; and, in the reverse direction, fire, when compressed and quenched, passes back again into the form of air; and air, once more coming together and condensing, becomes cloud and mist; and from these, compressed still further, flows water; and from water, earth and stones again — thus handing on, it appears, coming-to-be in a circle from one to another. Since, then, none of these things ever appears the same, who would not be ashamed to insist stubbornly that any one of them is, with certainty, this thing and no other? No one would — rather, it is far safer to speak of them as follows: whenever we see something continually becoming other and other — fire, say — we should call it not this, but that which is such, each time, fire; and not this, but that which is such, always, water; and nothing else, ever, as though it had any stability, whatever we point to using the words 'this' and 'that,' supposing thereby to indicate something. For it flees, refusing to abide the designation 'this' and 'that,' and 'thereof,' and every phrase that points to them as fixed and existing things. Rather, we should not speak of each of them this way, but call whatever recurrently appears alike, in each case and in all together, 'the such' — and so call fire, in particular, that which is throughout of this sort, and likewise everything else that has coming-to-be.

TIMAEUS — As for that in which each of these qualities is always appearing and from which it again perishes, to that alone do the names "this" and "that" properly apply; but whatever has some quality—hot, or white, or any of the opposites, and all the things composed of these—none of that should we call "that." Let me try to put this more clearly still. Suppose someone molds every shape there is out of gold, and never stops remolding each one into all the others—if someone pointed at one of them and asked what it was, the answer truest and safest by a wide margin would be "gold"," and never to speak of the triangle or whatever other shape has come to be in it as though these were things that are, since they shift even while one is in the act of naming them; rather one should be content if it will accept even that description with some measure of safety. The same account holds for the nature that receives all bodies. It must always be called the same, for it never departs at all from its own power—it is always receiving all things, and it has never taken on any shape at all like any of the things that enter it, in any way whatsoever. For by nature it lies there as a matrix for everything, set in motion and marked with shapes by the things that enter it, and because of them it appears different at different times—while the things that enter and leave are always imitations of the things that are, stamped from them in some manner hard to describe and wonderful, which we shall pursue later. For the present, then, we must have in mind three kinds: that which comes to be, that in which it comes to be, and that from which the thing coming to be grows, in likeness to it. And it is fitting to compare the receiving thing to a mother, that from which it grows to a father, and the nature between the two to their offspring; and to understand that if an impression is to display every variety of appearance, that very thing in which the impression is to be set could not be well prepared unless it were itself formless, free of all those characters which it is to receive from elsewhere. For if it were similar to any of the things entering it, then whenever things of the opposite character, or of an entirely different nature, came upon it in its receiving, it would render them badly, since it would show through with its own appearance mingled in. That is why the thing that is to receive within itself all the kinds must be free of all form—just as with fragrant ointments, the craftsmen who prepare them first see to it that the liquids meant to receive the scents are as odorless as possible; and those who attempt to press shapes into anything soft take care that no shape at all is visible in it beforehand, but smooth it out and make it as level as they can.

TIMAEUS — The same holds, then, for that which is to receive well, many times over, throughout itself, the likenesses of all the things that always are: it must by nature be free of all the forms. That is why we should not call the mother and receptacle of what has come to be, visible and altogether perceptible, earth, or air, or fire, or water, nor any of the things composed of these, nor any of the things from which these come—but rather, in calling it a kind that is invisible and formless, all-receiving, and partaking of the intelligible in some most perplexing way, most difficult to grasp, we shall not be speaking falsely. And so far as it is possible, from what has been said, to arrive at its nature, one might put it most correctly this way: fire is always the part of it that has been kindled that appears as such, water the part that has been moistened, and earth and air appear so far as it receives imitations of these. But we should examine this more closely by reasoning things out as follows. Is there some fire that is just by itself, and all the other things about which we always speak in this way, as each being a thing in itself—or are the very things we see, and all the things we perceive through the body, alone the things that have this kind of reality, with nothing else existing besides these anywhere at all, and are we saying in vain, every time, that there is some intelligible form of each thing, when this is nothing but a form of words? Now it would not be right to let the present question go untried and unjudged, simply asserting that things stand thus, nor should we tack on some further digression to an argument already long; but if some great distinction could be drawn in a few words, that would be most opportune of all. This, then, is how I cast my own vote. If understanding and true opinion are two distinct kinds, then these things exist entirely on their own—forms imperceptible to us, objects of thought alone. But if, as it seems to some, true opinion differs in no way from understanding, then everything we perceive through the body must be set down as the most stable reality there is. Now we must say these are two, because they have come to be separately and are unlike in character. For the one comes to be in us through teaching, the other through persuasion; the one is always accompanied by a true account, the other has none; the one cannot be moved by persuasion, the other can be changed by it; and of true opinion, we must say, every man has a share, but of understanding, only the gods, and but a small portion of humankind.

TIMAEUS — Given that this is so, we must agree that there is, first, a kind that keeps the same form always, ungenerated and indestructible, neither receiving into itself anything else from elsewhere nor itself passing into anything else anywhere, invisible and otherwise imperceptible—this is the very thing that understanding has been allotted to study. Second, there is that which bears the same name and is like the first, but is perceptible, generated, forever in motion, coming to be in some place and again perishing out of it, apprehended by opinion joined with perception. And third, there is again another kind, that of space, which is everlasting, admits no destruction, provides a seat for all things that come to be, and is itself apprehended without perception, by a kind of bastard reasoning, scarcely to be trusted—the very thing we look to when we dream and say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place, occupying some space, and that what is neither on earth nor anywhere in the heavens is nothing at all. Because of this dreaming state, we are unable, once roused, to draw the necessary distinctions and speak the truth about all these things and their kin, with respect to the waking and truly existing nature—namely, that for an image, since the very thing on which its coming-to-be depends is not its own, but it is forever borne along as the phantom of something else, it is fitting that it should come to be in something else, clinging in some way to existence, or else be nothing at all; whereas for that which really and truly is, the exact and true account comes to its aid, namely that so long as one thing is one thing and another is another, neither of the two, having come to be in the other, can ever become one and the same thing while also being two. This account, then, reckoned by my own vote, let it stand given in summary: that being, space, and becoming existed, three things in three ways, even before the heaven came to be. And the nurse of becoming, being made now watery and now fiery, and taking on in turn the shapes of earth and of air, and undergoing all the other affections that attend upon these, appeared many-shaped to look upon; yet because it was filled with powers neither alike nor evenly balanced, no part of it was in equilibrium, but it was shaken unevenly in every direction and swayed, and being moved it in turn shook those things—

TIMAEUS — and the things thus moved were carried, ever separating, this way and that, just as things shaken and winnowed by sieves and instruments used for cleaning grain settle, the dense and heavy ones in one place, the loose and light ones borne off to settle in another spot. In just this way the four kinds were then shaken by the receiving thing, which itself, being in motion, provided a kind of shaking like that of an instrument; and the things most unlike one another it separated furthest apart, while the things most alike it pressed together most closely into the same place—which is why these kinds came to occupy different regions, even before the ordered whole was formed out of them and came to be. Before that, all these things were in a condition without proportion or measure; but when the ordering of the universe was undertaken, fire and water and earth and air, though they still bore certain traces of themselves, were nevertheless disposed just as one would expect anything to be when god is absent from it—so disposed then by their nature, these things were first given shape by means of forms and numbers. That the god composed them to be as beautiful and as good as possible out of things that were not so disposed—let this stand, throughout, as something always assumed on our part. Now then we must attempt to explain to you the ordering and coming-to-be of each of these, in an account unfamiliar to you; but since you have shared in the paths of learning through which what is said must necessarily be shown, you will follow along. First, then, it is surely plain to everyone that fire, earth, water, and air are bodies; and body in every form possesses depth as well. And depth, in turn, must of necessity be bounded by a plane surface; and every rectilinear plane surface is composed of triangles. All triangles derive from two triangles, each having one right angle and the other angles acute; of these, one has, on each side, a portion of a right angle divided into equal parts, while the other has unequal parts of it divided unequally. This, then, we lay down as the starting point of fire and of the other bodies, proceeding according to the account that combines likelihood with necessity; but the starting points prior to these are known to god, and to whatever man is dear to him. Now we must say what the four most beautiful bodies would be—unlike one another, yet capable, by breaking down, of arising out of one another; for if we hit upon this, we shall have the truth about the coming-to-be of earth and fire and those in proportion between them. For we shall concede to no one that there are visible bodies more beautiful than these, each belonging to a single kind of its own. This, then, we must be eager to do: to fit together the four kinds of bodies that excel in beauty, and to affirm that we have grasped their nature sufficiently.

TIMAEUS — Of the two triangles, the isosceles has but one form, while the scalene has an unlimited number; so, of these unlimited ones, we must choose the most beautiful, if we are to begin in the proper way. If anyone can name a more beautiful one, chosen for constructing these bodies, his victory will be that of a friend, not an enemy. But we shall take, then, as the most beautiful of the many triangles—setting aside all the others—the one single triangle out of which the equilateral triangle is composed as a third stage. Why this is so is a longer story; but for whoever tests this claim and discovers that it is indeed so, a friendly prize awaits. Let there be chosen, then, two triangles, out of which the body of fire and the bodies of the other things have been fashioned: the one isosceles, the other having its longer side always three times the square of the shorter, in respect of power. Now what was said earlier rather unclearly must be made more precise. For the four kinds appeared to come to be out of one another through one another, all of them—but this appearance is not correct. For four kinds do indeed come to be out of the triangles we have chosen, three of them from the one triangle that has unequal sides, and the fourth, alone, fitted together out of the isosceles triangle. So it is not possible for all of them, breaking apart into one another, to turn a few large ones into many small ones and the reverse; but three of them can. For since all three are naturally composed from a single triangle, when the larger ones are broken up, many small ones will be formed out of the same triangles, taking on the shapes proper to themselves; and again, when many small ones are scattered apart along their triangles, a single number of them, forming one mass, will produce one large unit of another kind. So much, then, for their coming-to-be out of one another; next it would follow to speak of what shape each of them has come to be, and out of what combination of numbers. The first kind, and the smallest to be composed, will lead the way; its element is the triangle whose hypotenuse is twice the length of its shorter side. When two such triangles are joined along their diagonal, and this is done three times, with the diagonals and the short sides all set together at a single point as a center, one equilateral triangle is formed out of six such triangles in number.

