Complete Works

by Plato, Cooper, John M. , Hutchinson, D. S.

  Each group spent seven days in the meadow, and on the eighth they had to get up and go on a journey. On the fourth day of that journey, they came to a place where they could look down from above on a straight column of light that stretched over the whole of heaven and earth, more like a rainbow than anything else, but brighter and more pure. After another day, they came to the light itself, and there, in the middle of the light, they saw the extremities of its bonds stretching from the heavens, for the light binds the heavens like the cables girding a trireme and holds [c] its entire revolution together. From the extremities hangs the spindle of Necessity, by means of which all the revolutions are turned. Its stem and hook are of adamant, whereas in its whorl12 adamant is mixed with other kinds of material. The nature of the whorl was this: Its shape was like that of an ordinary whorl, but, from what Er said, we must understand its [d] structure as follows. It was as if one big whorl had been made hollow by being thoroughly scooped out, with another smaller whorl closely fitted into it, like nested boxes, and there was a third whorl inside the second, and so on, making eight whorls altogether, lying inside one another, with their rims appearing as circles from above, while from the back they formed [e] one continuous whorl around the stem, which was driven through the center of the eighth. The first or outside whorl had the widest circular rim; that of the sixth was second in width; the fourth was third; the eighth was fourth; the seventh was fifth; the fifth was sixth; the third was seventh; and the second was eighth. The rim of the largest was spangled; that of [617] the seventh was brightest; that of the eighth took its color from the seventh’s shining on it; the second and fifth were about equal in brightness, more yellow than the others; the third was the whitest in color; the fourth was rather red; and the sixth was second in whiteness. The whole spindle turned at the same speed, but, as it turned, the inner circles gently revolved in a direction opposite to that of the whole. Of the whorls themselves, the eighth was the fastest; second came the seventh, sixth, and fifth, all at the [b] same speed; it seemed to them that the fourth was third in its speed of revolution; the fourth, third; and the second, fifth. The spindle itself turned on the lap of Necessity. And up above on each of the rims of the circles stood a Siren, who accompanied its revolution, uttering a single sound, one single note. And the concord of the eight notes produced a single harmony. And there were three other beings sitting at equal distances from one another, each on a throne. These were the Fates, the daughters [c] of Necessity: Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos. They were dressed in white, with garlands on their heads, and they sang to the music of the Sirens. Lachesis sang of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the future. With her right hand, Clotho touched the outer circumference of the spindle and helped it turn, but left off doing so from time to time; Atropos did the same to the inner ones; and Lachesis helped both motions in turn, one [d] with one hand and one with the other.

  When the souls arrived at the light, they had to go to Lachesis right away. There a Speaker arranged them in order, took from the lap of Lachesis a number of lots and a number of models of lives, mounted a high pulpit, and spoke to them: “Here is the message of Lachesis, the maiden daughter of Necessity: ‘Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another cycle that will end in death. Your daemon or guardian spirit will not be assigned to you by lot; you will choose him. The one who has the [e] first lot will be the first to choose a life to which he will then be bound by necessity. Virtue knows no master; each will possess it to a greater or less degree, depending on whether he values or disdains it. The responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice; the god has none.’” When he had said this, the Speaker threw the lots among all of them, and each—with the exception of Er, who wasn’t allowed to choose—picked up the one that fell next to him. And the lot made it clear to the one who picked it up where in the order he would get to make his choice. After that, the models of lives were placed on the ground before them. There were far [618] more of them than there were souls present, and they were of all kinds, for the lives of animals were there, as well as all kinds of human lives. There were tyrannies among them, some of which lasted throughout life, while others ended halfway through in poverty, exile, and beggary. There were lives of famous men, some of whom were famous for the beauty of their appearance, others for their strength or athletic prowess, others still for their high birth and the virtue or excellence of their ancestors. And there were also lives of men who weren’t famous for any of these things. [b] And the same for lives of women. But the arrangement of the soul was not included in the model because the soul is inevitably altered by the different lives it chooses. But all the other things were there, mixed with each other and with wealth, poverty, sickness, health, and the states intermediate to them.

