Timaeus — Plato

Reading ^vv6vdC,ovTeq (conj. Hermann).

Degrees of intelligence in animals.

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of the head, but followed the guidance of those parts of the rhnaeus. soul which are in the breast. * In consequence of these habits timaeus. of theirs they had their front-legs and their heads resting upon the earth to which they were drawn by natural affinity ; and the crowns of their heads were elongated and of all sorts of shapes, into which the courses of the soul were crushed by reason of disuse. And this was the reason why they were 92 created quadrupeds and polypods : God gave the more senseless of them the more support that they might be more attracted to the earth. And the mo.st foolish of them, who the most foou trail their bodies entirely upon the ground and have no longer any need of feet, he made without feet to crawl upon the earth. The fourth class were the inhabitants of the water :

ish into reptiles:

the most these were made out of the most entirelv senseless and ;g"°'''''"' ^^'^ impure mto ignorant of all, whom the transformers did not think any fish. longer worthy of pure respiration, because they possessed a soul which was made impure by all sorts of transgression ; and instead of the subtle and pure medium of air, they gave them the deep and muddy sea to be their element of respiration ; and hence arose the race of fishes and oysters, and other aquatic animals, which have received the most remote habitations as a punishment of their outlandish ignorance. These are the laws by which animals pass into one another, now, as ever, changing as they lose or gain wisdom and folly. We may now say that our discourse about the nature of our task the universe has an end. The world has received animals, mortal and immortal, and is fulfilled with them, and has become a visible animal containing the visible — the sensible God who is the image of the intellectual \ the greatest, best, fairest, most perfect — the one only-begotten heaven.

IS now completed.

' Or reading ttoitjtov — ' of his maker.'

CRITIAS.

INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.

The Critias is a fragment which breaks off in the middle of Critias. a sentence. It was designed to be the second part of a trilogy, introducwhich, like the other great Platonic trilogy of the Sophist, ^'^'^ Statesman, Philosopher, was never completed. Timaeus had brought down the origin of the world to the creation of man, and the dawn of history was now to succeed the philosophy of nature. The Critias is also connected with the Republic. Plato, as he has already told us (Tim. 19, 20), intended to represent the idezd state engaged in a patriotic conflict. This mythical conflict is prophetic or symbolical of the struggle of Athens and Persia, perhaps in some degree also of the wars of the Greeks and Carthaginians, in the same way that the Persian is prefigured by the Trojan war to the mind of Herodotus, or as the narrative of the first part of the Aeneid is intended by Virgil to foreshadow the wars of Carthage and Rome. The small number of the primitive Athenian citizens (20,000), ' which is about their present number' (Crit. 112 D), is evidently designed to contrast with the myriads and barbaric array of the Atlantic hosts. The passing remark in the Timaeus (25 C) that Athens was left alone in the struggle, in which she conquered and became the liberator of Greece, is also an allusion to the later history. Hence we may safely conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato, who has used the name of Solon and introduced the Eg>'ptian priests to give verisimilitude to his story. To the Greek such a tale, like that of the earth-born men, would have seemed perfectly accordant with the character of his mythology, and not more marvellous than the wonders of the East narrated by Herodotus and others: he might have been deceived into

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