TIMAEUS: Four equilateral triangles, joined three plane angles at a time, make one solid angle—the one formed next in order after the most obtuse of the plane angles. When four such angles have been completed, the first solid figure results, one that divides the whole sphere into equal and similar parts. The second solid comes from the same triangles, but eight equilateral triangles uniting so that four plane angles yield a single solid one; and when six such angles have been formed, the second body is likewise complete. The third is put together out of one hundred and twenty of the elements, with twelve solid angles, each contained by five equilateral plane triangles, and it has twenty faces, each an equilateral triangle. And at this point one of the two elements was done generating these bodies, while the isosceles triangle went on to generate the nature of the fourth: four of them joined together, bringing their right angles to a common center, produce a single equilateral quadrilateral. Six of these joined together produce eight solid angles, each fitted together out of three plane right angles; and the shape of the resulting body has become the cube, having six plane equilateral quadrilateral faces. There remained one further construction, a fifth, and the god used it for the universe as a whole, embroidering it upon that. Now if someone, weighing all this carefully, were to raise the question whether the number of worlds should be said to be unlimited or finite, he would judge the view that they are unlimited to be really the opinion of someone inexperienced in matters where experience is called for; but whether it is proper to say there is truly by nature one such world, or five, is a question over which one might more reasonably come to a halt and feel at a loss. Our own account declares that by the likely reasoning there is by nature one god of this kind; but another, looking to other considerations, will judge otherwise. This question we must let go, and let us now assign the kinds that have arisen in our discussion to fire, earth, water, and air. To earth let us give the cubic form; for earth is the most immobile of the four kinds and the most malleable of bodies, and that which has the most secure bases must of necessity be preeminently of this character. And among the triangles we posited at the outset, the base formed of equal sides is by nature more secure than that of unequal sides, and the plane composed of each—the equilateral quadrilateral built from equilateral triangles—stands, both in its parts and as a whole, more firmly than the triangle does, of necessity.

TIMAEUS: For this reason, in assigning this figure to earth we preserve the likely account; and to water, in turn, we assign the least mobile of the remaining forms, to fire the most mobile, and to air the form in between; and the smallest body to fire, the largest to water, and the one in between to air; and again the sharpest to fire, the second to air, the third to water. Now of all these, the one having the fewest bases must by nature be the most mobile, being in every way the most cutting and sharp of all, and moreover the lightest, being composed of the fewest identical parts; the second is second in having these same properties, and the third is third. Let it stand, then, according to the correct and likely account, that the solid figure that has come to be in the form of the pyramid is fire's element and its seed; and let us say that the second in order of generation is that of air, the third that of water. All of these we must think of as so small that no single one of any kind is visible to us because of its smallness, though when many are gathered together their masses can be seen. And indeed the proportions governing their quantities, their motions, and their other properties, the god everywhere—wherever the nature of necessity yielded willingly and was persuaded—worked out with precision in every respect and fitted these together in due proportion. From everything we have said about these kinds, the following would be, by likely account, most nearly the case. Earth, on meeting fire and being dissolved by its sharpness, would be carried along, whether it happens to be dissolved in fire itself or in a mass of air or of water, until its parts, meeting one another somewhere, are refitted again to one another and become earth once more—for into any other kind it could never pass. Water, though, once broken up by fire — or indeed by air — admits of recombination so as to form one body of fire and two of air; and the divided fragments of one part of air could become two bodies of fire. And again, whenever a little fire, enclosed by much air or water or some earth, moving among things that are being carried along, struggles and is overcome and shattered, two bodies of fire combine into one form of air; and when air is overpowered and broken up, out of two whole parts and a half, one whole compact form of water will result.

TIMAEUS: For let us reason about these things again in this way: whenever, amid fire, some other kind is caught by it and severed by the keenness of its angles and its edges, then if it recombines into the nature of fire it ceases being cut—for no kind that is alike and the same as itself can ever produce any change in, or suffer anything from, another kind that is in the same condition and alike to it—but so long as it is passing into something else, being weaker, and struggles against something stronger, it does not cease being dissolved. And again, when smaller particles, enclosed by many larger ones, are shattered, few against many, and quenched, they cease being extinguished only once they consent to combine into the form of what has overpowered them, and fire becomes air, air becomes water; but if, in passing into these same forms, some other kind combining with them should struggle against them, they do not cease being dissolved, until, being thoroughly driven and broken apart, they escape to their kindred, or else, being overcome, one out of many becomes like the victor and remains dwelling together with it. And indeed it is through these very transformations that all things exchange their regions; for the bulk of each kind is set apart in a region of its own because of the motion of the receiving medium, while those parts that become each time unlike themselves and like other things are carried, by the shaking, toward the region of those things to which they have become alike. Now all the unmixed, primary bodies have come to be through such causes as these. But as for the fact that other kinds are found engendered within the forms of these, the cause must be sought in the construction of each of the elements: it was not merely one size of triangle that was planted at the beginning for each, but smaller and larger ones, in a number corresponding to the number of kinds found within the forms. Hence, as they mix with themselves and with one another, the variety is unlimited; and it is this variety that those who intend to give a likely account of nature must study closely. Concerning motion and rest—in what manner and among what conditions they occur—unless one comes to some agreement about this, much will stand in the way of the reasoning that follows. Something has already been said about them, but beyond that there is this further point: motion is never willing to exist in a state of uniformity. For it is difficult—rather, impossible—for there to be a thing to be moved without something to move it, or a mover without something to be moved; there is no motion where these are absent, yet it is impossible for these ever to be uniform.

TIMAEUS: Let us then always posit rest as belonging to uniformity, and motion as arising from non-uniformity; and inequality, in turn, is the cause of a non-uniform nature. We have already explained the origin of inequality; but we have not said how it is that things, once separated out by kind, do not cease from their motion and passage through one another. So let us say it again in this way. The revolution of the whole, since it has taken all the kinds together within it, being circular in shape and naturally inclined to gather in upon itself, constricts everything and leaves no empty space anywhere. For this reason fire has penetrated most thoroughly into everything, air second, since it is by nature second in fineness, and the rest likewise; for the things composed of the largest parts have left the greatest gaps in their structure, the smallest the least. This compacting, then, forces the small into the empty spaces of the large. So, with the small placed alongside the large, and the smaller particles separating out the larger while the larger compress the smaller together, everything is carried up and down toward its own proper region; for as each thing changes in size it also changes its position in space. In this way, and for these reasons, the generation of non-uniformity is continually preserved, providing the motion of these things that exists now and will exist forever without ceasing. After this we must understand that many kinds of fire have come to be—flame, for instance, and that which streams off from flame, which does not burn but provides light for our eyes, and that which, once the flame is extinguished, remains behind in what is still glowing hot. Likewise with air: the most translucent kind is called by the name aether, the murkiest is mist and darkness, and there are other nameless forms besides, arising from the inequality of the triangles. As for water, there are first of all two kinds: the liquid and the fusible. The liquid kind, because it partakes of those kinds of water which are small—being unequal—is mobile both of itself and by another, owing to its non-uniformity and the character of its shape; but the kind composed of large and uniform parts is more stable than the former and, being solidified by its uniformity, is heavy. Yet when fire enters and dissolves it, it loses this uniformity, and having lost it, it partakes more of motion; and becoming mobile, pushed by the neighboring air and stretched out over the earth, it takes the name melting for the reduction of its mass, and flowing for its being drawn out over the earth.

TIMAEUS: And again, when the fire departs from it, since it does not go out into a void, the neighboring air, being pushed, forces the still-mobile liquid mass into the seats vacated by the fire and mixes it in upon itself; and the liquid, being compressed and regaining its uniformity again, now that the fire, the craftsman of its non-uniformity, has departed, settles back into agreement with itself. And the departure of fire is called cooling, while the coming-together that follows fire's withdrawal is called becoming solid. Now of all these that we have called fusible waters, the one that becomes densest, composed of the finest and most uniform parts, a single uniform kind, sharing in a gleaming, golden color, is that most precious possession, gold, refined and hardened through the rock. The offshoot of gold—being, on account of its density, the hardest of all and having turned dark—is called adamant. And there is another kind, close to gold in its parts but having more than one form, denser in one respect than gold, and sharing in a small, fine portion of earth so as to be harder, yet lighter because it has large gaps within itself—this, one kind among the bright, solidified waters, when combined, has become bronze. And the portion of earth mixed into it, when with age the two separate again from one another, becomes visible by itself and is called verdigris. As for the rest of such things, it is no longer anything intricate to work out, if one keeps pursuing the pattern of likely accounts; and whenever, for the sake of relaxation, one sets aside for a while the accounts concerning things that always are and, in contemplating the likely accounts of things that come to be, gains a pleasure free of regret, one would thereby provide oneself a measured and sensible amusement in life. It is in this spirit that we now, having indulged ourselves, shall go on to trace out what follows next concerning these same matters, in likely fashion, as follows. Water mixed with fire, the sort that is fine and fluid because of its motion and the path along which it rolls upon the earth—it is on this account called liquid—and also soft, because its bases, being less firmly grounded than those of earth, give way: when this is separated from fire and isolated from air as well, it becomes more uniform and is compressed together by the elements departing from it; and having thus solidified, that portion which undergoes this above the earth is called hail, and on the earth, ice; and that which has undergone it less, being still only half solidified, is called, above the earth, snow, and on the earth, when it solidifies out of dew, is called hoarfrost.

