Timaeus

17a Socrates: One, two, three. Where is the fourth of our party, my dear Timaeus? Yesterday he was one of the guests, and now he is one of our hosts.

Timaeus: Some sickness has come upon him, Socrates. He would not have missed this meeting on purpose.

Socrates: Then it is your job to do your own share and to fill in for the one who is absent.

17b Timaeus: Of course, and we will fall short in nothing as far as we are able. It would not be right, after you entertained us yesterday with the welcome proper for guests, if we, the rest of us, did not gladly return you the favor with a meal.

Socrates: Do you remember how much I asked you to say, and on what subjects?

Timaeus: We remember some of it, and whatever we have forgotten you can remind us of, since you are here. But rather, if it is not too much trouble for you, go over it again for us from the beginning in a few words, so that it is fixed in our minds more firmly.

17c Socrates: So it shall be. Yesterday, in what I said about the state, the main point was this: what the state should be like and what kind of men it should be made of for it to become, as it seemed to me, the best possible.

Timaeus: And you said it just as we all wanted it, Socrates. It was entirely to our mind.

Socrates: Did we not first set apart within it the class of farmers and all the other crafts, apart from the class of those who would do the fighting?

Timaeus: Yes.

Socrates: And then, giving each person the single pursuit that suits him by nature, 17d one craft for each, we said that those who had to fight before all others must be the city's guards and nothing else, whether the one who came to do harm came from outside or from among the people inside, and that they should be gentle in judging

18a the people they rule, who are their friends by nature, but harsh in battle toward the enemies they run into.

Timaeus: Entirely so.

Socrates: For we said, I believe, that the guardians need a certain kind of character in their soul: at once spirited and also fond of learning and wisdom, to an unusual degree, so that they can be rightly gentle with one group and harsh with the other.

Timaeus: Yes.

Socrates: And what about their upbringing? Were they not raised on physical training and on music, and on the studies that go with these?

18b Timaeus: Certainly.

Socrates: And it was said, I think, that people raised this way must never think of gold or silver or any other possession as their own private property, but must take pay for their guarding from the people they keep safe, like hired soldiers, as much as is reasonable for sensible people, spend it together, live with one another, keep their care on excellence of character at all times, and have no leisure for the other pursuits.

Timaeus: That is exactly how those things were said too.

18c Socrates: And we also mentioned the women, saying that the women whose natures match the men's are the ones to be paired with them, and that all the pursuits must be given in common to all of them, both in war and in the rest of life.

Timaeus: That is how that was said as well.

Socrates: And what about having children? Or is this one easy to remember because it was so unusual: that we made marriages and children common to everyone, and arranged things so that no one would ever learn privately which child was his own, 18d while all would believe that all of them were of one stock, brothers and sisters to one another for everyone within the right age, parents and grandparents for those born before and above them, and children and children's children for those below them?

Timaeus: Yes, those are easy to remember too, just as you say.

Socrates: And do we remember how we said that the men and women in charge must arrange the coming together of the marriages secretly, 18e by means of certain lots, so that the bad are grouped apart and the good are each grouped with their own kind, and so that no one bears a grudge against them for it, since they think chance is the cause of the pairing?

Timaeus: We remember.

19a Socrates: And also that we said the children of the good ones must be raised, while the children of the bad ones must be handed out secretly to the rest of the city; and as the children grow up, the rulers must always keep watch and bring the worthy ones up again, while moving their own unworthy ones into the place of those who return?

Timaeus: That is so.

Socrates: So have we now gone through everything, by taking it again in outline just as yesterday, or are we still missing something from what was said, my dear Timaeus?

19b Timaeus: Not at all. Those were exactly the things that were said, Socrates.

Socrates: Then hear what I want to say next about the state we described, and what my own feeling about it is. My feeling is something like this. Suppose someone saw beautiful animals, whether made by a painter or really alive but keeping still, and longed to see them in motion and competing in the contests that suit 19c their bodies. I have that very same feeling about the state we described. I would gladly hear someone telling in words about the contests that a state takes part in, and see this state competing against other states: going to war in a fitting way, and in the fighting living up to its education and upbringing, in what it does in action and in what it says in words, with each of the other states. So, Critias and Hermocrates, 19d I have passed judgment on myself that I could never be able to praise these men and this city well enough. And there is nothing surprising about that in my case; but I have formed the same opinion about the poets of long ago and the poets of today—not that I look down on the poet's craft, but everyone can plainly see that the class of imitators imitates most easily and best whatever they were raised on, while whatever lies outside each one's upbringing 19e is hard to imitate well in deeds and even harder in words. As for the class of sophists, I consider them very practiced in many other fine speeches, but I am afraid that, since they roam from city to city and never keep a home of their own, they may miss the mark of what philosophical men and statesmen would do and say in deed and in word in their dealings with each group of people, when they act in war and in battles.

Socrates: What is left is the kind of people you are,

20a who have a share in both, in nature and in upbringing. For Timaeus here comes from Locri in Italy, a city with excellent laws, and in wealth and family he is second to no one there; he has held the highest offices and honors in his city, and he has, in my judgment, reached the top of the whole of philosophy. And all of us here know that Critias is no layman in any of the things we talk about. As for Hermocrates, many people bear witness 20b that he is up to all of this in nature and upbringing, and so we should trust it. That is why yesterday, when you asked me to go through the subject of the state, I gladly did you the favor, with this in mind: I knew that no one could give a better account of what comes next than you, if you were willing. For you alone of the people of today could set the state up for a fitting war and give back to it everything that belongs with that. So after I said what I was told to say, I set you the task that I am setting you now. You agreed together, after considering it among yourselves, 20c to pay me back now with the guest-gift of speeches. So here I am, all decked out for them and readier than anyone to receive them.

Hermocrates: Indeed, just as Timaeus here said, Socrates, we will lack nothing in eagerness, and we have no excuse for not doing this. In fact, yesterday, as soon as we left here and came to Critias's guest quarters where we are staying—and even earlier, on the road—we were considering this very thing. 20d So he brought us a story from an old report. Tell it to him now, Critias, so that he can judge along with us whether it is suitable for the task or not.

Critias: That is what must be done, if our third partner Timaeus agrees too.

Timaeus: He does agree.

Critias: Listen, then, Socrates, to a story that is very strange but absolutely true, as Solon, the wisest of the seven, 20e once said. He was a relative and a close friend of our great-grandfather Dropides, as he himself says in many places in his poetry:

Critias: And he spoke to our grandfather Critias, as the old man in turn used to recall to us, of how this city in ancient times had done great and wonderful deeds that had been lost through time and through the death of the people who did them, and that one of them was the greatest of all,

21a and now that we have remembered it, it would be right for us to return you a favor and at the same time, at the festival, to praise the goddess justly and truly, as if singing a hymn.

Socrates: Well said. But what is this deed that Critias spoke of—not as a story, but as something this city really did long ago, according to what he heard from Solon?

Critias: I will tell you, since I heard an old story from a man who was no youngster. For at that time Critias—so he said—was already close to 21b ninety years old, while I was about ten; and it happened to be the festival of the Apatouria in our tribe, the Cureotis. What usually happens at the festival happened then with us children too: our fathers set up prizes for reciting poetry. Many poems by many poets were performed, and since Solon's poems were new at that time, many of us boys sang them. Then one of our clan brothers—whether he really thought so at the time or wanted to do Critias a favor—said that he thought Solon 21c had been the wisest of men in everything else and also, in poetry, the most high-minded of all the poets. The old man—this I remember very well—was very pleased and said with a smile: "If only, Amynander, he had not used poetry as a side task but had worked at it seriously like other men, and had completed the account he brought back from Egypt, and had not been forced by the civil strife and the other troubles he found here when he came 21d to neglect it—then in my judgment neither Hesiod nor Homer nor any other poet would ever have won more fame than him." "And what was the account, Critias?" he said. "It was about the greatest and most famous of all deeds," he said, "and one that would most justly be called the finest: the deed that this city did perform, but of which the story has not survived to this day, because of time and the death of the people who performed it. Tell us from the beginning," he said, "what it was, and how, and from whom Solon heard it and reported it as true." 21e

"There is a district in Egypt," he said, "in the Delta, where at its top the stream of the Nile splits, a district called Saite. The greatest city in that district is Sais, the place King Amasis came from. The people of that city have a founding goddess: her name in Egyptian is Neith, and in Greek, by their account, Athena. And they say they are very fond of Athens and in some way related to the Athenians."

Critias: Solon said he went there and was held in very high honor among them,

22a and also that once, when he was asking the priests who were the most learned about such matters about the times of long ago, he found that neither he himself nor any other Greek knew practically anything about such things. And once, wanting to draw them out into talk about the ancient past, he tried to tell them the oldest stories of our own land: about Phoroneus, who is said to have been the first man, and about Niobe, and after the flood about Deucalion 22b and Pyrrha and how they survived, and to trace the family trees of their descendants, and to work out the number of years and try to reckon the dates for the things he spoke about. Then one of the priests, a very old man, said: "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children, and there is no Greek who is old." When Solon heard this he said: "What do you mean by that?" "You are all young in your minds," he said. "You have no old belief in them that comes from ancient tradition, and no knowledge grown gray with time. The reason for this 22c is this: there have been many destructions of mankind in many ways, and there will be more, the greatest ones by fire and water, and others, lesser ones, in countless other ways. For the story that is told among you too, how once Phaethon, the son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot but was not able to drive it along his father's path, and so burned what was on the earth and was himself struck by a thunderbolt and killed—this story has the form of a myth, but the truth 22d is that there is a shift of the things that travel around the earth in the heavens, and after long stretches of time a destruction of the things on the earth by a great fire. At those times, those who live in the mountains and in high and dry places are destroyed more than those who live near rivers and the sea. But for us the Nile is a savior in other ways and at those times too: it saves us out of that trouble by overflowing. And when the gods flood the earth and cleanse it with waters, those in the mountains survive, the herdsmen together with their flocks, while those in the cities 22e near you are carried down to the sea by the rivers. But in this land neither then nor at any other time does water flow down onto the fields from above; on the contrary, everything by nature rises up from below."

Critias: That is why, and for these reasons, the things preserved here are said to be the oldest. But in truth, in every place where extreme cold or heat does not keep people away, there is always a race of human beings, sometimes more,

23a and sometimes fewer. Whatever fine or great or otherwise notable thing has been done anywhere—among you, or here, or anywhere else we know by report—it has all been written down from of old and preserved here in the temples. But among you and the others the writing has only just been set up again each time, and then, after the usual number of years, a stream from the sky comes upon them like a disease and leaves your people 23b without letters and without learning, so that you become like new again from the beginning, knowing nothing of what happened here or among you in the ancient times. At any rate, the family trees you went through just now, Solon, of the people on your side, are barely different from children's stories. In the first place you remember only one flood of the earth, though many have happened before, and you do not know that the finest and best race of human beings once lived in your land 23c, the race from which you and the whole city that exists there now come, after a small seed of them was once left over; but this has escaped your notice, because for many generations the survivors died out without letters or speech. For there was a time, Solon, before the greatest destruction by water, when the city that is now Athens was the best in war and in every way the best governed, surpassing all others; and it is said to have produced the finest deeds and the finest constitution of all those 23d under the heaven of which we have ever heard. When Solon heard this, he said he was amazed and was full of eagerness, begging the priests to tell him everything about the ancient citizens exactly and in order. The priest said: "There is no grudge against you, Solon; I will speak for your sake and for the sake of your city, but most of all to please the goddess, who received and raised and educated both your city and this one—your city 23e first by a thousand years, taking the seed of your people from Earth and Hephaestus, and this one later. Of the founding of the city here, our temple records give the number of eight thousand years. And of the citizens who lived nine thousand years ago I will tell you in short their laws, and the finest of the deeds done by them:"

Critias: But the exact account of

24a everything in order we will go through again later at our leisure, when we take the written records themselves in hand. Compare your laws with the ones here. For you will find here now many examples of the customs that existed among you then: first the class of priests, set apart from the others; then the class of craftsmen, each practicing its own craft and not mixing with any other; and also the class of herdsmen, the class of hunters, 24b and the class of farmers. And you have certainly noticed that here too the class of fighters is separated from all the other classes, and the law has ordered them to care for nothing except matters of war. There is also the way they are armed, with shields and spears, with which we in Asia were the first to arm ourselves, after the goddess showed the pattern to your people first in that part of the world. And again, about practical wisdom: you see how much care the law took here right at the beginning about 24c the ordering of the world, working out everything, down to divination and medicine for health, from divine matters to human ones, and gaining all the other kinds of learning that go with these. So the goddess arranged and ordered all of this for you first, and settled you in the place where you were born, when she saw the good balance of the seasons there, because it would produce the most intelligent men. And so, since the goddess 24d is both fond of war and fond of wisdom, she chose and settled first the place that would produce men most like herself. You lived there, then, under such laws and were governed even better, and in every way you surpassed all other human beings in excellence, as is natural for people who are the offspring and the pupils of gods. Many are the great deeds of your city that are recorded here and admired, but one of them 24e stands above all the rest in size and excellence. For the records tell how great a power your city once stopped, which in its arrogance was marching against all of Europe and Asia at once, having set out from outside, out of the Atlantic Ocean."

Critias: For at that time that ocean could be crossed. For in front of the strait that you call, as you say, the Pillars of Heracles there lay an island, and this island was larger than Libya and Asia together. From it travelers in those days could reach the other islands, and from the islands

25a toward the whole mainland opposite, around that true sea. For this region here, everything inside the mouth we speak of, has the look of only a harbor with a narrow way in. But that open sea out there, and the land that surrounds it, could most rightly be called, in the full truth, a continent. In this island of Atlantis there had grown up a great and marvelous power of kings. It ruled the whole island, and many other islands too, and parts of the continent. And beyond this, it ruled the lands inside here as well: 25b all of Libya as far as Egypt, and all of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This whole power gathered itself into one. It then made a single rush to enslave your land and our land and every place inside the mouth, all of them at once. Then, Solon, the power of your city showed itself to all mankind in its courage and in its strength. Taking the lead of all men in bravery and in the skills of war, 25c it led the Greeks at first, and then, when the others had fallen away, it was left alone by necessity. It came to the very last dangers. It defeated the attackers and set up a trophy. It kept those who were not yet slaves from being enslaved. And it set free, without stint, all the rest of us who live inside the Pillars of Heracles. But at a later time there came extraordinary earthquakes and floods. One 25d terrible day and night fell. All your fighting men sank into the earth at once. And the island of Atlantis likewise sank into the sea and vanished. That is why even now the sea out there is hard to pass and impossible to explore. A very thin layer of mud lies in the way. The island left it as it settled down into the deep.

That, Socrates, is what old 25e Critias told you in brief, as he had it by hearing from Solon. Yesterday, while you were speaking about the city and about the men you described, I marveled as I called to mind the things I am telling now. I saw how, by some divine stroke of luck and not at random, most of what you said fell in with what Solon said.

Critias: But I did not

26a want to tell it right away; for after so long a time I did not remember it well enough. So I saw that I first had to go over everything for myself with care, and only then speak. That is why I quickly agreed yesterday to what you asked. I thought that in all work of this kind the greatest task is to lay down a speech that fits the plan, and that there we would find enough help. So, as this man said, yesterday I left here at once 26b and told them the story as I recalled it. Then I went away, and during the night I went over almost all of it and took it back into memory. How true is the saying that what is learned in childhood has a marvelous way of staying fixed in the mind! What I heard yesterday, I do not know whether I could take all of it back into memory. But these things, which I have known through a very long time, I would be utterly amazed if any of them had slipped away from me. I heard them then with much pleasure 26c and play. The old man taught me eagerly, and he often asked me questions. So they stuck in my mind like marks burned into a picture that cannot be washed off. And so at daybreak I told these very things to these men at once, so that they would have plenty of speech to share with me. Now, then, for the very purpose for which all this has been said, I am ready to speak, Socrates, not only in summary, but in detail, just as I heard each part. And the citizens and the city that you described to us yesterday as in a story, we will now carry 26d over into truth and set here. We will say that this city is that one. We will say that the citizens you had in mind are those real ancestors of ours whom the priest spoke of. They will fit in every way. We will not miss the mark when we say that they are the men who lived at that time. And all of us, taking the work in common, will try to give, as well as we can, what is fitting, as you ordered. So, Socrates, we must now consider whether this plan of ours is to your mind, 26e or whether we must look for some other plan in its place.