  Now, it seems that it is here, Glaucon, that a human being faces the greatest danger of all. And because of this, each of us must neglect all other subjects and be most concerned to seek out and learn those that will [c] enable him to distinguish the good life from the bad and always to make the best choice possible in every situation. He should think over all the things we have mentioned and how they jointly and severally determine what the virtuous life is like. That way he will know what the good and bad effects of beauty are when it is mixed with wealth, poverty, and a particular state of the soul. He will know the effects of high or low birth, [d] private life or ruling office, physical strength or weakness, ease or difficulty in learning, and all the things that are either naturally part of the soul or are acquired, and he will know what they achieve when mixed with one another. And from all this he will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reason out which life is better and which worse and to choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it leads the soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to become more just, and ignoring everything [e] else: We have seen that this is the best way to choose, whether in life or death. Hence, we must go down to Hades holding with adamantine determination to the belief that this is so, lest we be dazzled there by wealth and other such evils, rush into a tyranny or some other similar [619] course of action, do irreparable evils, and suffer even worse ones. And we must always know how to choose the mean in such lives and how to avoid either of the extremes, as far as possible, both in this life and in all those beyond it. This is the way that a human being becomes happiest. [b]

  Then our messenger from the other world reported that the Speaker spoke as follows: “There is a satisfactory life rather than a bad one available even for the one who comes last, provided that he chooses it rationally and lives it seriously. Therefore, let not the first be careless in his choice nor the last discouraged.”

  He said that when the Speaker had told them this, the one who came up first chose the greatest tyranny. In his folly and greed he chose it without adequate examination and didn’t notice that, among other evils, he was fated to eat his own children as a part of it. When he examined at [c] leisure, the life he had chosen, however, he beat his breast and bemoaned his choice. And, ignoring the warning of the Speaker, he blamed chance, daemons, or guardian spirits, and everything else for these evils but himself. He was one of those who had come down from heaven, having lived his previous life under an orderly constitution, where he had participated in virtue through habit and without philosophy. Broadly speaking, indeed, [d] most of those who were caught out in this way were souls who had come down from heaven and who were untrained in suffering as a result. The majority of those who had come up from the earth, on the other hand, having suffered themselves and seen others suffer, were in no rush to make their choices. Because of this and because of the chance of the lottery, there was an interchange of goods and evils for most of the souls. However, if someone pursues philosophy in a sound manner when he comes to live [e] here on earth and if the lottery doesn’t make him one of the last to choose, then, given what Er has reported about the next world, it looks as though not only will he be happy here, but his journey from here to there and back again won’t be along the
rough underground path, but along the smooth heavenly one.

  Er said that the way in which the souls chose their lives was a sight [620] worth seeing, since it was pitiful, funny, and surprising to watch. For the most part, their choice depended upon the character of their former life. For example, he said that he saw the soul that had once belonged to Orpheus choosing a swan’s life, because he hated the female sex because of his death at their hands, and so was unwilling to have a woman conceive and give birth to him. Er saw the soul of Thamyris13 choosing the life of a nightingale, a swan choosing to change over to a human life, and other musical animals doing the same thing. The twentieth soul chose the life [b] of a lion. This was the soul of Ajax, son of Telamon.14 He avoided human life because he remembered the judgment about the armor. The next soul was that of Agamemnon, whose sufferings also had made him hate the human race, so he changed to the life of an eagle. Atalanta15 had been assigned a place near the middle, and when she saw great honors being given to a male athlete, she chose his life, unable to pass them by. After her, he saw the soul of Epeius, the son of Panopeus, taking on the nature [c] of a craftswoman.16 And very close to last, he saw the soul of the ridiculous Thersites clothing itself as a monkey.17 Now, it chanced that the soul of Odysseus got to make its choice last of all, and since memory of its former sufferings had relieved its love of honor, it went around for a long time, looking for the life of a private individual who did his own work, and with difficulty it found one lying off somewhere neglected by the others. He chose it gladly and said that he’d have made the same choice even if he’d been first. Still other souls changed from animals into human beings, [d] or from one kind of animal into another, with unjust people changing into wild animals, and just people into tame ones, and all sorts of mixtures occurred.

