Timaeus

17a Socrates: One, two, three—but where is our fourth, my dear Timaeus? He was of yesterday's guests; today he was to be among our hosts.

Timaeus: Some illness befell him, Socrates; he would never have left this company of his own will.

Socrates: Then the work is his no longer but yours, together with the part of standing in for the absent man.

17b Timaeus: Assuredly, and we shall leave nothing undone that lies within our power; for it would not be just, after being entertained by you yesterday with gifts so fitting, that we the rest should fail to feast you in return with all eagerness.

Socrates: Do you remember, then, the tasks I laid upon you, and what they were about?

Timaeus: Some we remember; what we do not, you will remind us, being present. Better still, if nothing in it is hard for you, go back over them again in brief from the beginning, so that they may be made to stand more firmly with us.

17c Socrates: So it shall be. The chief point of the speeches I made yesterday about the constitution was this: what kind of city it showed itself to be, and built of what kind of men, as likely in my view to become the best.

Timaeus: And to us too, Socrates, when it was spoken, it seemed wholly to our minds.

Socrates: Did we not first distinguish within it the class of farmers and all the other crafts, setting them apart from the class of those who were to do its fighting?

Timaeus: Yes.

Socrates: And when we had given each, according to its nature, what was fitting to it 17d alone—a single pursuit for each, a single craft—did we not say of the very men who had above all to fight for it, that they alone ought to be the city's guardians, whether trouble came from without, or even from within, to work mischief, gently judging those

18a who were ruled by them and were by nature friends, but turning harsh in battle upon the enemies they met?

Timaeus: Exactly so, in every respect.

Socrates: For we said, I take it, that the guardian's nature in the soul had to be at once high-spirited and philosophical in a marked degree, so that toward the two kinds he could become rightly both gentle and severe.

Timaeus: Yes.

Socrates: And what of nurture? Were they not to be reared throughout in gymnastic and music, and in all the learning that belongs to these?

18b Timaeus: Quite so.

Socrates: And of those so reared it was said, I believe, that they must reckon neither gold nor silver nor any other possession as their own, but that, like auxiliaries in hire, they should take from those they keep safe a wage for their watchkeeping—so much only as a temperate man calls moderate—spend it in common, and live, boarding together with one another, keeping their care on virtue at all times, and leaving every other trade to others.

Timaeus: That too was said in just this way.

18c Socrates: And we made mention of the women as well: that their natures, being akin to the men's, were to be fitted to the same pursuits, and that all employments were to be given to all of them in common, in war and in the whole manner of their life.

Timaeus: So it was said, and this too.

Socrates: What of the begetting of children? Is it not easy to remember because of the strangeness of what was said—that we made marriages and children common to all among all, contriving that no one should ever come to know his own child as his in private, 18d while all counted all the children kin of their own blood: brothers and sisters every one who came within the proper age, and those before and above them parents and parents' parents, and those in the line below children and children's children?

Timaeus: Yes, and as you tell it, easy to remember.

Socrates: And do we remember how, that the natures might from the first turn out as good as possible, we said the rulers, men and women alike, must contrive the joining of marriages in secret 18e by means of certain lots, so that the bad should be matched with the bad and the good with the good, each with their like, and that no hatred arise among them on this account, they being led to believe that chance was the cause of each pairing?

Timaeus: We remember.

19a Socrates: And how we said that the children of the good must be reared, and those of the bad handed over in secret to the other rank of the city; and that those who watched the children as they grew must always be bringing the worthy back up, and transferring the unworthy among their own charges to the place of those who had gone back?

Timaeus: So it was.

Socrates: Have we passed through it all, then, as yesterday when we went back over the main points—or do we still long for anything that was said, my dear Timaeus, as left out?

19b Timaeus: Not at all; that was exactly what was said, Socrates.

Socrates: You may hear, then, what comes next about the city we went through, and what state I find myself in toward it. My feeling is something like this: as if one who had seen beautiful creatures, whether wrought by a painter's art or truly alive and at rest, should come to long to see them in motion, and contending in some struggle of those things that seem to belong 19c to their bodies—just so have I fared toward the city we went through. Gladly would I hear someone unfold in speech the contests this city contends in, as she matches herself against other cities—coming to war as is fitting, and in the waging of it rendering what befits her upbringing and nurture, both in her deeds of action and in her addresses to each city in words. This much, then, Critias and Hermocrates, 19d I have determined about myself: that I could never become capable of praising adequately those men and that city. Mine is nothing to wonder at; but I have formed the same judgment about the poets of things long past and of things present—not that I dishonor the poetic tribe, but it is plain to all that the mimetic kind will imitate best and most easily whatever stock it has been reared among, while what lies outside each man's nurture 19e is hard for him to imitate well in deeds, and harder still in words. The tribe of sophists, again, I take to be very practiced in many fine speeches of other kinds; yet I fear that, wanderers as they are from city to city, never having managed a dwelling of their own anywhere, they may miss the mark alike with philosophers and with men of politics, as to all that such men, dealing with each in deed and word amid war and its battles, would do and say.

Socrates: So there has been left over the stock of your own formation,

20a sharing as it does in the nature and nurture of both. This Timaeus here, being of Locris in Italy, the best-ordered of cities, second to none there in wealth and birth, has held the greatest offices and honors of his city, and philosophy, in my judgment, he has brought to the very summit of them all. And Critias, everyone here knows, is no amateur in any of the things we speak of. As for Hermocrates' nature and nurture, 20b the many who can testify make it right to believe him equal to all this. That is why yesterday, when you asked me to go through the constitution, I consented gladly, knowing that the next speech none of you, even willing, could deliver more adequately—for you alone of men today, having set the city forth as equipped for war, could render her all that befits her—and so, when I had said what was laid upon me, I charged you in turn with what I say now. You agreed, then, after taking common counsel with one another, 20c to repay me today the guest-gifts of my speeches; and here I stand, adorned for the feast, of all men most ready to receive.

Hermocrates: And indeed, Socrates, as this Timaeus has said, we shall fall short in no eagerness, and there is no sort of excuse before us for not doing this; so much so that yesterday, as soon as we left here and came back with Critias to the guest-house where we lodge, and even before that, on the way, we were considering just these things. 20d This tale, then, he set before us, from an account handed down from of old: tell it now, Critias, to our friend here, so that he may join in judging whether it fits the charge laid on us or does not.

Critias: That we must do, if the third partner, Timaeus, agrees too.

Timaeus: He does, of course.

Critias: Listen, then, Socrates, to a tale that is very strange, yet altogether true, as the wisest of the Seven, 20e Solon, once said. He was, in fact, a kinsman and very great friend of our great-grandfather Dropides, as he himself says in many places in his poems;

Critias: and to Critias, our grandfather, he told it—as the old man in turn reported to us—that there had been great and marvelous deeds of this city long ago, blotted out by time and the destruction of men, and that one of them, the greatest of all,

21a and the memory of it, brought to mind now, would make it fitting for us to render thanks both to you and, at the same time, in this festival, to praise the goddess justly and in truth, as it were singing her in hymn.

Socrates: Well said. But what deed is this, Critias—not told, indeed, as a story, but as actually done of old by this city, as the account of Solon ran?

Critias: I will tell it: I heard the tale from a man who was not young. For Critias at that time, he said, was already near 21b ninety years of age, and I was in my tenth year; and it happened to be for us the Cureotis day of the Apaturia. The custom of the festival, kept each time, fell to us boys then as well: our fathers set contests of recitation for us. And since the poets were then many and their poems many, and the poems of Solon were new at that time, many of us boys sang them. Then one of our clansmen said—whether he truly thought so then, or meant it as a courtesy to Critias—that Solon seemed to have been 21c the wisest of men in all else, and in poetry the freest of all the poets. And the old man—I remember it very well—was delighted, and smiled gently, and said: "If only, Amynander, he had not used poetry as a side-work, but had labored at it as the others did, and had completed the tale he brought here from Egypt, and had not been forced by the factions and by the other evils he found here on his return 21d to let it lie neglected—then in my judgment neither Hesiod nor Homer nor any other poet would ever have won greater fame than he." "And what was the story, Critias?" said he. "Of the greatest deed," said he, "and the most renowned of all, and most justly so, that this city ever performed; but through time and the destruction of those who did it, the story did not live on to reach us." "Tell it from the beginning," said he, "what it was and how, and from whom Solon heard it as true." 21e

"There is in Egypt," said he, "at the place where the Nile's stream divides at the crest of the Delta, a district called the Saite; and the greatest city of this district is Sais, birthplace too of King Amasis. Its founder deity is a goddess whose name in Egyptian is Neith, and in Greek, as their own account goes, Athena; and they profess to be very great lovers of the Athenians and in a way their kin.

Critias: To these people, Solon said, he journeyed, and was received with great honor among them,

22a and questioning once, about ancient things, the priests most experienced in such matters, he found that neither he himself nor any other Greek, so to speak, knew a single thing about them that could be brought to light. And once, wishing to lead them on into talk of ancient times, he undertook to tell the most ancient things among us—about Phoroneus, said to be the first man, and Niobe, and after the flood again about Deucalion 22b and Pyrrha, how they survived, and to trace the line of their descendants; and as he told it he tried, keeping careful memory of the years, to count up the times that had passed. Then one of the priests, a man well stricken in age, said: "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children; there is no old Greek." And when he heard this and asked how he meant it—"You are all young," he said, "in your souls; for you hold in them no old belief handed down by ancient report, and no learning grown gray with time. And the cause is this: 22c there have been many destructions of mankind and there will be—the greatest by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. That story told among you, how once Phaethon, the child of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and because he could not drive it along his father's path burned up all that was on the earth, and was himself struck by the thunderbolt and perished—that is told in the shape of a myth; 22d the truth of it is a swerving of the bodies that move around the earth in the heavens, and after long intervals a destruction of things on earth by violent fire. Then those who dwell in the mountains and in high places and in the dry perish more abundantly than those who live by rivers and the sea; and as for us, the Nile is our savior in other ways too, and at such times delivers us from this distress. But when again the gods cleanse the earth with waters and drown it, the herdsmen and shepherds in the mountains are saved, while those in the cities of your land are swept into the sea by the rivers; 22e and here in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does water flow down upon the fields from above; the contrary is its nature—to rise up from below."

Critias: This is why the things preserved here are said to be the most ancient; whereas the truth is that in every place where extraordinary winter or extraordinary sun does not hold them back, the stock of men is sometimes more,

23a sometimes less, but always there is a race of men. And whatever deeds of yours or of ours, or of any other people of whom we have report, were noble or great or otherwise extraordinary, all have been written down from of old and are preserved here in our temples; whereas with you and the others, writing and all that cities need have only lately been devised each time they are founded, 23b and then, after the appointed years, like a sickness, the heavenly flood comes sweeping down upon them and leaves only the unlettered and the unmusical among you, so that once more you become as it were young, knowing nothing of what was here or with you in the ancient days. At least the genealogies just now rehearsed, Solon, about your people—the ones you ran through—differ little from children's tales: first, you remember one flood of the earth only, though many had come before it; and further, you do not know that the fairest and best race of men once lived in your land, 23c from whom you yourself and your whole city as it is today are sprung, a little remnant of seed having then survived; and it escaped you because the survivors for many generations died without leaving a word in writing. For once, Solon, before the greatest destruction by waters, the city that is now the city of Athens was the best in war and by far the most nobly ordered in everything; and its deeds are said to have been the noblest, and its constitutions the finest of all 23d under heaven, so far as we have received report. When Solon heard this, he marveled, they say, and seized on it with all eagerness, beseeching the priests to tell him in exact order everything about the citizens of long ago. Then the priest said: No one grudges you this, Solon; I will tell it for your sake and your city's sake, and above all for the goddess', who chose and reared and trained both your land and this one, yours first 23e by a thousand years, receiving your seed from Earth and Hephaestus, and this one after. And the number of years since the ordering of this land of ours is written among us in our sacred records: eight thousand. Of the citizens of the nine thousand years past, then, I will set before you in brief their laws, and the finest deed they accomplished;

Critias: the exact account of

24a everything, in its turn, we will go through later, at leisure, taking up the records themselves. Consider their laws, then, against those of this place—for you will find here now many examples of what existed among you then: first, the class of the priests, set apart from all the rest; next, that of the craftsmen, each plying his craft by itself and mixing with no other; then the class of herdsmen and of hunters and that of farmers. And you noticed too, I suppose, the warrior class among us, separate from all the other classes, charged by the law to care for nothing else but war; 24b and further, the fashion of their armor, shields and spears, with which we of the lands about Asia were the first to arm ourselves—the goddess having first shown it forth, as in those places of yours she did before all. And as for wisdom, you see how much care our law took from the very beginning, about 24c the ordering of heaven, drawing everything for the sake of health down to divination and medicine, since these are divine, into the things of men, and acquiring all the other learning that follows upon these. This whole ordering and constitution, then, the goddess first established when she settled your city before ours, choosing the place in which you were born, and seeing the temperateness of its seasons, that it would bear the wisest of men; and since the goddess was a lover of war 24d and a lover of wisdom, she chose first and settled the place that was to bear men most like herself. And so you dwelt there, using such laws and governed even better still, surpassing all mankind in virtue, as is fitting for the offspring and pupils of the gods. Many deeds of your city are written here, great and admired; but one of all surpasses in greatness and in virtue. 24e For the records tell how great a power your city once stayed, as it went in its insolence upon all Europe and all Asia together, setting forth from the Atlantic sea beyond.

Critias: For the sea there was then navigable: for there lay an island in front of the mouth which you call, as you say, the Pillars of Heracles, and the island was larger than Libya and Asia together; and from it the voyagers of that time could pass to the other islands, and from the islands

25a to the whole of the opposite continent that encircles that true sea. For all that we call a sea here, this whole region within the mouth we speak of, seems but a harbor having a narrow entrance; that other is the open deep in truth, and the land that surrounds it may most rightly be called, in the full sense, a continent. In this island of Atlantis, then, there had arisen a great and marvelous power of kings, ruling the whole island and many other islands and parts of the mainland; and besides these, of the lands within the straits 25b they ruled Libya as far as Egypt, and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This power, then, all gathered into one, undertook with a single onrush to enslave your country and ours and every place within the mouth. Then it was, Solon, that the power of your city stood manifest before all mankind in virtue and in strength; for, placed at the head of all in courage of soul and in every art of war, 25c she led the Greeks at first, then, left alone of necessity when the others fell away, came to the uttermost of peril: prevailing over the invaders she set up her trophy, kept those not yet enslaved from being enslaved, and freed with unstinting hand all the rest of us who dwell within the bounds of Heracles. But in after times there came earthquakes of unexampled violence and floods, and one terrible day and night 25d descended: the whole warrior host of your city sank at once into the earth, and the island Atlantis in like manner sank beneath the sea and vanished; which is why even now that sea is hard to sail and hard to search, a very shallow mud lying in the way—the settling the island left behind as it went down.

So much, then, Socrates, is what you have heard in brief—told from the old 25e Critias, as the tale of Solon ran. And yesterday, as you were speaking of the constitution and of the men you described, I marveled as the things I now tell came back to me, seeing how, through some providential stroke of chance and not without design, your account met with most of what Solon said.

Critias: Still I was not minded

26a to say it at once; for after the interval I did not remember it well enough. I saw then that I must first take it all up sufficiently against myself, and so speak. That is why I quickly agreed yesterday to the task you laid on me, thinking that the greatest work in all such undertakings is to have some account fit for the purposes laid down as a base, and that this would furnish us to a moderate degree. So then, 26b as this man said, I left here yesterday and at once told them to these men as I recalled them; and going away I went over almost everything in the night and recovered it. How true, then, is what is said, that children's lessons hold a marvelous memorial. What I heard yesterday I could not say I could hold in memory again; but what I have heard over a very long time, I should greatly wonder if any of it had slipped away from me. They were heard then, 26c amid much delight and play, the old man teaching me eagerly and questioning me again in my turn so often that they became fixed in me like the burnt-in colors of an unwashable painting; and indeed I told these same things to these men here at daybreak, so that they might have matter for speech along with me. Now, then—for the sake of which all this has been said—I am ready to speak, Socrates, not in summaries only, but as I heard it, point by point; and the citizens and the city you yesterday set before us as in a tale, these we will now, carrying them over 26d into truth, set here, holding that this city is that one, and saying that the citizens you meant are those true ancestors of ours whom the priest told of. They will fit in every way, and we shall not stray from the mark in saying they were the men of that time. And all of us together, taking the task in common, will try to render, to the best of our power, what you appointed. So it must now be considered, Socrates, whether this account of ours 26e is to your mind, or some other must be sought in its place.