TIMAEUS — As for the many kinds of water mixed with one another—the whole class of them, filtered through the plants that grow from the earth, are called flavors—and because of their mixtures each kind, differing from the others, has given rise to many unnamed varieties; but four of them, being fiery in nature and coming out especially transparent, have received names of their own. The one that warms the soul together with the body is wine; the one that is smooth and separates the sight, and for that reason appears bright and gleaming and oily, is the oil-like kind—pitch, castor oil, olive oil itself, and whatever else has the same power; and whatever has the capacity to dissolve as far as the natural joints around the mouth, providing sweetness by this power, has received the name honey, the term applied most of all among such things; and the kind that dissolves flesh by burning it, a frothy class set apart from all the other flavors, has been named sap. As for the kinds of earth: the earth that is filtered through water becomes, in the following way, a stony body. When the water mixed with it is cut off in the mixing, it changes into the form of air; and having become air, it rushes up to its own place. But since no empty space lay above them, it pushed the neighboring air. That air, being heavy, when pushed and poured around the mass of earth, pressed hard upon it and squeezed it together into the very seats from which the new air was rising; and earth compacted inseparably by air together with water forms rock—more beautiful, the kind whose parts are equal and even and transparent, uglier, the opposite kind. And whatever has all its moisture snatched away suddenly by the swiftness of fire, and forms into something more brittle than that former kind, becomes the substance we have named earthenware; and sometimes, when moisture is left behind, earth that has become fluid through fire, when it cools, becomes the stone that has a black color. Two other kinds, again formed in the same way out of a mixture with much water, but out of finer parts of earth and being briny, half-solidified and yet dissolvable again by water: one is the kind that cleanses oil and earth, soda; the other, the kind well suited for the sensations that occur in the mouth in social gatherings, is the substance dear to the gods that is salt, in keeping with custom. Those things common to both, not dissolvable by water but by fire, are compounded in this way, for the following reason. Neither fire nor air melts masses of earth; for since their parts are naturally smaller than the interstices in earth's structure, they pass through its ample open spaces without forcing their way, and leave it undissolved, unmelted. But the parts of water, since they are naturally larger, force their way through, and in dissolving the earth, melt it.

TIMAEUS — Earth that is not compacted, then, only water dissolves by force in this way; but earth that has been compacted, nothing but fire dissolves, for entry has been left to nothing but fire. And of the combination of water, only fire dissolves the most forcibly bound kind, while both fire and air dissolve the weaker kind—the one working through the interstices, the other even through the triangles themselves; and of air compacted by force, nothing dissolves it except by resolving it into its element, while unforced, only fire melts it down. As for the bodies compounded of earth and water mixed together, so long as the water occupying the interstices of the earth in it, forced together, holds them, the parts of water coming upon it from outside, having no way in, flow around the whole mass and leave it unmelted; but the particles of fire, slipping into the gaps within the water—doing to water what water does to earth—working upon air the way fire itself does, are the sole cause by which the compound body, once melted, comes to flow. Now it happens that some of these bodies have less water than earth—the whole class of glass, and all the kinds called fusible stones—while others have more water: all the bodies that solidify into wax-like and incense-like substances. And so the kinds that have been variegated by shapes, combinations, and mutual transformations have now, more or less, been displayed; but we must try to bring to light the affections belonging to them, and the causes through which they have come about. First of all, then, sensation must always be presupposed for what we say, though we have not yet gone through the coming-to-be of flesh and what belongs to flesh, nor of the mortal part of the soul. And it happens that neither these things can be adequately explained apart from the affections that concern sensation, nor those apart from these—though to explain them together is nearly impossible. We must therefore first assume the one set, and come back afterward to what we have assumed. So that the affections may be discussed in due order after the kinds, let us take as prior to us the things concerning body and soul. First, then, as to why we call fire hot, let us look at it in this way, considering the separating and cutting action it produces upon our body. That the affection is something sharp, nearly all of us perceive—

TIMAEUS — but we must reckon with the fineness of its sides, the sharpness of its angles, the smallness of its parts, and the speed of its motion—by all of which, being forceful and sharp-cutting, it always cuts through whatever it meets—recalling the coming-to-be of its shape, that it is above all that particular nature, and no other, that, cutting through our bodies and mincing them into small pieces, has quite reasonably given both the affection and the name we now call heat. The opposite of this is plain enough, but let it not go without an account all the same. For the coarser-parted portions of the moisture surrounding the body, as they make their way in and expel the smaller ones, being unable to slip into their seats, and pressing together our moisture, turning it from uneven and moving into unmoving through evenness—the compression they produce solidifies it; and what is drawn together contrary to nature fights back according to its own nature, pushing itself in the opposite direction. To this struggle and this shaking has been given the name trembling and shivering, and the whole of this affection, together with what produces it, has been called cold. Hard is whatever our flesh yields to; soft, whatever yields to our flesh—and so also in their relation to one another. What yields is whatever rests on a small base; but what is composed of square bases, being very firmly planted, is the most resistant form, as is whatever, compacted into the greatest density, offers the strongest resistance. Heavy and light would be shown most clearly if examined together with what is called the nature of down and up. For it is not at all correct to think that there are by nature two regions, dividing the universe in two and opposed to each other—one below, toward which everything that has any bodily mass is carried, and one above, toward which everything moves only unwillingly. For since the whole heaven is spherical, all the points that are equally distant from the center must be alike extremities, and the center, being distant by the same measure from all the extremities, must be thought to lie directly opposite to all of them. Since the cosmos is naturally so constituted, whoever places any of the things just mentioned as up or down would not, in justice, be thought to be speaking a name that fits at all. For the middle region in it is not naturally either down or fittingly called up, but simply in the middle; and the surrounding region is neither the middle, nor does it have any part of itself different from another in being nearer the middle than what lies opposite. And since it is by nature alike in every direction, what names could one apply to it that are opposite to each other and in any way think one was speaking correctly?

TIMAEUS — For if there were some solid body evenly balanced at the center of the universe, it would never be carried toward any of the extremities, on account of their being alike in every direction; rather, even if someone were to travel around it in a circle, he would often, standing at antipodal points, call the very same spot of it both down and up. For the whole, as has just been said, being spherical, it is not the mark of a sensible person to say that it has one region down and another up. As for why these names came to be used, and in what contexts we have grown accustomed to use them and, because of that habit, to speak of the whole heaven as divided in this way—these points we must agree upon, having laid down the following as our assumption. If someone, standing in that region of the universe where the nature of fire has its especial seat, and where the greatest amount of it would be gathered, toward which it is carried—if someone, stepping onto that mass and having the power to do so, were to take away parts of the fire, setting them in scale-pans, and lifting the balance-beam, drag the fire by force into the unlike air—it is clear that the lesser quantity would yield to his force more readily than the greater; for whenever one and the same effort raises a pair of things together, the smaller must necessarily yield to the force and follow along more readily, the larger less so; and so the greater amount would be called heavy and said to move downward, the smaller, light and upward. This very same thing we must catch ourselves doing in this region here. For standing on the earth, when we separate out earthy kinds—and sometimes earth itself—we drag them by force and against nature into the unlike air, both clinging to what is akin to them, but the smaller yields more easily than the larger to those exerting the force, and follows first into the unlike medium; and so we have called it light, and the region into which we force it, up, while the opposite affection to these we call heavy and down. These things, then, must necessarily stand in varying relations to one another, because the masses of the various kinds occupy opposite regions, one here and another there—for what is light in one region, being opposite in place to what is light in the opposite region, and heavy to heavy, down to down and up to up, will all be found, on examination, to be opposite, crosswise, and in every way different from one another as they come to be and exist. Yet this one point must be understood concerning all of them: that the path toward what is akin to each is what makes the thing moving heavy, and the region toward which such a thing is carried, down; while things standing otherwise than these behave in the opposite way. So much, then, for the causes of these affections.

TIMAEUS — As for the affection of smooth and rough, anyone who has grasped its cause could probably explain it to another as well: for hardness mixed with unevenness produces roughness, while evenness combined with density produces smoothness. The greatest of the affections shared by the body as a whole still remains: it is the cause of pleasant and painful sensations in the things we have gone through, and all the sensations that, through the parts of the body, involve pains and, following upon them, pleasures at the same time. Let us, then, take up the causes of every affection, whether perceptible or imperceptible, in the following way, recalling what we distinguished earlier about the nature of what is easily moved and what is not easily moved; for it is along these lines that we must pursue everything we intend to grasp. For whatever is by nature easily moved, when even a slight affection falls upon it, transmits it in a circle, one part acting upon another in the same way, until the parts reach the seat of intelligence and report the power of what produced it; whereas the opposite kind, being stable and moving in no circle, only suffers the affection itself and moves nothing else nearby, so that, the parts not transmitting the affection to one another, the initial affection, remaining unmoved in them, produces insensibility in the living creature as a whole with respect to what it has undergone. This is the case with the bones and the hair and whatever other parts we have in us that are for the most part earthy; whereas what was said before applies especially to sight and hearing, because in them the power of fire and air is present in the greatest degree. Now pleasure and pain must be understood in this way: an affection that arises among us contrary to nature and all at once, and is violent, is painful; while what departs again all at once toward its natural state is pleasant; but what is gentle and gradual is imperceptible, and the opposite of these is opposite. And whatever comes about with ease is entirely perceptible in the highest degree, but has no share of pain or pleasure—such as the affections concerning sight itself, which was said earlier to be a body that becomes joined to us daily. For in this case, cuttings and burnings and whatever else it undergoes produce no pains, nor again pleasures when it returns to the same form; but the sensations are greatest and clearest according to whatever it undergoes and whatever things it comes into contact with by directing itself toward them in any way; for there is no force at all in its separation and combination.