Socrates: And what could we take up in its place, Critias, better than this one? It suits the sacrifice to the goddess that we are now holding better than any other, because of its kinship with her. And it is a very great thing that this is not a story made up, but a true account. For how, and from where, could we find others if we give these up? There is no way. So it is by good luck that you must speak, and that I must now, instead of yesterday's speeches,

27a keep quiet and listen to you in return.

Critias: Look, then, Socrates, at how we have set up the feast for you. It seemed right to us that Timaeus should speak first. He is the best astronomer among us, and he has made it his work to know most about the nature of the whole. He will begin from the birth of the world, and he will end with the nature of man. I am to speak after him. From his speech I will receive men as already come to be, and from you as trained with special care—27b some of them, at least. Then, following the account and the law of Solon, I will bring them in as citizens of this city, as if into a court with us as judges, on the ground that they are the Athenians of that time. The report of the sacred writings showed them to us, though they were hidden. The speeches after that we will make as about citizens and Athenians who already exist.

Socrates: It looks as if I am to be repaid in full measure and in splendor for my feast of speeches. Your task, then, Timaeus, it seems, will be to speak next, after you have called on the gods according to law.

27c Timaeus: Well, Socrates, all who have even a small share of good sense always call on a god at the start 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 had no birth at all—must call on gods and goddesses and pray, if we are not to miss the truth completely. We pray that everything we say be above all according to their mind, 27d and then in keeping with ours. Let that be our prayer about the gods. And now we must call on our own powers, so that you may learn most easily, and so that I may show my own thought as clearly as I can about the matters before us.

Timaeus: In my judgment, then, we must first make this division: what is that which always is and has no coming-to-be, and what is that which is coming to be

28a always, but never is? The first is grasped by thought together with reason, and it is always in the same state. The other is grasped by opinion together with sense that is without reason. It comes to be and passes away, but it never truly is. And again, everything that comes to be must come to be by some cause. For nothing can get a birth without a cause. Whenever the craftsman looks toward what is always in the same state, and uses a model of that kind as he works out the form and the power of his work, everything made this way must of necessity 28b turn out beautiful. But whenever he works toward what has come to be, using a model that was born, the work is not beautiful. Now the whole heaven—or cosmos, or whatever other name anyone would most accept for it—let that be our name for it. About it we must first ask the question that must be asked at the start about everything: Was it always, having no beginning of coming to be? Or did it come to be, starting from some beginning? It came to be. For it is visible and touchable, and it has a body. All such things are objects of sense. And 28c things of sense, grasped by opinion together with sense, have been shown to be things that come to be and were born. And we say again that what has come to be must have come to be by some cause.

Timaeus: To find the maker and father of this whole is a task. And having found him, it is impossible to tell of him to all men. And we must ask about it again, toward which of the two models the builder made

29a it, toward that which is always in the same state and unchanging, or toward that which has come to be? If this cosmos is beautiful, and its craftsman good, then clearly he looked to the eternal. If not—and that no one may say—then to that which has come to be. But it is plain to everyone that he looked to the eternal. For the cosmos is the most beautiful of the things that have come to be, and he is the best of the causes. So this cosmos, having come to be, was made in likeness of that which is grasped by reason and intelligence and stays always in the same state. 29b Since these things are so, it must by every necessity be an image of something. And it is most important of all to begin from the natural beginning. So we must draw the line here, for the image and for the model it is copied from: the accounts must belong to the same kind as the things they explain. About that which is lasting and firm and seen clearly by intelligence, the accounts must be lasting and unchangeable. So far as accounts can be, they must stand beyond refutation and defeat, and 29c nothing may be lacking in them. But the accounts of the thing made in likeness of that other, which is itself an image, must be likely ones, in the same measure as those others. As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. So, Socrates, if we find we cannot, in the many things about the gods and about the birth of the whole, give accounts that agree with themselves in every point and are exact to the full, do not be surprised. Rather, we must be content if we fall short of the likely in nothing. We must remember that I who speak 29d and you who judge have human nature. So we must accept the likely story about these things, and we must look for nothing beyond it.

Socrates: It is best, Timaeus. We must accept it fully, just as you say. We have received your opening speech with great wonder. Now finish for us, in your turn, the task you laid down.

Timaeus: Let us say, then, for what cause the maker put together becoming and 29e this whole. He was good. And no jealousy about anything ever arises in one who is good. Being free of it, he wanted everything to become as much as possible like himself.

Timaeus: This, then, is the most sovereign beginning of becoming and of the world, the one that

30a one would most rightly accept, taking it from wise men. God wanted all things to be good, and nothing bad, so far as was possible. So he took all that was visible. It was not still. It was moving without measure and without order. He brought it from disorder into order, for he judged that this was in every way better than that. It was not right then, and it is not right now, for the best to do anything but the most beautiful. 30b So he reasoned, and he found that of the things visible by nature, nothing without intelligence could ever be, as a whole more beautiful than a whole, than that which has intelligence. And again, intelligence could never come to anything apart from soul. Because of this reasoning, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, and so he wove the whole together. He did it so that the work might be, by its nature, as beautiful and as good as possible. So, by the likely account, we must say that this world became, through the providence of God, 30c a living thing with soul and with intelligence, in truth.

This being so, we must say next what living thing the maker made it like. Let us not stoop to compare it with any living thing whose nature is that of a part. Nothing like an unfinished thing could ever become beautiful. The other living things are parts, each after its kind, of one. Let us say that the world is most like that one. For all the intelligible living things are held within that one, just as this 30d world holds us and all the other visible creatures it has put together.

Timaeus: For God, wanting to make it most like the best of the intelligible things, the one complete in every way, made it one visible living thing, holding within it all

31a the living things whose nature is akin to its own. Did we speak rightly, then, when we said it is one heaven? Or would it be more right to say there are many, endless heavens? It is one, if it was made in the likeness of the model. That which holds all the intelligible living things could never be a second one beside another. There would have to be another living thing around those two, of which those two would be parts. And then this world would no longer be said to be like those two. It would more rightly be said to be like that other one, the one that holds them. So that this world may be like the complete living thing in its oneness, 31b the maker of worlds made neither two nor endless worlds. This heaven alone has come to be, only-begotten. It still is, and it will still be.

Now what has come to be must have a bodily form, and it must be visible and touchable. Without fire nothing could ever become visible. Without something solid nothing could become touchable. And nothing is solid without earth. So God, beginning to build the body of the whole, made it from fire and earth. But two things alone cannot be well joined without a third. 31c There must be some bond in the middle, to bring the two together. The best bond is the one that makes itself and the things it joins as much as possible one. And proportion is by nature the best at doing that.

Timaeus: For whenever among three numbers, or masses,

32a or powers of any kind, the middle is such that what the first is to the middle, the middle is to the last. And again, what the last is to the middle, the middle is to the first. Then the middle becomes first and last, and the last and the first both become middles in turn. So all of them must come to be the same, of necessity. And things that become the same as one another will all be one. Now if the body of the whole had had to come to be a flat surface with no depth, one middle term would have been enough. 32b It would have joined the things to itself and itself to the things. But the world had to be solid, as its nature required. And one middle term never joins solids; two middles always fit them together. So God set water and air in the middle, between fire and earth. He worked them toward one another, as far as it was possible, by the same ratio: as fire is to air, so air is to water. And as air is to water, so water is to earth. He joined them together and built a heaven visible and touchable. And for these reasons, from these things, 32c and from the number four, the body of the world was born, brought into one by proportion. From them it gained friendship, so that it came into unity with itself. No other can undo it, except the one who joined it.

The building of the world took each one of the four as a whole. The maker built it from all the fire, all the water, all the air, and all the earth. He left outside it no part, and no power, of any of them. He thought this: 32d first, that it should be, as far as possible, a complete living thing made of complete

33a parts.

Timaeus: And there is one thing more. Nothing was left over from which another thing like it could have been made. And it was to be without old age and without sickness. He saw that a body put together has hot and cold, and all the things with strong powers, standing around it outside. They fall on it at the wrong time. They break it apart, bring disease and old age, and make it waste away. Because of this cause and this reasoning, he made it one, complete out of all wholes, without age and without sickness. 33b And he gave it the shape that was fitting and akin to it. The living thing was to hold all living things within itself. For such a thing the fitting shape would be the one that takes in within itself all the shapes there are. So he made it round, shaped like a sphere, and turned it smooth, as on a lathe. From its center to its edges it stands at equal distance in every direction. Of all shapes it is the most complete, and the most like itself. He judged that like is ten thousand times more beautiful than unlike. And for many reasons he made its whole outside, all around, perfectly smooth. 33c It had no need of eyes. Nothing visible was left outside it. It had no need of hearing. Nothing audible was left. There was no air around it that needed to breathe. Nor did it need any organ to take food into itself, or to send out again what had before been dried up. Nothing went out of it, and nothing came to it from anywhere, for there was nothing else. It fed itself on its own decay. All things were felt and done within it and by it. By craft it came to be. 33d The one who put it together judged that it would be better self-sufficient than in need of anything else. And he did not think it needful to attach hands, for no use. It had no use for taking hold, nor for striking back at anyone. Nor did he attach feet. Nor, in general, the service that goes with

34a walking.

Timaeus: For he gave it the motion proper to its body. Of the seven motions, he gave it the one that has most to do with intelligence and thought. So he turned it in a circle, in the same place and within itself, and made it move by turning round. All the other six motions he took away, and he made it free of their wandering. For this circular motion it had no need of feet. So he brought it to birth without legs and without feet.

Now this world, being the whole and eternal thought of God about the god that was 34b one day to be—when it had been thought out, he made its body smooth and even everywhere, equal in every direction from its center, whole and complete out of complete bodies. He set soul in the middle of it. He stretched the soul through the whole, and then he wrapped the body around it from outside. And he made it a heaven turning round in a circle, one and alone. By its excellence he made it able to be its own companion, needing nothing else, and knowing itself and befriending itself well. For all these reasons, he brought it to birth a blessed god.

And the soul, too, he did not make as we now try to say, as if it were later and younger than the body. 34c God would not have joined them so as to let the older be ruled by the younger. It is because we share so much in chance and guesswork that we speak this way. He made the soul earlier and older than the body, in birth and in excellence, as its mistress and its ruler, to rule the thing that was to be ruled,

35a He built it out of these things, and in this way.

Timaeus: From the indivisible being, which always stays the same, and from the divided being that comes to be around bodies, he blended a third kind of being in between the two. It was made from both—from the nature of the same, in turn, and from the nature of the other—and he built it up in between their indivisible part and the part of them that is divided around bodies. He took these three things that existed and blended them all into one single form, forcing the nature of the other, which is hard to blend, into the same thing. 35b Then he mixed it together with being, and when he had made one thing out of three, he divided this whole again into as many portions as it needed, and each portion was a mixture of the same, of the other, and of being. He began dividing in this way. First he took one portion from the whole. Next he took a second portion, twice that size. He took a third portion, half again as much as the second and three times the first. He took a fourth portion, twice the second. He took a fifth portion, three times the 35c third. He took a sixth portion, eight times the first, and a seventh portion, twenty-seven times the first.

Timaeus: After these things he began to fill in

36a the double and the triple intervals. He was still cutting portions off from it and setting them between these intervals, so that in each interval there were two means. One of the two exceeded the outer terms by the same fraction of each, and was exceeded by them by the same fraction. The other exceeded by an equal number and was exceeded by an equal number. When the bonds had formed in the earlier intervals—distances of one and a half, of one and a third, and of one and an eighth—36b he filled every interval of one and a third with the interval of one and an eighth, leaving a small part of each one over. When that leftover fraction was set as a number against a number, its terms were 256 to 243. And at that point the mixture, from which he had cut all these pieces, was completely used up. So he split this whole structure lengthwise into two halves. Then he bent each one, middle onto middle, like a cross, and made them into one circle. He fastened them to themselves and to each other at the point directly opposite the crossing, and he kept them turning around by the motion that carries them in a circle, always in the same place. 36c He made one circle outer and the other inner. The outer motion he marked out as that of the nature of the same; the inner motion, that of the other. He turned the circle of the same around the side, toward the right, and the circle of the other along the diameter, toward the left. And he gave the mastery to the 36d rotation of the same and the like; for he left that one circle undivided. The inner circle he cut six times into seven unequal circles, each keeping the ratio of double and triple—three of each kind. He ordered those inner circles to move in opposite directions to one another. Three of them moved at the same speed, and four at speeds unlike one another and unlike the three, though each still moved in a fixed ratio.

And when the whole structure of the soul had come out as its builder intended, he then built all the body-like stuff inside 36e it, and joined middle to middle. The soul spread out from the middle to the far edge of heaven all around, wrapped heaven on the outside, and turned within itself. So it began a divine start of unceasing and intelligent life, for all time to come.

Timaeus: So the body of heaven came to be visible, while the soul itself is invisible, though it shares in reasoning and

37a harmony. It is a soul. It was made by the best of the intelligible things that always are, and it is the best of the things that have been born. It was blended from the nature of the same, from the nature of the other, and from being—three portions—divided in due proportion and bound together. It turns upon itself, and whenever it touches something whose being is scattered, or something indivisible, it is stirred through all of itself, and it says what each given thing is the same as and what it is 37b other than: what it is most of all, and where, and how, and when it happens—both about the things that come to be, what each thing is and what it undergoes in relation to each thing, and about the things that always hold the same state. And the account—the true statement that comes to be about the other and about the same—is carried along in the soul as it moves under its own motion, without voice or sound. When it arises about what the senses take in, and the circle of the other, going straight, announces it through the whole soul, then sure and true beliefs come to be. 37c But when it arises about what reasons, and the circle of the same, running smooth and true, reveals it, then intelligence and knowledge necessarily come to be. And if anyone says that what these two arise in is anything other than soul, he will say anything rather than the truth.

And when the father who had made it saw it move and live—an image of the everlasting gods—he delighted in it and rejoiced, and he planned to make it still more like its model. 37d Now the model itself is an everlasting living thing. So he tried to make this universe too like it, to the limit of its capacity. The nature of that living thing was eternal. It was impossible to attach that fully to anything born. So he planned to make a moving image of eternity. While he put the heavens in order, he made an image of eternity that stays one, an everlasting image going by number—and that is what we have called time. 37e Days, nights, months, and years did not exist before the heavens came to be. He planned their birth together with the heavens' construction. All of these are parts of time, and "was" and "will be" are forms of time that have come to be. We turn them onto everlasting being without noticing, and that is not correct.

Timaeus: For we say that it was, and is, and will be; but only "is" fits it by the true

38a true account. "Was" and "will be" are rightly said of the becoming that moves in time. For those two are motions. But what always holds the same state cannot move at all. It is not right to say that it becomes older or younger through time, or that it ever came to be, or has just now come to be, or will be again. In general, none of the things that becoming attached to what moves in our senses belongs to it. Those forms came to be when time, imitating eternity, circled by number. And besides these, there are still points like these: 38b that what has come to be "is" what has come to be, and what is becoming "is" what is becoming, and that what will come to be "is" what will come to be, and that what is not "is" not-being. We speak none of these accurately. Perhaps now is not the right moment to sort out such things exactly.