Socrates: And what better could we take in its place, Critias, when it would befit the moment best of all, both through the sacrifice now at hand to the goddess, being so near of kin to her, and because it is of the greatest moment that the tale be not a fable but a true account? For how, and from whom else, should we discover others if we let these go? It cannot be; so it is for you to speak with good fortune attending, and for me, in place of yesterday's speeches, now

27a keeping silence, to listen in return.

Critias: Look, then, at the arrangement of the feast of strangers we have devised for you, Socrates. It seemed to us that Timaeus, being the best astronomer among us and having most knowledge of the nature of the whole, should speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending with the nature of man; 27b and that I should follow him, having received from him, in his speech, men as they came to be, and from you, their education to a marked degree in some of them—and that, according to the word and law of Solon, I should introduce them, setting us up as their judges, and make them citizens of this city, as though they were the Athenians of that day whom the report of the sacred writings showed to be hidden from view; and that for the rest we should carry on the discourse as of citizens and Athenians indeed.

Socrates: It seems I am to be repaid for my feast of speeches most perfectly and most splendidly. So the task after this falls to you, Timaeus, as it appears: you are to speak, having invoked the gods according to law.

27c Timaeus: Yet all who share even to a small degree in soundness of mind, Socrates, call upon a god always, at the outset of every undertaking, small or great; and we, who are about to make speeches about the whole—how it came to be, or whether it is unbegotten—must, unless we are to miss the mark altogether, call on gods and goddesses and pray that everything we say be said first to their mind, and in consequence 27d to ours. So much, then, for our invoking of the gods; our own must follow, in whatever way you would most easily learn, and I most clearly set forth what I have in mind about the matters before us.

Timaeus: So then, in my judgment, we must first make this division: what is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always

28a coming to be and never is. The one is grasped by thought, with the aid of reason, being always in the same state; the other is a thing of opinion, with the aid of unreasoning sense, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being. And everything that comes to be must come to be by the agency of some cause; for nothing can find a coming-to-be apart from a cause. Now whenever the craftsman looks, always, toward that which holds to the same state, and uses some such thing as his model, working out the form and the power of his work from it, everything must of necessity 28b turn out beautiful in this way; but whenever he looks toward what has come to be, using a begotten model, it is not beautiful. And the whole heaven—or cosmos, or whatever other name would be most welcome, let that be its name for us—about this we must first inquire, as one must at the outset inquire of anything: was it always, having no beginning of coming-to-be, or did it come to be, setting out from some beginning? It came to be: for it is visible and tangible and has body; and all such things are sensible, 28c and things sensible are grasped by opinion together with sensation, and they showed themselves to be things that come to be and are begotten. And what has come to be, we say, must of necessity have come to be by the agency of some cause.

Timaeus: To discover the maker and father of this whole is a work; and having discovered him, to declare him to all men is impossible. And so we must go back and inquire about him this: after which of the models did he who fashioned it

29a work it out—after the thing that holds to the same state and is ever such as it was, or after that which has come to be? If this cosmos is beautiful and its craftsman good, then plainly he looked to the everlasting; but if—and it is not lawful even to say it—to what has come to be. But it is plain to all that he looked to the everlasting: for the cosmos is the most beautiful of things that have come to be, and he the best of causes. And so, having been begotten with an eye to that which is grasped by reason and thought and holds to the same state, 29b all this being so, the cosmos must of necessity be an image of something. Now in everything it is greatest to begin at the natural beginning. Here, then, we must distinguish, concerning the image and its model, that the accounts are akin to the very things of which they are the interpreters: 29c the accounts of what is lasting and firm and discernible by thought are lasting and unshifting—and, so far as it is possible and it belongs to accounts to be unrefuted and unconquered, nothing must be lacking in them—while the accounts of what was modeled on that other, being an image, are such as befit likelihood: 29d as being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, Socrates, on many subjects and about many things—about the gods and the birth of the whole—we are unable to give accounts that in every way agree with themselves and are exact, you must not be surprised; rather we must be content if we fall short of none in what is likely, remembering that I who speak, and you who judge, have a human nature; so that we should accept the likely tale about these things and seek nothing further beyond it.

Socrates: Most excellently, Timaeus, and we must accept it altogether as you direct. Your prelude we have received with wonder; now bring to its end for us the law that comes next.

Timaeus: Let us say, then, for what cause the composer composed becoming and this whole. 29e He was good; and in the good, envy about anything never arises. Being thus without envy, he wished all things to become as far as possible like himself.

Timaeus: This, then, one would most rightly receive as the most sovereign principle of becoming and of the cosmos,

30a accepting it from men of wisdom. For the god, wishing that all things be good and, so far as was possible, nothing base, took over all that was visible—not in quiet, but moving in discord and disorder—and brought it from disorder into order, holding the latter in every way better than the former. For it was not lawful then, nor is it now, for the best to do anything but the most beautiful. 30b Taking thought, then, he found that, of the things visible by nature, nothing without intelligence would ever be, as a whole, more beautiful than the work of one that has intelligence; and that intelligence cannot come to be present in anything apart from soul. For this reason, setting intelligence in soul and soul in body, he wove the whole together, that his work might be the most beautiful and best by nature. So then, according to the likely account, we must say that this cosmos came to be a living creature endowed with soul and mind, through the providence 30c of the god.

This being so, we must say next, in its turn, after what living thing its composer composed it in likeness. Let us not think any of the partial kinds worthy of the comparison—for nothing incomplete could ever turn out beautiful, being what it is like—but let us lay it down that it is most like that of which the other living things are parts, each in itself and by kind. For the intelligible living creature embraces within itself all intelligible things, just as this 30d cosmos here embraces us and all the other visible creatures that have been composed.

Timaeus: For the god, wishing to make it most like the most beautiful of intelligible things and in all ways most complete, composed one visible living creature, holding within itself all

31a the living things akin to it by nature. Did we speak rightly, then, in calling the heaven one, or would it have been more correct to speak of many, and without end? One—if, that is, it was made in accordance with its model. For that which embraces all intelligible living things could never be, with a second beside it; for then there would have to be another living creature embracing those two, of which they would be parts, and no longer would those two embrace—rather, this here would more rightly be said to be made like that embracing one. 31b So that this one might be like the all-complete living creature in its singleness, for these reasons he who made worlds made neither two nor an endless number, but this one heaven, alone begotten, having come to be, is and ever shall be.

That which comes to be must be body-like, visible, and tangible; yet nothing apart from fire would ever become visible, nor anything tangible without some solidity, nor anything solid without earth. So the god, at the beginning of the whole, set about composing its body out of fire and earth. But two things alone cannot be well joined without a third; 31c for there must be some bond in the middle drawing the two together. And the most beautiful of bonds is that which makes of itself and the things bound as much one as possible; and proportion is by nature the thing that best accomplishes this.

Timaeus: For whenever, of three numbers or masses

32a or powers, whatever they may be, the middle is such that, as the first is to the middle, so is the middle to the last, and again, as the last is to the middle, so the middle to the first—then, the middle becoming first and last, and the last and the first both becoming middle, all will of necessity come to be the same; and when they have become the same, all will be one. Now if the body of the whole had had to come to be a plane surface with no depth, one mean would have been enough 32b to bind its companions to itself and itself to them; but as it is, the world was to be solid in form, and solids are never joined by one mean but always by two. So the god, setting water and air between fire and earth, and working them, so far as was possible, into one ratio—as fire is to air, so air to water, and as air is to water, so water to earth—bound them together and thus composed a heaven visible and tangible. 32c And for these reasons, and from such elements, and in this number of four, the body of the cosmos was begotten, coming into accord through proportion; and from these it won friendship, so that, come together into one with itself, it could be dissolved by no other than him who bound it.

And of the four, the composition of the cosmos took each one entire. For out of all fire and water and air and earth its composer composed it, leaving out no part or power of any, having this in mind, 32d first: that the whole should be, as far as might be, a living creature complete, made of complete

33a parts.

Timaeus: And one thing more: no part of these elements was left over, out of which anything else of the kind could come to be; and further, he meant it to be ageless and free of sickness, seeing how things that assail a body from without—hot and cold and all that have strong powers—fall upon it out of season, break it up, and bring disease and age, and so make it waste away. For this cause and on this reckoning he fashioned it one whole of wholes, complete out of all, 33b ageless and free of sickness. And he gave it the shape that befitted it, the shape akin to it: for the living creature meant to embrace within itself all living things, the fitting shape would be that which embraces within itself all shapes there are; and so he turned it round, spherical, from its center keeping an equal distance everywhere to its edges, a circle, the most complete of shapes and most like itself of all shapes—judging the like ten thousand times more beautiful than the unlike. And he made its outer face everywhere smooth, all around, for many reasons. 33c It had no need of eyes, for nothing visible was left outside it; none of hearing, for there was nothing to hear; and no surrounding air stood about it, needing breath; nor had it need of any organ to receive food into itself and send away again what had been spent and drained. For nothing went out of it, nor did anything come into it from anywhere—there was nowhere such a place—since it provided for itself its own food as its own decay, and all within it it felt and did by its own power, a thing made by art; 33d for its maker judged it better to be self-sufficient than in want of others. And hands, which had no use for taking hold or for defense against another, he thought it needless to attach, and feet as well, and in general the whole apparatus that belongs to a base

34a for going on foot.

Timaeus: For motion he allotted it the one proper to its body—of the seven, the motion that has most to do with mind and understanding. And so, turning it round into one and the same place, within itself, he made it move in a circle, revolving; the other six motions he took away, and made it free of their wanderings. And for the sake of this circuit, having no need of feet, he brought it to birth without legs and without feet.

This one, then—the reasoning of the god being ever about the god who was one day to be, and being reckoned out—34b he made its body smooth and even, everywhere from the center equal, whole and complete, of complete bodies; and setting soul in its middle, he stretched it through the whole and further wrapped the body about it from outside; and he made the heaven a single circle, turning in a circle, alone and solitary, yet by its virtue able to keep itself company, needing no other, and knowing itself and, in due measure, its friend. For all these reasons he brought it to birth as a blessed god.

And the soul—not as we now attempt to say, that the god made it younger 34c than the body—for he would not have allowed the elder to be ruled by the younger, when he joined them—but it is somehow in our fashion, partaking greatly of the haphazard, that we speak of things this way; whereas he made the soul older in birth and in virtue, prior to the body, to be its mistress and to rule what was to be ruled.

35a was put together from these things and after this fashion.

Timaeus: From the being that is indivisible and always keeps to the same, and from the being that becomes divisible around bodies, he blended a third form of being midway between, drawn from both—from the nature of the same and from the nature of the other—and he composed it, on the same terms, between the part of them that is indivisible and the part divisible around bodies. And taking the three, he blended them all into a single form, forcing by compulsion the nature of the other, which was hard to mingle, into concord with the same. 35b And when he had mingled them with being, and made one out of three, he divided this whole again into as many portions as were fitting, each one mingled of the same, of the other, and of being. And he began to divide it thus: first he took one portion from the whole; then he took a second, double that one; then a third, half again the second and triple the first; a fourth, double the second; a fifth, triple the 35c third; a sixth, eightfold the first; and a seventh, twenty-sevenfold the first;

Timaeus: After this he set about filling in

36a the double and the triple intervals, cutting off yet further portions from what remained and setting them in between, so that within each interval there were two means: one exceeding and exceeded by the same fraction of the extremes, the other exceeding by an equal number and exceeded by an equal number. And when intervals of half again, of a third again, and of an eighth again had arisen out of these bonds within the earlier intervals, 36b he went on to fill every third-again interval with the eighth-again kind, leaving over a portion of each—the portion left over of each being an interval whose terms stood, number against number, as 256 to 243. And by now the mingled stuff from which he had been cutting these portions was entirely used up. Then he split this whole fabric down its length in two, brought the halves together middle to middle, like a man's two hands clasped, and bent them 36c into a single circle, joining them to themselves and to one another at the point directly opposite the clasp, and he carried them around in the motion that keeps them always in the same way within the same place; and he made one of them the outer circle and the other the inner. The outer motion he decreed to be that of the nature of the same, the inner that of the other. The circle of the same he caused to move round to the right along its side, the circle of the other to the left along the diagonal, and he gave the mastery to the 36d revolution of the same and like: this one he left single and undivided, but the inner one he split six times, into seven unequal circles, each keeping the ratio of the double and of the triple—three of each sort—and he appointed the circles to go in opposite directions to one another; in speed, three went at one pace, and the other four at paces unequal both to one another and to the three, yet borne along in due measure.

And when the whole fabric of the soul had come to be according to the mind of its maker, he then went on to weave all the bodily frame within 36e it, and bringing center to center he fitted them together; and the soul, woven through from the center out to the farthest reach of heaven, wrapping the heaven round about on the outside, and turning within herself, began a divine beginning of unceasing and intelligent life for all time to come.

Timaeus: And so the body of the heaven came to be visible; the soul herself is invisible, partaking of reasoning and

37a harmony, the best of things begotten, born of the best of things that forever are and are intelligible. And because she was compounded of the nature of the same, of the other, and of being—these three portions blended together, then divided in due proportion and bound—and because she circles round upon herself, whenever she touches anything whose being is scattered abroad, or anything that is indivisible, she, moved throughout herself, tells what any given thing is the same as and what it is 37b other than, and in what relation, where, how, and when it happens, both for the things that come to be, each toward each in being and in being affected, and for the things that keep forever to the same state. And reason, true reason, arising within her as she moves and is carried along by herself, without voice or sound, concerning what is other and concerning what is the same—when it arises concerning the things of sense, and the circle of the other, going straight, announces it through the whole soul, then opinions and convictions arise, firm and true; 37c but when it arises concerning the rational, and the circle of the same, running smooth and true, reveals it, then intelligence and knowledge are of necessity the result. And if anyone says that that in which these two arise is anything other than soul, he will say anything rather than the truth.

And when the father who had begotten it saw it move and live, a crafted image of the everlasting gods come to birth, he rejoiced, and in his delight he thought to make it still more like its model. 37d And since that model is an everlasting living thing, he set out to make this all, too, such a thing, so far as might be. Now the nature of that living thing is eternal, and to attach this fully to it was not possible; so he thought to make a moving image of eternity: and, as he ordered the heaven, he made of eternity that abides in oneness an eternal image moving according to number—and this image we have named time. 37e For days and nights and months and years were not before the heaven came to be; but he contrived the birth of these along with it, as it was being framed. And all of these are parts of time, and "was" and "will be" are forms of time that have come to be; and we unthinkingly carry them along and apply them, and so miss the mark, when we speak of the everlasting being.

Timaeus: For we say that it was and is and shall be, though only "is" befits it, according to the

38a true account, and "was" and "will be" should be said of the becoming that moves along in time—for these two are motions; but what keeps forever to the same state cannot rightly become older or younger with time, nor ever came to be, nor has now come to be, nor will hereafter be; and in general nothing of what becoming attaches to the things carried in the realm of the senses belongs to it—rather these are forms time has brought to birth, as time imitates eternity and turns in its circle by number. And there is this further point besides: 38b to say that what has become has become, and what is becoming is becoming, and what will come to be will come to be, and that what is not is not—of none of these do we speak with exactness. But perhaps this is not the moment to pursue such niceties now.

Time, then, came to be together with the heaven, so that, born together, they might, if ever a dissolution should come upon them, be dissolved together; and it was made on the pattern of the everlasting nature, that it might be as like 38c to that pattern as might be. For the model is a being that lasts through all eternity, while the heaven has been, is, and shall be, through all time. Such being the god's purpose and thought for the birth of time—that time might be born—the sun and the moon and five other stars, the ones called wanderers, came to be, to mark off and to guard the numbers of time. And when the god had made a body for each of them, he set them in the circuits in which the revolution of the other was traveling, seven bodies in seven 38d circuits: the moon in the circle first about the earth, the sun in the second above the earth, and the morning star and the one called sacred to Hermes in the circle that runs with the sun in equal speed, though they hold within it a power contrary to his—which is why the sun, the star of Hermes, and the morning star overtake and are overtaken by one another in their turn. As for the others, and the reasons for which he set them where he did, if one were to go through them all, the account, 38e being only incidental, would give a greater labor than the purpose for which it is spoken. Perhaps these things, taken at leisure later, would deserve a telling worthy of them.