TIMAEUS: Bodies made of larger parts yield only grudgingly to what acts on them, but transmit the motion through the whole, and so they produce pleasures and pains — pains when they are thrown out of their own state, pleasures when they are restored again to it. But whatever has taken on its withdrawals and emptyings little by little, and its fillings all at once and on a large scale, is insensible to the emptying but keenly sensitive to the filling; such things bring the mortal part of the soul no pains, but the greatest pleasures — as is plain in the case of sweet smells. Whatever, on the other hand, is estranged all at once, but returns to its own state again only slowly and by degrees, produces effects the very opposite of the former — as shows itself plainly when the body suffers burning or cutting. Now we have pretty well described the affections common to the whole body, and the names that have arisen for the agents that produce them. We must try to describe, so far as we can, what occurs in our several parts individually — both the affections themselves and, in turn, the causes of the agents that produce them. First, then, we must try to bring to light, as far as possible, the matters concerning flavors that we left aside earlier — affections peculiar to the tongue. These too, it appears, like most things, come about through certain combinations and separations, and beyond that they make use, more than the other senses do, of roughness and smoothness. Whatever particles enter around the little veins that stretch, as it were like sampling-probes of the tongue, toward the heart, and fall upon the moist and soft parts of the flesh, and in dissolving draw the little veins together and dry them out — these, if rather rough, appear astringent, and if less rough, appear merely tart. And those substances that scour these away, and rinse off the whole area of the tongue, if they do this beyond due measure and go so far as to erode its very substance — like the power of soda — are all called bitter; while those that fall short of the soda-like condition and use their scouring power in moderation appear to us salty, without harsh bitterness, and rather agreeable.

TIMAEUS: Substances that share in the heat of the mouth and are smoothed by it, catching fire together with it and then in turn burning back against the very thing that heated them, and being carried upward by their lightness to the sensations of the head, and cutting through everything they fall upon — because of these powers all such things are called pungent. And again, the substance that has been thinned out beforehand by decay, and works its way into the narrow veins, and there meets earthy parts and parts with a due proportion of air, so that it stirs them and makes them churn about one another, and in churning they collide and, working into one another, produce hollow places by stretching around what enters them — when moisture stretches hollow around air, sometimes earthy moisture, sometimes pure, moist vessels of air are formed, round hollow bodies of water; and those formed of the pure moisture, standing round transparent, are called bubbles, while those of the earthy moisture, when it is stirred and rises up together, are called boiling and fermentation — and the cause of these affections is called sour. Opposite to all these described affections is an affection from an opposite cause: whenever the composition of what enters, being in moist substances naturally suited to the tongue's condition, smooths what has been roughened by spreading over it, and draws together what is unnaturally contracted or, conversely, loosens what is unnaturally dispersed, and settles everything as much as possible into its natural state — every such thing, being pleasant and welcome to everyone as a remedy for violent affections, is called sweet. So much for that. As for the power of the nostrils, there are no distinct kinds within it. For every smell is a half-formed thing, and no kind possesses the due proportion needed to have any particular smell; rather, our veins around this region are formed too narrow for the kinds of earth and water, but too wide for those of fire and air, and that is why no one has ever perceived any smell of these; smells arise instead only when things are wetted, or decaying, or melting, or being burned as incense. For as water changes into air and air into water, smells come to be in the interval between these, and all smells are a kind of smoke or mist — that which passes from air into water being mist, and that which passes from water into air being smoke. Hence all smells are finer than water but coarser than air.

TIMAEUS: This becomes clear whenever, something obstructing the breath, one draws the air into oneself by force; for then no smell is filtered through together with it, but the air, stripped of all smells, follows alone. So these varied forms of smell have received two names only, not being drawn from many or simple kinds, but rather only the pleasant and the painful stand out distinctly as named here — one being that which roughens and does violence to the whole cavity that lies between our head and navel, the other being that which soothes this same region and restores it gladly to its natural state. Considering next the third perceptive part within us, that concerned with hearing, we must state the causes that produce the affections connected with it. Let us in general lay down that sound is a blow transmitted through the ears, by means of air, brain, and blood, all the way to the soul, and that the motion caused by it, beginning at the head and ending in the region of the liver, is hearing; and that whatever motion is swift is high-pitched, and whatever is slower is lower-pitched; and that motion which is uniform is even and smooth, while its opposite is rough; and that a large motion is loud, while its opposite is soft. The matters concerning their concords must necessarily be treated later on. There remains for us now a fourth kind of perception, which we must distinguish, since it comprises many varied forms within itself — all of which together we have called colors, a flame streaming off from the bodies of each thing, having particles proportioned to sight so as to produce sensation. The causes of the origin of sight itself were stated earlier. It is fitting, then, that here we should go through the subject of colors in a reasonable account of this kind: of the particles that stream from other things and fall upon sight, some are smaller, some larger, and some equal to the parts of sight itself; those that are equal are imperceptible, and these we call transparent, while those that are larger or smaller — the ones contracting sight, the others expanding it — are akin to the hot and cold affecting the flesh, and to the astringent affecting the tongue, and to all those heat-producing things we called pungent; these are white and black, being the same affections in a different kind, though appearing different because of these different causes.

TIMAEUS: So they must be named accordingly: that which dilates sight is white, and its opposite is black; while the swifter motion, belonging to a different kind of fire, falling upon and dilating sight all the way to the eyes, and forcing apart and dissolving the very passages of the eyes, pouring out from there fire all at once together with water, which we call a tear, being itself fire meeting fire from the opposite direction — and as the fire that leaps out flashes like lightning, while that which enters is quenched in the moisture, all sorts of colors arise in this churning — this affection we have called shimmering, and that which produces it we have named bright and gleaming. A kind of fire midway between these, reaching the moisture of the eyes and mingling with it, but not gleaming — when the ray of this fire mingles through the moisture and produces a blood-red color, we call this name red. And bright, mingled with red and white, becomes yellow; but as for the proportion in which each is mingled, even if one knew it, it would make no sense to state it, since for such things one could give neither any necessity nor any reasonably probable account with real precision. Red mixed with black and white gives purple; and dusky, when these are mixed together and burned more, and black is mingled further in. Tawny comes from a mixture of yellow and gray, and gray from white and black, and pale yellow from white mixed with yellow. White combined with bright and falling into deep black produces the color dark blue, and dark blue mixed with white gives gray-blue, and tawny mixed with black gives greenish. The rest are fairly evident from these, by whatever mixtures one might preserve their likeness in the probable account. But if anyone should put these matters to an actual test, he would show ignorance of the difference between human and divine nature — that a god possesses both the skill and the power to fuse plurality into a single unity, and likewise to break that unity back apart into many things, whereas no human being either is now, or ever will be in the future, capable of either of these two things. All these matters, then, being at that time of such a nature by necessity, the craftsman of the fairest and best took them over as they occurred in the process of becoming, when he was engendering the self-sufficient and most perfect god, making use of the causes concerned with them as his servants, but himself fashioning the good in everything that came to be.

TIMAEUS: This is why we must distinguish two kinds of cause, the necessary and the divine, and seek the divine in everything, for the sake of acquiring a life of happiness, so far as our nature allows it, while seeking the necessary for the sake of the divine — reckoning that without these we cannot, by themselves, either understand or grasp or in any other way share in those very things toward which we are in earnest. Now, since the kinds of causes lie before us, filtered out, like timber laid ready for carpenters, out of which the remaining account must be woven together, let us go back again briefly to the beginning, and move quickly to the same point from which we arrived here, and then try to set upon what has gone before a conclusion and a head fitting to the tale. As was said at the very start, these things, existing in disorder, god introduced into each of them, in itself and in relation to one another, such measures of proportion as it was possible for them to have, so far as they could be made analogous and proportionate. For at that time none of these had any share in such qualities except by chance, nor was there anything worth naming among the things now named, such as fire and water and any of the rest — but god first set all these in order, and then out of them constructed this universe, one single living creature containing within itself all living creatures, both mortal and immortal. Of the divine beings he himself becomes the craftsman, but the making of the mortal beings he assigned to his own offspring to fashion. And they, imitating him, having received the immortal principle of the soul, fashioned around it a mortal body and gave it the whole body as a vehicle, and built onto it another form of soul, the mortal kind, containing within itself terrible and necessary affections — first pleasure, the greatest incitement to evil, then pains, which drive away good things, and further, boldness and fear, foolish counselors both, and anger, hard to appease, and hope, easily led astray; and mingling these with irrational sensation and desire that ventures upon everything, they compounded the mortal kind of soul as necessity required. And on this account, reverencing to defile the divine part except so far as was wholly necessary, they gave the mortal part a separate dwelling apart from that other, in a different region of the body, building a neck between them as an isthmus and boundary between head and chest, so that they might be kept apart. It is in the chest, then, and in what is called the trunk, that they bound in the mortal kind of soul.

TIMAEUS: And since one part of the soul was by nature better, the other worse, they built the cavity of the chest as a separate lodging, marking it off the way one marks off women's quarters from men's, placing the midriff between them as a partition. The part of the soul that shares in courage and spirit, being ambitious for victory, they gave a dwelling closer to the head, in the space bounded by the neck above and the midriff below, so that, being obedient to reason, it might join forces with it in forcibly restraining the tribe of appetites whenever they refused, from the citadel above, to submit willingly to the command and reason. As the place where the veins are tied into a knot, and the source out of which blood is pumped forcefully to every limb, the heart they stationed in the guardhouse, so that when the might of spirit boiled up—reason having given the signal that some unjust act was occurring, whether from outside or from the appetites within—every sensitive part of the body might quickly, through all the narrow passages, perceive the summons and the threats and become obedient and follow throughout, and thus allow the best part to rule over them all. But foreseeing that the heart's leaping in anticipation of dangers, and its rousing in anger, would all involve such swelling brought on by fire, they contrived aid for it by planting the lung within, first soft and bloodless, then having hollows inside like a sponge pierced through, so that by receiving breath and drink it might cool the heart and provide relief and respite in the heat. For this reason they cut channels of the windpipe toward the lung, and set the lung around the heart like a cushion, so that when spirit was at its height within it, the heart, leaping into something yielding and being cooled, might suffer less and be better able to serve reason in company with spirit. As for the part of the soul that desires food and drink and whatever else it needs because of the nature of the body, this they settled in the region between the midriff and the boundary at the navel, fashioning throughout that whole area a kind of manger for the body's nourishment. And there they tied this thing down like a wild beast, one that must nonetheless be kept fed and joined to us, if a mortal race was ever to exist at all.