  After all the souls had chosen their lives, they went forward to Lachesis in the same order in which they had made their choices, and she assigned to each the daemon it had chosen as guardian of its life and fulfiller of its choice. This daemon first led the soul under the hand of Clotho as it turned [e] the revolving spindle to confirm the fate that the lottery and its own choice had given it. After receiving her touch, he led the soul to the spinning of Atropos, to make what had been spun irreversible. Then, without turning around, they went from there under the throne of Necessity and, when all of them had passed through, they travelled to the Plain of Forgetfulness in burning, choking, terrible heat, for it was empty of trees and earthly [621] vegetation. And there, beside the River of Unheeding, whose water no vessel can hold, they camped, for night was coming on. All of them had to drink a certain measure of this water, but those who weren’t saved by reason drank more than that, and as each of them drank, he forgot everything and went to sleep. But around midnight there was a clap of thunder and an earthquake, and they were suddenly carried away from there, this [b] way and that, up to their births, like shooting stars. Er himself was forbidden to drink from the water. All the same, he didn’t know how he had come back to his body, except that waking up suddenly he saw himself lying on the pyre at dawn.

  And so, Glaucon, his story wasn’t lost but preserved, and it would save us, if we were persuaded by it, for we would then make a good crossing of the River of Forgetfulness, and our souls wouldn’t be defiled. But if we [c] are persuaded by me, we’ll believe that the soul is immortal and able to endure every evil and every good, and we’ll always hold to the upward path, practicing justice with reason in every way. That way we’ll be friends both to ourselves and to the gods while we remain here on earth and afterwards—like victors in the games who go around collecting their [d] prizes—we’ll receive our rewards. Hence, both in this life and on the thousand-year journey we’ve described, we’ll do well and be happy.

  1. The Homeridae were the rhapsodes and poets who recited and expounded Homer throughout the Greek world.

  2. Thales of Miletus is the first philosopher we know of in ancient Greece. He is said to have predicted the solar eclipse of 585 B.C. Anacharsis, who lived around 600 B.C., is credited with beginning Greek geometry and with being able to calculate the distance of ships at sea.

  3. Creophylus is said to have been an epic poet from Chios. His name comes from two words meaning “meat” and “race” or “kind.” A modern equivalent would be “meathead.”

  4. Protagoras and Prodicus were two of the most famous fifth-century sophists.

  5. See 436b–c.

  6. See 439c ff.

  7. See 387d–e.

  8. Reading Dia sophōn in c1.

  9. See 357–367e.

  10. The ring of Gyges is discussed at 359d–360a. The cap of Hades also made its wearer invisible.

  11. Books ix–xi of the Odyssey were traditionally referred to as the tales of Alcinous.

  12. A whorl is the weight that twirls a spindle.

  13. Thamyris was a legendary poet and singer, who boasted that he could defeat the Muses in a song contest. For this they blinded him and took away his voice. He is mentioned at Iliad ii.596–600.

  14. Ajax is a great Homeric hero. He thought that he deserved to be awarded the armor of the dead Achilles, but instead it went to Odysseus. Ajax was maddened by this injustice and finally killed himself because of the terrible things he had done while mad. See Sophocles, Ajax.

  15. Atalanta was a mythical huntress, who would marry only a man who could beat her at running. In most versions of the myth, losers were killed.

