Partisanship and the Work of Philosophy in Plato's Timaeus

Partisanship and the Work of Philosophy inPlato’s Timaeus

Jacob Howland

Abstract: This article examines the political and philosophical problem ofpartisanship—the false inflation of a part into a semblance of a whole—in Plato’sTimaeus. Timaeus’s “likely story” about the cosmos both exemplifies and addressesthis problem, which first comes to light in the dialogue’s opening pages. Reflectionon the problem of partisanship allows us to grasp Timaeus’s understanding of thesimultaneously erotic and thumotic work of philosophy, the work of making thingswhole. While Timaeus is moved by a Socratic love of wisdom, I argue that heimplicitly corrects the picture of the erotic philosopher Socrates sets forth in theRepublic.

The Timaeus, Plato’s great cosmological drama, is a perplexing compositionthat places unusual demands on the reader. The difficulties of the text stemprimarily from a range of oppositions that pull at the warp and woof of thedialogue, threatening to unravel Plato’s intricately woven tapestry. The some-times extreme tension between the necessary and the good, nomos (law,custom, convention) and phusis (nature), reason and the appetites, the souland the body, spirited politics and erotic philosophizing (to name onlysome of the dialogue’s major themes), and the complexity of the interrelation-ship of these themes, can make trying to understand the Timaeus feel like aSisyphean endeavor.Perplexity, however, is sometimes the beginning of wisdom. The reader

who finds that the parts of the Timaeus resist integration into a well-knitwhole thereby rehearses on the level of interpretation a problem that, accord-ing to Timaeus, lies at the heart of human existence. Timaeus’s “likely story”(eikos muthos: 29d; cf. 59c, 68d) is centrally concerned with the relationshipof human beings to the unique, self-sufficient cosmos—the whole of which,in his account, we are properly but a part.1 The interpretative challenges

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Southern Political ScienceAssociation annual meeting. I would like to thank Scott Hemmenway for his provoca-tive comments on my presentation, and the Review’s anonymous referees for theirextremely helpful criticisms and suggestions.

1Timaeus’s muthos is “likely” in the manner of an icon or likeness that exemplifiesthe character of that which it images—“a rather special sense, in which the term

The Review of Politics 69 (2007), 1–27.Copyright # University of Notre DameDOI: 10.1017/S0034670507000290 Printed in the USA

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posed by the dialogue point toward the inner truth of Timaeus’s teaching: westand to the cosmos like a puzzle piece that is subtly unsuited to its intendedplace, and that can be made to fit only by a combination of calculation andforce. Timaeus’s likely story, which fashions a whole suitable for human exist-ence,2 is just such a combination; it teaches that we are at home in the cosmosonly insofar as we make ourselves a home, a process that primarily involvesordering our own souls. Not coincidentally, an overarching concern of theTimaeus is the political and philosophical problem of partisanship, or thefalse inflation of a part into the semblance of a whole—a problem thatTimaeus’s muthos both exemplifies and is designed to address.3

In the Timaeus, the problem of partisanship surfaces initially on an all toohuman level: merely listing the dialogue’s dramatis personae is sufficient tobring to mind the aggressive assertion and defense, through political conflictand conquest, of that which is regarded as one’s own. Timaeus andHermocrates are Dorians, a tribe distinguished by its emphasis on the cultiva-tion of manliness; they come, respectively, from Italian Locri and Syracuse,cities that were enemies of Athens during the Peloponnesian War.4 Critiasis either the head of the Thirty (the vicious oligarchy that would be installedby the Spartans in 404–403, years after the dramatic date of the Timaeus) or isthe grandfather of the latter.5 Hermocrates can with more certainty be identi-fied as a leader of the Syracusan oligarchs; in Syracuse as in Athens, domestic

[eikos] conveys the degree to which it is likened to, or exemplifies, the original ratherthan the probability regarding whether it might be true or false” (Catherine Osborne,“Creative Discourse in the Timaeus,” in Form and Argument in Late Plato, ed.Christopher Gill and Mary Margaret McCabe [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 186).Note that Timaeus also calls his likely speech a logos (“account”), especially whilediscussing the geometry of body (see 53d, 55d, 56a, 56b, 57d).