TIMAEUS: So that it might always be grazing at its manger, and dwelling as far as possible from the deliberating part, causing the least possible tumult and outcry, and might allow the best part to deliberate in peace about what is advantageous for all in common and for each individually—for this reason they gave it this position there. And knowing that it would never understand reason, and that even if it should somehow get a share of some perception of such things, it would have no innate concern for any reasoned arguments, but would be led about above all by images and phantoms by night and by day—for this the god, plotting against it, constructed the form of the liver and placed it in that creature's dwelling, contriving it to be dense and smooth and bright and sweet, yet also possessing bitterness, so that the power of thoughts moving from the mind might, as in a mirror that receives impressions and yields visible images to be seen, at one time frighten this thing when it employs a portion of that bitterness akin to itself, bearing down on it harshly with a threat, mixing itself swiftly through the whole of the liver so as to display bilious colors, and by contracting the whole make it wrinkled and rough, and by bending the lobe and the receptacles and the gates down from their upright position, and squeezing them, and by blocking some and closing others, cause pains and nausea; and again, when, on the contrary, some breath of gentleness from the thinking part paints the opposite kind of images, giving the bitterness rest by being unwilling to stir or touch a nature opposite to its own, but instead employing toward the liver the sweetness native to it, and setting all its parts straight and smooth and free, it might make the portion of the soul settled around the liver cheerful and content, giving it a measured way of passing the night, engaged in divination in sleep, since it had no share in reason and understanding. For those who put us together, remembering their father's instruction to make the mortal race as good as possible within the limits of power, set right even this base part of us in this way, so that it might somehow lay hold of truth, and for that purpose established the seat of divination in this organ. And there is sufficient proof that god has given divination to human folly: for no one in his right mind lays hold of true, inspired divination, but only when the power of his understanding is fettered in sleep, or he is deranged through disease, or has passed out of himself through some form of possession.

TIMAEUS: But it belongs to a person in his right mind to think over and recall, whether dreaming or waking, the things said by this prophetic and inspired nature, and to sort out by reasoning all the apparitions that were seen, working out in what way and for whom they signify something of evil or good to come, or past, or present; but it is not the task of one who is still in the grip of madness to judge what has appeared and been spoken by himself—rather, as the old saying rightly has it, to do and to know one's own affairs and oneself belongs only to the sound of mind. That is why it is the custom to appoint the tribe of prophets as judges over inspired divinations—people some call diviners themselves, in total ignorance that they are interpreters of riddling utterance and vision, and not diviners at all, but most properly to be called prophets of things divined. This, then, is why the liver has the nature it does and is situated where we say it is—for the sake of divination. And while each living thing is alive, this organ's signs are clearer, but once deprived of life it goes blind, and its divinations become too dim to signify anything clear. The structure and seat of the neighboring organ came about on the left for the sake of the liver, so as to keep it always bright and clean, like a mirror always standing ready and prepared at its side. This is why, whenever there is some uncleanness about the liver due to bodily illness, the spleen's porous texture, being hollow and bloodless as it is woven, receives and cleanses it all away; and so, filling up with what is purged away, it grows large and festers, and again, when the body is purified, it subsides and shrinks back to its former size. So much, then, for the soul—what part of it is mortal and what divine, and where and with what companions and for what reasons it was settled apart. That this account is true we could affirm with confidence only if a god agreed; but that it is likely, as we have said, both now and on further reflection, this we must venture to assert, and let it be asserted. What comes next in order must be pursued in the same manner: it was the remaining part of the body, how it came to be. It would be most fitting for us to put this together out of the following line of reasoning.

TIMAEUS: Those who put together our race knew that we would be undisciplined in drink and food, and that through greed we would consume far more than what is measured and necessary; so that there should not be swift destruction through disease, and the mortal race come to an end straightaway before it was complete, foreseeing this they set up what is called the lower belly as a receptacle to hold the surplus of drink and food, and they coiled the formation of the intestines round about, so that the food, passing through too quickly, should not force the body to need further food again too quickly, and by producing insatiable craving make the whole race, through gluttony, unphilosophical and uncultured, disobedient to the most divine part within us. As for bones and flesh and everything of that nature, matters stood as follows. The origin of all these lies in the generation of marrow: for the bonds of life, by which the soul is bound to the body, are fastened together in this, and take root there for the mortal race; and the marrow itself came to be from other things. For of the triangles, whichever were first, unwarped and smooth, and most capable of yielding fire and water and air and earth with precision, these the god, separating each from its own kind, and mixing them with one another in due proportion, contriving a seed-stock for every mortal kind, made into the marrow, and afterward, planting in it the various kinds of souls, divided the marrow itself, at once in the original distribution, into just as many and such shapes as the souls were going to have severally in their several forms. And the portion which was to hold the divine seed within it, like a field, he shaped round on every side and called this share of the marrow the brain, since once each living creature was completed, the vessel around this part would become its head; but the part that was to hold the remaining, mortal part of the soul he divided into shapes at once round and elongated, and called all of it marrow alike; and casting out from these, as if from anchors, the bonds of the whole soul, he then fashioned our entire body around this, fitting first a covering of bone all around it. And he put the bone together in this way: sifting earth pure and smooth, he kneaded it and moistened it with marrow, and after this put it into fire, then dipped it into water, then again into fire, and again into water; and by carrying it back and forth many times into each in this way he made it unmeltable by either.

TIMAEUS: Making use of this, he turned on a lathe, around the brain, a bony sphere, and left in it a narrow passage; for the marrow that runs through neck and backbone, he shaped vertebrae from that same stuff and slid them beneath it like pivots, beginning from the head, running through the whole trunk. And thus, to preserve the whole seed, he fenced it in with a stone-like enclosure, fashioning joints, employing in them the power of the Other as something set in the middle, for the sake of movement and bending. But considering that the condition of bony substance was more brittle and inflexible than it should be, and that becoming heated through and then cooled again it would quickly mortify and destroy the seed within it, for these reasons he devised the kind of sinews and the kind of flesh, so that by binding all the limbs together with the one, stretching and relaxing around the pivots, it might allow the body to bend and extend, while the flesh would serve as a defense against heat and a shield against cold, and further, as a protection against falls, like felted furnishings, yielding softly and gently to bodies, and having warm moisture within itself, sweating in summer and being moistened from without, it would provide a coolness proper to the whole body, while in winter, by means of this same fire, it would ward off, in due measure, the frost that approaches and surrounds it from outside. Having thought all this through concerning us, the modeler in wax mixed and fitted together water and fire and earth, and mingling into them a ferment compounded of sour and salt, formed flesh, juicy and soft; and the nature of the sinews he blended from bone and unfermented flesh into a single substance midway in power between the two, using a yellow color for it. This is why sinews came to have a power more taut and sticky than flesh, but softer and moister than bone. With these the god wrapped round the bones and the marrow, binding them to one another with sinews, and afterward overshadowed all of them from above with flesh. Those bones that had the most soul in them he fenced with the least flesh, while those with the least soul within he covered with the most and densest flesh; and indeed at the joints of the bones, wherever reason did not show any necessity requiring it, he grew only a scant covering of flesh, so that the bodies would not be made unwieldy by flesh getting in the way of the bending of the joints, being thereby hard to move, nor again, where flesh was abundant and dense and packed tightly together, that it should, through its solidity, produce insensibility and make the parts concerned with thought duller and less retentive of memory.

TIMAEUS: For this reason the thighs and shins and the region around the hips, and the bones of the upper arms and forearms, and all our other joint-free parts, and whatever bones within us are empty of intelligence for want of soul in the marrow—all these have been filled out with flesh. But the parts that have intelligence received less flesh, unless some part was constructed to have flesh purely for the sake of sensation on its own account, as with the form of the tongue; otherwise the rule holds generally, for a nature that comes to be and grows by necessity nowhere admits both dense bone and abundant flesh together with keen sensation. The structure around the head would have had all these most of all, if the two could have come together at once, and the human race, having a fleshy, sinewy, and strong head set upon it, would have gained a life twice as long and many times over, and healthier and less painful than the life we have now. But as it was, the craftsmen responsible for our coming-to-be, weighing whether they should make a longer-lived but worse race or a shorter-lived but better one, agreed that a shorter but superior life was in every way to be chosen over a longer but inferior one for every creature. That is why they did not cover the head with dense bone, or with flesh and sinews, since it has no joints. For all these reasons, then, the head, once attached to the body of every man, is more richly endowed with sensation and intelligence, but far weaker than the rest of the body. And it was for these reasons and in this way that the god set the sinews at the outer end around the head, glued them in a ring about the neck through their likeness to one another, and bound the extremities of the jaws to them beneath the shape of the face; the rest he scattered among all the limbs, joining joint to joint. As for the power of our mouth, those who arranged it fitted out teeth, tongue, and lips as they are now arranged, for the sake both of necessities and of what is best, contriving the entrance for the sake of necessary things and the exit for the sake of the best things. For everything that enters, giving nourishment to the body, is necessary, while the stream of speech that flows out and serves thought is the finest and best of all streams.

TIMAEUS: As for the head, leaving it as nothing but naked bone was impossible, given how far the seasons swing toward heat at one extreme and toward cold at the other, nor again to let it become muffled in flesh and so dull and unfeeling. Since the fleshy substance did not dry out completely, a larger rind formed and separated off from it—what is now called skin. This, because of the moisture around the brain, drew together into itself, and sprouting in a circle, clothed the head all around; and as the wetness climbed up beneath the seams, it irrigated the skin and pulled it shut at the crown, gathering it as it were into a knot. The varied pattern of the sutures came about through the power of the revolutions and of nutrition, being more numerous where these forces conflicted more with one another, and fewer where they conflicted less. The divine power then pricked this whole skin all around with fire, and once it was pierced and the moisture carried outward through it, whatever was pure moisture and heat departed, while the mixed part, of which the skin itself was made, was lifted by the current and stretched out long outside, having a thinness equal to the puncture; but being slow, it was pushed back inward under the skin by the surrounding outer air and took root there coiled up. And it is by these processes that the class of hairs has grown in the skin, being akin to it as a strap is akin to leather, but harder and denser through the compacting effect of the cold, which each hair, once it separates from the skin, undergoes as it cools and is compressed together. By this means the maker made our heads shaggy, using the causes stated, but intending that this should serve as a covering instead of flesh, for the safety of the brain, being light and providing adequate shade and shelter in both summer and winter, while posing no obstacle to keenness of sensation. As for the interlacing of sinew, skin, and bone in the region of the fingers, once mixed from the three and dried out, it became one common hard substance—skin of a sort—produced by these contributing causes, but wrought for the sake of the most decisive purpose, namely what was to come afterward. For those who were putting us together knew that women and the other animals would one day come to be from men, and they also knew that many of the creatures would need the use of claws for many purposes; hence in human beings, right from birth, they sketched out the growth of nails. It is on this reasoning and for these ends that, out at the tips of the limbs, they made skin and hair and nails spring forth.