Timaeus: And when each of the beings that had a part in bringing time to completion had come to the motion proper to it, and their bodies, bound with living bonds, had been born as living creatures, and had learned the task commanded them, in the motion of the other

39a which runs aslant, passing beneath the motion of the same, which both governs it and leads it, they went round now in a greater circle and now in a lesser—those in the lesser circle more swiftly, those in the greater more slowly. And by the motion of the same, those that circled most quickly appeared to be overtaken by the slower ones and to overtake them in their turn; for the motion of the same twisted all their circles into spirals, because each went forward at once in two 39b opposite directions: so the one that left its own place most slowly seemed to keep nearest to it, though it was in truth the swiftest. And that there might be a clear measure of their slowness and speed in relation to one another, and that they might run their courses, eight in all, the god kindled a light in the second circuit from the earth—the one we now call the sun—so that it might shine through the whole heaven as far as might be, and that living things might share in number, so far as was fitting for each, learning it from the revolution of the same and 39c like. Night and day, then, came to be thus and for these reasons—the period of the one and wisest circuit; and the month, whenever the moon, having run round her own circle, overtakes the sun; and the year, whenever the sun runs round his own circle. But the periods of the others, human beings have not thought about—few, indeed, of the many have—and they neither name them nor measure them one against another by numbers; so that, 39d so to speak, they do not know that these wanderings of theirs are time—wanderings that wear away a measureless plenty and are marvelously adorned. And yet it is none the less possible to perceive that the perfect number of time completes the perfect year at that moment when the relative speeds of all the eight circuits, having run their courses together, come round once more to their head, measured by the circle of the same that goes uniformly. And for reasons such as these, then, were begotten those stars that make their journey through the heaven and have their turnings, so that this world 39e might be as like as possible to the perfect and intelligible living thing, in its imitation of the everlasting nature.

By that point he had finished everything else, down to the birth of time, into the likeness of the model after which he shaped it; but it still fell short in this one way: it did not yet contain all the living things born within itself. This, then, this remaining lack, he set out to remedy, stamping the world after the nature of the model. And just as intelligence beholds the ideas present in the true living thing—of what kinds they are, and how many—of just such kinds and just so many he resolved that this world too must hold.

Timaeus: Now there are four kinds: one, the heavenly race of gods; a second,

40a the winged kind that haunts the air; a third, the kind that dwells in water; and the fourth, the kind that goes on foot and lives on dry land. The divine kind he fashioned for the most part out of fire, that it might be as radiant as possible and most beautiful to behold; and, likening it to the whole, he gave it a rounded shape, and set it in the intelligence of the supreme, to follow after it, distributing it round about in a circle over the whole heaven, to be a true adornment wrought upon it throughout. To each he allotted two motions: one fixed in the same place, turning always about the same things and 40b thinking the same thoughts about the same things within itself; and one that goes forward, governed by the revolution of the same and like; but the five other motions he left still and standing, that each god might become as excellent as possible. And for this cause the fixed stars, divine and everlasting living things, forever turning in the same place about the same things, always abide where they stand; while those that turn and hold the wandering course such as was described before were born under those other conditions. And Earth, our nurse, winding about 40c the axis stretched from pole to pole through all, he contrived as guardian and maker of night and day, the first and eldest of the gods born within the heaven. But the dances of these same gods, and their encounters with one another, and the circuits' turnings back round upon themselves and their advances; at their conjunctions which gods come into one another and how many stand in opposition; which pass before which, and at what times each of them is hidden from us and again comes to light—fears and signs they send to those who cannot reckon, of the things 40d that will come to be after these—to tell of all this without seeing these very workings of the images would be a labor spent in vain. But let what has been said of these things suffice, and of the visible and begotten gods; let the account find here its natural end.

But to tell of the other daimons and to know their birth is greater than our powers; we must believe those who spoke of them before, children of gods, as they said, and plainly knowing their own forebears. And so, though they speak without proofs that are likely or necessary, it is impossible not to believe the children 40e of gods, who claim to report what is their own; following the law, we must believe them.

Timaeus: Let the birth of these gods stand with us, then, as those men told it, and be told so. Of Earth and Heaven were born Oceanus and Tethys; and of these, Phorcys and Cronos and Rhea, and all who came

41a after them; and of Cronos and Rhea, Zeus and Hera, and all their brothers and sisters whom we know, and yet other children of these. And when all the gods had received their birth—those who patrol the heavens openly, and those who show themselves only as far as they wish—he who begat this all spoke to them as follows:

"Gods of gods, whose maker and father I am of the works that came to be through me—indissoluble, unless I am willing. For everything bound 41b may be loosed; yet only evil would wish to loosen what has been harmoniously joined and stands in good condition. And so, though you have come to be, you are not immortal, nor wholly indissoluble—yet you shall never be loosed, nor shall death's lot come upon you: for you have won a bond greater than those with which you were bound when you came to be, and more sovereign still—my will. Now learn what I declare to you. Three races of mortals remain unbegotten; and unless these are begotten, the heaven will be incomplete, for it will not have within 41c itself all the kinds of living things, as it must if it is to be complete enough. But let them be begotten through me and share in life, and they will be made equal to the gods. Turn therefore, as is natural for you, to the fashioning of living things, imitating my power in your own begetting. And inasmuch as a part of them should rightly bear the same name as the immortals—the part called divine, and ruling within those who are willing ever to follow justice and to follow you—that part, when I have sown it and given it its beginning, 41d I will hand over to you. The rest is yours: weaving the mortal onto the immortal, fashion living creatures and beget them; give them food, make them grow, and receive them back again as they wane."

He spoke, and turned again to the former mixing bowl, the one in which he had poured and blended the soul of the whole; into it he decanted what remained of the former ingredients, mixing them in a way much the same, though they were no longer in the same way unadulterated, but of second and third degree. And when he had compounded the whole, he divided off souls equal in number to the stars, 41e and assigned each soul to each star; then, setting them as into a chariot, he showed them the nature of the all and declared to them the laws of destiny: that the first birth would be one and the same for all, ordained so that none might be brought low by him; and that, sown each into the instrument of time proper to each, it was needful for them

42a to grow into the most god-fearing of living creatures; and since human nature is twofold, the better kind was to be that which would hereafter be called man.

Timaeus: And when they were implanted of necessity in bodies, and things kept coming into their bodies and going out of them, first of all there would be born in every one a sensation, one and the same for all, innate, forced upon them by violent affections; second, love, mingled of pleasure and pain; and besides these, fear and spirit, and all 42b that attend upon them, and all that grow and stand opposed to them by nature. If they mastered these, they would live in justice; mastered by them, in injustice. And whoever lived well through his appointed time would journey back to the dwelling place of his kindred star and have a blessed life lived in its companionship; but whoever failed of this would pass, in the 42c second birth, into the nature of a woman. And if the wickedness in him did not cease even then, he would keep changing, according to the likeness of the character his way of living had bred in him, into one bestial nature after another of that kind, and he would not be done with changing and his toils until he had drawn into the revolution of the same and like within himself that great mob of things grown up later in him from fire and water and air 42d and earth, turbulent and irrational, and had mastered them by reason, coming back to the form of the first and best condition. And when he had laid down all these laws for them, that he might be blameless of whatever wickedness should afterward be in each, he sowed some into the earth, some into the moon, and some into the other instruments of time; and after the sowing he handed over to the younger gods the work of molding mortal bodies, and of fashioning what was left over of human soul, as much as still had 42e to be added, and all that follows from it—and he charged them to rule over it, and to steer the mortal creature as beautifully and as well as their power allowed, save that it must not itself become the cause of evils to itself.

And he, having ordered all these things, abode in his own accustomed character.

Timaeus: And while he abode, his children took note of his ordinance and obeyed it; and receiving the immortal principle of a mortal creature, in imitation of their own maker, they borrowed from the cosmos fire and earth and water and air,

43a portions that were to be paid back again; and they fused what they received into one, not with the indissoluble bonds by which they themselves were held, but with pegs so fine and close for their smallness as to be unseen, making out of all one body for each creature; and into this body, such as it was—open to inflow and outflow—they embedded the circuits of the immortal soul. Bound as they were within a great river, the circuits neither mastered nor were mastered, but were borne along and bore things along by force, so that the 43b whole creature moved indeed, but moved at random, advancing as chance took it and without reason, holding all six motions: forward and backward, again to right and to left, and up and down—wandering in all six directions it went on its way. For the wave that engulfed it and flowed away again, the wave that gave it its food, was great; and the impacts that beset each one stirred up still greater tumult, whenever 43c a body fell in with some alien fire striking from outside, or with the hard crust of earth, or with the slippery gliding of wet water, or was caught in the tossing of winds driven through the air; and under all these the motions, carried through the body, fell upon the soul—motions which for this reason were afterward named, and are called even now, sensations, all of them together. And at that time, then, producing the greatest and mightiest motion, they, together with the stream that flowed on without end, 43d shook and violently convulsed the circuits of the soul: against the circle of the same, flowing clean counter to it, they blocked it wholly, and stopped both its ruling and its going; and the circle of the other they shook into turmoil, so that the three distances of the double and of the triple in each, and the means and bonds of the half-again, the third-again, and the eighth-again intervals, being dissoluble in no way save by him who bound them, were twisted into every kind of 43e turning, and brought every kind of bending and ruin upon the circles, so far as was possible, so that, barely holding to one another, they were borne along indeed, but borne without reason—now in opposition, now aslant, now turned belly up—as when a man lies face up, his head propped on the ground and his feet thrown up against some support: in that state, both to the sufferer and to those who look on, right seems left and left right, each to each.

Timaeus: And when the circuits suffered this and other such things violently,

44a whenever they chanced upon something outside belonging to the kind of the same or to the kind of the other, then, calling it the same or the other of something, quite contrary to the truth, they became false and foolish, with no circuit in them then ruling or leading; and when certain sensations, arriving from outside and falling in, dragged after them the whole vessel of the soul, then those circuits, themselves mastered, seemed to be mastering. And because of all these affections the soul becomes, as things now are, 44b at first without intelligence, whenever it is bound into a mortal body. But when the stream of growth and nourishment runs less, and the circuits, recovering their calm, go upon their own courses and are restored more and more as time advances, then the revolutions, guided toward the shape natural to each of the circles, and calling the other and the same by their right names, make the one who has them become intelligent. If, then, a right nurture of learning also comes to his aid, 44c he becomes whole and wholly sound, having fled the greatest of diseases; but if he neglects it, he makes his way through life lame, and comes again to Hades unfinished and unintelligent. All this, then, comes to pass later; but the things now set before us must be gone through with more exactness, and those before them—the birth of the body part by part, and of the soul, and by what causes and providences of the gods each came to be—must be traveled through by those holding 44d to what is most likely, pursuing these things in this same way.

The divine circuits being two, and the shape of the all a sphere, the gods, imitating that round shape, bound them into a spherical body—the thing we now name the head, divinest of all that is in us and master of all the rest; and the gods, gathering all the body together, handed it over to be the head's servant, perceiving that it would share in all the motions there were to be. And that it might not, rolling along the ground with its heights and depths of every kind, be at a 44e loss now to climb over, now to come down from, they gave it this body as a chariot, and with it a ready means of passage;

Timaeus: And this is why the body came to have length, and why it grew four limbs, stretching out and bending, the god contriving a way of travel; laying hold on these and pushing off against them, it became possible for it to journey through all places,

45a carrying the dwelling of the divinest and holiest thing in us high above us. Legs and arms, then, grew attached to all creatures for this reason; and because the gods judged the front more precious and more fit to lead than the back, it was in that direction they granted us the greater part of our going. Man's front, too, had to be set apart and unlike the rest of his body. And so first, about the hollow of the head, setting the face forward there, they embedded instruments 45b for all the soul's foresight, and ordained that this should be the ruling part, as being by nature in front. And first among the instruments they forged together the light-bearing eyes, binding into them a cause of this kind: of fire, so much of it as does not burn but gives a mild light, kindred to each day, they contrived a body to come to be. For they made the fire within us, being brother to that fire, stream pure through the eyes, smooth and close through the whole, and packed densest 45c in the middle of the eyes, so that all the coarser part was held back within, and only such fire as this strained through, pure. And whenever the light of day is about the stream of sight, then it falls forth, like to like, and, coming together into one compact body, kindred, it settles along the straightness of the eyes, wherever the thing falling from within braces against what has chanced from without. And everything, being made of like affections through likeness, whenever it touches 45d this, or anything else touched by it, hands on the motions of these things through the whole body clear to the soul, and so gives rise to that sensation by which, as we say, we see. But when the kindred fire has gone away into night, the stream is cut off; for going out toward the unlike, it is altered and quenched, being no longer akin to the neighboring air, since that air has no fire. And so it ceases to see, and becomes a bringer of sleep instead; for the safeguard the gods contrived for sight, the nature of the 45e eyelids—when these close together, it shuts in the power of the fire within; and this power spreads and smooths the motions within, and when they are smoothed, quiet comes; and when quiet has grown great, a sleep falls lightly touched with dreams,

Timaeus: And when certain of the greater motions were left behind, of whatever sort, and in whatever places they chanced to remain,

46a such and so many images presented themselves, likenesses of the motions formed within, made into remembrances for those who had waked. And about the making of images in mirrors, and in all that is manifest and smooth, there is nothing left hard to make out. For out of the partnership with one another of the fire within and the fire without, and of the smoothness, which each moment takes one form and is refashioned in many ways, 46b all such things of necessity come to view, the fire about the face growing compact, upon the smooth and bright, with the fire about the sight. And so the left appears as right, because the contact comes about with opposite parts of the sight upon opposite parts, contrary to the established habit of impact; while right appears as right and left as left, the reverse of before, when the light that is joining shifts to what it joins with—46c and this happens when the smoothness of the mirror, taking on heights on this side and on that, pushes the right part of the sight toward the left and each toward the other. And when the face is turned along its length, this same thing makes everything appear upside down, thrusting the lower part of the beam toward the upper, and the upper in turn toward the lower.

All these, then, are co-causes which the god uses as serving instruments, working out, so far as is possible, the form of the 46d best; though most people suppose them not co-causes but causes of all things—cooling, heating, compacting, melting, and producing all such effects—things that in no way can have reason or intelligence. For of the things that are, to soul alone—so it must be said—does it belong to win intelligence; and soul is invisible, while fire and water and earth and air have all come to be visible bodies. And the lover of intelligence and knowledge must of necessity pursue as first 46e the causes of the intelligent nature, and as second those that come to be when things moved by others move others by necessity. And so must we do likewise: both kinds of causes must be spoken of, and apart from one another—the kinds that with intelligence fashion what is beautiful and good, and those that, bereft of intelligence, at every turn produce what is random and without order.

Timaeus: Let it stand as said, then, that the eyes are co-causes of the power sight has come to hold; but the greatest of their works for our benefit, that for which the god bestowed

47a them on us—that must next be told. Sight, then, has become, by my account, the cause of the greatest benefit to us: for none of the accounts now spoken about the whole would ever have been uttered, had we never seen the stars, nor the sun, nor the heaven. But as it is, day and night having been seen, and the months and the circuits of the years, and the equinoxes and the solstices, these have brought forth number, and given us the notion of time, and the inquiry into the nature of the whole; 47b and from these we have won the harvest of philosophy—and no greater good has come, or will ever come, to the mortal race as a gift from the gods. This, then, I say, is the greatest good the eyes give us; and for the lesser goods, why should any man sing their praises?—the goods whose loss the man who is no philosopher would bewail in vain laments. But let this stand as our account of the cause here: the god devised and gave us sight, that we might behold the circuits of intelligence in the heaven and use them for the revolutions of our own thought within us, which are akin 47c to those—ours troubled, though theirs stand untroubled—and that, having learned them and come to share in the natural rightness of reckonings, we might imitate the god's utterly unwandering circuits and set our own wanderings within us in order. And of voice and hearing there is again the same account: they were given by the gods for the same ends and the same reasons. For speech is ordained for this purpose above all, contributing the greatest share toward it; and as much again of music 47d as is given to serve hearing by way of the voice was given for the sake of harmony. And harmony, whose motions are akin to the circuits of the soul within us, was given by the Muses as an ally to the one who uses the Muses with intelligence—not for irrational pleasure, as it now seems to be, but to serve as an ally in setting to order and bringing into concord with itself the circuit of the soul that has come to be discordant in us. And rhythm again, as a helper to the same ends, was given by the same powers, because of the unmeasured condition and want of 47e grace that comes to be in most of us.