  16. Epeius is mentioned at Odyssey viii.493 as the man who helped Athena make the Trojan Horse.

  17. Thersites is an ordinary soldier who criticizes Agamemnon at Iliad ii.211–77. Odysseus beats him for his presumption and is widely approved for doing so.

  TIMAEUS

  Translated by Donald J. Zeyl.

  Timaeus offers the reader a rhetorical display, not a philosophical dialogue. In a stage-setting conversation, Socrates reviews his own previous day’s exposition of the institutions of the ideal city (apparently those of the Republic), but the remainder of the work is taken up by Timaeus’ very long speech describing the creation of the world. Other works in the Platonic corpus similarly consist of a single speech: not to mention the Apology, the same is true of Critias (Timaeus’ incomplete companion piece) and Menexenus. But Timaeus’ speech is unique among them in having extensive philosophical content: here we get philosophy, but grandiose and rhetorically elaborate cosmic theorizing, not the down-to-earth dialectical investigation of most of Plato’s philosophical works. For a parallel one has to look to Phaedrus, where Socrates’ two speeches on erotic love, especially the second, similarly deck out philosophical theses in brilliant, image-studded rhetorical dress.

  Timaeus, who appears to be a dramatic invention of Plato’s, comes from Southern Italy, noted for its Greek mathematicians and scientists. He bases his cosmology on the Platonic division, familiar for example from Phaedo and Republic, between eternal, unchanging ‘Forms’ and their unstable ‘reflections’ in the physical, perceptible world of ‘becoming’. But he introduces a creator god, the ‘demiurge’ (Greek for ‘craftsman’), who crafts and brings order to the physical world by using the Forms as patterns—Timaeus does not conceive the Forms as themselves shaping the world. And he develops the theory of a ‘receptacle’ underlying physical things, onto which, as onto a featureless plastic stuff, the Formal patterns are imposed. In these terms, and emphasizing mathematical relationships as the basis for cosmic order, Timaeus sets out the foundations of the sciences of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and physiology, including the physiology and psychology of perception, ending with a classification of the diseases of body and soul and provisions for their treatment. Timaeus was a central text of Platonism in later antiquity and the Middle Ages—it was almost the only work of Plato’s available in Latin—and the subject of many controversies. Did Timaeus’ creation story mean that the world was created in time—or did it merely tell in temporal terms a story of the world’s eternal dependence on a higher reality, the Forms? Did the demi
urge really stand apart from those realities in designing it, or were they in fact simply the contents of his own divine mind? Timaeus was central to debates on these and other questions of traditional Platonism.

  Most scholars would date Timaeus among Plato’s last works, though a minority argue for a date in the ‘middle period’, closer to Republic, which it seems certainly to postdate. Plato, as author of the work, is responsible for all Timaeus’ theories. How far do they represent his own philosophical convictions at the time he wrote? Timaeus himself emphasizes—in effect, because of the great distance, literal and metaphorical, separating us from the heavens, on which the rest of the world depends—that we cannot have more than a ‘likely story’, not the full, transparent truth, about the physical details of the world’s structure. It may be instructive to work out detailed theories, but he offers them as no more than reasonable ways in which the creator might have proceeded in designing the world. Moreover, according to the Phaedrus, rhetorically skilled speakers will base what they say on the full philosophical truth, but will vary and embellish it as needed to attract and hold their hearers’ attention and to persuade them to accept what is essential in it. Timaeus may be Plato’s spokesman, but if Plato attended to the Phaedrus’s strictures on rhetoric in composing his speech, one should exercise more than ordinary caution in inferring from what Timaeus says to details of Plato’s own commitments even on matters of philosophical principle. In what Timaeus says about ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, the Forms and ‘reflections’, the ‘demiurge’ and the ‘receptacle’, and the arguments he offers on these subjects, what belongs to the rhetorical embellishment—intended to impress Socrates and his other listeners—and what is the sober truth, as Plato now understands it? The dialogue forces these questions on us, but gives no easy answers.