Time came to be along with the heavens, so that, born together, they may also come apart together, if ever they do come apart. It was made on the pattern of the everlasting nature, so that it would be as like it as possible. 38c For the model is a living thing that is for all eternity, while the heavens have come to be and are and will be through all time. So, by this reasoning and this plan of the god for the birth of time—so that time might be born—he made the sun and the moon and five other stars, called "wanderers," to set apart and guard the numbers of time. He made the body of each one and set them in the circles that the circle of the other traveled, seven in number—38d seven bodies in seven circles. The moon went into the circle closest to the earth, the sun into the second above the earth, and the morning star and the star called sacred to Hermes into the circle that runs at the same speed as the sun. But those two hold a power opposite to his. That is why the sun and the star of Hermes and the morning star overtake one another and are overtaken, each in turn. Why the god set up the rest where he did, and for what reasons—if someone went through all of it, the account, being a side matter, would cause more trouble than the purpose it is told for. 38e These things, perhaps, might get the full telling they deserve later, at leisure.

Timaeus: And when each of these bodies had come to the motion proper to it, so that time was completed together with all the things that had to be worked along with it—then, since their bodies were bound fast with bonds of soul, they became living creatures, and they learned the order given to them, moving in the motion of the other

39a which is slanted. Since the motion of the same was going on and ruling through it, some of the stars ran around the larger circle and some around the smaller. The ones on the smaller circle went around faster, and the ones on the larger circle more slowly. Under the motion of the same, the fastest ones seemed to be overtaken by the slower ones. That motion bent all their circles into a spiral, because their motion went two ways at once, in opposite directions. 39b And since that motion was itself the fastest, it showed the star that drew away from it most slowly as the nearest. And so that there might be some clear measure of slowness and speed among them for the eight circuits, the god lit a light in the second circle from the earth—the one we now call the sun—so that it might shine through all the heaven as much as possible, and so that living things might share in number, as many as it was right for, learning it from the 39c rotation of the same and the like. Night and day came to be in this way, then, and for this reason: they are the period of the one and wisest turning. The month comes whenever the moon, having gone around her own circle, overtakes the sun; the year, whenever the sun has gone around his own circle. But people have not grasped the circuits of the others; only a few out of the many have. They do not name them, and they do not measure them against one another by numbers. The result is that, so to speak, 39d they do not know that these wanderings are time—wanderings countless in number and wonderfully varied. And yet it can still be understood well enough that the perfect number of time fulfills the perfect year at that moment when the relative speeds of all eight circuits, completed together, come to a head, measured against the circle of the same, which moves in like manner. It was for these reasons, then, that the stars were begotten which travel through the heavens and have their turnings—so that this universe might be as like as possible 39e to the perfect and intelligible living thing, in its imitation of the everlasting nature.

And by then he had finished everything else, down to the birth of time, in the likeness of the thing he modeled it on. But it was still unlike its model in one way: it did not yet hold all the living things inside itself. This remaining part he now worked out, stamping it from the nature of the model. The forms that intelligence sees within the living thing that truly is—what kinds they are, and how many—of just those kinds and that number he decided this universe too must have.

Timaeus: There are four kinds. One is the heavenly race of gods; another

40a the winged kind that travels the air; the third is the kind that lives in water; and the fourth, the kind that walks on dry land. He made most of the divine kind out of fire, so that it would be as bright as possible to see and the most beautiful. And as it was to be like the whole universe, he made it round, like a wheel. He set its intelligence in the wisdom of the highest, to follow after it, and assigned it a place all around the heavens in a circle—a true ornament, worked over the whole of it. He gave each one two motions: one that stays in the same place, always 40b thinking the same thoughts about the same things; and one that moves forward, ruled by the rotation of the same and the like. The other five motions he left unmoving and standing still, so that each might become as good as possible. For that reason, then, all the fixed stars came to be—divine living things, everlasting, turning in the same place at the same rate, staying put forever. But the stars that turn aside and have the kind of wandering described earlier came to be for those reasons. And the earth, our nurse, winding about 40c the axis stretched through it from pole to pole, he devised as guardian and maker of night and day—the first and oldest of the gods that have come to be inside the heaven. Now, their dances, and their standings against one another, and the circlings-back of their circles upon themselves and their advances—and in their meetings, which gods come into line with which, and which stand face to face, and through which they pass ahead of one another, and at what times each is hidden from us and then shows itself again, sending fears and signs of the things 40d that will happen afterward to people who cannot work out the reckoning—to say all this without seeing those models would be wasted effort. But enough has been said here. Let the account of the visible and begotten gods end here, at its natural close.

As for the birth of the other kinds of spirits, to tell it and to know it is more than our powers allow. But we must believe those who spoke before. They are children of gods, as they said, and clearly they know their own ancestors. 40e It is impossible to disbelieve the children of gods, even when they speak without likely proofs and without proofs of necessity. Following the law, we must trust them, since they claim to be reporting about their own family.

Timaeus: So let the birth of these gods be settled among us as those people told it, and let it be said like this. The children of Earth and Heaven were Ocean and Tethys; and their children were Phorcys and Cronus and Rhea and all who came after

41a them. From Cronus and Rhea came Zeus and Hera and all the brothers we know of, and then the children of these as well. So when every one of the gods had come to be—both those who circle about in the open and all those who appear as much as they choose—the maker of this universe spoke to them like this:

Gods of gods—those works whose maker and father I am—what came to be through me cannot be undone unless I will it. 41b Everything that is bound can be undone, true. But it is an evil for what is beautifully fitted together and in good condition to want to come undone. So, since you have come to be, you are not immortal, and not fully beyond being undone. Still, you will never be undone, and you will never meet a share in death. You have won a bond of my will, which is greater and more sovereign than the bonds you were tied with when you came to be. Now learn what I show you and say to you. Three mortal kinds are still unborn. If they are not born, the heaven will be incomplete, for it will not have all the kinds of living things within 41c itself. And it must have them, if it is to be complete enough. But if they are born through me and share in life, they will be made equal to the gods. So, so that mortal things may exist and this whole universe may truly be all-complete, turn, as your nature leads, to the making of living things, and imitate my power in your own births. And so far as it is right for them to share the immortal name, I will sow the divine part in them that rules—the part that follows justice always and follows you willingly—and having sown it and given it its start, 41d I will hand it over to you. The rest is your work: weaving the mortal onto the immortal, make living creatures. Beget them, feed them, make them grow, and take them in again as they waste away.

He said this, and turned back to the first mixing bowl, the one in which he had mixed and blended the soul of the universe. He poured in what was left of the earlier material, mixing it in much the same way, but no longer unmixed and pure in the same way as before—only second grade and third. When he had put the whole thing together, he divided out souls, as many as the stars, 41e and assigned one to each star. Then he set them each in place, as if into a chariot, and showed them the nature of the universe. And he told them the laws of destiny: their first birth would be one and the same for all, so that none should be lessened by him; and they were to be sown into the instruments of time that suited each

42a there to grow into the most god-fearing kind of living thing. Human nature is double. The better part should be the kind that would later be called "man."

Timaeus: And whenever they were necessarily planted in bodies—one thing of their body coming on, and another going—first, sensation necessarily grew up in all of them, one kind, born in them, out of the violent impacts. Second, love, mixed with pleasure and pain. Besides these, fear and anger, and whatever follows those two, and whatever is by nature set against them. 42b If they mastered these, they would live with justice; if they were mastered by them, with injustice. Whoever lived well for the time given to him went back again to the home of the star he was born with, and he lived a blessed life in his familiar ways. But whoever failed in this changed at his second birth into a woman's nature. 42c And if he still did not stop doing evil there, he changed again, in keeping with the likeness of his own bad habit, into some beast-like nature, and kept changing. He did not rest from his toils until he had mastered with reason the great crowd within him—the later growth, fastened on from fire and water and air and earth, noisy and without reason—and, drawing it along by the circle of the same and the like within him, he had come to the form of the first and best state. 42d And when he had laid down all these laws for them, so that he would be without blame for any evil of theirs afterward, he sowed some of them into the earth, some into the moon, and some into the other instruments of time. After the sowing he handed the rest over to the younger gods: to mold mortal bodies; to shape what was left over of the human soul that still had to be added, 42e and all the things that follow from that; and to rule over these; and to steer the mortal creature as beautifully and as well as they could—so long as it did not itself become the cause of evils to itself.

And having set all these things in order, he stayed in his own usual state.

Timaeus: And while he stayed so, his children took note of their father's order and obeyed it. Taking the immortal beginning of a mortal creature, and imitating their maker, they borrowed fire and earth and water and air from the universe

43a The portions were to be given back again later. They glued the parts they took to what was like them, not with the unbreakable bonds by which they themselves were held; instead they fused them with pegs so tiny that no one could see them, packed close together, and they made each body one thing out of all of them. Then they put the circles of the immortal soul into a body that things flow into and flow out of. When the circles were tied into this great river, they could neither master it nor be mastered by it. The river swept them along, and they swept it along. So the 43b whole animal was in motion, but it went in disorder and without reason, wherever it happened to go, with all six motions at once. It moved forward and backward, then to the right and the left, down and up, wandering through all six places. 43c The wave that flooded in and drained away, the wave that gave it food, was large. And everything that struck the circuits upset them even more. This happened when someone's body met fire from outside that belonged to something else, or hit the hard, solid earth, or the slippery streams of water, or when winds rushing through the air caught it. Through all these things, the motions passed through the body and fell upon the soul. Because of this, they were given their name then, and all of them together are still called sensations today. 43d And at that time these motions, supplying the greatest and most violent movement, moved along with the channel that flowed without stopping, and shook the circles of the soul hard. They completely blocked the circle of the Same, running against it, and stopped it from ruling and from going its own way. And they shook the circle of the Other apart. The three intervals of each kind, of the double and the triple, and the joining means and couplings of three-to-two, four-to-three, and nine-to-eight, were not completely undone, except by the one who had bound them. Yet they now made every kind of twisting 43e of all the circles, and every kind of bending and ruin of the circles, in every way that was possible, so that the circles were barely held to one another. They moved, but they moved without reason—now in opposite directions, now sideways, now upside down. It is like this: when a man lies on his back, with his head resting on the ground and his feet thrown up against something, then in that state, both for the man it happens to and for the people watching him, his right seems left and his left seems right, each for each of them.

Timaeus: So the rotations suffered this, and other things like it, violently,

44a whenever they met with something outside from the kind of the Same or from the kind of the Other. Then, calling the Same "other" and the Other "same," against the truth, they became false and foolish; and no circle in them was then ruling or leading. When certain sensations, moving in from outside, fell upon them and dragged the whole vessel of the soul along with them, then those sensations, though mastered themselves, seemed to rule. 44b Because of all these experiences, the soul is at first, when it is newly tied into a mortal body, without intelligence. But when the flow of growth and food grows less, and the circles, coming back to calm, go their own road again and settle more as time goes on, then the turnings are guided back to the natural course of each circle. They name the Other and the Same correctly, and they make the person who has them become intelligent. And if someone adds to them right nurture and education, 44c he becomes whole and perfectly healthy, and he escapes the greatest disease. But if he neglects them, he travels through life lame, and he comes back to Hades unfinished and without intelligence. These things happen later, though. What is set before us now must be gone through more exactly. The things before this—the birth of the body part by part, and the soul, and through what causes and what care of the gods it came to be—must be set out by those who hold to what is most likely, 44d going this same road as they do it.

The two divine circles: the gods imitated the round shape of the whole and tied them into a ball-shaped body, the thing we now name the head. This part is the most divine, and it rules over everything in us. The gods gathered the whole body together to serve it, since they understood that it was to share in every kind of motion there would be. 44e And so that the head, rolling along the ground—a ground with heights and depths of every kind—would not be stuck, unable to climb over some places and get down from others, they gave it the body as a carriage and an easy way to travel.

Timaeus: That is why the body got its length, and why it grew four limbs that stretch out and bend; the god planned this way of travel. By gripping these limbs and bracing on them, the body became able to move through every kind of place,

45a It carries the home of what is most divine and most holy above the rest of us. For that reason, legs and hands grew onto it. 45b The gods judged the front more honorable and more commanding than the back, and so they gave us most of our movement in that direction. A person's front had to be set apart and unlike the rest of his body. That is why, first, around the hollow of the head, they set the face onto the front of it and tied to it the tools of all the soul's planning. They ordered that the part that is by nature in front should be the part that shares in rule. 45c Of these tools, they first built the eyes, which carry light. They bound them in for this reason. Out of the part of fire that cannot burn, but gives a mild light, a light kin to every day, they made a body come to be. For the pure fire inside us, brother to that fire, they made to flow through the eyes, smooth and thick throughout, and they packed the middle of the eyes most full of it, so that only that pure kind strained through clean, and everything thicker was held back. 45d So when the light about the stream of sight is of the day's own kind, it flows out like to like, joins into one solid thing, and forms one body of kindred stuff along the straight line of the eyes, wherever the stream falling from inside meets something outside. This whole thing, made to feel alike through its likeness, passes on the motions of whatever it touches, and of whatever touches that, into the whole body, all the way to the soul. And so it gives the sense by which we say we see. But when the kindred fire goes away into night, the stream is cut off. Going out toward what is unlike, it changes and is put out like a flame, no longer joining with the air next to it, since that air holds no fire. So the person stops seeing, and this is what brings sleep on. For the gods made a device to keep sight safe—the eyelids' 45e nature: when these close, they shut in the power of the fire inside. That power then spreads out and evens the motions inside; when they are evened, quiet comes; and when much quiet has come, a sleep with few dreams falls.

Timaeus: But if some greater motions are left behind—the kind that stay, in whatever places they stay—

46a such and so many images do they supply, made alike inside and outside; and when a person wakes, these are remembered. The making of images in mirrors, and in everything smooth and bright, is no longer hard to make out. For out of the meeting of the two fires, the fire inside and the fire outside, and out of one surface always forming on the smooth part and being reshaped in many ways, 46b all such things appear by necessity, when the fire about the face is packed together with the fire about the sight on the smooth, bright surface. Left things show as right, because the meeting happens with opposite parts of the sight on opposite sides, against the settled habit of meeting. But right things show as right and left things as left, the other way around, when the light, as it joins with what it joins with, falls to the other side; and this happens when the smooth face of a mirror takes on a rise on this side or that and pushes the right part of the sight to the left, and each part to its opposite. 46c Turned along the length of the face, the same thing makes the whole image show upside down, pushing the lower part of the light to the top and the upper part back to the bottom.

All these things are among the joint causes that the god uses as servants, 46d as he completes the form of the best as far as he can. But most people take them to be not joint causes but the causes of everything, as they cool and heat, pack together and break apart, and produce all such things. Yet it is not possible for them to have any reason or intelligence in anything. For of the things that are, one must say that the soul alone is the thing that can gain intelligence; the soul is unseen, while fire, water, earth, and air have all come to be as bodies that can be seen. The lover of intelligence and knowledge must hunt for the causes of intelligent nature first, and for the things that come to be because other things move them and move yet others by necessity second. 46e This is what we must do too: both kinds of causes must be spoken of, but apart—the ones that with intelligence are makers of things fine and good, and the ones that, cut off from intelligence, always turn out whatever falls to them, without order.

Timaeus: So let it be said that the eyes are joint causes of the power sight now holds; but their greatest useful work, the thing for which the god

47a gave them to us, must be said next. Sight, then, by my account, has become the cause of the greatest help to us: none of the words now spoken about the whole would ever have been spoken if we had not seen the stars, the sun, and the sky. But now, from seeing day and night, the months and the turns of the years, and the equinoxes and the solstices, number has been worked out for us, and we have been given the idea of time and the search into the nature of the whole. 47b From these we got philosophy, and no greater good has come or will ever come to the mortal race as a gift from the gods. So I say this is the greatest good of the eyes. As for the other, smaller goods, what could we sing praise for? A man without philosophy, if he went blind, would grieve and mourn over them for nothing. But let this be the cause we give for these things: the god found out sight and gave it to us, so that, seeing the circuits of intelligence in the sky, we might use them for the turnings of our own thought, 47c which are akin to those circuits, ours disturbed while those are calm; and, learning them and taking part in the natural correctness of reason, and copying the god's circuits, which never wander, we might set straight the wanderings within us. About voice and hearing, again the same account holds: they were given by the gods for these same ends. For speech has been set up for these very ends, and it brings the greatest share to them; and all that part of music 47d useful to the voice for hearing was given for the sake of harmony. Harmony has motions akin to the circuits of the soul in us. It is useful to anyone who uses the Muses with intelligence, not for senseless pleasure, as it now seems to be, but it was given by the Muses as an ally, to set in order and bring into agreement with itself the circuit of the soul in us that has come to be out of tune. And rhythm too was given for these same ends by the same gods, a helper against the lack of measure and the want 47e of grace that comes to be in most of us.