The things said so far, then—except for a few—have shown what was wrought through intelligence; and what comes to be through necessity must also be brought into the account.

Timaeus: For mingled,

48a then, was the birth of this world, begotten of necessity joined with the ordering of intelligence. And intelligence ruling over necessity—persuading her to lead most of the things that come to be toward what is best—in this way, and by necessity thus conquered under wise persuasion, this all was put together at the beginning. If, then, anyone is to tell how it truly came to be on these terms, he must mix in also the kind of the wandering cause, and how it is its nature to carry things along. So here again we must 48b turn back, and, taking up another beginning suited to these things, begin once more from the start, as we did before with the things of that time, so now with these. We must look, then, upon the nature of fire and water and air and earth as it was before the birth of the heaven, and its affections before that time; for no one has yet shown their birth, but we speak as if we knew what fire is and what each of the others is, laying them down as beginnings, the elements, of the whole—a likeness that not even one who has but a little understanding would rightly draw, not even so far as the forms 48c within a syllable. Let it stand thus with us now, then: of the first principle of all things—whether one calls it one or many, or in whatever way one thinks of them—the present account must not speak; not for any other reason, but because it is hard, in the manner of the present account, to set forth what seems true to me. So do not think I ought to speak of it; nor could I persuade myself that I was setting my hand rightly 48d to so great a task. But keeping to what was said at the outset—the power of likely accounts—I shall try to speak of each thing and of all no less likely than before, and indeed more likely, from the beginning. And now, at the start of what is to be said, calling upon the god to be our savior and keep us 48e true to the doctrine of the likely through an account strange and out of the common way, let us once more begin to speak.

And let the beginning again about the whole be divided more greatly than the one before: then we distinguished two kinds; now a third, another kind, must be made plain to us.

Timaeus: Those two were enough for what was said before: one, laid down as the form of the model, intelligible and ever the same; and the copy

49a of the model, a second, subject to becoming and visible. A third kind we did not then distinguish, thinking the two would be enough; but now the account, it seems, compels us to attempt to set forth with words a kind that is hard and dim. What, then, having what power and what nature, must we take it to be? Chiefly this: that it is the receptacle of all becoming, as it were its nurse. That much is true as said; but it must be said more clearly—a hard thing 49b, and hard too for this reason, that questions about fire and the things that follow fire must first be raised for its sake. For it is hard to say of each of these what it really is—that this is water rather than fire, or this one rather than any other of them, or all together rather than each in turn—in such a way as to rest upon some trusty and firm account. How, then, and where, and what may we say about them, having raised the questions in the right way? First, then: what we now call water, when it condenses—as we suppose—we see becoming 49c stone and earth; and when it melts and disperses, this same becomes wind and air; and air, when it is heated along, becomes fire; and fire, on the other hand, when it is drawn together and quenched, passing back again into the form of air, becomes air; and air, coming together and thickening, becomes cloud and mist; and from these, as they are packed together yet more, flowing water; and from water, earth and stones again—and so, as it appears, becoming is handed on in a circle from one to the other. In this way, then, since 49d none of them ever presents itself as the same, who would not be ashamed of himself, insisting with fixed assurance that any one of them is this, and this something or other, and nothing else? There is none such; but by far the safest course, in laying these down, is to speak thus: whatever we always behold becoming other at other times—as fire—we should address, not this, but in each case the such, as fire; nor this as water, but the such, always; nor any other thing whatever as having some fixedness, of all 49e that we point to and make known by using the words "this" and "that," supposing we are saying something; for it runs away, not enduring the words "this" and "that," nor "here," nor any phrase that points them out as fixed in being. But of these one should not speak, one by one; rather one should call the such—the ever-turning, like to each thing and to all things—by such names: and so fire, the such that runs through all; and the all, whatever it be that has becoming.

Timaeus: And that in which each of them, ever coming to be, makes its appearance, and from which it again passes away,

50a only that thing, in turn, is to be addressed by way of the names 'this' and 'that', while whatever qualified thing it may chance to be—the hot, the white, any of the opposites, and everything made from these—none of these is ever to be used as its name. But here again we must press for still greater clarity about it. If someone were to mold every manner of shape out of gold and, without recasting it, kept remaking each into every other, and someone pointed to one of them and asked 50b what in truth it was, the safest answer by far, with truth in view, would be to say that it is gold—and never to speak of the triangle, or whatever other shapes had been forming, as things that are, since they shift even while the gold is being posed; and if anyone were willing to accept even such a statement with assurance, we should be content with that. The same account holds for the nature that receives all bodies: it must always be called by the same name, for it never altogether departs from its own power—it always receives all things, and 50c it has never in any way taken on any form resembling any of the things that enter it. For it is laid beneath all nature like a block ready for the stamp, moved and reshaped by the things that enter it, and through them it appears different at different times. And the things that enter and leave are always copies of the things that are, stamped from them in a manner hard to express and marvelous—a manner to which we will return later. For the present, then, we must conceive three kinds: 50d that which comes to be, that in which it comes to be, and that from which the coming thing, being copied, grows. And it is right to liken the receiver to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature between these two to their offspring. We must also grasp that it could not be otherwise: if an imprint is going to show all the variety of a variegated form, that very thing in which the imprinting settles must be well prepared for it—except that it be formless, empty of all those forms 50e it is someday to receive from somewhere. For if it were like any of the things entering it, then whenever it had to receive something of the opposite kind, of an altogether different nature, it would copy it badly, showing its own appearance alongside. And so the thing that is to receive into itself all kinds must of necessity stand outside all forms. Just as in the case of the unguents—all those that men contrive by art to be fragrant, they first make the liquids that are to receive the scents as odorless as they can; and those who undertake to stamp shapes into soft materials let no shape at all be evident in them, but smooth them and make them as smooth as they can be made.

51a Timaeus: The same, then, holds also for that which is to receive well, again and again across its whole self, the likenesses of all the things that are forever: it is right that it stand by nature outside all the forms. That is why we should not call the mother and receptacle of the thing that has come to be, the visible and in every way sensible, earth or air or fire or water, nor any of the things that come from these, nor those from which these came to be; but let us say it is a kind invisible and formless, all-receiving, and partaking 51b in some most perplexing way of the intelligible, the hardest of all things to capture—and we shall not be speaking falsely. And insofar as it is possible, from what has been said, to reach its nature, this is the most correct way to speak of it: that the part of it ablaze at any moment appears as fire, the part moistened as water, and as earth and air insofar as it receives likenesses of these. But we must examine these matters by distinguishing the question more sharply, in an argument of the following kind: is there such a thing as fire itself, existing on its own, and all the things we are forever speaking of in this way, 51c each of them being in itself—or are the things we see, and all that we perceive through the body, the only things that possess truth of this kind, with nothing else anywhere in any way beside them, so that what we say each time—that there is an intelligible form of each—was said in vain, and that there was nothing there after all but an account? It is not right, then, to leave the question now before us unexamined and unjudged and to insist, as if by force, that we already hold the answer; nor should another stretch of argument 51d be tacked on midway, as a detour in a long argument; but if some great defining principle could be set out briefly and made plain, that would be the most timely thing of all. This, then, is how I myself cast my vote. If intelligence and true belief are two kinds, then these things exist in themselves absolutely—forms imperceptible to us, grasped by intelligence alone; but if, as it seems to some, true belief differs in nothing from intelligence, then everything we perceive through the body must be set down as most certain. 51e Of those two, then, we must say why they came to be apart and are unlike. For the one arises in us through teaching, the other through persuasion; the one is always attended by a true account, the other is without account; the one cannot be moved by persuasion, the other can be talked out of; and while we must say that every man partakes of the former, of intelligence the gods partake, and of the race of men but a little.

Timaeus: these things being so,

52a we must agree that one kind is that which has the character of the selfsame—unbegotten and indestructible, neither admitting anything into itself from anywhere else nor itself passing anywhere else into anything, invisible and otherwise imperceptible; this is what intelligence has been granted to survey. A second, of like name and like that one, is sensible, begotten, always borne along, coming to be in some place and again perishing out of it, grasped by belief together with perception; and a third, again, is the kind that belongs to place—always being, not admitting destruction, 52b but providing a seat for all things that have coming-to-be, itself apprehended, without perception, by a kind of bastard reasoning, hardly to be trusted—at the sight of which we play the dreamer and say that everything that is must needs be somewhere, in some place and holding some room, and that what is neither on earth nor anywhere in heaven is nothing at all. And amid all this, and the other things akin to them, about the waking and truly existing nature we are, because of this dreaming, 52c unable, once awake and distinguishing, to speak the truth: that for an image—since not even that on which it is wrought belongs to the image itself, but it is always the fleeting phantom of something else—for this reason it is proper for the image to come to be in something other, somehow clinging to being; or else it is nothing at all. And for that which really is, the helper is the exactly true account: as long as the one is something other and the other something other, neither ever coming to be 52d in the other, the two will never at the same time become one and the same and two.

This, then, being the verdict cast by my vote, let the account be handed down in summary: that being and place and coming-to-be existed—three, distinct three ways—before the heaven came to be. And the nurse of coming-to-be, made watery and fiery and receiving the forms of earth and air, and suffering all the affections that attend these, 52e appeared to sight in every sort of shape; but because it was filled with powers neither alike nor in balance, it had no balance in any part of itself, but swayed unevenly in every direction, itself shaken by them, and in its turn, as it moved, shook them in return.

Timaeus: and the other moving things were ever carried each in a different direction as they were sorted apart, like the things shaken and

53a winnowed by the winnowing fans and the implements used for cleansing grain—the dense and heavy settling in one place, the rare and light coming to rest in another as they were carried; at that time, then, the four kinds, shaken by the receiver as it moved like an implement giving the shake, drew off: the most unlike marking their bounds farthest from one another, the most like driven most into the same place; and for this reason each kind held a different region even before the whole came to be ordered out of them. Before this, all these things had existed without reason and without measure. 53b But when the whole set out to be ordered, fire first and water and earth and air—possessing, to be sure, some traces of themselves, yet altogether in the state in which everything naturally is when a god is absent—in that state, then, he first marked them out, as they were by nature, with forms and numbers. That the god joined them together, as best and most beautifully was possible, out of things in such a state—let this stand as the premise always granted among us; but now we must attempt to set forth the ordering of each kind and its coming-to-be 53c by an account unfamiliar to you; yet since you share in the courses of education through which one must make what is said plain, you will follow along.

First, that fire and earth and water and air are bodies is evident to everyone; but the form of body has depth in every case. And depth, in turn, must of necessity be everywhere enclosed by the plane surface; and the plane's true base is put together from triangles. All triangles, in turn, begin from 53d two triangles, each having one right angle and the rest of its angles acute: of these, one has on either side an equal part of a right angle divided by equal sides; the other has unequal parts of a right angle divided by unequal sides. This, then, we posit as the principle of fire and of the other bodies, proceeding along the likely account joined to necessity; but the principles still prior to these the god knows, and the men who are his friends. We must next say what kinds of most beautiful bodies 53e would come to be, four in number, unlike one another, yet such that some can come to be out of others by their dissolution—for once we have this, we hold the truth about the coming-to-be of earth and fire and the proportionate kinds between them. For this much we will concede to no one: that visible bodies finer than these could exist, each kind being what it is. This, then, is what we must strive for: to fit together the four kinds of bodies that differ in beauty, and to say that we have adequately grasped their nature.

54a Timaeus: Of the two triangles, the isosceles has taken one nature; the oblong one, kinds without limit. So we must choose, in turn, the most beautiful of the unlimited ones, if we are to make a beginning in the right way. If anyone has a finer choice to name for their construction, he—as a friend, not an enemy—wins the day; but we take as the most beautiful of the many triangles one alone, passing over the rest: the one out of which the equilateral triangle was put together in thirds. 54b Why this is so would take a longer account; but for whoever tests it and finds it to be indeed so, friendly prizes lie laid up. Let it then be settled that two triangles were chosen, out of which the body of fire and the bodies of the rest were devised: the one isosceles, the other always having the greater of its sides triple in square of the lesser. What was said before obscurely must now be marked off more precisely. The four kinds, then, seemed all to have their coming-to-be through one another—an appearance not correct: for the four kinds come to be from 54c the triangles we chose, three of them from the one that has unequal sides, while the fourth alone was fitted together from the isosceles triangle. So it is not possible for all of them, dissolving into one another, to become few and large from many and small, and the reverse; but the three can. For since all of them are by nature from one triangle, when the larger are dissolved, many small ones will be formed out of those same triangles, taking on the shapes proper to them; and when small ones, again, are many and scattered into 54d the triangles, they become one number of one mass and can complete one other large kind. Let this much, then, have been said about their generation into one another; but of what sort each came to be in shape, and out of how many numbers falling together, it would be next in order to say. The beginning will be the first and smallest form constructed; its element is the triangle that has its hypotenuse double the shorter side in length. And when two such are joined along the diagonal, and this is done 54e three times, the diagonals and the short sides being brought to rest on the same point as center, one equilateral triangle has come to be out of six in number.

Timaeus: and equilateral triangles, when four come together with every three plane angles, make one solid

55a angle, one that arises next in succession to the bluntest of the plane angles. When four such have been completed, the first solid kind is constructed—one that distributes the whole circumference into equal and like parts. The second comes from the same triangles, put together as eight equilateral triangles, each set of four planes producing one solid angle; and when six such had come to be, the second body in its turn thus found its end. The third came to be from twice sixty of the elements compacted together, 55b with twelve solid angles, each enclosed by five equilateral triangular planes, and twenty bases of equilateral triangles. And the other of the two elements was dismissed, having begotten these; but the isosceles triangle begat the nature of the fourth, constructed in fours, gathering its right angles to the center and making one equilateral square; and six such, 55c compacted together, produced eight solid angles, each fitted together from three right plane angles; and the shape of the body constructed came out cubic, having six square plane bases with equal sides. There being still one fifth construction, the god used it for the whole, working it over with figures.

Someone reckoning all this in due measure might here be at a loss whether one must say there are unlimited worlds or a limited number: the 55d unlimited ones he would judge, in truth, to be the doctrine of some science of the unlimited, in which one must be expert; but whether it is ever right to say that they are in truth by nature one or five—standing at that question he would more fittingly be in perplexity. Our account, then, declares it to be by nature one—a god—in accordance with the likely account; another man, having looked elsewhere toward other things, will judge otherwise. But let this be set aside, and let us now distribute in the account the kinds that have come to be into fire and earth and water and air. To earth, then, let us give the cubic kind: 55e for earth is the most immobile of the four kinds and the most plastic of bodies, and the thing that has the safest bases must of all things have come to be such; and the base that is safer by nature, of the triangles posited at the start, is that of the equal-sided over that of the unequal-sided, and the plane composed from each—the equilateral from the equilateral triangle, the square from the right-angled one—stands more firmly of necessity, both in its parts and as a whole.

Timaeus: for this reason

56a in assigning this to earth we preserve the likely account; to water, in turn, of the remaining kinds the hardest to move; the easiest to move, to fire; the middle, to air. And the smallest body to fire, the largest again to water, and the middle to air; and the sharpest again to fire, the second to air, the third to water. All these, then—the one with the fewest bases must be by nature the easiest to move, 56b the most cuttable and the sharpest of all in every way, and further the lightest, composed of the fewest of the same parts; the second, second in these same qualities; and the third, third. So let it be, by the correct account and the likely one, that the solid kind of the pyramid, having come to be, is the element and seed of fire; the second kind, in order of generation, let us say is air's, and the third water's. All these, then, must be conceived as so small that 56c no single one of each kind is ever seen by us because of its smallness, but when many are massed together their bulk is seen; and that the proportions in their numbers, their movements, and all their other powers were everywhere fitted by the god—wherever the willing nature of necessity, persuaded, gave way, there throughout, completed with exactness by him, they were joined together in proportion.

