Timaeus — Plato
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W/if was Plato the enemy of the poets ? clxv would have called them, the essential forms, of truth and justice Repuhik x. out of the variety of opinion and the complexity of modern introducsociety, — which would preserve all the good of each generation ^'"''' and leave the bad unsung, — which should be based not on vain longings or faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into the nature of man.
Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or prose, two in one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the service of God and man ; and feelings of love might still be the incentive to great though4:s and heroic deeds as in the days of Dante or Petrarch ; and many types of manly and womanly beauty might appear among us, rising above the ordinary level of humanity, and many lives which were like poems (Laws vii.
817 B), be not only written, but lived by us. A few such strains have been heard among men in the tragedies of y^schylus and Sophocles, whom Plato quotes, not, as Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep and serious approval, — in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in passages of other English poets, — first and above all in the Hebrew prophets and psalmists.
Shakespeare has taught us how great men should speak and act ; he has drawn characters of a wonderful purity and depth ; he has ennobled the human mind, but, like Homer (Rep. x. 599 foil.), he 'has left no way of life.
The next greatest poet of modern times, Goethe, is concerned with * a lower degree of truth ' ; he paints the world as a stage on which * all the men and women are merely players ' ; he cultivates life as an art, but he furnishes no ideals of truth and action. The poet may rebel against any attempt to set limits to his fancy ; and he may argue truly that moralizing in verse is not poetry.
Possibly, like Mephistopheles in Faust, he may retaliate on his advei'saries. But the philosopher will still be justified in asking, ' How may the heavenly gift of poesy be devoted to the good of mankind ? ' Returning to Plato, we may observe that a similar mixture of truth and error appears in other parts of the argument.
He is aware of the absurdity of mankind framing their whole lives according to Homer; just as in the Phaedrus he intimates the absurdity of interpreting mythology upon rational principles; both these were the modern tendencies of his own age, which he deservedly ridicules. On the other hand, his argument that clxvi The arginnent for immortality. Republic X. Homcr, if he had been able to teach mankind anything worth Introduc- knowing, would not have been allowed by them to go about TioN. begging as a rhapsodist, is both false and contrary to the spirit of Plato (cp. Rep. vi. 489 A foil.).
It may be compared with those other paradoxes of the Gorgias, that ' No statesman was ever unjustly put to death by the city of which he was the head'; and that 'No Sophist was ever defrauded by his pupils' (Gorg. 519 foil.) The argument for immortality seems to rest on the absolute dualism of soul and body. Admitting the existence of the soul, we know of no force which is able to put an end to her.
Vice is her own proper evil; and if she cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot be destroyed by any other.
Yet Plato has acknowledged that the soul may be so overgrown by the incrustations of earth as to lose her original form ; and in the \ Timaeus he recognizes more strongly than in the Republic the influence which the body has over the mind, denying even : the voluntariness of human actions, on the ground that they f proceed from physical states (Tim. 86, 87).
In the Republic, as elsewhere, he wavers between the original soul which has to be restored, and the character which is developed by training and education The vision of another world is ascribed to Er, the son of Armenius, who is said by Clement of Alexandria to have been Zoroaster. The tale has certainly an oriental character, and may be compared with the pilgrimages of the soul in the Zend Avesta (cp. Haug, Avesta, p. 197).
But no trace of acquaintance with Zoroaster is found elsewhere in Plato's writings, and there is no reason for giving him the name of Er the Pamphylian. The philosophy of Heracleitus cannot be shown to be borrowed from Zoroaster, and still less the myths of Plato. The local arrangement of the vision is less distinct than that of the Phaedrus and Phaedo.
Astronomy is mingled with symbolism and mythology ; the great sphere of heaven is represented under the symbol of a cylinder or box, containing the seven orbits of the planets and the fixed stars ; this is suspended from an axis or spindle which turns on the knees of Necessity; the revolutions of the seven orbits contained in the cylinder are guided by the fates, and their harmonious motion produces the music of the spheres. Through the innermost or eighth Republic x. of these, which is the moon, is passed the spindle; but it is Introducdoubtful whether this is the continuation of the column of light, ^'°^- from which the pilgrims contemplate the heavens ; the words of Plato imply that they are connected, but not the same. The column itself is clearly not of adamant.
The spindle (which is of adamant) is fastened to the ends of the chains which extend to the middle of the column of light — this column is said to hold together the heaven ; but whether it hangs from the spindle, or is at right angles to it, is not explained.
The cylinder containing the orbits of the stars is almost as much a symbol as the figure of Necessity turning the spindle; — for the outermost rim is the sphere of the fixed stars, and nothing is said about the intervals of space which divide the paths of the stars in the heavens. The description is both a picture and an orrery, and therefore is necessarily inconsistent with itself.
The column of light is not the Milky Way — which is neither straight, nor like a rainbow — but the imaginary axis of the earth. This is compared to the rainbow in respect not of form but of colour, and not to the undergirders of a trireme, but to the straight rope running from prow to stern in which the undergirders meet.
The orrery or picture of the heavens given in the Republic differs in its mode of representation from the circles hi the same and of the other in the Timaeus. In both the fixed stars are distinguished from the planets, and they move in orbits without them, although in an opposite direction : in the Republic as in the Timaeus (40 B) they are all moving round the axis of the world.
But we are not certain that in the former they are moving round the earth. No distinct mention is made in the Republic of the circles of the same and other; although • both in the Timaeus and in the Republic the motion of the fixed stars is supposed to coincide with the motion of the whole. The relative thickness of the rims is perhaps designed to express the relative distances of the planets.
Plato probably intended to represent the earth, from which Er and his companions are viewing the heavens, as stationary in place ; but whether or not herself revolving, unless this is implied in the revolution of the axis, is uncertain (cp. Timaeus). The spectator
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