So almost everything that has been said, except a little, has shown the things made through intelligence. But we must also set beside the account the things that come to be through necessity.

Timaeus: For the birth of this world

48a came to be as a blend, from necessity and the ordering of intelligence together. Intelligence ruled over necessity by persuading it to lead most of the things that come to be toward what is best. In this way, with necessity beaten by wise persuasion, this whole was put together at the beginning. So if anyone is to tell how it truly came to be, he must mix in as well the kind of cause that wanders, the kind by which things are naturally carried along. 48b So here we must turn back again, and, taking for these very things another beginning that fits them, we must again begin from the start about them, as we did back then about the things of that time. We must look at the nature of fire, water, air, and earth before the birth of the sky, and at their states before that time. For no one has yet shown their birth; but we speak of fire and of each of the others as if we knew what fire is, setting them down as the beginnings of the whole, its elements; yet even to compare them to the shapes within a syllable 48c would not be fitting for anyone with even a little sense. But now let our position be this: what we think about the beginning or beginnings of all things, or in whatever way seems right about them, must not be said now—not for any other reason, but because it is hard, in the present way of going through the subject, to make clear what we think. So do not think that I must speak of it; and I could not persuade myself that I would be setting my hand rightly 48d on so great a work. But keeping what was said at the start—the power of likely accounts—I will try to speak in likely terms no less than before about each thing and about all; indeed, from the start onward, more than before. So now again, at the start of what we say, we call on the god to save us from a strange and unaccustomed story and to carry us through to the belief in likely things, and 48e let us begin again to speak.

This new beginning about the whole must be divided more finely than the last one. For then we divided two kinds; now a third other kind must be shown.

Timaeus: The two kinds were enough for what was said before: one was the form taken as the model, intelligible and always the same; and the copy

49a of the model was the second, having birth and being visible. The third kind we did not divide off then, since we thought the two were enough. But now the account seems to force us to try to show, in words, a form that is hard and dim. What power and nature must we take it to have? This above all: that it is the receiver of all birth, like a nurse. What is true has been said; but it must be said more clearly, and that is hard, 49b partly because we must first raise difficulties about fire and the things that follow fire. For it is hard to say of each of these what it truly is—what must be called water rather than fire, and what any one of them is rather than all of them, each one—in such a way as to use some sure and fixed account. So how, and in what way, and what should we say about them, if we raise the questions as we should? First, what we now call water: when it hardens, we 49c see it become, as we think, stones and earth; and when it melts and breaks apart, this same thing becomes breath and air; and when air burns, it becomes fire; and fire, when it comes back together and is put out, goes again into the form of air; and air, coming together and growing thick, becomes cloud and mist; and from these, packed still more, comes flowing water; and from water come earth and stones again. And so, as it seems, they hand on the cycle of birth to one another in a ring. 49d So since none of these things ever shows itself as the same, would anyone not be ashamed of himself if he insisted firmly that any one of them is this certain thing and not something else? It cannot be done. By far the safest way to speak about them is this: what we always see becoming now this, now that—fire, for instance—we should not call "this fire" but always "the such," each time; not "this water" but always "the such"; and never call anything else by a name as if it had any fixedness, in all the cases where we think we are pointing at something 49e when we use the words "this" and "that" to show it. For it runs away and will not stand for "this" or "that" or "here," or any way of speaking that shows these things as fixed and standing things. So we should not call each thing "this," but should call it "the such," always turning about, the same way for each thing and for all alike; and so fire is "the such" through all time, and everything whatever that has birth.

Timaeus: But as for that into which each of these always comes when it shows itself, and from which it again passes away—

50a We should call only that one 'this' or 'that', applying both names to it; but no quality—hot or white or anything among the opposites, and nothing that comes from them—should ever be called 'this' or 'that'. We must try once more to speak about it more clearly. If someone made all kinds of shape out of gold and went on reshaping each one into all the others without ever stopping, and someone pointed to one of them and asked 50b what it is, by far the safest answer and the truest is to say 'gold'. We should never say that the triangle, or any of the other shapes that come and go in it, are real, since they change even as we name them. If someone is willing to accept even a name like that with some confidence, we should be satisfied. The same account applies to the nature that receives all bodies. We must always call it by the same name, since it never departs at all from its own power. It always receives everything, and 50c it never takes on any shape like the shape of any of the things that enter it, in any way at all. By nature it lies there like a mold for everything, and it is moved and given shape by the things that enter it; because of them it looks different at different times. The things that enter and leave it are always copies of what is, stamped from them in a way that is hard to describe and wonderful, and this we will take up again later. For now we must think of three kinds: 50d what comes to be, that in which it comes to be, and that from which what comes to be is copied and grows. And we may fairly compare the thing that receives to a mother, the source to a father, and the nature in between them to their child. And we must understand that when a stamp carrying every kind of variety is going to appear, the thing in which the stamping is set could not be well prepared in any other way than by being free of all the shapes it is going to receive from somewhere. 50e If it were like any of the things that come into it, then when it received something of the opposite kind, or of a wholly different nature, it would copy it badly, and show its own appearance along with it. That is why the thing that is to receive all kinds in itself must be free of every form. It is the same with scented oils: the makers first make sure of this very thing, and make the liquids that are to hold the smells as free of smell as possible. And those who try to press shapes into soft materials leave no shape showing in them at all beforehand; they smooth them out first and make them as even as possible.

51a Timaeus: Then the same must hold for the thing that is going to receive, well and all over itself, repeated copies of everything that always is: it must by nature be free of all forms. So we should not call the mother and receptacle of everything that has come to be, everything visible and in every way perceivable, earth or air or fire or water, or anything made out of these, or anything out of which these are made. Rather, we will not be wrong if we say that it is an invisible and shapeless kind of thing that receives everything, 51b and that it partakes of what is intelligible in the hardest-to-pin-down way, and is itself the hardest thing to catch. As far as we can reach its nature from what has been said, one would be most right to put it like this: at any given time the part of it that has been set on fire appears as fire, the part made wet as water, and earth and air insofar as it receives copies of these. But we should look into these matters more by reasoning, and draw the line like this: is there a fire itself, all on its own, and are all the things we always talk about 51c real in that way, each one by itself? Or are these things we see, and all the rest that we perceive through the body, the only ones with that kind of truth, with no others besides them anywhere at all, so that every time we say there is some intelligible form of each thing we say it in vain, and it turns out to be nothing but words? So it is not right to leave the question untested and undecided and still insist strongly that this is how things are; nor should we pile onto a long account, as a side matter, 51d another long stretch of argument. But if some great limit could be marked out in a few words, that would be the most timely thing of all. So this is how I cast my own vote: if intelligence and true opinion are two kinds, then these things exist all on their own, forms we cannot perceive, grasped only by thought. But if, as it seems to some, true opinion does not differ from intelligence at all, then everything we perceive through the body must be taken as most firmly real. 51e Those two must be called two, because they have come to be apart and are not alike. One of them comes to us through teaching, the other through persuasion. The one always comes with a true account, the other has no account. The one cannot be moved by persuasion, the other can be persuaded to change. And we must say that every man shares in true opinion, while gods share in intelligence, and of mankind only a small part.

Timaeus: Since this is how things stand,

52a we must agree that there is one kind that keeps the same form, ungenerated and indestructible, that neither receives anything else into itself from anywhere nor itself goes off into anything else; it is invisible and in every way beyond perception, and this is the thing that thought has been assigned to study. Second is what shares its name and is like it: what is perceived, generated, always carried about, coming to be in some place and again destroyed from there, grasped by opinion together with perception. Third is the kind of the receptacle, always there, not admitting destruction, 52b providing a seat for everything that comes to be; it is grasped without perception by a kind of bastard reasoning, and it is hardly believable. Yet we dream about it as we look at things, and we say that everything that is must surely be somewhere, in some place, and must occupy some space, and that what is not on earth or anywhere in heaven is nothing at all. Because of this half-asleep state of ours, all these claims and others like them make it impossible 52c for us, when we wake up and draw distinctions, to tell the truth about the nature that is free of sleep and truly real: that an image, since even the thing it is made for does not belong to itself but is always the appearance of something else being carried along, must for that reason come to be in something else, holding on to being in some way, or else it would be nothing at all; and the true and precise account stands as a helper to what really is, showing that as long as one thing is one thing and another is another, neither of them, ever coming to be in the other, 52d will become one and the same and two at once.

So let this be the account given in summary, as my own vote counts it: that there are being, and the receptacle, and coming-to-be, three things in three ways, even before the heaven came to be. And the nurse of coming-to-be is made wet and set on fire and takes on the shapes of earth and air, and suffers whatever other states go along with these, 52e and it appears all kinds of different ways. But because it is filled with powers that are neither alike nor evenly balanced, no part of it stays in balance; it is rocked unevenly in every direction, it is shaken by those things, and then as it moves it shakes them in turn.

Timaeus: And as they move, they are always carried different ways as they separate out, like the things shaken by winnowing baskets and the machines used to clean grain, and

53a as they are dried out, the dense and heavy ones settle one way, and the rare and light ones are carried off and settle into a different seat. This is how the four kinds were shaken by the receptacle, as it moved and gave a shaking like an instrument: it pushed the most unlike ones furthest apart from each other, and drove the most alike ones together into the same place. That is why they took different places, one here and one there, even before the whole universe was put in order and came to be from them. Before that, all these things were in a state without reason and without measure. 53b But when an attempt was made to put the universe in order—fire, water, earth, and air first, still showing some traces of their own nature, but disposed exactly as anything is likely to be when a god is absent from it—these things, in that state, were the first he shaped, with forms and numbers. And let this stand for us as a rule to be repeated at every point: that the god set them together to be as beautiful and as good as possible, out of things that were not in that state. For now, though, we must try to explain to you the arrangement of each of them and their coming-to-be, 53c in an account unlike the one we are used to. But since you share in the paths of education along which what is said has to be shown, you will follow.

First, that fire, earth, water, and air are bodies is clear to everyone. Every form of body also has depth. And depth of necessity includes within it a flat surface. And the straight-edged base of the flat surface is made up of triangles. All triangles begin from 53d two triangles, each of which has one right angle and the others acute. Of these, one has, on both of its sides, parts of a right angle divided by equal sides, and the other has unequal parts divided by unequal sides. These we lay down as the starting point of fire and the other bodies, since we follow the likely account that goes along with necessity. As for the principles above these, god knows them, and any man who is a friend of his. We must say what the 53e four most beautiful bodies would be: unlike each other, and yet able, when they break apart, to come to be from one another in some cases. If we get this, we have the truth about the coming-to-be of earth and fire and of the ones in between that follow proportion. For we will agree with no one that there are visible bodies more beautiful than these, each of them being a single kind. So we must try to fit together the four kinds of bodies that differ in beauty, and say that we have grasped their nature well enough.

54a Timaeus: Of the two triangles, the isosceles has one nature, while the unequal-sided one has infinitely many. So we must pick out the most beautiful of the infinite set, if we are to make a proper start. If someone can pick out a more beautiful one and name it for their construction, he wins—he being not an enemy but a friend. We, then, pick one as the most beautiful of the many triangles and pass over the rest: the one from which the equilateral triangle is put together out of three. 54b The reason for this would take a longer account. But for anyone who tests this and finds that it is so, the prizes are laid out in friendship. So let two triangles be picked out, the ones from which fire and the other bodies have been constructed: the isosceles, and the one whose longer side always has three times the power of the shorter side. What was said unclearly before must now be marked out more clearly. For it seemed that all four kinds came to be from one another and into one another, but that was an incorrect impression. Four kinds do come to be from 54c the triangles we have picked: three of them from the single one that has unequal sides, and the fourth fitted together from the isosceles triangle alone. So not all of them can break apart into one another, so that a few large ones come to be out of many small ones, or the other way around; but the three can. Since all of them grow from one, when the larger ones are broken up, many small ones will form out of the same parts, taking on the shapes that belong to them. And when many small ones are scattered apart along their triangles, 54d one number of them, forming a single mass, would produce one other single form, a large one. Let this much be said about their coming to be from one another. Now, in order, we should tell what sort of form each of them has come to be, and out of what numbers of parts put together. The first and smallest form to be put together will lead off, and its element is the triangle whose hypotenuse is twice the length of its shorter side. When two of these are put together along their diagonals, and this is done three times, 54e with the diagonals and the short sides all brought to meet at a single center, one equilateral triangle is formed out of six of them.

Timaeus: And when four equilateral triangles are put together, joining three plane angles into one solid

55a angle, it makes one that comes right after the most obtuse of the plane angles. When four of these are completed, the first solid form is put together, one that divides a whole sphere into equal and similar parts. The second comes from the same triangles, but from eight equilateral triangles put together, which make one solid angle out of four plane angles. And when six of these are produced, the second body is completed in this way. The third is formed from twice sixty of the elements fitted together, 55b with twelve solid angles, each of them enclosed by five equilateral plane triangles, and it has twenty bases, which are equilateral triangles. So one of the two triangles was done with generating these, and the isosceles triangle went on to generate the nature of the fourth: it is put together in groups of four, bringing the right angles together at the center and producing one equilateral square. Six of these 55c fitted together produced eight solid angles, each made of three right plane angles joined together. The shape of the body that was formed is a cube, with six square equilateral faces as its bases. There was still one fifth kind of construction left, and the god used it up on the whole, filling in the picture of the universe.

So if someone, thinking all this through properly, were at a loss over whether we should say that there are infinitely many worlds or a limited number, on the 'infinitely many' side 55d he would think it the view of someone truly without limit, in a matter where one needs to be experienced. But whether it is right ever to say that in truth they are one or five, on this ground he would reasonably be at a loss. So the god reveals to us that the universe is naturally one, in line with the likely account; but someone else, looking at other things, will hold a different opinion. Let us set this question aside, and let us now distribute the kinds our account has produced among fire and earth and water and air. Let us give the cube shape to earth. 55e Of the four kinds, earth is the least able to move, and of bodies it is the most easily molded. And the body with the most stable bases must of necessity have come to be like this. Of the two triangles we laid down at the start, the one with equal sides is by nature a more stable base than the one with unequal sides. And of the flat figures put together out of each of them, the equilateral square necessarily stands more firmly than the equilateral triangle, both in its parts and as a whole.

Timaeus: So

56a by assigning this to earth we preserve the likely account. Of the remaining forms we give to water the one that is hardest to move, to fire the one easiest to move, and the middle one to air. And we give the smallest body to fire, the largest to water, and the middle one to air. And the sharpest again to fire, the second to air, and the third to water. All of this follows: the one with the fewest bases must by nature be easiest to move, and it is the most cutting 56b and the sharpest of all in every way, and the lightest as well, since it is made of the fewest identical parts. The second has these same properties in the second degree, and the third in the third degree. So let it be settled, in line with the true account and with the likely one, that the solid form of the pyramid that has been produced is the element and seed of fire. Let us say that the second in order of coming-to-be is the element of air, and the third the element of water. We must think of all of these as small in this way: each single one of each kind is invisible to us because of its smallness, 56c but when many are gathered together their masses are seen. And we must also think that the god has fitted these together in proportion, in their numbers and their motions and their other powers, everywhere with precision, wherever the nature of necessity willingly gave way after being persuaded.