2Eikos may mean “fitting” as well as “likely.”3This characterization of the problem of partisanship borrows the language of David

Lachterman: “What is ‘The Good’of Plato’s Republic?” St. John’s Review 39 (1989–1990):139–71. I take up Lachterman’s reflections in the penultimate section of the essay.

4The Athenians fought three battles against the Locrians in 426–25. The Locriansentered into a treaty with Athens in 422 but in 415 closed their city to the Athenianexpedition. See Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 3.99.1, 3.103.3, 5.5.3, 6.44.2.

5The scholarly debate about the identity of the Critias who appears in the Timaeus isreviewed in Platon: Timee/Critias, tr. Luc Brisson (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 326–35.Diskin Clay identifies the Timaeus’s Critias as the tyrannical leader of the Thirty(“The Plan of Plato’s Critias,” in Tomas Calvo and Luc Brisson, Interpreting theTimaeus-Critias: Proceedings of the 4th Symposium Platonicum [Sankt Augustin:Academia-Verlag, 1997], 52 n. 6). WarmanWelliver argues that he is the tyrant’s grand-father (Character, Plot and Thought in Plato’s Timaeus-Critias [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977],50–57), as do Laurence Lampert and Christopher Planeaux, “Who’s Who in Plato’sTimaeus-Critias and Why,” Review of Metaphysics 52 (1998): 87–125. Welliver maintainsthat the dramatic date of the Timaeus must be prior to 424, when Hermocrates first

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politics was characterized by a struggle for supremacy between the few andthe many.6 Timaeus’s muthos is furthermore prefaced by Critias’s account ofSolon’s visit to Egypt. An Egyptian priest tells Solon that numerous destruc-tions of mankind by flood and fire have occurred and will come to be in thefuture, leaving behind only illiterate and uneducated men and obliteratingmemory. The priest goes on to tell him of invaders from Atlantis whosought to “enslave” the region around the Mediterranean Sea and weredefeated by ancient Athenians (22c–25d). The story of Atlantis points backtoward the Persian Wars, in which the Athenians played a leading role indefending the Greek cities against an invading empire, and forward to thedefeat of the Athenians when they and their allies attempted to conquerSyracuse and Carthage in the expedition of 415–4137—a defeat in whichHermocrates was to play a crucial role.8

accuses Athens of designs on Sicily (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 4.58–65); Brissonsuggests the period 430–425 (Platon: Timee/Critias, 72).

6Cf. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 6.35.1 with 6.36.2, 6.38.2, 6.38.4, and 6.40.7The tradition of reading the Atlantis story as a political allegory containing a criti-

cism of contemporary Athens goes back to Giovanni Bartoli’s L’Essai sur l’explicationhistorique que Platon a donnee de sa Republique et de son Atlantide (1789). A thorough dis-cussion of this tradition, including recent scholarship by Luc Brisson, Christopher Gill,and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, is provided in Jean-Francois Pradeau, Le Monde de laPolitique: Sur le recit atlante de Platon, Timee (17–27) et Critias (Sankt Augustin:Akademia Verlag, 1997), 71–110. As Gill shows in “The Genre of the AtlantisStory,” Classical Philology 72 (1977): 287–304, there are echoes of the Persian conflictin Critias’s tale, but Atlantis is primarily to be understood as “the dream or idealPericlean Athens had about itself” (296); the story is thus (on one level) an allegoryof Athenian imperialism during the Peloponnesian War (294–98). Cf. Gill, Plato: TheAtlantis Story (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1980), xvii–xx. Vidal-Naquet’s illuminat-ing essay “Athens and Atlantis: Structure and Meaning of a Platonic Myth,” in TheBlack Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. AndrewSzegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 262–84,links the conflict between “proto-Athens” and Atlantis with Timaeus’s account ofthe Same and the Other.

8Hermocrates is among the first to recognize the Athenian threat to Sicily, againstwhich he rallies the Syracusans and repeatedly attempts to unite the Greek cities ofSicily (Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 4.58–4.65, 6.32.3–6.41, 6.72–6.73, 6.75.4–6.80). At 6.72.1, Thucydides praises Hermocrates as “a man otherwise lackingnothing in comprehension, and in war both well-experienced and conspicuous incourage.” Hermocrates’ repeated comparison of the Athenians to the Persians(6.33.5, 6.76.4, 6.77.1), and the trick whereby he ensures that the Athenian generalsfail to retreat when they might have gotten away (7.73.3–7.73.4), strongly suggestthat we are to regard him as a Syracusan Themistocles. Cf. Herodotus, The History,esp. 8.75 (where Themistocles deceitfully convinces the Persian commanders thatthe Greeks are going to retreat from Salamis) with Lampert and Planeaux, “Who’sWho in Plato’s Timaeus-Critias,”101–2.