Of all the kinds we named at the outset, then, this is how things would stand 56d most according to the likely account. Earth, meeting with fire and dissolved by its sharpness, would drift along—whether dissolved in the fire itself or chancing to fall into a mass of air or of water—until its parts, meeting somewhere and again fitted to themselves, became earth once more, for it could never pass into any other kind. But water, divided by fire, or even by air, could come to be, as it was formed, one body of fire and two 56e of air; and the portions of air, when one part is dissolved, would become two bodies of fire. And again, when fire is hemmed in by air, or by waters, or by some earth—a little amid much, moving amid what is carried along, and fighting and being overpowered and broken to pieces—two bodies of fire combine into one kind of air; and when air is overpowered and cut into pieces, from two wholes and a half there will be one whole, compacted kind of water.

Timaeus: for let us now reckon these again in this way—how, when taken in fire, of the

57a when a kind of the others is cut by it through the sharpness of its angles and its sides, it ceases being cut once it has settled into that one's nature — for each kind, like and the same as itself, can neither implant any change in another nor suffer any from a thing that remains the same in the same way — while so long as, becoming something else and being the weaker, it battles with the stronger, it does not stop being broken apart. And again, when the smaller kinds, enclosed 57b by many larger ones and few in number, are shattered and quenched, they cease being quenched, willing as they are to compose themselves into the form of what prevails over them; and as they are quenched, fire becomes air, and air water. But if it moves against them and battles with some of the other kinds as they gather, it does not cease being broken apart until either, driven hard and utterly dissolved, it escapes to its kindred, or, defeated, it becomes one out of many, resembling the victor, and remains as that one's settled dweller. And by such affections as these all of them change their regions; 57c for the multitudes of each kind stand apart in a place of their own, because of the motion of the receiving thing, while the things that are unlike themselves at each moment and like others are carried, by the shaking, toward the place of those to which they have become like.

So much, then, for the bodies that are unmixed and primary, and the causes of such a kind through which they came to be. But the other kinds that have grown into their forms must be credited to the structure of each of the elements — 57d in that it planted at the beginning not one size of each triangle only, but smaller and larger ones as well, and in a number just as great as the kinds there are in the forms. That is why, as they mix both with themselves and with one another, their variety is beyond counting; and those who mean to reason about nature with a likely account must become observers of it.

About motion and rest, then — in what manner and through what they come to be — unless someone settles the matter by agreement, many things will stand in the way 57e of the reasoning that comes after. What has been said about them already, and in addition to that this further point: that motion is never willing to reside in uniformity. For the thing moved to be without the mover, or the mover without the thing moved, is hard — rather, impossible; and there is no motion when these are absent, while it is impossible for these ever to be uniform.

Timaeus: In this way, then, let us set rest in uniformity and motion, always, into

58a irregularity. The cause, in turn, is the unevenness of the irregular nature. We have gone through how inequality comes to be; but how each kind, once separated out by kind, ever ceases from its motion and carrying through one another — that we have not said. Here, then, is how we shall put it. The revolution of the whole, once it had taken in the kinds, being rounded like a circle and inclined by its own nature to draw in upon itself, squeezes everything and allows no empty region to be left behind. That is why 58b fire has spread through everything most of all, air second, as being second in fineness by nature, and the rest in that same ratio; for the things made of the largest parts have left the greatest emptiness in their structure, and the smallest the least. The coming together of the packing, then, drives the small into the gaps of the great. And so, with the small set in among the great, the lesser sorting out the larger and the larger compacting the lesser together, all things are carried up and down toward their own places; 58c for as each thing changes its size, it changes its station among places too. In this way, through these causes, the coming-to-be of unevenness, preserved forever, provides that the motion of these things has been, is, and will be unending.

After this we must understand that many kinds of fire have come to be — for instance flame, and that which goes out from the flame, which does not burn but gives light to the eyes, and that which is left of it 58d among the embers when the flame is put out; and in the same way with air: the clearest has taken the special name ether, the murkiest is mist and darkness, and there are other forms without names, all begotten by the inequality of the triangles. The kinds of water were divided first in two: the liquid, and the fusible kind of it. The liquid, because it partakes of the small and unequal kinds of water, has come to be mobile, both of itself and under something else, through its unevenness and the look of its shape; while that 58e made of large and uniform parts is more stationary than it, and heavy, congealed by its very uniformity. But when fire enters and dissolves it, it loses that uniformity, and, having lost it, takes on more motion; and grown easy to move, pushed and stretched out over the earth by the air beside it, it took for the stripping away of its masses the name melting, and for its flowing down upon the earth the name stream — each affection so named for what it suffered.

59a Timaeus: Again, when the fire falls out of it at once — since it does not go into an empty void — the air next at hand, being pushed, drives the liquid mass, still easy to move, into the places the fire has left, shoving it there and mixing itself with it; and the mass, pushed together, takes back its uniformity again — the fire, that maker of unevenness, having gone its way — and returns to the same state as before. And the departure of the fire was named cooling, and the coming together, once that has gone, congealing. Of all these 59b waters we have called fusible, the kind that becomes densest out of the finest and most uniform particles, single in form, tinged with a gleaming yellow color — filtered through rock — settled as gold, the most precious of possessions; and the branch of gold, hardest through its density and grown dark, was called adamant. But the kind near to gold in its parts, holding several forms in one, and in density — being denser than gold — also taking a small and fine portion of earth, so as to be harder, yet lighter 59c because it has great gaps within itself — one kind of the bright and congealed waters, when it compacted, became copper; and the earth mingled with it, whenever the two grow old and part from one another again, becoming conspicuous by itself, is called rust. As for the rest of such things, one who pursues the form of the likely stories should not trouble to reason out any more of their variations — the form that, when someone for refreshment's sake sets aside the accounts about what is, which are always the same, and contemplates instead the likely ones 59d about becoming, wins a pleasure that can never be regretted, if he makes it a pastime of his life at once measured and wise. In this spirit, then, let us set down what we have now and go on to what is next and likely concerning these same things, in this way. The water mixed with fire, insofar as it is fine and liquid through its motion and the path it takes rolling over the earth, is called liquid; and soft, again, in that its bases yield while being less firmly seated than those of earth. When this, having parted from the fire, is isolated from the air, 59e it has grown more uniform, and is pressed in upon itself by what departs from it; and so congealed, the part that suffered this most above the earth became hail, and the part upon the earth, crystal; while the part affected more gently, still half-congealed, became above the earth snow, and upon the earth, compacted out of dew, is called hoarfrost.

Timaeus: The most numerous kinds of water, mixed with one another — the kind as a whole,

60a strained through the plants of the earth and called juices — each kind, taking on an unlikeness through its mixtures — most of the rest have provided many nameless kinds; but as many as were four fiery kinds, becoming the most translucent, have taken names: that which warms the soul along with the body, wine; that which is smooth and sorts out sight, and therefore shows bright and gleaming and richly oily to behold — the oily kind: pitch, and castor, and oil itself, and whatever else has the same power; 60b and insofar as its diffusion reaches all the way into the nature of the gatherings about the mouth, providing sweetness by that power, honey took the name most universal of all; while the kind that dissolves flesh by burning, the frothy kind, separated off from all the juices, was named opos.

The kinds of earth: that which is filtered through water becomes a stony body in this way. When the water mingled with it is cut away in the mingling, it has changed into the form of air; and becoming 60c air, it streams up to its own place. Now none of it left a void behind; so it pushed the air beside it. And that air, heavy as it is, pressed and poured around the mass of earth, squeezed it hard and packed it together into the seats from which the new air had risen; and earth, squeezed by the air together with the water into an unbreakable union, comes to be rock — the finer when its parts are equal, uniform, and translucent, the meaner when the opposite. And when all the moisture has been snatched out by the speed of fire 60d and it has compacted more crumbly than that, the kind arose to which we have given the name earthenware. But sometimes, when some moisture is left behind, the earth becomes fusible, and when it is cooled after passing through the fire it turns into a stone of black color. Two others, again, formed alike in these ways — out of a mingling in which much water was set apart, and out of the finer parts of earth, both briny — when they had become half-congealed and were loosened again by water: the one, the kind that cleanses oil and earth, became natron; the other, well fitted in the unions 60e that belong to the sense of taste about the mouth, became the body of salt, dear to the gods, in due measure [by law]. The common compounds made from both are not dissolved by water, but by fire; in such a way do they compact. Fire and air do not melt the masses of earth: for the parts of these are by nature smaller than the gaps of its structure, and passing through its wide open spaces without forcing, they leave it undissolved and so present it unmelted; but the parts of water, since they are by nature larger, force their passage through, and dissolving it, melt it.

Timaeus: Earth

61a when compact and unyielding, only water dissolves by force in this way, and of what has compacted together nothing dissolves it but fire; for an entrance has been left open to none but fire. Of water, again, in its compacted form, the most violently compacted only fire disperses, and the more weakly compacted both — fire and air — disperse, fire through the gaps, air even through the triangles; and of air compacted by force nothing dissolves it except at its element, while without force only fire melts it. Of the mixed bodies made of earth and water: so long as 61b the water in them holds the earth's gaps, packed in there by force, the parts of water coming at them from outside, having no way in, flow around the whole mass and leave it unmelted; but the parts of fire, entering into the gaps of the waters, doing to [the air] what water does to earth, have turned out to be the only causes of the common body's flowing once it has been melted through. And these, it turns out, are of two sorts: those having less water than earth — the whole genus about glass 61c and all the kinds called fusible stones; and those having more water, again — all the waxlike and combustible bodies that compact together.

And so the kinds, diversified by their shapes and by their combinations and changes into one another, have been all but fully displayed; but we must attempt to bring to light the affections they undergo and the causes through which these have come to be. First, then, sensation must always attend the things we have been naming; but the coming-to-be of flesh and of the things about the flesh, and of the soul in its mortal part, we have not yet gone through. And it happens that these cannot adequately be treated apart 61d from the affections that are objects of sensation, nor can those be treated without these — while to do both at once is almost impossible. So we must lay down one side first, and come back around again to what has been laid down. That the affections, then, may be told next after the coming-to-be, let what concerns body and soul be first for us. First, then, as to why we call fire hot, let us look at it here, considering the separation and cutting of it about our body, 61e once we have conceived what it does. For that the affection is something keen, we almost all perceive;

Timaeus: but the fineness of the sides and the sharpness of the angles, the smallness of the parts and the swiftness of the motion — with all of which it is violent and cutting, ever cutting sharply whatever it

62a meets, must be reckoned out by calling to mind the coming-to-be of its shape: that it is this nature above all, and no other, which, dividing us and cutting our bodies into small pieces, has rightly given both the affection and the name to what we now call hot. The opposite of these things is plain enough, yet let it lack nothing of an account. For the parts of the fluids about the body that enter with larger parts, pushing out the smaller and unable to slip into their seats, crowd together the moisture in us 62b — which, from uneven and moving, becomes still through uniformity — and working a packing together, they congeal it; and what is being gathered against nature fights with what is natural in itself, thrusting itself toward the opposite. From this battle and this quaking were named trembling and shivering, and the whole affection, and the agent of it, took the name cold. And hard is whatever our flesh yields to, and soft whatever yields to our flesh; and so also with one another. A thing yields only as far as what steps upon it is small; while the one built 62c of square bases, since it is planted very deep, is the most resisting of forms, and whatever comes together into the greatest density is strongest in opposition. But heavy and light, examined together with the nature of what is called down and of what is called up, would be shown most clearly. For it is nowhere right to suppose that there are by nature two places, taking in the whole divided in two and opposite to one another — one, down, toward which everything that has any bulk of body is carried, the other, up, toward which everything comes against its will; for since the whole heaven 62d is spherical, the things that have come to be at equal distances from the center are all extremities, and they must all alike have the nature of extremities, while the center, standing the same measure from the extremities, must be thought to be opposite to all of them. Since the cosmos has this nature, would not anyone who sets up or down for the things we have mentioned seem, with justice, to be using a name that fits nothing? For the middle region of it, having by nature neither down nor up, has a right to be called neither — only the middle; and the region about it is neither the middle, nor does it hold one part of itself more directly opposite the center than another — than any of the parts across from it. And for what is by nature alike in every direction, what contrary names could anyone apply, and where, and think he spoke well?

Timaeus: For if some solid thing were at the center of the

63a whole, evenly balanced, it would never be carried toward any of the extremities, because of their perfect likeness in every direction; and even if someone walked about it in a circle, he would often stand at its antipodes and call the same part of it now down, now up. For the whole, being spherical — as was just now said — for a man of sense to speak of one region of it as down and another as up is not the act of a sound mind. But from what these things were named, and in what circumstances we are accustomed, because of them, to divide the whole heaven in this way 63b and speak so — this must be settled by agreement among those who accept these premises of ours. If someone were to step into that region of the whole in which the nature of fire had its lot, where the greatest part of it would be gathered and toward which it is carried, and, standing upon it with power over it, were to lift out portions of the fire, setting them in scales, raising the beam and dragging the fire into the alien air by force — it is clear 63c that the lesser would be forced more easily than the greater; for when two things are raised at once by a single strength, the smaller follows the force more, the larger less, as it is necessarily stretched and pulled along; and the much was to be called heavy and borne downward, the small light and borne up. This very thing, then, we ourselves must be caught doing in this region. For standing on the earth, we pry apart the earthy kinds — sometimes the very earth itself — and drag them by force into the alien air, against nature, both of them held fast by their 63d kindred; and when we force them into the unlike, the smaller follows sooner than the larger; so we have called it light, and the place into which we force it, up; and the affection opposite to these, heavy and down. These things, then, must of necessity stand in this varied relation to one another, because the multitudes of the kinds occupy places opposite to one another — for what is heavy in one place will be found light 63e in the opposite place, and heavy against the heavy, down against the down, and up against the up — all of them opposed and oblique and in every way different from one another, both in coming to be and in being — but this one thing must be conceived about all of them: that the road toward the kindred, being the road each thing takes, makes what is carried heavy, and the place toward which such a thing is carried, down; while the things standing otherwise than these stand each as the other of the two. About these affections, then, let these be the causes that have been spoken.

Timaeus: And the cause of the affection of smooth and rough anyone at all could discern and be able to tell to another; for hardness mixed with unevenness, and the

64a evenness is provided by density.

And the greatest of the affections common to the whole body that still remains is the cause of pleasant and painful things, which we covered when we drew those distinctions, together with those affections which through the body's parts have acquired the senses, and hold within themselves pains and, at the same time, pleasures that follow upon them. Let us take the causes on these lines for every affection, sensible or insensible, recalling that earlier we distinguished the nature 64b easily moved and the nature hard to move; for along this road we must pursue everything we intend to take. What is by nature easy to move, whenever even a slight affection falls into it, passes it around in a circle, each part working the same effect on the next, until, arriving at the seat of intelligence, it reports the power of the thing that caused it; while the opposite kind, being settled, travels through no circle but suffers alone, 64c and moves none of its neighbors, so that, because the parts hand nothing on from one to another, the first affection stays unmoved within them and, spreading through the whole creature, leaves what suffered it without any feeling. Such are the bones and the hair, and whatever other parts in us are mostly earth; the opposite holds above all in what lies forward, about sight and hearing, because the power of fire and air in them is greatest. Pleasure and pain, then, must be conceived on this pattern: the affection that comes to be against nature and 64d by force, all at once, is painful; the return into nature, again all at once, is pleasant; what comes gently and by little degrees passes unfelt, and the opposite case is the opposite of these. Whatever happens with ease is perceptible in the highest degree, yet partakes of neither pain nor pleasure—like the affections of sight itself, that body which, we said earlier, comes to be conjoined with us day by day. Through it, cuttings and burnings and whatever else it suffers produce no pains, nor 64e pleasures when it returns again to the same state; yet its perceptions are the greatest and the clearest, both in whatever it undergoes and in whatever it touches, reaching out toward anything at all—for there is no violence at all in its dividing and its combining.

Timaeus: Bodies built of larger parts, though, give way reluctantly to what acts on them, and while they carry the motions through their whole extent they meet pleasures and pains, estranged

65a in their pains, and, restored once more to the same state, in their pleasures. Whatever has received its withdrawals and emptyings in small degrees, but its refillings all at once and in large measure—becoming insensible to the emptying while perceptive of the filling—gives the mortal part of the soul no pain, but the greatest pleasures; the case of sweet smells shows this plainly. And whatever is estranged all at once, and returns to its own state 65b again with difficulty and by little and little, gives back the opposite in everything; these are the plain cases of burnings and cuttings of the body.