From all the kinds we have described, then, this is how 56d things would most likely go. When earth meets fire and is broken up by its sharpness, it is carried along—whether it is broken up in fire itself, or happens to be in a mass of air or of water—until its parts happen to meet again and, fitted together with one another, become earth; for it would never come to be any other kind. But when water is divided by fire, or by air as well, it can happen that one body of fire is formed, and two 56e of air. And when one part of air is broken up, two bodies of fire can come to be. And again, when fire is surrounded by air or by water or by some earth, a little amount among a lot, and is moved along with what is being carried, it fights and, when it is beaten, is smashed apart; two bodies of fire then combine into one form of air. And when air is overpowered and broken up, from two whole bodies of it and a half, one whole compact form of water comes to be.

Timaeus: Let us reason these things out again like this: when something is caught in fire and one of the

57a another kind is cut by it, by the sharpness of its angles and its sides; and once it has settled into the nature of that thing, it stops being cut—for each kind, being alike and the same as itself, can neither cause any change in anything nor suffer any from what stays the same and like itself—but as long as it keeps coming to be as something else, and being the weaker fights the stronger, it does not stop being broken up. And again, when smaller things are surrounded by many larger ones and are smashed to pieces while they are few and put out, 57b they stop being put out when they have formed themselves into the shape of the thing that overpowers them; and so air comes to be from fire, and water from air. But if it moves toward the same kind and some other kind joins in and fights it, it does not stop being broken up, until either it is pushed and broken apart completely and escapes to what is related to it, or, being beaten, it becomes one out of many, like the thing that won, and stays there living beside it. And 57c in fact all things change their places through these experiences. For the masses of each kind have been separated off in their own place, because of the motion of the thing that receives them; and things that keep becoming unlike themselves but like others are carried by the shaking toward the place of those they have come to be like.

This is how the pure and first bodies have come to be, through causes of this kind. But the fact that other kinds grow within their shapes we must blame on the way each of the elements was put together: 57d at the beginning, each of them did not plant only one size of triangle, but smaller and larger ones as well, and in number as many as there are kinds within each shape. So when they mix with themselves and with one another, their variety is endless. Anyone who is going to use a likely account about nature must become a student of this variety.

So about motion and rest—how they come about, and with what things—unless someone comes to an agreement about them, many things will stand in the way 57e of the reasoning that follows. Some things have already been said about them; to those we now add these further points: there can never be motion in a state of uniformity. For it is hard, or rather impossible, for a thing that is going to be moved to be there without something to move it, or for something that is going to move to be there without something to be moved. But there is no motion when these are absent, and it is impossible for them ever to be uniform.

Timaeus: So let us take it that rest goes with uniformity, and motion always goes with

58a lack of uniformity; and inequality is in turn the cause of that lack of uniformity. We have already gone through how inequality comes to be. But we have not said how, once things have been separated off by kinds, each of them stops its motion and carrying through one another. So we will now speak again, as follows. The revolution of the whole, once it gathered the kinds in with it, being round and by nature tending to come together on itself, squeezes everything and leaves no empty space remaining. That is why 58b fire has spread through everything the most, and air second, since it is second in fineness by nature, and the rest in the same way. For the things made of the largest parts leave the greatest amount of empty space in their structure, and the smallest ones leave the least. The coming together of compression pushes the small ones into the gaps of the large ones. So when small ones are set beside large ones, and the smaller separate the larger while the larger press the smaller together, everything is shifted up and down toward its own place. 58c For each thing, as it changes in size, also changes its position. So for these reasons, as long as the state of lack of uniformity is preserved, it keeps providing these things with motion without a break, motion that is now and will always be.

After this we must understand that there are many kinds of fire: for example, flame; and what goes off from the flame, which does not burn but gives light to the eyes; and what is left behind in 58d glowing-hot things when the flame has gone out. The same with air: the clearest kind is called aether, the murkiest is mist and darkness, and there are other kinds without names, which came to be because of the inequality of the triangles. Water divides into two kinds first: the liquid kind, and the kind that melts and runs. The liquid kind, because it partakes of the small kinds of water, which are unequal to each other, has become able to move both by itself and under the push of something else, because of its lack of uniformity and the shape of its form. But the kind 58e that is made of large and even parts is steadier than that one and heavy, being solid because of its uniformity. But when fire enters and breaks it up, it loses its uniformity. Having lost it, it shares more in motion; and once it moves easily, being pushed by the air next to it and stretched down toward the earth, it took the name 'melting' for the clearing away of its masses, and 'flowing' for the stretching down toward the earth, each name taken from what it undergoes.

59a Timaeus: And when the fire falls out from there again, since it does not leave into an empty space, the air next to it is pushed and, while the wet mass is still easy to move, shoves it into the seats of the fire and mixes it with itself. As it is pushed together and gets back its uniformity, now that fire, the maker of the lack of uniformity, has gone away, it settles back into the same state as itself. And the getting rid of the fire was named 'cooling', and the coming together after it left was named the kind of state that is 'solid'. Of all of these, 59b the waters we have called fluid: the one that becomes densest, made of the finest and most even parts, a kind of a single form, joined with a gleaming yellow color, set and strained through rock, hardened into gold, the most prized possession there is. A branch of gold, the hardest thing there is because of its density and turned black, was called adamant. The kind that is close to gold in its parts, but has more forms than one; in density, on the one hand, denser than gold, since it has taken in a small and fine portion of earth and so is harder, but on the other hand lighter, because it has 59c large gaps within it—this, one of the bright and solid kinds of water, came to be as bronze. And what is mixed into it from earth, when the two separate from each other again as it ages, becomes visible on its own and is called rust. There is no point in going through the rest of such things in detail, when one is chasing the form of likely stories. When someone sets aside the accounts of what always is, for the sake of rest, and studies the likely accounts about coming-to-be, 59d and gains a pleasure he will never regret, he is having a moderate and sensible amusement in his life. With that in mind, leaving these matters here, let us go through the next likely points about the same things, like this. Water mixed with fire, insofar as it is fine and liquid because of its motion and the path along which it rolls over the earth (and so it is called liquid), and also soft, because its bases are less firmly set than those of earth and give way—when this is separated from fire and left alone without air, 59e it becomes more uniform, and it is packed together by the things leaving into it; and once it is frozen in this way, the part of it above the earth that has undergone this most is hail, and the part on the earth is ice; the part that has undergone it less, and is still only half-frozen, is snow above the earth, and on the earth it is called frost when it hardens out of dew.

Timaeus: And most kinds of water, mixed with one another—the whole class of them,

60a strained through the plants that grow out of the earth, and called juices—because of the mixtures each of them has its own unlikeness; they have produced many other kinds without names, but four of them, the kinds with fire in them, being the most distinct, have taken names. The one that warms the soul along with the body is wine. The one that is smooth and divides up the sight, and so looks bright and gleaming and oily, is the oily kind: pitch, castor oil, and olive oil itself, and everything else with the same power. Whatever spreads out 60b as far as the natural unions around the mouth, and by this power provides sweetness, has the name 'honey' above all the rest. And the kind that breaks down flesh by burning, a foamy kind, set apart from all the juices, was named 'sap'.

Of the kinds of earth, the kind that is strained through water becomes a stony body in the following way. When the mixed water is beaten in the mixing, it changes into the form of air; and becoming 60c air, it runs up to its own place. But no empty space lay above them. So it pushed the air next to it. And this air, being heavy, was pushed and poured around the mass of earth; it squeezed it hard and packed it into the seats from which the new air had risen. And earth, packed together by air and bound fast with water, becomes rock; the kind with equal and even parts is more beautiful and translucent, the opposite kind is uglier. But when all the moisture is snatched away by the speed of fire and what forms is drier than that, 60d the kind we have named 'pottery', that is how it comes to be. And sometimes, when a little moisture is left behind and earth that has become fluid through fire is cooled, it becomes a stone with a black color. Two more kinds, formed in the same way as these, but out of a mixture with much water, and of finer parts of earth and salty: they half-solidify, and are dissolved again by water. The one that cleans oil and earth is 'lye'. The other, which fits well into the mixtures 60e around the sense of the mouth, became salt, a body loved by the gods by the reckoning of [law]. The things common to both, which water cannot dissolve but fire can, solidify in the following way. Fire and air do not melt masses of earth. For being made of smaller parts than the gaps in its structure, they pass through plenty of room without forcing it; they leave it undissolved and so keep it from melting. But since the parts of water are larger by nature, they make their way through by force, dissolving it and melting it.

Timaeus: Earth,

61a for only water dissolves it by force while it is still unformed, and once it is formed nothing but fire does; for no way in is left for anything but fire. And of the ways water is packed together, the tightest packing is dissolved by fire alone, and the weaker packing by both fire and air—air through the gaps, fire through the triangles as well. And nothing dissolves air that has been packed together by force, except at the level of the element; only fire melts it without force. As for bodies mixed out of earth and water, as long as 61b the water in them holds the gaps of the earth, packed together by force, the parts of water that come at them from outside have no way in; they flow around the whole mass and leave it unmelted. But the parts of fire that go into the gaps of the water, doing to the water what water does to earth—making it into [air]—are the only ones that make the shared body melt and run. And these happen to be the things that have less water than earth: the whole class of things around glass, 61c and everything that is called a kind of molten stone. And the things that have more water are all the bodies that solidify as wax-like and incense-like substances.

So the kinds that are varied among one another by their shapes, their combinations, and their transformations have now been pretty well shown. Next we must try to make clear the experiences they undergo, and the causes that produce them. First of all, perception must always be present in the things we keep talking about; but we have not yet gone through the coming-to-be of flesh and what goes with flesh, or of the mortal part of the soul. As it turns out, neither of these can be adequately explained without the other: not these without 61d the experiences that involve perception, nor those without these; and doing both at once is almost impossible. So we must lay down one of them first, and come back later to what we have laid down. So that the experiences may be told in order after the kinds, let what concerns body and soul come first for us. First, then, in what way we call fire hot—let us look at it like this, by considering the division and the cutting that it makes in our body. 61e For we all more or less perceive that the feeling is a sharp one.

Timaeus: The fineness of its sides, the sharpness of its angles, the smallness of its parts, and the speed of its motion—all of which make it violent and cutting, so that it sharply cuts whatever it meets,

62a we must reckon, as we remember how its shape came to be, that it is above all that nature and no other which, by dividing our bodies and cutting them into small pieces, reasonably gave both the feeling and the name to what we now call 'hot'. The opposite of this is obvious, but still let nothing go without an account. For when the larger parts of the fluids around our body enter, pushing out the smaller ones and not being able to get into their seats, they pack together 62b our moisture, which has been moved out of its uneven state, and make it motionless through uniformity and compression, and so they freeze it. And what is gathered together against its nature fights, pushing itself by its own nature in the opposite direction. This struggle and this shaking were given the names 'trembling' and 'shivering'; and the whole experience, and the thing that causes it, got the name 'cold'. And 'hard' is the name for whatever our flesh gives way to, and 'soft' for whatever gives way to our flesh; and the same between things themselves. What gives way is whatever rests on a small base. And what is made of 62c square bases, since it stands very firmly, is the most resistant kind; whatever comes together into the greatest density is the most resistant of all. Heavy and light, along with what is called the nature of 'down' and 'up', would be made clearest by an examination. For it is not right to suppose that there are two places by nature, dividing the whole in two and opposite to each other: a 'down' place, toward which everything that has any bulk of body travels, and an 'up' place, toward which everything goes unwillingly. For since the whole 62d heaven is spherical, the things that stand at an equal distance from the middle are the extremes, and they must all be extremes in the same way; and the middle, standing the same distance from the extremes, must be thought to be directly opposite all of them. Since the universe is by nature like this, would anyone who calls any of the things we have mentioned 'up' or 'down' not seem to be using a name that does not fit at all? For the middle place in it is by nature neither down nor up, and it is right to call it neither, but just 'in the middle'. And the region around it is neither middle, nor does it have one part of itself different from another, any more toward the middle than toward what is directly opposite. And for something that is by nature the same all over, what kind of opposite names could anyone put on it, and how could he think he was speaking correctly?

Timaeus: For even if there were some solid body at the middle of the

63a whole, evenly balanced, it would never be carried to any of the extremes, because they are alike all around. But if someone walked around it in a circle, he could often stand with his feet opposite it and call the same part of it both 'down' and 'up'. For the whole, as has just been said, being spherical, it would not be the mark of a sensible person to say that it has some place 'down' and another 'up'. But the places these names come from, and the things among which we are used to having them, are the reason we divide up the whole heaven in this way 63b and speak of 'up' and 'down'; this we must agree on, starting from the following assumptions. If someone stood in the place of the universe where the nature of fire has its lot, where most of it would have gathered, since that is where it travels, and had the power to do so, and took away parts of the fire and put them on a scale, lifting the beam and dragging the fire by force into air that is unlike it, 63c clearly the smaller amount is moved by force more easily than the larger. For with one force lifting two things at once, the lesser must follow the force more, and the greater, being stretched down, must follow it less. And the large amount was called 'heavy' and 'carried down', and the small amount 'light' and 'up'. We must notice that we do this very same thing around this place of ours. For standing on the earth, we lift earthy kinds, and sometimes earth itself, and drag them by force and against their nature into air that is unlike them, while both 63d hold on to what is related to them; and as we force them into what is unlike them, the smaller follows more easily than the larger. So we have called that 'light', and the place we force it to, 'up'; and the opposite experience is 'heavy' and 'down'. These things must therefore stand in different relations to one another, because the masses of the different kinds occupy places opposite to one another. For what is light in one place will turn out to be opposite to what is light 63e in the opposite place, and heavy to heavy, down to down, and up to up; everything will be found to be opposite and sideways and different in every way, both in coming to be and in being. But one thing we must understand about all of them: the path each takes toward what is related to it is what makes the thing being carried 'heavy', and makes the place such a thing travels to 'down'; and the opposite names belong to things related in the opposite way. So let these be given as the causes of these experiences.

Timaeus: As for the experience of smooth and rough, anyone who sees the cause could no doubt tell it to another person; for hardness mixed with unevenness, while the

64a Density produces evenness.

The greatest of the common conditions left to cover—the ones that affect the whole body—is the cause of pleasure and pain, which we have already sorted into kinds. There are also the conditions that come through parts of the body: those parts have gained sensation, and they hold in themselves pleasures, with pains following along at the same time. So let us take the causes this way for every condition, of things that can sense and things that cannot. Let us remember that earlier we divided nature into 64b things easy to move and things hard to move. That is the road we must follow for everything we hope to catch and understand. What is easy to move by nature spreads even a small affection in a circle, part after part, each part doing the same work on the next, until the affection reaches the thinking part and announces the power of the thing that made it. The opposite kind stays fixed. It travels in no circle; it only takes the blow, 64c and it moves nothing near it. So its parts do not pass the affection from one to another. The first affection stays where it fell, and even when it spreads through the whole animal, the thing affected feels nothing. This is what happens in bones and hair and every other part of us that holds the most earth. The parts at the front are the opposite—most of all around sight and hearing—because the power of fire and of air is strongest in them. Think of pleasure and pain this way. A condition that goes against nature and comes 64d on us by force, all at once, is painful. One that goes back toward nature, all at once, is pleasant. One that comes quietly, little by little, is not noticed. The opposite conditions are felt in the opposite way. Anything that happens with ease is felt very strongly, yet shares in no pain or pleasure. The affections of sight itself are like that. We said earlier that sight is a body that becomes joined to us naturally day after day. Cuts, burns, and anything else it suffers do not cause it pain, nor does it feel 64e pleasure when it returns to its own state again. But its sensations are the strongest and the clearest, both in whatever it suffers and in whatever it reaches out and touches in any direction. For there is no force at all in its separating and combining.

Timaeus: Bodies made of larger parts give way slowly to whatever works on them and spread the movements through the whole body. So they have pleasures and pains, casting off

65a pains, and gaining pleasures when they settle back into their former state. Some things let go of what is in them and empty out little by little, while their fillings come all at once and in large amounts. The emptying is not noticed; the filling is felt. These give the mortal part of the soul no pain, but the greatest pleasures. This is clear in sweet smells. Other things are stripped all at once, but return 65b to their former state only little by little and with difficulty. They do the opposite in every way. That is plain in the burns and cuts of the body.