PARTISANSHIP AND THE WORK OF PHILOSOPHY 3

These historical facts underscore the relevance of the orienting questionposed by Peter Kalkavage in his recent translation of the Timaeus: “Why isthe greatest philosophic work on the cosmos framed by politics?”9 This questionpoints us in the right direction, but does not go far enough. The form of thequestion is dictated by the fact that Timaeus’s speech is generally read inabstraction from its overtly political context, perhaps because Platonicscholars almost universally regard the Timaeus as a dialogue of primarilymetaphysical significance.10 Once this basic context is taken into account,however, it makes more sense to turn Kalkavage’s question around: Whyshould a political inquiry turn into an investigation of the cosmos? Havingrecapitulated the main points of certain speeches about the best regime thathe delivered “yesterday,” Socrates reminds his hosts that he has conceiveda desire to see his city at war (18b–c). Why is Socrates’ relatively pedestrianrequest followed by Timaeus’s high-flying cosmogonical discourse?A preliminary response to this question returns us to the theme of partisan-

ship. Timaeus tells Socrates at the very beginning of the dialogue that “itwouldn’t be at all just . . . after being entertained [xenisthentas] by you yester-day with gifts so befitting to guests [xeniois], not to host you heartily inreturn” (17b). He and his companions will repay Socrates with speechesbecause nomos—specifically, the custom of hospitality (xenia)—obliges themto do so.11 We soon learn that Critias has devised a plan that will showcasehis own contribution to today’s “guest-gift of speeches” (20c): he willsatisfy Socrates’ request to see his city at war by identifying Socrates’ citizens

9Plato’s Timaeus (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2001), 4, emphasis inoriginal. Quotations from the Timaeus are drawn from Kalkavage’s translation,which I have occasionally modified. Unless otherwise indicated, Stephanus pages(cited parenthetically) refer to the Timaeus.

10Cf. the introductory remarks of Jacob Howland, “Love of Wisdom and Will toOrder in Plato’s Timaeus: On Peter Kalkavage’s Translation,” Interpretation 30.1(2002): 93–105. An exception is Bartoli, who considered the dialogue to be part of atrilogy (Republic/Timaeus/Critias) constituting “a reflection on government, a praiseof political justice and of respect for the laws” (Pradeau, Le Monde de la Politique,73). Pradeau’s book, which focuses on the Atlantis story and begins with a reminderthat “the primary and final destination [of Timaeus’ exposition] is to permit theachievement of a political reflection” (8, emphasis in original), is also noteworthy.Pradeau echoes the observations of Pierre Hadot, “Physique et Poesie dans la Timeede Platon,” Revue de Theologie et de Philosophie 115 (1983): 113–33; see esp. 115, 118.Recent studies in English that pay close attention to the political context of thedialogue and the character of its participants include Lampert and Planeaux,“Who’s Who in Plato’s Timaeus-Critias”; Welliver, Character, Plot and Thought; andJohn Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1999).

11This is emphasized by Brisson, who notes that “it is Zeus himself, Zeus the god ofHospitality, who guarantees respect for these rights and obligations [of xenia]” (Platon:Timee/Critias, 222 n. 6).


with the ancient Athenians and then relating how the Athenians defeated theinvaders from Atlantis (26c–e). Yet the norms of hospitality also obligeCritias—in whose home Timaeus and Hermocrates are staying as guests(cf. 20c)—to give the foreigners a role in today’s proceedings. ThatTimaeus’s role turns out to be a main one is, from Critias’s point of view, anunavoidable accident. Because Timaeus happens to be “the most astronomi-cal of us and the one who’s made it his main job to know about the nature ofthe all,” his contribution will be a speech “beginning from the birth of thecosmos and ending in the nature of mankind” (27a). Giving the Locrianpride of place in the order of speeches surely strains against Critias’sinclination to aggrandize himself (discussed below), yet the content ofTimaeus’s speech rules out any other arrangement.12