So much, then, is nearly said of the affections common to the whole body, and of as many of the names as have arisen for those who undergo them. The affections that arise in our own particular parts, and the causes in the things that act, we must now try to describe as far as 65c we can. First, then, what we left unsaid earlier in speaking of the juices—affections proper to the tongue—must be brought to light as best we can. These too, like most things, appear to come about through certain combinations and separations, and to make rather more use than the rest of roughness and smoothness. Whatever enters the little veins—the tongue's testing vessels, as it were, 65d stretched toward the heart—and falling into the moist, tender earthen parts of the flesh dissolves them, draws the veins together and dries them: being rougher, these appear as astringent; those that roughen less, as harsh. And those that cleanse these and rinse the whole tongue—doing this beyond due measure, and laying on until they melt away its very nature, like the power of lye 65e—have all been named bitter; while the weaker kinds, below the lye-like state, which cleanse up to the moderate degree, are salty, without rough bitterness, and show themselves the more welcome to us.

Timaeus: And whatever shares the heat of the mouth and is ground down by it, heated with it and in turn heating back what warms it, then carried by its lightness up to the seat of sensation in the head, and cutting

66a whatever it falls upon—by these powers everything of the kind has been called pungent. But what has first been thinned by decay, and then slips into the narrow veins, meeting the earthen parts lodged there and whatever hold a measure of air, so that, set moving about one another, they churn, and churning tumble about, and entering into one another carve out hollows, stretched taut by what enters—66b which, when a moist shell has been wrapped round hollow air, now earthy, now pure, become moist vessels of air, hollow and round; and those of the pure kind, coming round transparent, were given the name of bubbles, while those of the earthy kind, moved and lifted up all together, took the byname of seething and leavening—the cause of these affections has been called acid. To everything said on this subject, 66c the opposite affection comes from an opposite cause: whenever what enters in the moist things, being by nature akin to the tongue's own state, anoints what has been roughened and smooths it, gathers what has been unnaturally packed together, releases what has been scattered, and above all settles everything into its nature by sweat—such a remedy of violent affections, grown pleasant and welcome to all, is called sweet. 66d

So much for these. About the power of the nostrils, there are no kinds in it. For the whole tribe of smells is half-born, and no simple kind has chanced upon a symmetry with anything such that it could take up a smell; but the veins about these organs of ours were framed narrower toward the kinds of earth and water, wider toward those of fire and air, and so none of them has ever perceived any smell of any of these: smells arise only from things being moistened, or decaying, or melting, or given off as vapor. For as 66e water changes into air and air into water, smells come to be in the interval between them; all smells together are smoke or mist—mist is what goes from air into water, smoke what goes from water into air. Hence all smells together have come to be finer than water, denser than air.

Timaeus: They make themselves felt, too, when someone stops his breath the other way and drags the air forcibly into himself; for then no smell filters in with it, and the breath, robbed of smells, alone

67a follows. Hence these variations of theirs have come to be nameless—not arising from many kinds, nor from simple ones—and here only the pleasant and the painful show themselves plainly, spoken of in two ways: the one roughening and doing violence to the whole cavity within us, as much of us as lies between the crown of the head and the navel; the other soothing this same region and giving it back, gratefully, to its natural state.

Examining the third sensitive region in us, about 67b hearing, we must say by what causes its affections occur. Let us define voice, in general, as the blow passed through the ears by air, brain and blood, clear to the soul; and hearing as the motion this blow sets up, beginning at the head and ending at the seat of the liver: so much of it as is swift makes the sound high, so much as slower makes it deep; the uniform is smooth and level, its opposite rough; 67c what is much is loud, its opposite small. Of their consonance with one another we must speak in what comes later.

A fourth sensitive kind still remains for us, which we must divide—it holds many varieties within itself. All of them we called colors: a flame streaming off each of the bodies, its particles matched in scale to sight for perception; and of sight's coming to be, the causes were told earlier. 67d Here then, about colors, above all, a fair account ought to make its way through in order: the particles traveling from other bodies and falling upon sight are some smaller, some larger, some equal to the parts of sight itself. The equal are imperceptible—these are what we call transparent; the larger and the smaller, the one combining sight, the other dividing it, are brothers to 67e the hot and the cold about our flesh, the astringent about the tongue, and the kinds we named pungent for their heating: white and black are these same affections come to be in another kind, yet appearing different through these causes.

Timaeus: So they should be named: what divides sight is white; its opposite, black; and the swifter current of another kind of fire, which falls upon and divides sight clear to the eyes, and the very outflows of the eyes

68a thrusting them out violently and melting them, pouring from there a mass of fire and of water—which we call tears—while itself being fire meeting them from the opposite side: of the fire leaping out, as it were from a lightning flash, and of the kind entering and being quenched about the moisture, colors of every sort arise in this churning—the affection we named a flash, and what it brings about we called bright and gleaming. 68b The kind of fire between these two, again, that reaches the moisture of the eyes and mingles with it, without gleaming, while the radiance of fire mingles with it through the moisture and gives it a blood-warm color—this we call red. Bright mixed with red and with white has become yellow; and in what measure, and with what—even if one knew, it makes no sense to say—since of these one could give neither any necessity nor the likely account, even in moderation. Red, though, 68c mixed with black and white makes purple; and dusky-dark when, with these mingled and burned as well, more black is blended in. Flame-red comes from the mixture of yellow and gray; gray from white and black; pale yellow from white mingled with yellow. White meeting bright, and then falling headlong into dark, makes a deep blue; blue mixed with white, sea-green; flame-red with black, leek-green. As for the rest, 68d they would be nearly clear from these, for anyone who likened them to the mixtures by which they would keep the likely story. But if anyone, probing these things in deed, took such a touchstone, he would be blind to how far human nature stands from divine: god is at once wise enough and strong enough to blend the many into one and again to dissolve the one into the many, while no man is capable of either, now or ever after. 68e

All these things, then, so constituted by necessity, the craftsman of the fairest and the best took up as they were in the things coming to be, when he begot the self-sufficient and most perfect god: using those causes as serving instruments, while he himself crafted the good in everything that comes to be.

Timaeus: For this reason we must distinguish two kinds of cause, the necessary and the divine, and seek the divine in all things

69a for the sake of gaining a blessed life, so far as our nature admits; the necessary for the sake of those others, reckoning that without them those very things—the only ones our striving is set on—can neither be discerned, nor gained, nor shared in any other way.

Now that the kinds of cause have been sifted clean and lie beside us builders like timber, out of which the remaining part of our account must be woven, let us go back for a moment to the starting point and travel quickly to the same spot we came here from, 69b and try to set upon what came before an ending that fits—a head for the story. For as was said at the beginning, these things, then in disorder, god brought into order: in each of them, toward itself and toward the others, he wrought all the symmetries that were possible, and wherever it was possible, proportionate and measured. At that time they had no share in any of this except by chance, nor was anything of what is now named worth naming at all—fire, water, or any of the rest; but all these 69c he first set in order, and then out of them framed this whole: one living creature holding within it all living things, mortal and immortal. Of the divine he himself became the maker; the birth of the mortal kind he charged his own offspring to fashion. And they, imitating him, received from him the deathless beginning of a soul, and then molded around it a mortal body, gave it the whole body for a vehicle, and built within it another kind of soul, the mortal kind, holding within it dreadful and necessary 69d affections: first pleasure, the greatest lure of evil; then pains, that chase the good away; and again boldness and fear, two counselors without sense; spirit, hard to console; and hope, easy to lead astray. Mixing these with irrational sensation and with desire that dares anything, they made up the mortal kind of necessity. And on this account, in awe of staining the divine—since necessity did not lie wholly with them—they housed the mortal apart from it, in 69e another dwelling of the body, building an isthmus and a boundary between head and breast, setting the neck between, that they might be separate; and in the breast, and what is called the chest, they lodged the mortal kind of soul.

Timaeus: And since in that soul the better part and the worse had grown up together, they built the cavity of the chest in two, dividing it, as it were

70a into a dwelling for women, and one for men apart, and setting the midriff between them as a partition wall. The part of soul that shares in courage and spirit, being fond of victory, they settled nearer the head, between midriff and neck, so that, hearing the word of reason, it might with it hold down by force the tribe of appetites, whenever these would in no way willingly obey the command and the word from the citadel. And the heart, 70b as the knot of the veins and the spring of the blood that courses violently through all the limbs, they established in that escort's quarters, so that when the fury of spirit boiled up, and reason sent round word that some wrong was being done from without, or that some desire from within was at work, all that is sensitive in the body, perceiving the encouragements and the threats swiftly through all the narrow channels, might become obedient and follow everywhere, and so let what is best rule 70c over them all. Foreseeing, too, from the heart's leap in expectation of fears and the upsurge of spirit, that all such swelling was to come about through fire in the heated, and contriving its relief, they planted the form of the lung: soft and bloodless first, then riddled within with passages like the holes of a sponge, so that, taking in breath and damp, 70d and cooling, it might give breath and relief amid the heat. For this reason they cut channels from the windpipe to the lung, and set the lung about the heart like a poultice, so that when spirit burns at its height in the heart, it may leap into this yielding, be soothed and cooled, strain less, and serve reason the better with its spirit.

And the part of soul that desires food and drink, and whatever else it feels the want of through the body's nature, this they 70e settled in the region between the midriff and the boundary toward the navel, building in all that place, as it were, a manger for the food of the body; and there they tethered such a creature—wild, yet of necessity fastened and fed there, if ever the mortal kind was to exist at all.

Timaeus: So that it might feed forever at its manger and dwell as far as might be from the place of counsel, making the least tumult and outcry,

71a so that it might deliberate there best, in quiet, about what is good for all in common and for each in particular—for this reason they gave it that station. Knowing, though, that it would never follow reason, and that even if it somehow took in some share of sensation, no care for reason would ever be born in it, while night and day it would be most of all beguiled by images and phantoms, god for its sake contrived the form of the liver 71b and set it in that creature's dwelling: he made it dense and smooth and bright and sweet, with a share of bitterness contrived within it, so that the power that travels from the mind through the thoughts, in this organ as in a mirror that receives impressions and lets it see the images, might frighten it—whenever, using its kindred part of bitterness, a grim threat sweeps in, steeping the whole liver sharply through with choleric colors, crumpling and roughening all of it, 71c bending down the lobe and coiling shut its channels and gates, blocking some and closing others, and so deal out pains and sicknesses; while when again gentler images are painted there by a breath of mildness from the thoughts, quieting the bitterness by refusing to move against or lay hold of the nature opposed to it, and using the sweetness native to it there, and setting everything in it 71d straight and smooth and free, it might make the soul's portion housed about the liver gracious and of good cheer, keeping in the night a moderate diversion, practicing divination in sleep, since it had no share in reason or understanding. For the framers of us, remembering the father's letter, when he sent forth the mortal kind with the charge to make it as excellent as they were able, so far succeeded that in this place they set the oracle even of our worse part, 71e that it might touch truth in some fashion. And here is proof enough that god gave prophecy to human folly: no one in his right senses touches inspired and true divination—but only when the power of understanding is fettered in sleep, or wasted by sickness, or thrown off key by some possession.

Timaeus: But it belongs to the sound-minded to see the meaning of what has been said, calling to mind the dream or the waking vision handed over by the prophetic and inspired nature, and whatever apparitions

72a appear: to divide everything by reason—what it signifies, and for whom, of evil or good still to come, already past, or now present. For the seer, while he remains in that state, to pass judgment on the things seen and spoken through himself is no part of his work; but the good old saying holds, that to do one's own, and to know one's own and oneself, belongs to the sound-minded alone. Hence too the law sets judges over 72b the inspired oracles. Some, wholly in the dark, call these judges seers themselves, not grasping that they are proclaimers of a riddling voice and vision, and no seers at all: prophets of the things divined is the name they would bear most rightly.

Such, then, is the nature of the liver, and such the place where, as we say, it grew—for the sake of divination; and while each creature still lives, it yields its signs more plainly, but robbed of life it has gone blind, and its oracles too faint 72c to show anything clearly. And the frame and seat of its neighbor, the spleen, came to be on the left for the liver's sake, to keep it always bright and clean—a tablet, as it were, made ready like a mirror and lying forever beside it. Hence, too, whenever impurities gather about the liver through bodily diseases, the spleen, cleansing them all away, takes them into its own frenzy, being woven hollow and bloodless; 72d and so, filled with what is purged off, it swells great and humped, and then, when the body is cleansed, sinks low and settles back into its place.

Of the soul, then—what in it is mortal, what divine, and where, and with what, and for what reasons it was housed apart—as to the truth of what has been said, we could insist on it alone and absolutely then, if god himself gave his nod; but the likely account is what we have, and we must run the risk of saying so now, and say it all the more boldly as we look at it again, and let it be said and stand. 72e What follows next must be pursued on the same plan: what remained over of the body, and the way it came to be. Out of reasoning of this kind, it would best become it to have been put together.

Timaeus: The framers of our kind knew the unmeasured appetite there would be in us for drink and food, and that through greed we would spend ourselves on far more than the moderate and the necessary; so that ruin should not come swiftly by diseases, and the race die off at once unfinished,

73a they took this counsel: foreseeing it, they set the so-called lower belly lower down as a receiving vessel for the surplus drink, and for the food that would come along with it; and they coiled the growth of the intestines round about it, so that the food should not hurry through and compel the body, all too soon, to need more food again, breeding insatiability, and make the whole kind through gluttony unphilosophical and unmusical, disobedient to what is most divine in us. 73b

About bone and flesh, and all such nature, this is how it fell out. The beginning of them all was the generation of marrow; for the bonds of life, the soul being yoked to the body, are fastened out in this, and rooted the mortal kind; and marrow itself came to be out of others. Whatever of the first triangles were from the start without warp and smooth, such as could offer fire, water, air and earth with the most exactness—each kind by itself 73c the god drew off from its own kind, and mingled them with one another in due measure, making, as it were, a store of seed for every mortal kind; out of these he wrought the marrow. And after this, planting within it, he lodged there the kinds of souls, dividing the marrow itself, straight away in the first apportionment, into as many shapes, and such, as each kind was in turn to take shape in. And the part that was to hold within itself the divine seed, molding it round about on every side like a tilled field, he named that portion of marrow 73d the brain, meaning that when each creature was finished, the vessel about this would become its head; and the part that was to receive what remained of soul, the mortal part, he divided into shapes both round and oblong—all of it he called marrow—and then, as when a man casts anchors, he worked out of these the bonds of all soul round about this whole body of ours, first riveting to it a covering over 73e the whole: bone. Bone comes to be on this wise: he sifted earth clean and smooth, kneaded it and steeped it in marrow, and after this set it into fire, then dipped it into water, and again into fire, and again into water; and so passing it back and forth many times between the two, he made it insoluble by both.

Timaeus: Working with this, then, he wound about the brain a sphere of bone, and left for it a narrow passage out

74a remaining below; and about the marrow of neck and spine together he shaped the vertebrae out of it and strung them like spools, beginning from the head, through the whole cavity. And so, to keep all this seed safe, he walled it round with a stony enclosure, making joints, and using in them the one part against the other as a power standing in between, for the sake of movement and bending. But judging the condition of the bony nature 74b harder and less bending than was due—and that when it grew hot and then cooled again it would putrefy quickly and spoil the seed shut up within it—for these reasons he contrived the kind of sinew and of flesh: with the sinew, binding all the limbs as it tightened and slackened about the spools, to let the body bend and stretch; and flesh he made to be a screen against summer's heats, a wrap against winter's, and besides, like padded wares, a possession against falls, 74c yielding softly and gently to hard bodies, holding within itself a warm moisture that in summer would keep free of sour sweat and, moistened, furnish a natural coolness through the whole body from outside; and in winter, again, with this same inner fire, would beat off in good measure the frost that assails from without and closes round. Our fashioner, planning all this, mingling water and fire and earth and fitting them together, kneading in a leaven of sharp and salt, 74d made flesh moist and soft; and the nature of sinew he blended from bone and unmixed flesh, tempering the two into one mean power, and giving it a yellow color. So sinew got its force—tenser and more glutinous than flesh, softer and wetter than bone; and wrapping bones and marrow about with these, binding them to one another with sinews, the god then overshadowed them all from above with flesh. 74e The bones that had most soul in them he walled in with the least flesh; those that had least, within, with the most and the densest flesh; and at the meeting-places of the bones, wherever reason showed no necessity for flesh to be there, he grew it thin, so that, standing in the way of the bends, they might not make the body hard to live in, being slow to move—nor yet, when many and dense and rammed hard against one another, breed numbness by their solidity, making the thoughts harder to remember and duller of hearing.