So much, then, for the common conditions of the body as a whole, and for the names those conditions have won among the people who feel them. Next we must try to describe the things that happen in our own parts—the conditions themselves and the causes of what does them—as far as 65c we can. First, we should make clear, as far as we can, what we left out earlier when we spoke of the juices: the conditions special to the tongue. These too, like most things, appear to come about through certain combinations and separations. But they make more use of roughness and smoothness than the other senses do. Whatever enters the small veins—such as the tongue's test veins 65d stretched toward the heart—falls into the moist, tender, earthy parts of the flesh and melts them, drawing the veins together and drying them. The rougher ones come across as harsh; the ones that roughen less come across as astringent. The things that cleanse these parts and wash the whole tongue, doing this past the right measure and taking hold so far as to dissolve the tongue's very nature—like the power 65e of lye—are all called bitter. Those that fall short of the lye-like state, and cleanse in the right measure, come across as brackish, without a rough bitterness, and they seem friendlier to us.

Timaeus: The things that share the heat of the mouth and are ground down by it catch fire along with it and pay the heating back in turn. Their lightness carries them up toward the sensations in the head, and they cut

66a through everything they strike. Because of these powers, all such things were named pungent. The sharp taste works the other way. Particles thinned out first by decay slip into the narrow veins. There they act on the earthy parts lodged in them and on whatever holds a measure of air, so that, moving around these things, they are churned up. Churned, they tumble about and pass into one another, hollowing out other parts, stretched tight by what enters. 66b This means air shut in by a coat of moisture around it—sometimes earthy, sometimes pure—so that hollow, rounded vessels of water are formed. The ones from the pure moisture stay transparent, and were given the name bubbles. The ones from the earthy kind, which move and rise up together with it, were given the names fermentation and bubbling. And the cause of these conditions was given the name sharp. All that has been said about these has 66c an opposite condition from an opposite cause. When the makeup of what enters the moist parts is by nature suited to the tongue's own state, it smooths over what has been roughened, as if with a salve; it draws together what stands packed or has been scattered against nature; and above all it makes the body sweat in the natural way. Every such cure of violent conditions becomes pleasant and dear to everyone, and it is called sweet. 66d

That covers those senses. Next, the power of the nostrils: it has no distinct kinds. Every smell is only half-formed, and no single kind of thing has ever been fitted in the right proportion to give a smell. Our veins in that region were made narrower than the kinds of earth and water, and wider than those of fire and air. That is why none of these was ever sensed by smell on its own—only when some of them were damp, or rotting, or melting, or burned as incense. For smells come to be when 66e water changes into air, or air into water, in the space between the two. All smells together are smoke or mist. Mist is what passes from air into water; smoke is what passes from water into air. That is why all smells are finer than water and thicker than air.

Timaeus: This becomes clear whenever someone holds the nose shut and forces breath into himself. Then no smell passes through with it. The breath, emptied of smells, alone

67a follows. That is why the many varieties of these two have come to be nameless. They are not made of many simple kinds. In that place only two show plainly: the pleasant and the painful. The painful kind is rough and forces the whole cavity, the part of us that lies between the crown of the head and the navel. The pleasant kind is the same thing in reverse: it soothes, and gives back again graciously, as its nature is.

A third perceptive part in us to examine is 67b hearing, and we must say what causes its conditions. Let us say in general that sound is a blow carried through the ears by air, brain, and blood, all the way to the soul. Hearing is the movement that blow sets up: it begins at the head and ends at the seat of the liver. The faster it moves, the higher the sound; the slower it is, the lower. The movement that is even is smooth and level; the opposite is rough. 67c A great movement is loud; the opposite is soft. The harmony of these sounds must be treated in what will be said later.

One sense kind is still left, the fourth. It has many varieties within it, and we must divide them. We called all of them together colors: a flame that streams off each body, made of particles matched in size to sight for perception. The causes of the birth of sight were told 67d earlier. About colors, then, a fair and fitting account should go through them. Particles travel from other bodies and fall on sight. Some are smaller than the parts of sight, some larger, some the same size. The ones of the same size are not felt at all; we call these transparent. The larger and the smaller ones act on sight: the larger combine it, the smaller divide it. White and black are brother and sister to the hot and cold in the flesh, to the harsh 67e things of the tongue, and to the heating things we called pungent. They are those same conditions born again in a different kind, but they appear as something else for these reasons.

Timaeus: So we should name them this way. White is what divides sight. Black is its opposite. The swifter motion of another kind of fire strikes and splits sight all the way out to the eyes, and it forces the passages of the eyes themselves

68a outward and melts them, pouring out from there fire and water all at once—the water we call tears. That incoming current is itself fire, meeting the outflow from the other side. The fire leaping out is like a flash of lightning; the fire coming in is quenched in the moisture. All sorts of colors come to be in this mixing. We named the condition gleaming, and what it produces bright and shining. 68b But there is a kind of fire between these two. It reaches the moisture of the eyes and mixes with it, but does not shine. When the fire's gleam spreads through that moisture and gives it a blood-red color, we give it the name red. Bright, mixed with red and with white, has become yellow. How much goes into which mixture—even if someone knew, it would make no sense to say. About such things no one could state any necessity, or even the likely account, in any measured way. Red, mixed with black and white, makes 68c purple. It turns dark when black is blended in with these after they are mixed and heated further. Ginger comes from a blend of yellow and gray. Gray comes from white and black. Sallow comes from white mixed with yellow. When white joins with bright and falls too deeply into black, it makes a deep blue. Blue mixed with white makes gray-blue. Ginger mixed with black makes leek-green. Most of the other colors are clear enough from these 68d, in whatever mixtures they keep to the likely story. But if anyone took these things as a test and examined them in practice, he would show he does not know how different human nature is from divine: God both knows how and is able to blend the many into one and to dissolve the one back into the many. No human is capable of either—not now, and none ever will be. 68e

All these things, then, having that nature by necessity at that time, the craftsman of the fairest and best took up as he made things come to be. It was when he fathered the self-sufficient and most perfect god. He used those causes as serving helpers, but the good design in everything that came to be was his own work.

Timaeus: That is why we must divide the kinds of cause in two: the necessary and the divine. In everything we must seek out the divine

69a for the sake of gaining a blessed life, as far as our nature allows. The necessary kind is there for the sake of those divine things. We must reckon that without them we could not perceive, take hold of, or in any other way share in the things we strive for by themselves.

So now that the material is laid out before us like timber for builders—the kinds of causes sifted and sorted, out of which the rest of the account must be woven—let us go back to the start for a moment. Let us travel quickly to the point we came here from, 69b and now try to set on the story a fitting head, an ending, to match all that came before. As was said at the beginning, these things lay without order. The god brought proportion into each of them, toward itself and toward the others, as many and in whatever ways it was possible for them to be in measure and in proportion. Before that, they shared in none of this except by chance, and none of what we now name—fire, water, and any of the rest—deserved the name at all. He first set all these in order, 69c and then out of them he put together this whole universe: one living creature holding all living things within it, mortal and immortal. He himself is the craftsman of the divine things. But he ordered his own offspring to craft the birth of the mortal kind. They imitated him. They took over the immortal beginning of the soul, and around it they later molded the mortal body. They gave the whole body to the soul as its vehicle. And in it they built another kind of soul, the mortal kind, with terrible and necessary 69d conditions inside it. First was pleasure, the strongest lure toward evil. Then pains, which chase good things away. Then boldness and fear again—two foolish counselors. Then spirit, hard to calm. And hope, easy to lead astray. Blending these with sensation that lacks reason and with desire that runs at everything, they built the mortal kind, as necessity required. And for this reason, holding reverence for the divine—unwilling to pollute it unless sheer necessity forced them—they housed the mortal part in 69e a separate dwelling of the body. They built a barrier and boundary between the head and the chest, placing the neck in between, so the two would be apart. In the chest, and in what is called the breast, they settled the mortal kind of soul.

Timaeus: And since one part of this soul was born better and one worse, they built the cavity of the chest up in two, dividing it, so to speak, into

70a a women's dwelling, and one for men, kept apart, with the midriff set between them as a dividing wall. The part of the soul that shares in courage and spirit—the part that loves to win—they housed nearer the head, between the midriff and the neck. There it could listen to reason and, together with reason, hold down the desiring kind by force whenever that part would not in any way willingly obey the command and the word coming down from the citadel. The heart 70b they stationed at the knot of the veins, as the spring of the blood that surges hard through every limb, in the quarters where it keeps guard—so that, when the force of spirit boils up, reason having given word that some unjust act is being done by someone outside or by some desire within, the heart would then sense quickly, through all the narrow passages, everything in the body that can be sensed, hear the encouragements and the threats, obey, and follow reason everywhere. In this way the best part is allowed to rule over 70c all the rest. They also knew in advance that the heart's pounding, when fearful things are expected and spirit rises, would be a swelling caused by fire. So they contrived a helper for it: they planted the lung there—soft and without blood at first, then with hollow channels inside, pierced through like a sponge. Taking in breath and drink, 70d cooling them, the lung provides breathing and relief in the heat. That is why they cut channels from the windpipe to the lung and wrapped the lung around the heart like a soothing poultice. Then, when spirit blazes at its height inside the heart, the heart leaps against something that gives way, is cooled, strains less, and can serve reason with its spirit all the better.

The part of the soul that desires food and drink, and whatever else the body's nature leaves it lacking, they housed 70e in the space between the midriff and the boundary at the navel. Through that whole region they built a kind of manger for the body's food. And there they chained up that part like a wild beast. Tethered, it had to be fed, if any mortal race was ever going to exist at all.

Timaeus: The point was that it should feed at its manger always and dwell as far away as possible from the part that plans, making as little disturbance and outcry as possible,

71a The strongest part, so that it might be allowed to take counsel in quiet about what benefits all the parts together and each one apart—for these reasons they gave it its position here. But they knew it would never take part in reasoning. And they knew that even if it somehow got some share of the senses, it would not be born with any care for words and argument. Night and day, what would charm it most was images and phantoms. So the god made a plan for it. He built the form of the liver 71b and set it in that part's home. He made it dense and smooth and bright and sweet, and he gave it a share of bitterness too. His plan was this: the power that comes from the mind in its thoughts was to act on the liver like a mirror that takes impressions and shows figures for the mind to see, and so to frighten it. Whenever that power comes down hard with a stern threat, and uses the bitterness that is kin to it, it steeps its sharp taste through the whole liver at once. Sour, bile-like colors then show on it. The power draws the liver all into folds and makes it rough. 71c It bends the lobe, the chambers, and the gates out of their straight shape and cramps them; it stops some and shuts them, and this brings pains and sicknesses. But when in turn the mind breathes out some gentle thought and paints the opposite figures, the liver grows calm. The bitterness rests, because the mind neither moves it nor touches the nature that works against it. Instead the mind uses the sweetness that grows there beside it, and it sets all the parts of the liver right and smooth and free. 71d In this way it makes the share of the soul that lives around the liver mild and even in temper. At night that share has a moderate way of life, and it uses prophecy in sleep, since it has no share in reason and understanding. For the beings who put us together remembered the father's order. When he sent out the mortal kind, he told them to make it as good as they were able. They carried out that order so well that they set up in this part the seat of prophecy for the worse part of us, 71e so that it might in some way touch the truth. And there is sign enough that the god gave prophecy to human folly. No one in his right mind touches divine and true prophecy. He touches it only in sleep, with the power of his understanding chained, or when sickness has changed it, or when some divine possession has thrown it off course.

Timaeus: But for a person of sound mind to take in, and hold in memory, what was said—both in dreams and in waking sights—through the prophetic and inspired nature in us, and to take note of whatever images

72a appear, and to sort them all out by reasoning: what each one means, and to whom it points—evil or good, yet to come, past, or present. And while the person is still in that inspired state, it is not his task to judge the visions and the words that came from him. Rather, it is well said, and was said long ago, that to do one's own work, and to know what belongs to oneself and to know oneself, belongs to the sane person alone. That is why the law sets judges over the 72b divine prophecies. Some people call those judges "seers," and they are wholly mistaken. Those men are only spokesmen for a riddling message and a vision; they are not seers at all. It is most correct to call them prophets of the things that are being divined.

The liver, then, has this nature, and it grew in the place we named, for the sake of prophecy. While each creature is still alive, such a sign gives much clearer signs. But when the liver is robbed of life, it has become blind, and its prophecies grow too faint 72c to show anything plainly. The frame and seat of its neighbor, the spleen, was set on the left side for its sake. The spleen keeps the liver bright and clean at all times, like a mirror kept in readiness, and like a smooth wax tablet that always lies beside it. That is why, when unclean matter gathers around the liver because of diseases of the body, the spleen washes it all away and takes it into its own hollowness, for it is hollow and woven without blood. 72d Filled with what is washed away, it swells and grows big and bloated. And when the body is cleansed again, it sinks down and settles back to its usual size.

So much, then, about the soul: how much of it is mortal and how much divine, and in what place, with what companions, and for what reasons it was settled apart. We could press the claim that this account is true only if the god agreed to it at the time. But we do claim this much: it is a likely account, both now and still more when you look into it again. Let us run the risk of saying it, and let it stand as said. 72e What comes next after these things we must hunt down in the same way. What was left over was the body, as it came to be. And of all things, it would best fit the body to be put together by reasoning of this kind.

Timaeus: The beings who put our kind together knew of the uncontrolled greed for drink and food that would grow up in us, and they knew that in our greed we would use far more than the moderate amount, more than we need. So that ruin might not come from sharp diseases, and so that our mortal kind might not right away

73a come to its end while still unfinished, they saw all this ahead of time. They set up the so-called lower belly as a place to receive the leftover of the drink and the food. They coiled the guts around it. They did this so that food rushing through too fast would not force the body to want more food again at once, and so that its endless hunger would not, through gluttony, make the whole race without love of wisdom and without the Muses, and disobedient to the most divine thing in us. 73b

Now about the bones and the flesh and all that kind of nature, this is how it went. For all of them together, the beginning was the birth of the marrow. The bonds of life were anchored in it, for the soul was made to serve with the body there, and so they rooted the mortal kind. But the marrow itself was made from other things. Of the triangles, the god took all those that were by nature at the first the least crooked and the smoothest, and could most exactly furnish fire, water, air, and earth. Each sort he sifted out from its own 73c kind, and he mixed them with one another in due measure. In this way he made a seed-mixture for every mortal kind, and out of them he worked the marrow. After that he planted it, and in it he sowed the kinds of souls. And as he made the first division, he split the marrow itself into as many shapes, and such shapes, as each kind of soul would later have. The part that was to hold the divine seed, like a field, he shaped round on every side. He named that share of the marrow 73d the brain, because when each living thing was finished, the vessel around this part would become the head. The part that was to hold the rest of the soul, the mortal part, he split at the same time into shapes both round and long. He named all of it marrow. Then, as if dropping anchor from it, he worked out of these the bonds of the whole soul, and bound them around this whole body of ours. He first fastened a covering of bone over 73e all of it. And bone comes together like this. He sifted out earth that was clean and smooth. He kneaded it and wet it with marrow. Then he dipped it into fire, and after that into water, then again into fire, and again into water. He carried it back and forth this way many times between the two, and he made it so that neither of the two could dissolve it.