TIMAEUS: Once all the parts and limbs of the mortal living being had grown together, and it necessarily had to have its life amid fire and breath, and for this reason was wasting away, being melted and drained by these, the gods contrived help for it. Blending a nature akin to human nature with other forms and other kinds of sensation, so that it would be a different living thing, they planted it—what are now the tame trees, plants, and seeds, trained by agriculture to be gentle toward us, although in earlier times nothing existed but the untamed varieties, which predate the domesticated sorts. For whatever partakes of life may most rightly and justly be called a living thing; and what we are now speaking of does participate in that third form of soul, the one our account places in the region between the navel and the midriff, a kind that has no part whatsoever in opinion, reasoning, or understanding, but only in sensation, pleasant and painful, together with desires. For it remains passive throughout, and since it was turned in upon itself, around itself, repelling motion from without and using only its own, its birth did not grant it the nature to observe and reason about any of its own experiences. Hence it lives, and is not other than a living thing, but it stands fixed, rooted and stationary, because it is deprived of motion by itself. Having planted all these kinds to be food for us, their inferiors, the higher powers channeled our body itself, cutting it through with conduits as one cuts channels in a garden, so that it might be watered as if by an incoming stream. And first they cut two hidden channels beneath the junction of skin and flesh—two veins along the back, twin as the body itself happens to be, right and left; these they let down along the spine, taking the generative marrow between them, so that it might flourish as much as possible, and so that the flow, since it ran downhill from there to everything else, might provide an even supply of water. After this, splitting the veins around the head and weaving them crosswise through one another, they sent them down, steering those on the right over to the body's left flank, and bending the left-hand ones across to the right, so that there might be a bond, together with the skin, linking the head to the body—since the head was not encircled by sinews at the crown—and also so that the experience of the senses from both sides might be made evident to the whole body.

TIMAEUS: From this point on they arranged the conveyance of water in some such way as this, which we shall see more easily once we have first agreed on the following: that everything composed of smaller parts contains the larger, while what is composed of larger parts cannot contain the smaller; and fire is of all the kinds the one with the smallest parts, and so it passes through water, earth, air, and whatever is composed of these, and nothing can contain it. The same must be understood about our stomach: when food and drink fall into it, it contains them, but breath and fire, being of parts smaller than its own structure, it cannot contain. These, then, the god used for conveying water from the stomach to the veins, weaving together a network of air and fire like a fish-weir, having a double funnel-mouth at the entrance, one of which he further wove in two; and from these funnel-mouths he stretched out, as it were, cords all around, through the whole, to the outer edges of the network. The interior parts of the woven structure he composed wholly of fire, but the funnel-mouths and the outer casing of air-like material; and taking this, he arranged it around the creature he had shaped, in the following manner. He let down one of the funnel-mouths into the mouth; and since it is double, he let one part down through the windpipe into the lung, the other beside the windpipe into the stomach. The other funnel-mouth he split, and let each part out in common through the passages of the nose, so that whenever the one through the mouth did not operate, all the currents from that one too would be replenished from this one. The rest of the hollow of the weir he wrapped around all the hollow part of our body, and made it so that this whole mass sometimes flows gently together into the funnel-mouths, being air, and sometimes the funnel-mouths flow back, while the network itself, since the body is porous, sinks in through it and out again, and the rays of fire within, being bound fast to it, follow the air as it goes in either direction—and this, for as long as the mortal living creature holds together, never ceases happening. And it is to this process that the one who assigned the names gave the terms inhalation and exhalation. And all this activity and experience has come to be for our body, so that, being watered and cooled, it might be nourished and live.

TIMAEUS: For whenever, as the breath goes in and out, the fire bound within follows along with it, and being forever suspended, passing in through the stomach, takes hold of the food and drink, it melts them, and dividing them into small portions, conducting them out through the passages by which it travels, draws them off as if from a spring into channels leading to the veins, and sets the streams within the veins running along the body as though along a pipe. Let me turn once more to what happens in breathing, by what causes it operates in the way it now does. It is this way: since there is no void into which anything in motion could enter, and breath moves outward from us, the next point is clear to everyone—that it does not move into a void, but pushes what is next to it out of its place; and what is pushed drives out in turn what is next to it, and by this necessity everything, being driven around, follows the breath into the place from which it came out, entering there and filling it up, and this all happens at once, like a wheel turning, because there is no void anywhere. That is why the chest and the lung, in releasing breath outward, become filled again by the air around the body, which sinks in through the porous flesh and is driven around; and again, as the air turns back and passes out through the body, it forces the inhaled breath back around through the passage of the mouth and nostrils. The cause of the origin of these movements must be posited as follows. Every living creature has its inner parts, around the blood and the veins, hottest, as if it had within itself a kind of spring of fire; and this is what we compared to the weaving of the fish-weir, saying that the whole of it was woven of fire stretched through the middle, and all the other, outer parts, of air. Now it must be agreed that heat naturally moves outward to its own region, toward what is akin to it; and since there are two outlets, one through the body outward, the other in turn through the mouth and nostrils, whenever it rushes toward one, it drives the other around; and what is driven around, falling into the fire, is heated, while what goes out is cooled. And as the heat changes and the parts at the other exit become hotter, the hotter part inclines back that way again, moving toward its own nature, and drives around what is at the other side; and since this experiences the same things and gives back the same things in return always, a circle is thus set swaying this way and that, and it is by both these movements together that inhalation and exhalation are brought about.

TIMAEUS — And indeed the causes of the sensations produced by medical cupping-glasses, and of swallowing, and of things thrown—whatever is released and travels through the air, and whatever moves along the ground—must be traced along these same lines; likewise all the sounds that appear fast or slow, high or low, sometimes discordant because of the dissimilarity of the motion they produce in us, sometimes concordant because of similarity. For the slower sounds, moving after the faster ones, catch up with the motions of those earlier and swifter sounds just as they are dying away and have already arrived at a state similar to their own—and when the slower sounds, arriving later, set those earlier motions moving again, they do not throw in some other, disruptive motion, but rather impose the beginning of a slower movement conforming to the pattern of the faster motion as it fades, and by fitting a likeness onto it, they blend high and low into a single experience. This is what gives pleasure to the unmusical and delight to the musical, through the imitation of divine harmony that comes to exist in mortal movements. And indeed all the flows of water, and further the fall of thunderbolts, and the wonders people marvel at concerning the pull exerted by amber and by the Heraclean stone—not one of these involves any genuine attraction; rather, since there is no such thing as void, and these things push each other around into one another's places, and as they separate and combine each thing shifts to exchange its own seat with another—it is by these interwoven interactions that these apparent wonders will show themselves to anyone who investigates properly. And indeed the phenomenon of breathing, from which our account set out, has come about in just this way and through these same causes, as was said before: fire cuts up the food, and being borne along inside the body in company with the breath, it fills the veins from the belly by drawing up, through this joint motion, the matter that has been cut up there. And this is why, throughout the whole body, in all living things, the streams of nourishment flow in this manner. And these freshly cut portions, being akin to the body—some from fruits, some from greenery, which the god planted for us for this very purpose, to be nourishment—take on all sorts of colors because of their mixture, though the color that runs through them most is red, a nature produced by the cutting and wiping action of fire in moisture.

TIMAEUS — From this comes the color of what flows through the body—the sort of appearance we have described, which we call blood, the nourishment of the flesh and of the whole body; from it, drawing their supply, all the parts fill up whatever space has been emptied. The manner of this filling and depleting occurs just as the motion of everything in the universe occurs, whereby everything akin is borne toward its own kind. For the things surrounding us on the outside are constantly dissolving us and distributing us, sending off to each kindred form what belongs to it, while the blood-filled parts within us, in turn, having been broken into small pieces inside us and enclosed as if beneath a heaven belonging to each living creature, have no choice but to copy how the whole cosmos moves; so each of the divided parts within, moving toward its kindred substance, refills again what has just been emptied. Whenever more flows out than flows in, the whole thing wastes away; whenever less, it grows. Now the newly formed structure of any living creature has the triangles of its elemental kinds still fresh, as it were straight from the keel-blocks, and these triangles are locked tightly together with one another; yet the whole mass of it is compacted soft, since it has only just come from marrow and has been nourished on milk. So the triangles that enter it from outside, contained within the food and drink it takes in, being older and weaker than its own triangles, are overpowered by the new ones, which cut them up, and the creature grows large as it is nourished from many similar particles. But when the root of the triangles slackens, from having fought many contests over a long time against many opponents, then the incoming particles of food can no longer be cut down into a form similar to the body's own, while the body's own triangles are easily divided by those coming in from outside. Every living thing wastes away when overcome in this contest, and this condition is called old age. Finally, when the bonds holding together the triangles around the marrow no longer hold firm under the strain and come apart, they in turn release the bonds of the soul; and the soul, once freed in accordance with nature, flies off with pleasure. For anything contrary to nature is painful, while whatever happens in accordance with nature is pleasant. And death, likewise, when it comes through disease or from wounds, is painful and violent, but the death that comes with old age, reaching its end in accordance with nature, is the least distressing of deaths and comes more with pleasure than with pain.