Timaeus: And so the flesh upon the thighs and shins and

75a about the hips, and the bones of the upper arms and the forearms, and whatever other bones we have without joints—and the inner bones, empty of understanding in their marrow through the scantiness of soul—all these he packed full of flesh; while the wiser ones, less so—unless somewhere he framed flesh for their own sake, for the sake of sensation, in just that way, like the form of the tongue—the most part otherwise. For the nature that comes to be of necessity and 75b is nourished together with them admits nowhere dense bone and much flesh at once, together with sharpness of hearing besides. Above all others the constitution about the head would have had these, had the two been willing to fall together; and our race, wearing flesh and sinew upon it, with a solid head, would have won a life double and many times multiplied, healthier and freer of pain than the one it has now. But the makers of our generation, reckoning whether they should work the kind longer-lived 75c and worse, or shorter-lived and better, came to this judgment: that a longer life but a meaner one must yield in every case to a shorter one that is better. And so, the head's bone being thin and its flesh and sinews scanty—since it has no bends—they left it without a covering of flesh. By all this, then, the head was joined to the body the more perceptive and the wiser, but far weaker than the whole man. And the sinews, for these reasons, 75d the god, binding them round the head's far end, glued in a circle about the neck, and tied to them the ends of the jaws beneath the face's nature; the rest he scattered through all the limbs, joining joint to joint. And the power of our mouth, with teeth and tongue and lips, the fashioners ordered, for the sake of the necessary things and the best, in the arrangement it keeps now: 75e the entrance contrived for the necessary, the exit for the best; for whatever enters in gives food to the body, which is necessary, while the spring of speech that flows outward, ministering to intelligence, is the fairest and the best of all springs.

Timaeus: But the head, again, it was not possible to leave as bare bone alone, because of the seasons' excess in either direction—nor yet, again, to see it cloaked over and grown dull and numb under the crowd of flesh. Now of the

76a fleshlike nature, since it would not dry away entirely, a larger peel kept coming apart and separated off—the skin, as it is now called. And this, because of the moisture about the brain, met and grew together with itself, and wound the head round in a circle; while the moisture, rising beneath the seams, lifted it and closed it at the crown, gathering it, as it were, into a knot; and the manifold look of the seams came from the power of the revolutions and of the nourishment, warring against one another the more of them, 76b the fewer of them the less. This whole skin the divine pierced round with fire; and when it was pierced, and the moisture was carried out through it, what was moist and hot, so far as it was pure, went away; but what was mixed, of the same stuff as the skin, borne outward by the rush, stretched out far, its thinness equal to the bore of the puncture, and then, thrust back by the surrounding air without in its slowness, curled in again beneath the skin 76c and rooted there. And from these affections the race of hair grew in the skin, kindred to it, strap-like in its being, but harder and denser by the felting of the cooling which each hair, parting from the skin, chilled and felted along with it. On this pattern, then, our maker made the head hairy, working from the causes told, and judging that instead of flesh it should be a covering 76d for what lies about the brain—light, for safety's sake, and in summer and in winter equal to giving shade and shelter, while in nothing it would stand in the way of quick perception. And the interweaving about the fingers of sinew and skin and bone—the three mixed, drying into one common hard skin—was wrought by those causes working together, but for the sake of the chiefest thought of what was afterward to be. For 76e that some day from men there would spring women and the other wild kinds, those who framed us knew; and they knew, too, the need of nails—that the creatures would want them for many things and many uses; and so, in men come to be at once, they stamped the generation of nails. On this account, then, and by these reasons, they made the skin grow hair, and nails upon the ends of the limbs.

Timaeus: But when all that belonged to the mortal creature had grown together—

77a members and limbs every one—and its life had of necessity to abide in fire and breath, while because of these it wasted away, melted and emptied by them, the gods contrived for it a help. Blending with the kindred nature of the human kind other forms and other senses, so as to make another living thing, they planted it: what are now the tamed trees and plants and seeds, schooled by husbandry to gentleness toward us, were once only the 77b wild kinds, older than the tame. For everything that has any share in life may, in full justice, be called a living creature; and this creature we speak of now partakes of the third kind of soul, which the account seats between midriff and navel, having no share at all of opinion and reason and mind, but of sensation, pleasant and painful, together with desires. For it undergoes everything without pause; but when it is turned about within itself and upon itself, having thrust away 77c the motion from outside and used its own, its birth-giving nature has not granted it, even seeing, to reason out anything of its own. And so it lives and is a living creature still, but it stands fixed and rooted fast, because it has been cut off from motion of its own.

Having planted all these kinds, then, the betters made them food for the worse—to us—cutting channels through our very body, as one cuts irrigation ditches in gardens, that it might be watered as from a stream flowing upon it. And first they cut hidden channels beneath 77d the joining of skin and flesh—the two spinal veins, twin, as the body chanced to be, right and left; these they let down along the backbone, taking the fruitful marrow between, that it might flourish as much as possible, and that thence there might be abundance for the rest, the overflow coming as if down a slope, to furnish a level watering. And after this, splitting the veins about the head and weaving them 77e through one another in opposite ways, they let them down, bending those from the right toward the left of the body and those from the left toward the right, so that there might be, along with the head, a bond to the body through the skin—since it could not be wound round with sinews in a circle over the crown—and so, too, that the affection of the sensations might be plain through the whole body from either side.

Timaeus: And from here on, then, they made ready the waterways in some such manner

78a A thing of this kind, which we shall see the more easily if we first settle an admission of this sort: that everything composed of smaller parts holds in what is larger, while what is composed of larger parts cannot hold the smaller, and that fire, of all the kinds, has the finest parts; hence it passes through water and earth and air and everything composed of these, and nothing has the power to hold it in. The same must be understood, then, of the belly within us: food and drink, when they fall into it, 78b it holds; but breath and fire, having finer parts than its own fabric, it cannot hold. With these, then, God contrived the irrigation that goes from the belly into the veins: a netting woven of air and fire, like the meshes of a fowler's net, having at its entrance double pouches, each of which he plaited again with two channels; and from the pouches he stretched, as it were, cords running in a circle throughout, clear to the farthest ends of the netting. The inner part of the plaited work he fashioned all of fire, 78c while the pouches and the membrane he made of airy substance; and taking this he wrapped it about the creature that had been molded, in the following way. The part of the pouches he let down toward the mouth; and since it was double, he let one branch down by the windpipes into the lung, and the other into the belly alongside the windpipes; the remaining part he split, letting each half run out through the channels of the nose as a shared passage, so that whenever one of the two did not go by way of the mouth, all its streams might be replenished by way of the other. The other membrane of the net he made grow around our body wherever it is hollow, and this whole thing he made now to flow softly in toward the pouches, being air, 78d and now to flow back, the pouches receding while the mesh, the body being porous, sinks in through it and out again, and the rays of the fire within, being woven into it, follow along as the air moves either way; and this, 78e so long as the mortal creature holds together, never ceases from going on; and to this kind of process, we say, the giver of names gave the name of inhalation and exhalation. And this whole work and experience of ours came to be for the body's sake, that, watered and cooled, it might feed and live.

Timaeus: for whenever, as the breath moves in and out, the fire within follows after it, held fast to it, and always coursing in its passage through the belly it enters and takes the

79a food and drink it has caught up, it melts them, dividing them into small bits, and conducting them along through the outlets by which it makes its way, it draws them, like water from a spring into channels, up into the veins, and makes the streams of the veins flow through the body as through a watercourse.

Let us look again at the phenomenon of breathing, and at the causes by whose help it has come to be such as it now is. It was in this way, then: 79b since there is no void into which any of the things that move could enter, and the breath moves out from us, what follows is plain to everyone—it goes not into a void but pushes the air next to it from its seat; and what is pushed always drives on its own neighbor, and under this necessity everything, driven round in a circle, comes back to the seat from which the breath went out, entering there and filling it up; and it falls in with the breath, and all of it together 79c swings round like a wheel, because void is nothing at all. This is why the breath let go from the chest and the lung becomes full again by the air about the body, which sinks in through the porous flesh and is driven round; and again, when the air is turned back and goes out through the body, it pushes the breath inward by the passage of the mouth and nostrils. The cause of the thing's first arising must be set down 79d as this: every living creature has that part of itself which lies about the blood and the veins warmest of all, like a spring of fire dwelling within it; and this we likened just now to the mesh of the net, stretched through the middle, woven all of fire, while everything else outside it is of air. The hot, then, must be granted to go out by nature to its own place, toward its kindred; and there being two ways out, one outward through the body, the other again 79e by the mouth and the nostrils, whenever it rushes toward the one it drives what is there round to the other; and what is pushed, falling in upon the fire, grows hot, and what passes out grows cold. And when the heat shifts over, and those at the other outlet become the warmer, again the warmer inclines that way the more, borne toward its own nature, and pushes the part at the other round; and this, forever suffering the same and returning the same, keeps a circle thus shaken this way and that, and from the two together affords that inhalation and exhalation come to be.

Timaeus: and also of the affections connected with the physicians' cupping instruments

80a and of the swallowing of drink, and of things hurled, both those let fly into the air and those that travel over the ground, the causes must be pursued by this same road; as too all sounds that appear swift and slow, high and low, now jarring as they move, through the unlikeness of the motion they stir within us, now consonant through its likeness. For the slower motions catch the motions of the earlier and faster ones just when they are dying down and have arrived at the like, 80b which the slower then come up to and set moving; and in seizing them they do not throw in a different motion and throw them into disorder, but set up the beginning of a slower movement in accord with the faster; and as it dies away, attaching likeness to it, they blend one single affection out of high and low; and from this they have given pleasure to the witless, and gladness to the wise, through the imitation of the divine harmony become present in mortal movements. And all the flowings of waters too, and further 80c the falls of the thunderbolts, and the wonder worked by amber in its drawing and by the Heraclean stones—of none of these is there ever any drawing at all, nor does any void exist; but they thrust one another round, and as they are sundered and brought together, each changes places toward its own seat, all of them moving so; and when these affections are entwined with one another, they will be seen to have worked their wonders for one who inquires by the right method. 80d

And so breathing too, from which our account set out, has come about in accordance with these things and by their means, as was said before: the fire cutting the foods, and the breath following along and carrying them up within, filling the veins from the belly by this joint carrying, as it pumps up from there the pieces that have been cut; and through these things the streams of nourishment have thus come to flow over the whole body in all living creatures. And these, freshly cut and from kindred things—some from fruits, some from green herbage, 80e which God planted in us for this very purpose, that they might be our food—take on every manner of color through their mingling, while the red hue, the most abundant of all, spreads round about them, being the nature wrought in the moist from the cutting and wearing away of fire.

Timaeus: hence the thing that flows through the body has taken the color of that appearance we went through just now, which we call blood, the pasture of the flesh and of the whole body,

81a whereby each part, watered by it, fills the place of what has gone empty; and the manner of the filling and of the withdrawal comes about just as the movement of each thing in the whole has come to be, by which everything kindred is borne toward itself. For the things that stand around us outside are always melting and distributing, sending off to each kind what belongs to its own stock; and the particles in the blood again, cut small within us and wrapped round, as it were, by 81b a heaven standing fast about each living creature, are compelled to imitate the movement of the whole; and so each of the parts divided within, borne toward its kindred, refills what was then emptied. When more goes out of what flows in, everything wastes away; when less, it grows. When the structure of the whole creature is new, then, and its triangles still fresh, as though just out of the vat, it possesses a strong clasping of them to one another, and the whole mass of it has set 81c soft, having been newly made from marrow and nurtured in milk; and the triangles embraced within it, when the triangles of which foods and drinks are made come in from outside, being older and weaker than its own, it overpowers, cutting them, and accomplishes a great thing, nourishing the animal out of many like things. But when the root of its triangles gives way, because they have contended in many contests against many things over a long time, 81d they can no longer cut the incoming food into their own likeness, while they themselves are easily divided by the newcomers from outside; and so every living thing wastes away, being worsted in this, and the affection is given the name of old age. And in the end, when the bonds fitted about the triangles of the marrow can no longer hold out against the strain as they are pulled apart, they let go in their turn the bonds of the soul, and she, loosed, flies out 81e according to nature with pleasure; for everything contrary to nature is painful, while what comes to be as it is naturally born to be is pleasant. And death, on the same principles, when it comes through diseases or under blows, is painful and violent; but the death that comes with old age, arriving at its end in the course of nature, is of all deaths the least grievous, and comes more with pleasure than with pain.

Timaeus: But from what disease is composed—that is surely plain to everyone.

82a For since the body has set firm out of four kinds—earth, fire, water, and air—when these suffer an unnatural excess and defect, and a shifting of place from what is their own to what is another's, and since fire and the others again, being many kinds instead of one, each takes in what does not belong to it, and everything else of this sort—all these bring on disorders and diseases. For when each of them comes to be unnaturally and changes its ground, what was cool before grows hot, 82b what was dry becomes wet afterward, and the light and the heavy in their turn, and it undergoes changes of every sort on every side. For only, we say, when the same is added to the same in the same part, in the same way and in due measure, and departs again, does it let the thing remain the same as itself, safe and healthy; but whatever of these transgresses, going out or coming in, will bring alterations of every kind, and diseases, and corruptions past counting.

So when secondary structures have set firm in the course of nature, 82c a second understanding of diseases comes to one who is willing to consider it. For when marrow had been compacted out of those elements, and bone and flesh and sinew, and blood as well, formed in another manner yet from the same elements—most of the rest proceeding as before—the greatest of the diseases have fallen in together here in all their severity: when the coming-to-be of these things runs the reverse way, then it is that they are destroyed. For by nature flesh and sinew come from blood, sinew from the fibers by reason of their kinship, 82d and flesh from the clot, what clots separating from the fibers; and what leaves the sinews and flesh again, sticky and oily, both glues the flesh to the nature of the bones and nourishes and increases the bone itself about the marrow, while the part that filters through the dense bones, the purest kind of triangles, smoothest and most oily of all, trickling and dripping from the bones, waters the 82e marrow. When each of these things comes about in this way, health is the result for the most part; disease, when the opposite. For when flesh dissolving sends its melt backward into the veins, then blood, along with breath, abundant and of every sort, shifting in the veins through colors and bitternesses, and further through sharp and salt powers, takes on biles and ichors and phlegms of every kind;

Timaeus: for all these, having become things that turn back upon themselves and are corrupted, destroy first the blood itself, while they themselves afford no

83a nourishment any longer to the body, but are carried every way through the veins, keeping no longer the ordered circuits that are according to nature; and they are hostile to themselves, because they can take no enjoyment of themselves, and at war with the body that stands firm and keeps its place, destroying and melting it. Now as much of the flesh as is oldest and is melted, becoming hard to digest, blackens under its long burning; and because it has been eaten through on every side, 83b it falls, bitter as it is, harshly upon every part of the body not yet corrupted; and at one time the black color has taken sharpness in place of bitterness, the bitter part having been thinned the more; at another time the bitterness again, dyed with blood, has taken a redder color, and when the black is mingled with this, a greenish tinge; and a yellow color too mingles with the bitterness, whenever fresh flesh is melted by the fire about the flame. And the common name for all these things—bile—was imposed by some 83c physician or other, or perhaps by someone who had power to see into many and unlike things, and yet to discern in them one kind present in all, worthy of one name for them all; while the other things said to be kinds of bile each took its own name from its color. Of ichor, one kind is the gentle serum of blood, the other the sharp and savage serum of black bile, whenever it mingles through heat with a salt power; and such a thing is called sharp phlegm. And the matter melted with air out of young and tender flesh, 83d when this has been beaten into air and wrapped about with moisture, and bubbles have formed from this affection, each invisible through smallness, but all together presenting a mass that can be seen, and of a color white to look at because of the birth of foam—this whole dissolution of tender flesh entangled with breath, we say, is white phlegm. And when new phlegm is forming, its serum is sweat and tears, 83e and all the other such bodies that are shed day by day as purgings; and all these have become instruments of disease, whenever blood is not filled up in the natural way from foods and drinks, but takes its mass from opposites against the laws of nature.