Timaeus: Using this bone, then, he first turned a round shell of bone about the brain, and for it he left

74a a narrow opening. And he molded vertebrae from it for the marrow of the neck and of the back at once, and spread them under it like fastenings, starting from the head and running through the whole body-trunk. In this way he kept the whole seed safe and walled it in with a stone-like fence. He set joints in it, using each one against the next, with a middle power placed between them, for the sake of movement and bending. But he judged that the bony nature 74b was too hard and too unbending, and that when it took fire and then cooled it would fester and quickly ruin the seed shut up inside it. So he contrived the race of sinews and the race of flesh in this way. With the sinews he tied all the limbs together, and as they tighten and slacken around the fastenings, the body can bend and stretch. The flesh he made to be a screen against summer heats, a shelter against winter cold, and a quilted pad against falls, like padded goods; it gives way gently and softly to bodies, and it holds warm moisture inside itself. In summer that moisture makes it sweat, and watered from outside, it spreads its own coolness over the whole body. In winter, this same warmth 74c fights back in due measure against the frost that comes at it from outside and closes around it. Our wax-modeler thought all this out. He mixed water and fire and earth together and fitted them as one. Out of sharp and salty stuff he made a 74d leavened lump and kneaded it in with them, and so he built flesh that was juicy and soft. And the nature of sinew he blended out of bone and flesh without leaven, mixing the two into one middle power, and he gave it a yellow color. So sinews won a power tighter and more gluey than flesh, but softer and wetter than bone. With these the god wrapped bones and marrow together, tied them to one another with sinews, and after that he shaded them all with flesh 74e on top. The bones that held the most soul he fenced in with the least flesh. The ones that held the least soul within he covered with the most flesh and the thickest. And at the joints of the bones, wherever reason showed there had to be a joint, he grew only a little flesh. He did this so that the flesh would not stand in the way of the bendings and make the bodies hard to live with, as they grew stiff and slow to move. Nor did he want many thick layers pressed very hard into one another, which by their hardness bring numbness, to make the mind slower to remember and duller in its thinking.

Timaeus: That is why the bone of the thighs and of the shins, and

75a the part around the hips, and the bones of the upper arms and of the forearms, and all our other bones that have no joints, and the bones inside us that are empty of understanding in their marrow because they hold so little soul—all these he filled up with flesh. But the bones with sense in them he filled less. In one place only did he build flesh up by itself for the sake of the senses, as with the shape of the tongue; most parts he left the other way. For the nature that comes to be by necessity and is 75b fed and nourished with them cannot anywhere take in thick bone and much flesh along with hearing that is sharp as can be. The frame around the head would have had all of these better than anything else, if the two had been willing to come together at the same time. Then our human kind, wearing flesh and sinews on its head and a head that was hard and strong, would have won a life twice as long, and many times longer, healthier and with less pain than the one it has now. But as things were, the makers of our race weighed the question: would they make the kind longer-lived 75c and worse, or shorter-lived and better? They decided that of a longer life, lived worse, and a shorter one, lived better, everyone must without fail choose the shorter. So they did not roof the head over with thin bone, flesh, and sinews, since it has no joints either. And so, for all these reasons, the head joined to the body was made quicker to feel and wiser, but far weaker than the whole man. For these reasons 75d too, and in this way, the god wrapped the sinews around the far end of the head, and glued them in a circle about the neck by likeness, and he bound the ends of the jaws to them under the face's natural line. The rest he scattered through all the limbs, joining joint to joint. And the power of our mouth they ordered with teeth and tongue and lips, for the sake of the necessary things and the best things, as it now stands arranged 75e. The entrance they made for the necessary things, and the exit for the best. For everything that goes in and gives food to the body is necessary. But the stream of words that flows out and serves intelligence is the fairest and best of all streams.

Timaeus: But the head, again, it was not possible to leave as bare bone alone, because of the excess of the seasons toward either extreme. Nor could one watch it being covered over with the mass of flesh and so growing deaf and without feeling. So then, since the

76a fleshlike nature did not dry up all the way through, a larger rind, forming around it, came off on its own: the skin, as it is now called. This skin, because of the moisture around the brain, met itself and sprouted, and it wrapped the head round in a circle. The moisture, rising up under the seams, lifted the skin and closed it at the crown, gathering it like a knot. And the seams took their many different shapes from the power of the circular movements and of the nourishment: where these fought with each other more, there were more seams; 76b where there were fewer, fewer. Then the divine pierced all this skin round about with fire. When it was pierced, and the moisture went out through the piercings, the part that was pure liquid and heat passed away. But the mixed part, made of the very stuffs of the skin, was carried out by the rush and stretched far, as thin as the pierce was deep. And because it moved slowly, the breath standing around outside pushed it back, and it coiled in again under the skin and took root. 76c Through these events, then, the race of hair grew in the skin. Hair is skin's own kindred, cord-like in nature, but harder and denser through the packing of the cooling that each hair took on as it was chilled and pressed together with the skin separating from it. Working from these causes, the maker made our heads shaggy. He used the causes stated, and he also saw that the hair should stand in place of flesh as a light roof for the part around the brain 76d, for the sake of safety, good enough to give shade in summer and cover in winter, and no hindrance at all to quick feeling. But the bone in the plaiting of sinew and skin around the fingers, mixed out of the three and dried, became one hard skin common to all of them. It was made by those joint causes, and it was shaped for the sake of the chief thought about what would come later. For the beings who put us together knew that some day women and the other 76e living things would come to be out of men, and they knew too that nails would be needed, that many of the creatures would stand in need of them for many uses. So they stamped the growth of nails into human beings right from the start. On this account, and for these reasons, they made skin grow, and hair, and nails at the ends of the limbs.

Timaeus: And when all the parts of the mortal living thing had grown together

77a as parts and limbs, its life had of necessity to lie in fire and breath; and because of these, as it melted away and was emptied, it wasted. So the gods contrived a help for it. They took the nature of a race kindred to the human race, and, blending it with other forms and senses, so as to make it another living thing, they planted it. What are now our cultivated trees, plants, and seeds, tamed by farming to be gentle toward us, came from this planting. Before that there were only the 77b wild kinds, older than the tame ones. Whatever shares in life may, with all justice, be called a living thing. And this kind shares in the third form of soul, the one our account says is seated between the midriff and the navel. That soul has no share at all in belief or reasoning or mind, but it has feeling of pleasure and pain, together with desires. For it is acted on the whole time. And though it is turned in itself and around itself, and has pushed away the 77c motion from outside and used its own motion, becoming has not granted it, by nature, to reason out anything of its own and see it. So it lives, and it is a living thing and no other; but it stands fixed and rooted and planted fast, because it is cut off from motion of its own.

The beings greater than us, then, planted all these kinds as food for us, the weaker. They cut channels through our very body, as one cuts channels in gardens, so that it might be watered as if by a stream flowing over it. First, under the joining of skin and flesh 77d, they cut hidden channels, two veins along the back, a twin pair, since the body happened to be made of right and left. These they let down beside the spine, and they took the fruitful marrow that lay between. They did this so that the marrow might flourish as much as might be, and so that, with an easy run from there to the rest, the pouring-in of moisture might give an even watering. After this they split the veins about the head, and, weaving them across one another 77e in opposite directions, they let them through: those from the right side leaning toward the left of the body, and those from the left toward the right. They did this so that the head, together with the skin, might have a bond to the body, since the head was not wrapped round with sinews in a circle over the crown; and so that the feeling of the senses, coming from either side, might be clear through the whole body.

Timaeus: And next from here they made the watering ready in a certain way

78a of such a kind—which we will understand more easily if we first agree to this: everything that is put together from smaller parts holds back larger things, but things made of larger parts cannot hold back smaller ones; and fire has the smallest parts of all the kinds, which is why it passes right through water and earth and air and everything made out of these, and nothing can hold it back. We must think the same way about our belly: when food and drink fall into it, 78b it holds them, but breath and fire, being made of smaller parts than its own structure, it cannot hold. The god used these for carrying water from the belly to the veins. He wove a net of air and fire like the woven fish traps, with two basket-shaped openings at the entrance, and one of these he wove again into two prongs; and from the openings he stretched what one might call cords all around to the outer edges of the net. All the inner 78c part of the weaving he made of fire, while the basket openings and the shell were like air; and he took it and set it around the animal he had formed in the following way. He let the openings into the mouth; and since they were double, he led one down along the windpipe into the lung, and the other to the belly beside the windpipe. The other one he split and let each part open out through the channels of the nose as a shared passage, so that whenever one of them did not come in through the mouth, everything—the streams of that one and of 78d the other alike—would be filled from there. The rest of the shell of the trap he grew around whatever part of our body is hollow, and he made all of this at one time flow softly into the basket openings, since it is air, and at another time flow back out through the openings; and since the body is porous, the net sinks in through it and out again, while the rays of fire bound inside follow along wherever the air goes, and this does not stop happening 78e as long as the mortal animal holds together. This is the process, we say, that the man who gave things their names named breathing in and breathing out. The whole function and effect of this in our body has come about so that, with its watering and cooling, the body may be fed and live;

Timaeus: For when the breath goes in and out and the fire linked inside follows it, and always floating through the belly it comes in and takes the

79a food and drink, it melts them; and cutting them into small pieces it carries them out along the passages it travels through, as if pumping from a spring through channels into the veins, and makes the streams of the veins flow through the body like water in a pipe.

Let us look again at the experience of breathing, and at the causes that have made it what it now is. Here is how it works. 79b Since there is no empty space into which anything in motion could enter, and our breath is carried outward, the next step is clear to everyone: it does not go into a void, but pushes what is next to it out of its place; and what is pushed always drives on what is next to it, and by this necessity everything is driven round to the place where the breath left, and entering there and filling it up, it follows along with the breath, and all of this happens at once 79c like a wheel turning round, because there is no void. That is why, when the chest and the lung let the breath out, they become full again as the air around the body slips in through the porous flesh and is driven round; and when the air turns back and goes out through the body, it pushes the breath back inward through the passage of the mouth and the nostrils. The cause of the start of all this we must set down 79d as follows. Every animal has the hottest part of itself inside, around the blood and the veins, as if it had a kind of spring of fire within it; and we compared this to the net of the fish trap, all woven of fire and stretched through the middle, while everything outside it is of air. We must agree that the hot, by its own nature, goes outward to its own place, to what is kin to it; and since there are two ways out, one outward through the body, the other 79e through the mouth and the nose, when it rushes out the one way it pushes the other way around, and what is pushed falls in with the fire and grows hot, while what goes out grows cool. As the heat changes over and the stuff along the other exit grows hotter, the hotter part leans back that way again, carried toward its own nature, and pushes what is on the other side around; and what always suffers the same and gives back the same, being shaken back and forth in a circle like this, is what produces breathing in and breathing out.

Timaeus: And so too with the effects around the medical cupping glasses,

80a their causes, and the causes of swallowing, and of things that are thrown, whether they travel through the air or along the ground—all these must be traced the same way. And the same is true of all the sounds that seem fast and slow, high and low: sometimes as they travel they clash, because of the unlikeness of the motion they set up in us, and sometimes they harmonize, because of the likeness. For the slower motions catch up with the motions of the earlier, faster ones when these have already stopped and settled into a like state; 80b coming on later and setting those going, they move them, and in catching up they did not throw in a different motion and cause confusion, but attached the start of a slower movement to the likeness of the faster one as it was ending, and so blended a single experience out of high and low. From this they give pleasure to the foolish and joy to the thoughtful, through the imitation of the divine harmony that has come to be in mortal motions. And so too with all the streams of water, and also 80c the falls of thunderbolts, and the wonders of the attraction of amber and of the Heracles stones: none of these things ever involves any pulling. There is no empty space; these things push one another round, and as things separate and come together each goes by turns to its own place. When these effects are woven together, they will appear marvelous to anyone who studies them the right way. 80d

And so breathing too, where our account began, has come about in this way and through these causes, as was said before: the fire cuts up the food, floats inside and follows the breath, and fills the veins from the belly as it rises along, by pumping the pieces up from there. For this reason the streams of nourishment flow so through the whole body in every animal. Being freshly cut and coming from things related to us—some from fruits, some from the green plants 80e that God planted for this very purpose, to be food—it takes on all kinds of colors from the mixing, but the red color spreads mostly through it, since it is a stuff fashioned by the cutting and smearing of fire in liquid.

Timaeus: That is why what flows through the body has the look we have described, which we call blood, the nourishment of the flesh and of the whole body,

81a from which each part draws water and fills the base of whatever has been emptied; and the way filling and emptying happen is just as in the universe the motion of everything has happened, in which everything that is kin moves toward itself. For the things that stand around outside us always melt us and deal us out, sending what is like each kind off to its own kind; while the things with blood inside us, cut into pieces and enclosed as if under a heaven 81b belonging to each animal, are forced to copy the motion of the whole. So each of the inner parts, carried toward what is kin to it, filled up again whatever had been emptied at that time. When more flows away than flows in, the whole thing wastes; when less, it grows. Now in a young creature the whole body is newly put together, with its triangles still fresh, as if on the building frame of its kind; it has a strong locking of them to one another, and its whole bulk is set together 81c soft, since it has lately come from marrow and been fed on milk. Then the triangles that get enclosed in it when things come in from outside—whatever the food and drink are made of—being older and weaker than its own triangles, it masters them by cutting them with its new ones, and by feeding the creature from many like things it makes it large. But when the root of the triangles loosens, because over a long time it has fought many struggles against many 81d things, the food that comes in it can no longer cut so as to match itself, and it is itself easily broken up by what comes in from outside. Every creature then wastes as this overcomes it, and this experience is called old age. At the end, when the bonds fitted together around the marrow can no longer hold out and are pulled apart by the strain, they in turn release the bonds of the soul; and the soul, freed, flies away 81e with pleasure, as is natural. For everything that goes against nature is painful, and whatever happens in the way nature meant it to is pleasant. Death too works the same way: the kind that comes with diseases and wounds is painful and violent, but the kind that reaches its end with old age goes naturally, is the easiest of all deaths, and comes with more pleasure than pain.

Timaeus: Where diseases come from is plain enough to everyone.

82a Since there are four kinds from which the body is put together—earth, fire, water, and air—when any of these gains too much or too little, contrary to nature, or shifts from its own place to a foreign one, and since fire and the others happen to have more kinds than one, when each takes on what does not suit it, and in all such cases, this creates upsets and diseases. For when each thing goes against nature and changes its place, whatever was cold before grows hot, 82b whatever was dry later becomes wet, and light things become heavy, and it takes on every kind of change in every way. For only, we say, when the same is added to and taken from the same thing in the same way and in due proportion will it allow that same thing to stay whole and healthy; but whatever goes wrong in any of these respects, in leaving or in coming, will bring all kinds of change and disease and endless decay.

When second formations have again been put together naturally, 82c a second understanding of diseases comes to anyone who wants to think it through. For when marrow has been put together out of those things, along with bone, flesh, and sinew, and blood too has come to be in a different way but out of the same things, most of the other diseases come about as before, but the greatest of the diseases turn out hard to deal with in this way: when the coming-to-be of these runs in reverse, then they are destroyed. For by nature flesh and sinew come from blood—sinew from the fibers, because they are kin, 82d and flesh from what sets and separates out of the fibers when it congeals. What goes off from the sinew and flesh, sticky and greasy, at once glues the flesh to the nature of the bones, and by feeding the bone around the marrow itself makes it grow; while what is filtered through the density of the bones, the purest kind of triangles, the smoothest and the greasiest, dripping and trickling down from the bones, waters the 82e marrow. When each of these things happens this way, health generally results; disease results when it goes the opposite way. For when melting flesh sends its melt back in reverse into the veins, then along with the breath there is much blood of every kind in the veins, varied in colors and bitterness and in sharp and salty powers, and it holds biles, ichors, and every kind of phlegm;

Timaeus: For all of it has turned into spoiled, corrupted stuff; it destroys the blood itself first, and itself provides no

83a nourishment to the body any longer; it travels everywhere through the veins, no longer keeping the order of the natural cycles. It is at war with itself, because it has no enjoyment of itself, and it is an enemy to the body's settled structure that stays in its place, destroying and melting it. So whatever oldest flesh melts, becoming hard to digest, darkens from old burning, and because it has been gnawed through everywhere, 83b being bitter it attacks harshly every part of the body that is not yet destroyed. Sometimes, as the bitter part thins out more, the dark color turns sharp instead of bitter; and sometimes the bitterness, dyed with blood, takes on a redder color, and when the dark is mixed with it, a greenish color. A yellow color also mixes in with the bitterness when fresh flesh is melted by the fire in the flame. The common name for all these—some doctors named it bile, 83c or someone able to look at many different things and see in them one kind that deserves one name for them all; the other things said to be kinds of bile each got its own account from its color. As for ichor: one kind is the mild whey of blood, the other is the wild kind, from black bile and sharp stuff, when it mixes through heat with a salty power; this kind is called sharp phlegm. Then again, what melts along with air out of new and soft flesh, when this 83d is blown about and caught up in moisture, and bubbles form out of this experience—each one invisible because it is so small, but together making a mass you can see, and having a white color to look at because of the foam that forms—all this melting of soft flesh, mixed with breath, we say is white phlegm. When new phlegm forms, its whey is sweat and tears, 83e and whatever other such fluids flow out of the body each day as it is cleansed. All these have become instruments of disease, whenever the blood does not fill up naturally from food and drink, but takes on its bulk from the opposite things, against the laws of nature.