TIMAEUS — As for where diseases arise from, that, I think, is clear to everyone. Since the body is packed together out of four kinds—fire, water, air, and earth—the unnatural excess or deficiency of these, and the shifting of any of them from its proper region into a foreign one; and further, since fire and the other elements each in fact occur in more than one kind, the taking on by each part of the body of a kind not proper to it, and all such things as these, produce internal conflict and disease. For when each element comes to be, or shifts, contrary to its nature, then whatever was previously cold grows hot, and what is dry later becomes moist, and things become light or heavy, and undergo every sort of change in every direction. For only, we say, when the same thing is added to and taken from the same thing, in the same manner and proportion and in the same respect, will it be allowed to remain itself, safe and healthy; but whatever oversteps this measure in what leaves or enters from outside will produce all sorts of alterations, diseases, and countless forms of decay. Now that a second set of natural compounds has been formed, there is a second level of understanding of diseases available to anyone who wishes to grasp it. For since marrow, bone, flesh, and sinew are compounded from those first elements, and blood too—formed in a different way, but out of the same elements—most of the other diseases arise in the manner described before, but the gravest diseases prove harsh in this way: when the formation of these compounds proceeds in reverse, that is when they are destroyed. For by nature flesh and sinew arise out of blood—sinew out of the fibers, because of its kinship with them, and flesh out of what coagulates when separated from the fibers; and what departs in turn from sinews and flesh, being sticky and oily, both glues the flesh onto the substance of the bones and also nourishes and increases the very bone that surrounds the marrow, while the part filtered through the density of the bones—the purest, smoothest, and oiliest kind of triangles, oozing and dripping from the bones—waters the marrow. And when each of these processes occurs in this way, health generally results; when it happens in the opposite way, disease results. For when flesh, wasting away, sends its wasted matter back into the veins, then blood, together with breath, abundant and of every kind, becomes mottled in the veins with colors and bitternesses, and further with sharp and salty qualities, and takes on bile of all sorts, serous fluids, and phlegms of every kind.

TIMAEUS — For all these substances, having been formed by a reversal and corruption of the process, first destroy the blood itself, and, providing no further nourishment to the body, are carried everywhere through the veins, no longer keeping the order of their natural circuits—hostile to one another, since they get no benefit from each other, and hostile too to the body's constitution, which they remain at war with, destroying it and dissolving it. Now whatever part of the flesh is oldest when it wastes, being hard to digest, turns black from long-standing charring, and because it has been eaten through everywhere, being bitter, it attacks harshly whatever part of the body is not yet corrupted; and sometimes, in place of its bitterness, the black matter takes on a sharp quality, as the bitterness is refined further, while other times the bitterness, dyed by blood, takes on a redder color, and when the black is mixed with this it becomes greenish; and further, a yellow color mixes in with the bitterness when fresh flesh is consumed by the fire around the flame. And the common name for all these substances is one that certain physicians, or perhaps someone capable of seeing, amid many dissimilar things, one single kind present in all of them worthy of a common name, have called bile; while the other kinds of bile, as they are called, have each received their own account according to their color. Serum, meanwhile, is in one form the mild whey of blood, and in another the wild whey of black, sharp bile, when it mixes with a salty quality through heat; and this kind is called sour phlegm. And again, what melts away together with air out of fresh, tender flesh—when this becomes windy and enveloped by moisture, and bubbles form from this condition, invisible individually because of their smallness, but together making a visible mass, having a color that looks white because of the way foam is generated—all this wasting of tender flesh, entangled with breath, we call white phlegm. And of newly forming phlegm, again, the whey is sweat and tears, and all the other bodily fluids of that sort that are discharged daily in the process of purging. All these things have become instruments of disease whenever, rather than being restocked the natural way out of food and drink, the blood builds up its mass from contrary sources, contrary to the laws of nature.

TIMAEUS — Now when each portion of flesh is broken down by disease while its foundations remain, the destructive force is only half as severe, since recovery is still possible with ease; but when the substance that binds flesh to bones falls sick, and no longer, separating itself from fibers and blood, becomes nourishment for bone and a bond for flesh to bone, but instead, from being oily, smooth, and sticky, becomes rough and salty and parched through bad regimen, then all such affected matter crumbles back again beneath the flesh and sinews, pulling away from the bones; and as it falls away from its roots it leaves the sinews bare and full of salt, and falling back in turn into the bloodstream, it increases the number of the diseases already described. And grave as these afflictions of the body are, still graver ones precede them, when the bone, because of the density of the flesh, fails to get sufficient breathing room, and, heated by mold, becomes gangrenous and can no longer take in nourishment, but instead, as it crumbles, sends its own matter in the reverse direction into that same flesh; and the flesh, falling into the blood, makes all the previous diseases rougher still. And worst of all is when the very nature of the marrow falls sick, from deficiency or some excess; this produces the gravest and most decisive of diseases leading to death, since the whole nature of the body is forced to flow in reverse. There is, again, a third kind of disease that must be understood as arising in three ways: from breath, from phlegm, and from bile. Whenever the lung, which is steward of the breath for the body, fails to keep its passages clear, being blocked by discharges, then, since in some places no breath enters while in others more than the proper amount comes in, the parts that get no refreshment putrefy, while other parts, as the breath forces its way violently through the veins and twists them, melt the body and become trapped, enclosed as it takes hold of the midriff; and from these conditions countless painful diseases arise, often accompanied by a great deal of sweating. Often, too, when the flesh is disrupted within the body, breath is generated there and, unable to make its way out, causes the same agonies as the breath that enters from outside—worst of all when it surrounds the sinews and the small veins there, and, swelling up, pulls the tendons and the connected sinews backward so forcefully; and it is from this very straining of the affliction that these diseases have been named tetanus and opisthotonos.

TIMAEUS: For these conditions the remedy is difficult, since fevers, once they set in on top of them, generally resolve them. The white phlegm, because of the breath trapped in its bubbles, is dangerous when shut in, but when it finds vents to the outside of the body it is milder—though it mottles the body, producing white blotches and vitiligo and the diseases akin to these. When mixed with black bile and spread over the circuits in the head—which are the most divine of all—it disturbs them; in sleep this poison is gentler, but when it attacks people who are awake it is harder to shake off. Since it is an affection of what is by nature sacred, it is most justly called the sacred disease. Sharp, salty phlegm is the source of all catarrhal diseases; and because the places into which it flows are so various, it has taken all sorts of names. All the conditions of the body that are called inflammations, from their burning and blazing, arise from bile. When bile finds a vent to the outside, boiling, it sends up all kinds of pustules; but when it is shut in it produces many burning diseases, and the worst of these is when it mixes with pure blood and displaces the fibrous element from its proper arrangement—the fibers that are dispersed throughout the blood so that it may have the right proportion of thinness and thickness, so that it neither flows out like a liquid through the loose flesh of the body because of heat, nor, again, becomes too thick and sluggish to circulate readily in the veins. The fibers preserve the right measure of these things by their very nature; and when someone gathers together the fibers even of blood that is dead and has grown cold, all the rest of the blood disperses, but if they are left alone they quickly congeal it, along with the surrounding cold. Since the fibers have this power within the blood, bile—which is by nature old blood, and has again been dissolved out of the flesh back into this state, hot and moist—when it first falls in little by little, congeals through the power of the fibers; and in congealing, being forcibly quenched, it produces internal chill and trembling.

TIMAEUS: But when bile flows in more abundantly, overpowering the fibers with its own heat and setting them boiling, it shakes them into disorder; and if it manages to prevail to the end, it burns its way through to the marrow and, cutting loose the soul's cables there, as it were the mooring-lines of a ship, sets it free. But when the bile is less, and the body holds out even as it wastes away, the bile itself is overpowered, and either it is expelled over the whole surface of the body, or, forced through the veins into the lower belly or the upper, it gets expelled from the body the way a faction drives a banished man from a rebelling city, producing diarrhea and dysentery and all diseases of that kind. So a body that falls ill chiefly from an excess of fire produces continuous burning and fevers; one that falls ill from air produces quotidian fevers; one from water produces tertian fevers, since water is more sluggish than air or fire; while one from earth, being the most sluggish of the four in the fourth degree, and purged only in periods four times as long, produces quartan fevers, and is released from them only with difficulty. Such, then, is how the diseases of the body come about. As for those of the soul that arise through the condition of the body, they come about in this way. We must grant that disease of the soul is folly, and that there are two kinds of folly: one is madness, the other ignorance. Whatever affection produces either of these in a person must be called a disease; and we must set down excessive pleasures and pains as the greatest of the soul's diseases. For when a man is overjoyed, or conversely suffering under pain, hastening inopportunely to seize the one and to flee the other, he can neither see nor hear anything rightly; he is in a frenzy, and at that moment is least capable of any share in reasoning. And the man in whom seed grows abundant and fluid around the marrow, like a tree bearing more fruit than is proportionate, undergoes many pangs and gains many pleasures, one after another, in his desires and in the offspring of such desires, and becomes for the greater part of his life frenzied because of these extreme pleasures and pains; his body renders his soul diseased and witless, and yet people reckon him not as ailing but as deliberately depraved. But the truth is that licentiousness in matters of sex arises, for the most part, from the condition of a single substance which, through the porousness of the bones, becomes fluid and moistening within the body, and is a disease of the soul. And indeed almost everything that is called incontinence in pleasures, and is reproached as though the wicked did wrong willingly, is not rightly reproached; for no one is willingly wicked, but the bad man becomes bad through some evil condition of the body and an unschooled upbringing—things that are hateful to everyone and come upon him against his will. And again, in the matter of pains too, the soul in the same way acquires much vice on account of the body.