Timaeus: so when each kind of flesh is dissolved by diseases while its foundations hold, the calamity is only half its strength—for it is still easy to recover—

84a but when flesh actually falls ill together with the bones, and the blood no longer separates from the fibers and the sinews to become food for bone and a bond joining flesh to bone, but instead, out of what was oily and smooth and sticky, has grown rough and salt, parched by bad living—when all this happens, every such thing cools itself back again beneath the flesh and the sinews, withdrawing from the bones; and the flesh, dropping out from the 84b roots along with them, leaves the sinews bare and full of salt, while they themselves, falling again into the stream of the blood, make the ailments spoken of before more numerous. And when these grievous conditions come upon the body, those before them grow greater still—whenever bone, denied sufficient respiration through the density of the flesh and warmed by the southeast wind, has mortified, neither taking in its food again 84c nor passing back in the way of nature into the flesh, cooling, while that passes into flesh, and flesh falling into blood, so that all the diseases turn out rougher than those before; and the last of all, when the nature of the marrow sickens from deficiency or from some excess, brings about the greatest and most sovereign of the diseases toward death, the whole nature of the body of necessity flowing away in reverse.

There is a third kind of diseases, again, which must be understood as arising in three ways: 84d one from breath, one from phlegm, one from bile. For when the lung, the steward of breath for the body, blocked by flows does not offer clear passages—here no air passing, there more entering than is due—the part that gets no cooling rots away, while the part forcing its way through the veins and swinging them round with it melts the body toward the partition at its middle and is shut up within, 84e and from these there have often been wrought myriads of painful diseases, with a great flood of sweat. And often, when flesh has been dissolved within the body and breath has arisen there, unable to make its way out, it has brought the same birth-pangs as the things that come pressing in—the greatest of all when, gathered round the sinews and the small veins there and swollen, it strains the tendons and the sinews joined to them backward in this way against them; and from the tautness of the affection itself these diseases have been named tetanus and opisthotonus.

Timaeus: and the cure of these too is hard; for fevers, when they come on after such conditions as these

85a —are what loosen them most of all. The white phlegm, because the breath in its bubbles is caught and grows harsh, though it keeps its milder vents for breathing outside the body, mottles the body with white patches and freckles, and breeds the diseases akin to these. When it is blended with black bile and flung over the courses in the head, the most divine of all, and thrown into confusion with them, it deals out in sleep a gentler poison, 85b but one harder to shake off when it falls upon the waking; and being a disease of a sacred nature, it is most justly called sacred. Sharp, salty phlegm is the source of all the diseases that are catarrhal; and because the places it flows into are of every kind, it has taken every kind of name. As for what is called inflammation of the body, the word comes from burning and blazing—and in every case bile is the cause. When it wins a vent to the outside, seething, it throws up growths of every sort; 85c imprisoned within, it engenders many burning-hot diseases; and the worst of all comes when, blended with pure blood, it tears the race of fibers out of their own well-ordered array—fibers that had been strewn through the blood precisely so that it would keep a due balance of thinness and thickness, and so that, grown hot, it would not run out of the body like a mere liquid thinned away, nor yet, being denser and hard to move, labor its way around the veins. 85d The fibers, formed by nature, keep watch over the due season of all this: when someone gathers them together, even out of blood that is dead and cooling, the whole of the remaining blood breaks into flux; but left to themselves they quickly make it clot along with the cold surrounding it. Black bile—which is by nature blood grown old, and has melted down again out of the flesh into this—falls into the blood at first little by little, hot and moist; but through the power of the fibers 85e it clots; and as it clots and is forcibly quenched, it brings chills and shivering from within.

Timaeus: When still more of it streams in, it masters the fibers with its own heat, boils them into disorder, and shakes them apart; and if it proves strong enough to carry the struggle through to the end, it burns its way through to the race of marrow and melts apart the soul's fastenings there, like a ship's mooring lines, and lets the soul go free; but when it is the weaker, and the body, even as it melts, holds out against it, then the bile is defeated in its turn and either falls away through the whole body or is crowded down through the veins into the lower belly or up into the upper—like a fugitive from a city in civil strife, bursting out of

86a the body in its flight, it brings on diarrhea, dysentery, and all such diseases. Now the body that is sickest from excess of fire produces continual burnings and fevers; the one from air, fevers every other day; the one from water, third-day fevers—water being slower than either air or fire; while the one from earth, slowest of the four, cleansed only over periods four times as long, hardly rids itself even after bringing on quartan fevers. 86b

So the diseases of the body come about in this way; those about the soul arise from a bodily condition, as follows. We must grant that a disease of the soul is folly, and that folly has two kinds, madness and ignorance. Whatever affliction a person suffers that partakes of either of these must be called a disease; and pleasures and pains beyond all measure must be set down as the soul's greatest diseases. For a man transported with joy, or the reverse, suffering under 86c grief, who hurries to grasp the one untimely and to flee the other, can neither see nor hear anything aright, but raves, and at that moment is least capable of sharing in reasoning. Whoever has seed about the marrow in great abundance and flux, and has grown, like a tree, more fruitful than is fitting, wins many birth-pangs in each season and many pleasures in his appetites and the offspring that come of them; frantic for the better part of his life with the greatest pleasures 86d and pains, and holding a soul made sick and witless by the body, he is thought bad not as one diseased but as one willing it. Yet in truth the intemperance in matters of sex is for the most part a disease of the soul, born in a fluid and moistening body from the condition of one single kind: the sponginess of the bones. And nearly all the reproaches for incontinence of pleasures, and the disgrace laid on faults as if they were willing, are not justly made; for no one is 86e bad willingly; the bad man becomes bad through some corrupt condition of the body and an uneducated nurture—things hateful to every man and arriving against his will. And once more, in the matter of pains, the soul likewise owes much of its wickedness to the body.

Timaeus: For whenever any of the sharp and salty phlegms, and any of the bitter and bilious humors, wanders through the body, wins no vent for breath outside, and coils about within,

87a mingling the vapor rising from them with the motion of the soul, and so blended into it, they engender diseases of the soul of every kind, now more intense and now milder, now fewer and now more; and as they are carried to the three regions of the soul and strike now this one, now that, they diversify the forms of peevishness and despondency beyond count, and of rashness and of cowardice, and with them of forgetfulness and slow learning. And further, when 87b constitutions have been set up so badly, and evil discourses, private and public, have been spoken in the cities, and besides this the things learned from youth up hold in no way any healing for these ills, that is how all of us who are bad become bad, through two causes wholly involuntary. Of these, the planters must be called to account rather than the planted, and the rearers rather than the reared; still, one must strive in whatever way one can—through nurture, through pursuits, and through studies—to flee wickedness and to lay hold of its opposite. This, however, is another manner of discourse. 87c

But the converse of this—the care of bodies and of minds, and the causes by which they are preserved—it is fitting and proper in turn to render again; for it is more just to hold discourse about goods than about evils. All that is good is beautiful, and the beautiful is never without measure; so the living thing that is to be of such a kind must be set down as proportioned. Of the proportionings, we take in the small ones and reason about them, but of the greatest and most sovereign we are 87d without any reckoning. For nothing of health and disease, of virtue and vice, has a proportion or disproportion greater than that of the soul itself to the body itself; and of this we take no thought at all: that when a form weaker and smaller bears a soul strong and great in every way, and when again the contrary of these two is joined together, the whole living creature is not beautiful—for it is out of proportion in its greatest measures—while the fitting arrangement is the most beautiful and most lovable of all sights to one able to see it whole. 87e So too a body over-long in the legs, or with any other unmeasured excess over itself, is at once ugly, and in the partnership of toil it causes many wearinesses, many strains and, through its lopsidedness, many falls, the cause to itself of ten thousand ills,

Timaeus: The same must then be thought of the whole compound, the living creature we speak of: that when the soul in it, being stronger

88a than the body, clings to it with overmuch eagerness, it shakes the whole thing from within and fills it with diseases; and when it presses hard into studies and inquiries, it melts away; while teachings, and battles in argument, public and private, born of wrangling and rivalry, set it ablaze and unsteady it, and bringing on fluxes they deceive most of the so-called physicians and make them blame the innocent causes. And when, again, a body grows great and out beyond its soul, joined to a small and weak intelligence—since there are by nature two cravings among humankind, 88b for food by way of the body, and for understanding by way of the divinest thing in us—then the motions of the stronger prevail, swelling their own and making the soul's dull, slow to learn, and forgetful, and so fasten upon us the greatest disease, ignorance. One salvation there is for both: to move the soul apart from the body never, nor the body apart from the soul, so that each, guarding against the other, may grow proportioned and 88c sound. The one who works mathematics, or any other intense study, upon the mind owes the body its counter-motion, by taking up gymnastic; and the one who molds the body with care owes the soul its counter-motions, by using music and all philosophy, if anyone is to deserve to be called, rightly, both beautiful and good. And on the same principle the parts too must be tended, each imitating 88d the form of the whole. For the body is burned and chilled within by what enters it, and dried and moistened again from outside, and undergoes all that follows upon these, under both kinds of motion; if one keeps quiet and hands the body over to those motions, it is overpowered and destroyed; but if one imitates what we named the nurse and foster-mother of the universe, and lets the body never keep still, but moves it and sets some trembling always working in it, he wards off, by motions according to nature, 88e both those from within and those from without; and shaking it in due measure, he brings the wandering affections and parts of the body into order with one another by their kinship—as in the earlier account we gave of the universe—and, setting friend beside friend instead of enemy against enemy, he will not let the body breed wars and diseases, but health

89a as the working result.

Timaeus: Of the movements, again, the best is that which a thing makes in itself by itself—for it is most akin to the movement of thought and of the universe—while the movement under another is worse; worst of all is that which moves a body lying at rest and keeping still, through others, part by part. And so of the purgings and restorations of the body, the best is that through exercise, the second that through rocking—on shipboard, and wherever rides can be had without weariness; a third kind of movement, the medical one that comes of drug-purging, 89b is useful to one under great compulsion, but otherwise is not at all to be accepted by anyone in his right mind. For diseases that do not hold great dangers must not be stirred up with drugs. Every constitution of disease is, in a way, like the nature of living things: for the race of living things, too, comes into being with appointed spans of life for the kind as a whole, and each animal, having the life allotted to it, grows 89c apart from the sufferings of necessity; for the triangles have their power from the very beginnings of each creature and hold together, strong enough to last until a certain time, beyond which no one could ever live out life. So too with the constitution of diseases: when someone destroys it with drugs before the appointed term, the result tends to be that great diseases come from small, and many from few. That is why all such things must be schooled with regimens, so far as a person has leisure, 89d and not, by drugging, provoke a stubborn evil.

And so much, then, for the common living creature and for the part of it that is the body—how one might live most according to reason, both training it and being trained by it, on one's own; but what is to do the educating must itself, earlier and before all, be prepared as far as possible to be most beautiful and best for the work of educating. To go through all this with exactness 89e would itself alone be a work sufficient for the task; but following it in passing, as with what came before, one might carry the account through fittingly enough, viewing it in this way, with an account like this.

Timaeus: As we have said many times—that the soul's forms are settled in us threefold, each in its place, and each of them has its motions—so now too, as briefly as may be, it must be said: that the one which passes its time in idleness, keeping its own motions still, is bound to become the weakest, and the one exercised the strongest;

90a and therefore we must take care that they keep their motions proportionate to one another. As for the most sovereign kind of soul in us, we must think this about it: that a god has given it to each one as a daimon—that which we say dwells at the crown of the body, and, because of its kinship with what is in heaven, lifts us from the earth, our nature being a plant not of earth but of heaven; and this is said most truly: for from that place, where the soul's first growth took root, the divine, hanging our head and root 90b above, keeps the whole body upright. Now whoever has given himself to the appetites, or to rivalry, and toiled hard at all such beliefs, is bound to have his convictions mortal bred into him, and to become mortal through and through, so far as it is at all possible, falling short of it by not even a little, because he has nurtured that part; while whoever has labored at the love of learning and at true understanding, and exercised that part of himself above all, 90c must, if he touches truth, of necessity think immortal and divine thoughts, and, so far as human nature can partake of immortality, fall short in no part of it; and because he constantly tends the divine within him and keeps the daimon that dwells with him well ordered, he is happy above all men. And the tending of anything whatsoever is one and the same: to give each the nourishments and the motions proper to it. To the divine in us the kindred motions are the thinkings 90d and revolutions of the universe; these, then, everyone must follow, setting right the revolutions in our heads that were twisted awry at our birth, by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, and so making the one who understands like the thing understood, according to its ancient nature; and having made it like, he will have reached the end of the best life set before humans by the gods, both for the time now and for the time to come. 90e

And now, indeed, the task laid upon us at the beginning—to go through the universe, down to the birth of humankind—seems very nearly to have its end. For the other living things, how they came to be, we must recall in few words, unless some necessity forces the account longer; that way one would seem to keep better measure with oneself in these discourses. So let what follows be the telling of it.

Timaeus: Of the men that came to be, all who were cowards and lived lives of injustice were, by the likely account, changed and planted as women in the second

91a birth. And at that time, because of these things, the gods contrived the passion of union: they shaped a living creature in us and another in women, giving each a soul, and made each in this way. Into the passage for drink—by which the liquid, passing through the lungs under the kidneys into the bladder and pressed by the breath, is sent out with it—they bored, opening it into the marrow that stands fixed from the head down through the neck along the spine, 91b which in the earlier account we called seed. And this, being ensouled and taking in breath—by the very channel through which it breathed—implanted in it a living desire for flowing forth, and brought the passion for begetting to completion. That is why in men the nature about the genitals has become disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that will not be ruled by reason, and under frenzied appetites strives to master all; while in 91c women again the so-called matrix and womb, for the same reasons, being a desiring creature lodged within for the making of children, when it remains unfruitful beyond the due season for a long while, bears its indignation angrily, and wandering everywhere through the body, blocking the out-paths of breath and suffering nothing to breathe, it casts one into the utmost straits and brings on all manner of other diseases, until the desire and the 91d passion of both, gathering them together—as one plucks fruit from trees—sow upon the womb as upon a plowed field living creatures invisible through their smallness and not yet formed, and then, separating them again and rearing them great within, bring them after that into the light and accomplish the birth of living creatures. Thus women came to be, and the whole female kind. But the tribe of birds was being reshaped, growing feathers instead of hair, from the harmless men, the light ones, who had their heads in the heavens yet believed, in their simplicity, 91e that the proofs about such things were most secure through sight. And the land-going and wild kind came to be from those who made no use of philosophy and gazed not at all on the nature of the heavens, because they no longer used the revolutions in the head, but followed the ruling parts of the soul about the chest.

Timaeus: From these ways of life, then, their forelimbs and heads, dragged toward the ground by kinship, were braced upon the earth, and they took on elongated and manifold

92a crowns, wherever the revolutions in each had been crushed together by their idleness. And from this came their race four-footed and many-footed, the god laying down more supports for the more witless, so that they might be drawn the more toward the ground. And from the most witless of these, whose whole body was stretched altogether toward the ground, since there was no more need of feet, the footless ones were begotten, creeping along the earth. And 92b the fourth kind, the water kind, came from the most senseless and most unteachable of all, whom the remolders judged unworthy even of pure breathing any longer, since their souls held every kind of transgression unclean; and instead of a fine and pure breath of air they thrust them into breathing water, murky and deep. From this came the tribe of fish, and that of shellfish, and together with them all that have come to be water-dwellers, who, as the penalty of their uttermost ignorance, won by lot 92c the uttermost of dwellings. And by these rules, then, all living things, then and now, pass into one another, transformed by the losing and the gaining of intelligence and folly.

And now at last let us declare our account about the universe to have its end. For having taken in mortal and immortal living things, and been completed in this way, this world has become a visible living creature embracing all that is visible, an image of the intelligible, a god perceivable to sense, greatest and best and most beautiful and most perfect—one heaven, this one, the only one of its kind.