Timaeus: When diseases break down each piece of flesh but its roots stay in place, the trouble is only half as bad—there is still an easy recovery—

84a but when the bond that ties flesh to bone falls sick, and no longer separates off from fibers, blood, and sinew to become food for the bone and a fastening of flesh to bone, but turns from greasy, smooth, and sticky into rough, salty, and dried out through bad diet, then when this happens, all such stuff crumbles away again under the flesh and the sinews, breaking off from the bones, and the parts that fall away from the 84b roots leave the sinews bare and full of brine. When these fall back into the flow of blood, they make the diseases mentioned before more numerous. When these painful troubles happen in the body, the ones before them become even greater: when a bone, too dense to get enough breath and heated by decay, starts to rot, and neither takes in nourishment 84c nor goes back into it in reverse as it crumbles—the rot going on into the flesh, and the flesh falling into the blood—then every disease it makes is harsher than those before. Last of all, when the nature of the marrow sickens from lack or from excess, it produces the greatest and most deadly of diseases, since the whole nature of the body is then forced to flow in reverse.

A third kind of disease must be understood 84d as arising in three ways: one from breath, one from phlegm, and one from bile. For when the lung, the steward of the body's airs, does not keep clear passages, being blocked by fluids, the breath does not go some places and enters other places in greater amount than it should; what does not get any cooling rots, and where it forces its way through the veins and twists them and melts the body, and finding a partition in the middle 84e it is trapped there, and countless painful diseases have come from these, often with heavy sweating. Often, when flesh in the body breaks apart and air gets in and cannot get out, it causes the same pains as the things that get in; and the greatest pains, when it gathers around the sinews and the little veins there and swells up, and so pulls the tendons and the connected sinews backward with these. From the sheer tightness of this condition these diseases have been called tetanus and opisthotonos.

Timaeus: And the remedy for these is hard; for fevers that come on in such cases

85a dissolve them most of all. White phlegm, when the air in its bubbles is trapped and causes trouble, but when it finds breath outside the body, is gentler; even so it makes the body spotted, producing white patches, rough scales, and related diseases. When it is mixed with black bile and spreads over the circuits in the head, which are the most divine, and disturbs them, it acts more gently when it comes during sleep, 85b but when it attacks people who are awake, it is harder to shake off; and since it is a disease of a divine part, it is most rightly called sacred. Sharp and salty phlegm is the source of all the diseases that come as runnings-down; and because the places it flows into are of all kinds, it has taken all kinds of names. Everything in the body said to be inflamed—named from burning and blazing—comes about entirely through bile. So when it finds breath outside, it boils and sends out all kinds of 85c swellings; when it is shut up inside, it causes many burnlike diseases; and the greatest harm comes when it mixes with pure blood and scatters the family of fibers out of their own order. These were spread through the blood so that it would have a balanced thinness and thickness, and would neither flow out as liquid through the porous body because of heat, nor again be too thick and hard to move, 85d so that it could barely circulate in the veins. The fibers keep this balance in the way nature forms things; when someone gathers them together even in dead blood that has gone cold, all the rest of the blood runs liquid; but if they are left alone, they quickly set along with the cold that surrounds the blood. Since the fibers have this power in the blood, bile—which by nature is old blood that has melted out of the flesh into the blood again—hot and wet, when it first seeps in little by little, sets 85e through the power of the fibers; and as it sets and is put out by force, it causes a chill and trembling inside.

Timaeus: When more of it flows in, it overpowers the fibers with its own heat, boils them up, and shakes them into disorder; and if it is strong enough to hold out to the end, it breaks through to the stuff of the marrow and burns it, and so loosens the soul's cables there like a ship's moorings, and sets it free. But when it is weaker and the body holds out as it is worn down, then it is overpowered and either breaks out all over the body, or is pushed down through the veins into the lower or the upper cavity, like a fugitive from a city in faction, out of

86a the body it falls out, and causes diarrhea, dysentery, and all such diseases. So a body that has fallen sick mainly from an excess of fire produces continual burnings and fevers; one from air, fevers every other day; one from water, tertian fevers, because water is slower than air and fire; and one from earth, which is four times as slow as these and is cleansed in periods four times as long, produces quartan fevers and is barely rid of them. 86b

That is how the diseases of the body come about; those of the soul come about through the state of the body in this way. Folly must be agreed to be a disease of the soul, and there are two kinds of folly: madness and ignorance. So whatever experience gives someone either of these must be called a disease, and excessive pleasures and pains we must count as the greatest diseases of the soul. For a person who is overcome with joy, or in the opposite case tormented by 86c grief, rushing to grab the one at the wrong time or to run away from the other, can see or hear nothing straight, and rages, and at that time is least able to take part in reasoning. A person whose seed is abundant and runny around the marrow, and who is by nature like a tree that bears more fruit than is right—having many birth pangs at each act and many pleasures in his desires and in the births that come of them—becomes mad for most of his life because of the greatest pleasures 86d and pains; and since his soul is sick and foolish because of the body, he is thought to be not sick but willingly bad. But in truth, sexual excess for the most part, through the condition of one kind of thing in the body—the looseness of the bones that makes things runny and wet—has become a disease of the soul. And almost everything said in blame of lack of self-control with pleasures—and the reproach that such bad acts are done on purpose—is not rightly blamed; for no one is bad 86e willingly. The bad person becomes bad through some bad condition of the body and an upbringing without teaching, and these things come to everyone unwanted and against their will. And again, in the same way, the soul gets much of its badness in relation to pains through the body.

Timaeus: Whenever any of the sharp and salty phlegms, or any bitter and bilious humors, wander through the body, get no breath outside, and are coiled up inside,

87a they mix their vapor with the flow of the soul and blend with it, and they cause all kinds of diseases of the soul, in greater or less degree, few or many; and being carried to the three places of the soul, whichever of them each falls upon, they produce all kinds of bad temper and gloom, they produce rashness and cowardice, and also forgetfulness and difficulty in learning. On top of these, when people are so badly 87b put together that bad policies and bad arguments are spoken in the cities, in private and in public, and when from youth no studies that can cure these are learned, in this way we all become bad—the bad among us—through two things that are entirely against our will. Of these we must blame the ones who plant more than what is planted, and the ones who feed more than what is fed; but everyone must strive in whatever way he can, through upbringing, practices, and studies, to run from badness and to win its opposite. This much, then, is one branch of our account. 87c

The counterpart of this, again—the care of bodies and minds, and the causes by which they are kept well—it is right and proper to give in return; for it is more just to give an account of good things than of bad ones. Everything good is fine, and what is fine is not without measure; so a living thing of this sort we must count well proportioned. Of proportions, we notice the small ones and reason about them, but the most important and the greatest ones 87d we take no account of. For with regard to health and disease, virtue and badness, no proportion or disproportion is greater than that of the soul itself to the body itself; and none of this do we consider or take thought of: that when a strong and in every way great soul carries a weaker and smaller body, or again when the two are put together the other way round, the whole living thing is not fine—for it is out of proportion in the greatest proportions—while the one arranged the opposite way is, for anyone able to see it, the most beautiful and the most lovable of all sights. 87e Just as a body with legs too long, or some other excess out of measure with itself, is at once ugly, and in sharing the work causes many strains, many cramps, and, because it is unbalanced, many falls, making countless troubles for itself,

Timaeus: We must think the same about the two together, the living thing we speak of: when in it the soul is stronger

88a than the body and holds it in a passion, it shakes the whole thing and fills it with diseases from inside; and when it goes intensely into some kinds of learning and inquiry, it wears the body down; and when it gives lessons and argues in words, in public and in private, in disputes and rivalries, it sets the body on fire and shakes it; and bringing on flows of fluid, it deceives most of the so-called doctors and makes them blame the innocent things. And again, when a body that is big and overgrown with soul is joined with a small and weak mind—for by nature humans have two 88b sets of desires, through the body a desire for food, through the most divine part in us a desire for understanding—the motions of the stronger element take over, increasing their own side and making the soul's part dull, slow to learn, and forgetful, and so they produce the greatest disease, ignorance. There is one safeguard for both: do not exercise the soul without the body, nor the body without the soul, so that the two may defend each other, keep their balance, and be 88c healthy. So the person who works at mathematics or at some other very demanding study of the mind must also give the body its movement, by taking exercise; and the person who carefully shapes the body must in turn give the soul its movements, making use of music and of all philosophy, if someone is to be rightly called both fine and good at once. In the same way the parts too must be cared for, copying the form of the whole 88d. For the body is burned and cooled inside by what comes in, and again dried and wetted from outside, and suffers what follows from these under both motions; and when a person keeps the body idle and hands it over to these motions, it is overpowered and ruined. But if someone imitates what we called the nurse and caretaker of the universe, and never lets the body stay idle but keeps it moving, always giving it some kind of shaking, then through 88e all of it he wards off the motions inside and outside according to nature; and shaking it in due measure he sets in order toward one another the experiences that wander around the body and its parts, according to their kinship, following the account we gave earlier about the universe. He will not set enemy next to enemy and let them breed wars and diseases in the body, but setting friend next to friend he will produce health

89a and will so provide it.

Timaeus: Of motions, then, the best is the motion a thing produces in itself by itself—for it is most akin to the motion of thought and to the motion of the universe. The motion produced by another is worse, and the worst is the one that moves the body part by part through other things while the body itself lies still and keeps quiet. That is why, of the cleansings and buildups of the body, the best is the one through exercise; second is the one through being carried along, on voyages and wherever rides are easy. A third kind of motion 89b is useful sometimes when one is forced to it, but otherwise a person with sense should by no means accept it: the cleansing by drugs that comes from medicine. For diseases that do not carry great dangers must not be provoked with drugs. For every formation of diseases is in some way like the nature of living things. The coming together of these happens with set times of life for the whole kind, and each living thing grows with its own life span already allotted to it, 89c apart from the troubles that come by necessity. For the triangles come together right at the start of each thing with a power that can hold out for a certain length of time, beyond which no one could ever live out a life. The same rule holds for the formation of diseases: when someone destroys it before its allotted time with drugs, small diseases tend to become great, and few to become many. That is why all such conditions must be managed with diets, as far as one has leisure for it, 89d and one must not use drugs and provoke a trouble that is hard to handle.

Let this be said about the living thing in common, and about the part of it that is the body—how someone may best live by reason, training it and being trained by it himself. But what is to guide it must rather, and before all this, be prepared, as far as possible, to be the finest and the best guide there is. To go through these matters with precision 89e would be a task big enough on its own; but as a side task, following on from what has been said before, one could look at it this way and finish the account like this, not without reason.

Timaeus: As we have said many times, three kinds of soul are housed in three different ways in us, and each of them happens to have its own motions. So in the same way, now too, we must say as briefly as possible that the one of them that lives in idleness and keeps quiet about its own motions must necessarily become the weakest, while the one that is exercised in training becomes the strongest;

90a so we must see to it that they keep their motions in balance with one another. We must think about the ruling kind of soul in us in this way: God has given each of us a guiding spirit; this is what we say lives at the top of our body and lifts us up from the earth toward our kinship with the heaven, since we are a plant not of the earth but of the heaven, and we are quite right to say so. For from there, where the first coming-to-be of the soul sprang, the divine part, hanging our head and root 90b from above, keeps the whole body upright. So the person who has given himself over to desires or to love of winning, and works hard at these, must have all his convictions mortal; and since he has grown that part of himself, he must in no way fall short of becoming as fully mortal as it is possible for a mortal to be. But the person who is eager for the love of learning and for true understanding, and has trained this part of himself most of all, 90c must surely, if he lays hold of truth, think immortal and divine thoughts—every necessity brings this about—and as far as human nature can share in immortality, he must leave no part of that undone; and since he always cares for the divine part and has the spirit within him well ordered and living with him, he must be exceptionally happy. There is one care for everything and for everyone: to give to each the nourishments and the motions that belong to it. To the divine part in us, the thoughts and revolutions of the universe 90d are kin; and each of us must follow these, setting right the revolutions in our head that were thrown off course at our birth, by learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, and making the thinking part like the thing thought about, in accord with its ancient nature. Once it has been made like, it reaches the end of the best life set before humans by the gods, both for the present time and for the time to come. 90e

And so what we were told from the beginning to go through—the account of the whole up to the coming-to-be of humans—now seems almost to have reached its end. The other living things, and how they came to be in turn, we must touch on briefly, since there is no need to draw it out; that way one will seem to keep better measure in the accounts of these things. Let this sort of thing, then, be told in this way.

Timaeus: Of the men who were born, those who were cowards and lived unjust lives were changed, by the likely account, into women in the second

91a birth; and at that time, for these reasons, the gods crafted the desire for sex, forming a living creature with a soul—one in us and one in women—making each of them in this way. They bored a channel from the passage of drink—where what we drink passes through the lung, down past the kidneys into the bladder, and is squeezed out again by the breath—through to the marrow that is set together from the head down the neck and along the spine, 91b which we called seed in our earlier accounts. This marrow, being alive and having taken breath, put into the place where it breathed a living desire for outlet, and so brought to completion the desire to beget. That is why in men the part around the genitals has become disobedient and self-willed, like a creature that will not listen to reason, and it tries to rule everything through mad desires. And in 91c women, for these same reasons, the womb—the so-called matrix—being a creature with a desire for childbearing, when it stays fruitless past its season for a long time, grows angry and takes it hard; and wandering all over the body, blocking the channels of the breath and not letting them breathe, it drives them into the worst difficulties and causes all kinds of other diseases. This lasts until the desire and the 91d passion of the two bring them together and, like picking fruit from trees, they sow into the womb as into a field living things too small to see and unformed; then they separate them out and grow them large inside, and after that bring them to the light and complete the coming-to-be of living creatures. Women, then, and the whole female sex came to be in this way. The race of birds was reshaped, growing feathers instead of hair, from men who were harmless but light-minded, and given to studying the sky, who in their simple-mindedness believed that the surest proofs about these things come through sight 91e. The land-going and beastly kind came to be from those who made no use of philosophy and paid no attention at all to the nature of the heaven, because they no longer used the revolutions in the head, but followed the leading parts of the soul that are around the chest.

Timaeus: From these ways of life their front limbs and their heads were pulled down to the earth by kinship and pressed into it, and they got long and varied

92a tops of the head, since in each of them the revolutions were crushed together by idleness. From this cause there grew the four-footed kind and the many-footed kind, God setting more supports under the more foolish, so that they would be pulled down more to the earth. To the most foolish of these, whose whole body is stretched down against the ground so that they no longer have any need of feet, he gave birth to them without feet, crawling on the ground. The fourth kind, 92b the water-living one, came to be from the most mindless and unlearned of all, whom the reshapers no longer deemed worthy even of pure breath, because their souls were wholly unclean from every kind of wrong; but instead of the thin, pure breath of air they pushed them into the murky, deep breathing of water. From these came the tribe of fish and of shellfish and everything that lives in water, as the penalty for the deepest ignorance, receiving the lowest homes 92c.

And so now let us say that our account of the whole has reached its end. For this cosmos, taking in mortal and immortal living things and being filled up in this way, has come to be a visible living thing containing all that is visible, an image of the intelligible, a perceptible god, greatest and best, most beautiful and most complete: this one heaven, unique of its kind.