TIMAEUS: For whenever the sharp and salty phlegms, and all the bitter and bilious humors, wander about the body and find no vent outward, but are shut in and mix their vapor with the motion of the soul, blending with it, they produce all sorts of diseases of the soul, more or less severe, more or fewer in number; and carried to the three regions of the soul, whichever region each of them strikes, they produce varied forms of ill temper and despondency of every kind, along with assorted forms of recklessness and timidity, and likewise of poor memory and slowness at learning. Beyond this, when people so badly constituted live under bad political systems, and bad words are spoken among cities both privately and publicly, and further, when from childhood on no studies capable of curing these ills are learned, it is in this way that all of us who are bad become so through two causes entirely beyond our will; and the blame for this must be laid on the begetters more than the begotten, and on those who raise more than those who are raised. Still, one must strive, so far as one is able, through upbringing and through pursuits and studies, to escape vice and to lay hold of its opposite. But this belongs to another kind of discourse. Now the converse of this, the treatment of bodies and minds by which they are preserved, it is fitting and proper to give in return, since it is more just to give an account of good things than of bad. Everything good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not without proportion; so a living creature that is to be such must be set down as well-proportioned. Now we perceive small instances of proportion and reason about them, but the most sovereign and greatest instances we treat without reasoning at all. For with regard to health and disease, and virtue and vice, no proportion or disproportion is greater than that between the soul itself and the body itself; yet we give no thought to this and take no notice of it—that whenever a strong and altogether great soul is carried by a weaker and lesser bodily form, or when, conversely, the two are joined together the other way about, the whole living creature is not beautiful, for it is out of proportion in the most important proportions of all; whereas the creature in the opposite condition is, to one able to behold it, the most beautiful and lovely of all sights. Just as a body that is disproportionately long in the leg, or has some other excess out of measure, is at once unsightly, and also, in the exertions it must share, produces much fatigue and many cramps and falls through its lack of balance, causing itself countless troubles—

TIMAEUS: the same must be thought true of the combination of the two we call a living creature: whenever the soul within it, being stronger than the body, is overly spirited, it shakes the whole body through from within and fills it with diseases; and whenever it pursues some course of learning or inquiry too intensely, it wastes the body away; and again, when it engages in teaching and disputation in public and in private through arguments carried on in strife and rivalry, it sets the body ablaze and shakes it loose, and by inducing discharges it deceives most so-called physicians into blaming the wrong causes. And conversely, when a body too big and too powerful for its soul is yoked to a slight and feeble intelligence—since there are by nature two kinds of desire in human beings, one for food on account of the body, the other for wisdom on account of what is most divine in us—the motions of the stronger part prevail and, increasing what belongs to themselves, make the soul's part dull, slow to learn, and forgetful, and so bring about the greatest disease of all, ignorance. There is one safeguard against both these dangers: neither to move the soul without the body, nor the body without the soul, so that, each defending against the other, they may become evenly balanced and healthy. So the man who is working hard at mathematics or any other intense study of the mind must also give his body its due exercise by taking part in gymnastics; and the man who is carefully molding his body must in turn render to the soul the motions proper to it, by cultivating music and philosophy in every form, if he is to be rightly called at once beautiful and good. And these same parts of the body must be looked after in the same way, in imitation of the form of the universe as a whole. For since the body is heated and cooled within by the things that enter it, and again dried and moistened by things from outside, and undergoes the consequent effects from both these kinds of motion, then, whenever a person surrenders his body to these motions in a state of rest, it is overpowered and perishes; but if a person imitates that which we called the nurse and wet-nurse of the universe, and above all never allows the body to remain at rest, but keeps it moving and by constantly producing certain tremors in it wards off, in accordance with nature, the internal and external motions, and by shaking it in due measure brings into orderly arrangement, according to their affinities, the affections and parts that wander about the body—following the account we gave earlier concerning the universe as a whole—then he will not allow enemy to be set beside enemy and breed wars and diseases in the body, but will bring about health by setting friend beside friend.

TIMAEUS: Now among motions, the finest is the kind a thing sets going in itself by its own agency, since it bears the closest kinship to the movement of intellect and to that of the cosmos; motion produced by another is worse; and worst of all is that which, while the body lies still and at rest, moves it part by part by means of something else. Therefore, of the modes of purifying and restoring the body, the best is that through exercise; second is that through swaying motions, as in sailing or in any other conveyance that produces no fatigue; and a third kind of motion, useful only on occasion of great necessity but otherwise never to be accepted by a sensible person, is the medical purging brought about by drugs. For diseases that do not carry great dangers should not be provoked by medications; since every constitution of diseases bears some resemblance to the nature of living creatures. For the composition of a living being has, in a sense, fixed periods of life allotted to it, both for the species as a whole and for each individual creature, which grows with its own destined span of life, apart from those sufferings that come by necessity; for the triangles, from the very beginning, are constituted with a power in each case sufficient to last only up to a certain time, beyond which no one could ever continue to live. The same holds true of the constitution of diseases; whenever someone destroys this, in defiance of its destined time, by means of drugs, then diseases that were small and few tend to become great and many. Hence one must manage all such conditions, so far as one has the leisure to do so, by regimen, rather than provoke a troublesome evil by drugging it. Concerning the living creature as a common whole, then, and the bodily part of it, and the way in which a person might best live according to reason, both training and being trained by himself, let this be said. But that which is to do the training, the soul itself, must be prepared beforehand, and with even greater priority, to be as excellent and as fair as possible for its task of training. To go through these matters with precision would in itself be work enough for a treatise on its own; but as a subordinate matter, following the plan we have kept to so far, one might not be out of place in bringing the discussion to a close in this way, as follows.

TIMAEUS — As we've said many times, three kinds of soul are settled in us, in three regions, and each has its own motions. So now too, as briefly as possible, we must say this: whichever part lives in idleness and keeps its own motions still is bound to become weakest, while the part that gets exercise becomes strongest. That's why we must watch that their motions stay in due proportion to one another. As for the ruling kind of soul in us, we should think of it this way: god has given it to each of us as a guiding spirit — this thing that we say lives in the topmost part of our body and lifts us up from earth toward our kinship in heaven, since we are a plant not of earth but of heaven. And that's exactly right, for it is from there, from the place where the soul first came to be, that the divine suspends our head and root and keeps our whole body upright. So for a person absorbed in appetites or rivalries, working hard at those alone, all his convictions are bound to become mortal, and insofar as it's possible at all for a human being to become wholly mortal, he falls short of that not even a little, since it's exactly this side of himself he's built up. But for the person who has devoted himself to the love of learning and to true understanding, and who has exercised this part of himself above all, it's entirely necessary, if he lays hold of truth, that he think immortal and divine thoughts — and insofar as human nature admits a share in immortality, he leaves no part of that behind; and since he's always caring for the divine and keeps in good order the guiding spirit that lives within him, he is happy beyond the ordinary measure. And the one care that fits every part of us is this: to give each part the nourishment and the motions proper to it. Now the movements that are kindred to the divine element in us are the universe's own reasonings and orbits. Those are what every one of us ought to follow, setting right the circuits in our head that were thrown out of order at our birth, by coming to know the cosmos's harmonies and circling paths — and so rendering the understanding part like the thing it understands, following our original nature, and by so likening it, achieving the goal of the best life the gods have set before human beings, both for the present and for time to come. And with that, the task set for us from the start — to give an account of the universe up to the birth of human beings — has, I think, pretty much reached its end. As for how the other animals came to be, that needs only brief mention, nothing that requires dwelling on at length; that way a person may seem to himself to have kept fair proportion in his account of these matters. So let this be said on the subject.

TIMAEUS — Of the men who were born, all those who were cowards and spent their lives unjustly were, by all reasonable account, changed into women at the second birth. And it was at that very time, for this reason, that the gods devised the desire that belongs to sexual union, fashioning one living thing, ensouled, in us, and another in women, making each of them in the following way. The channel for drink — by which the drink, passing through the lung under the kidneys into the bladder, is pressed by the breath and expelled along with it — they bored through so as to connect it to the marrow that runs, compacted, from the head down the neck and through the spine, the very thing we earlier called seed. And this marrow, being ensouled and having gained a means of breathing, implanted in that very place where it breathes a living desire for outflow, and so brought about the desire for begetting. This is why, in men, the part concerned with the genitals has become disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that will not listen to reason, and through its raging desires tries to master everything. And likewise in women, what are called the womb and matrix, for these same reasons, contain a creature desirous of childbearing; and whenever it goes unfruited for a long time past its season, it grows distressed and bears this badly, and wandering all through the body, blocking the passages of breath, not allowing respiration, it throws the body into the extremest straits and produces all sorts of other diseases — until the desire and love of each sex, drawing them together, as if plucking fruit from trees, sow into the womb, as into a plowed field, living things invisible for their smallness and still unformed, and then, separating them out again, nourish them within to a great size, and after that bring them to light and complete the birth of living creatures. This, then, is how women and the whole female sex came to be. And the tribe of birds was transformed, growing feathers instead of hair, out of men who were harmless but light-headed, men who studied the heavens but in their simplicity thought that the surest proofs about such things came through sight. The land-dwelling, wild-animal kind, in turn, came from men who made no use whatsoever of philosophy and gave no thought at all to the nature of the heavens, because they no longer made use of the circuits in the head but instead followed the parts of the soul around the chest as their guides.

TIMAEUS — From these habits of life, then, their forelimbs and heads were dragged down to the earth and fixed there by kinship with it, and their crowns were drawn out long and took on all sorts of shapes, depending on how each one's revolutions were squeezed together through disuse. It's from this cause that their kind grew four-footed and many-footed, god setting more feet under the more mindless ones, so that they might be drawn even more toward the earth. And the most mindless of these, those whose whole body is stretched out flat against the earth as though there were no further need of feet, these the gods bred footless, writhing along the ground. The fourth kind came to live in water, born from those who were the most thoughtless and ignorant of all — creatures whose remolders no longer thought them worthy even of pure breath, on the grounds that their soul was made impure by every kind of transgression; so instead of fine, pure air to breathe, they were thrust into water, to draw a murky, deep sort of breath there. From this came the tribe of fish, and that of shellfish, and all the other creatures that live in water, having been allotted, as the penalty for their utter ignorance, the most degraded dwellings of all. And it is according to these same principles that, both then and now, living things pass back and forth into one another, changing as they lose or gain understanding or its lack. And so let us now say that our account of the universe has, at last, reached its end. For having taken in mortal and immortal living things and been filled up in this way, this world has come to be a visible living thing containing the visible things within it, an image of the intelligible, a perceptible god, greatest and best, most beautiful and most complete — this one heaven, being of a single kind, having come into being.

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