In sum, the Timaeus begins within the horizon of nomos, specifically callingattention to the way in which Greek custom regulates the relationshipbetween host and guest so as to give each party his due. There is more,however. Besides politely making room for his companions to participate ina shared discourse, Socrates’ request presumably springs from a desire toguard against unintentional philosophical partisanship—the mistake ofresting content with a narrow and incomplete understanding of the world,thus failing to open oneself up to potentially broader and more adequateperspectives. Critias, whose thinking seems to be confined to the parti-cularities of space and time, exemplifies partisanship in this extended,philosophical sense as well as in more ordinary senses.13 Not surprisingly,it is Timaeus who is the main object of Socrates’ attention: Socratesaddresses the first words of the dialogue to Timaeus, and at 20a he praiseshim for having reached “the very peak of all philosophy.” Like the Sophist

12Hermocrates’ role in this “feast of speeches” (27b) remains undetermined. He isnot mentioned in the program described at 27a–b, but Critias 108a–c suggests thatHermocrates will speak after Critias. Speculation about what he might have said isoffered in F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), 6–8.

13Critias’s conception of a true discourse is one that corresponds “with historicalevents and particular facts” (Osborne, “Creative Discourse in the Timaeus,” 208); heaccordingly proposes that the citizens of whom Socrates spoke yesterday “asthough in a muthos” be “carried . . . into the truth” by his identification of them withthe ancient Athenians (26c–d). Pradeau notes that Critias “never considers the exist-ence of man outside of the temporal and geographic limits of the city” (Le Monde dela Politique, 56); cf. 27b, where Critias explains that, having “received from him[Timaeus] the men born by his speech,” he will “make speeches as though aboutmen who are already citizens and Athenians.” Where Critias moves “back” throughtime toward an uncorrupted original (the paradigmatic regime of the ancientAthenians), Timaeus’s discourse achieves universality by moving “up” toward theeternal, unchanging model (paradeigma: 28a) of the sphere of Becoming. There is,nevertheless, a place in Timaeus’s account for Critias’s conception of truth, once it is,so to speak, cut down to size; see below, n. 46.


and the Statesman, which showcase the Stranger from Elea, the Timaeusplaces a visiting philosopher in the delicate position of holding forth in thepresence of Socrates. Put to the test in this way, what does Timaeus revealabout his philosophical identity? And what might he be able to teachSocrates?Several commentators have addressed these questions in connection with

the themes of spiritedness (thumos) and philosophical eros. Kalkavage main-tains that the speeches of Socrates and Critias in the dialogue’s openingpages are meant to anticipate Timaeus’s intellectual endeavor, which showsitself to be peculiarly thumotic and practical, as opposed to erotic and contem-plative, in character—especially when viewed against the implied backdropof the Republic. If the philosophical movement of the Republic is fromBecoming to Being, he suggests, the movement of the Timaeus is “backdown from Being to Becoming.” Being is, above all, “useful” with respectto the artful renovation of Becoming: as a “changeless model” for theconstruction of the cosmos, it “guarantees the stability and fine formationof a likeness.” Timaeus exemplifies “the mathematical temperament ofproblem-solving,” a temperament that Kalkavage characterizes as the “willto order” and that is more closely connected with thumos than with philoso-phical eros.14

While Kalkavage calls attention to the thematic importance of thumos in thedialogue, he misses the mark in portraying Timaeus as an “accomplice” ofCritias who “renovate[s] Becoming in order to make the world at large recep-tive to noble designs, including and especially the noble designs of politicalidealists like Critias and his ambitious grandson.”15 As Warman Welliverhas shown, Critias’s rivalry with Timaeus is central to the dialogue’sdrama.16 Plato provides multiple hints about Critias’s overreaching nature.Critias asserts that the citizens of Socrates’ clearly non-historical city inspeech are identical to the ancient Athenians who fought the armies ofAtlantis (26d). “[G]ood Athenian that he is,” he thus “takes possession of[Socrates’ city] by dubious means for his own purposes.”17 In providing apreview of the story of these ancient Athenians, Critias aggrandizes hisfamily by pointing to his great-grandfather’s kinship and friendship with“the wisest of the Seven [Sages]” (20d). Critias’s preview violates the

14Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus, 19, 42, 135 (s.v. “desire”). In the Timaeus, Kalkavagemaintains, mathematics—the primary instrument of the divine craftsman’s fabricationof the cosmos—is “not valued for its theoretical or contemplative power,” as in theRepublic, but “as a form of productive practice”; it is “the means by which worldand soul are made law-abiding and well-behaved” (19).

15Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus, 42.16Welliver, Character, Plot and Thought. Although Welliver’s monograph is highly

germane, it is not cited in the article by Lampert and Planeaux.17Welliver, 18. Cf. 21: “[A]ll of [Critias’s] maneuvers have the distinct ring of

Periclean Athens.”


previously agreed upon order of speeches, thus dramatically recapitulating“the deceitful abuse of an agreement” that led to the Athenian victory cele-brated at the Apatouria or “Feast of Deception,” the festival at whichCritias first heard Solon’s story.18 Critias, furthermore, “exploits the changeof order to step into the limelight himself, to take primary credit for thewhole series of speeches, and to reduce Timaeus’s story of the creation to amere prelude to his second and grander account of the war [in theCritias].”19 Welliver’s analysis of Critias’s character leads to the conclusionthat he is “an ingrate, a transgressor of the laws of hospitality, a blasphemer(at least in Socrates’ opinion), a boor, a cheat, a perfidious partner, and aliar.”20 Timaeus, on the other hand, exemplifies the moderation and order-liness of the citizens of the city of which Socrates speaks on the day beforethe conversation of the Timaeus.21

Welliver’s study suggests that Kalkavage’s characterization of Timaeus’sessentially nonerotic and thumotic turn of mind is too broad: it fails to dis-tinguish Critias’s inherently disorderly and hybristic behavior fromTimaeus’s orderly, Socratic minding of his own business. If we approachTimaeus’s cosmological speech with this distinction in mind, a number ofquestions suggest themselves. Might Timaeus’s muthos be intended notmerely (or even primarily) to defeat Critias, but also to moderate hisnature—or at least to make clear what such moderation would involve?22

More important, how deeply rooted is Timaeus’s affiliation with Socrates?Might further reflection disclose that Timaeus’s “will to order” actuallysprings from a Socratic love of wisdom? Could Timaeus’s admittedly thumo-tic discourse be simply the most visible aspect of an inwardly Socratic eros?I propose to approach the problem of partisanship in the Timaeus with the

foregoing questions in mind. Following the Socratic principle that the begin-ning is the most important part of every work (Rep. 377a). I focus on the wayin which Timaeus’s likely story answers to Socrates’ summary of “yester-day’s” speeches, a summary that seems designed to test the philosophicalnature of his companions, particularly Timaeus. I argue that, in spite of his

18Welliver, 20–21.19Welliver, 19.20Welliver, 27.21Welliver maintains that Socrates’ request to see his city of “yesterday” at war is

fulfilled in the dramatic action of the Timaeus-Critias—dialogues in which Timaeus,by means of his magnificent speech, successfully defends against the “treacherousattack” through which Critias seeks victory in what he clearly regards as a rhetoricalcontest (Welliver, 31–32; cf. Critias 108a–c).

22This possibility is indirectly raised by Lampert and Planeaux, who suggest thatAlcibiades is the “missing fourth” of the Timaeus (cf. 17a), and that his failure “toattend to [Timaeus’s] new tale of an orderly and moral cosmos” is to be explainedby the fact that “he could not be moderated by Socrates” (“Who’s Who in Plato’sTimaeus-Critias,” 121).


apparent obtuseness regarding the question of the beginnings (archai) of phi-losophical inquiry and his fairly consistent denigration of eros, Timaeuspasses this test. His spirited and seemingly nonerotic manner of speakingis, in part, a measured response to the rhetorical context in which he findshimself; more important, it reflects his understanding of the foundationalrole of thumos in the life of the philosopher as well as in human life ingeneral. On one hand, Timaeus’s understanding of the problem of partisan-ship implies a Socratic awareness of the whole and is guided by an eroticopenness to what Socrates calls the “Good”—an openness that sets himapart from Critias and Hermocrates. At the same time, he is acutely consciousof the extent to which goodness is limited by necessity in human experience.Just as Timaeus’s eros is responsive to the beauty and harmony of what is(28a–31a), his thumos is responsive to the conditions dictated by necessity.In the extent of his engagement with necessity—an engagement he under-stands to be prerequisite to the philosophical education of eros, as well as toprovide a field for the display of this education—he distinguishes himself,if not from Socrates then at least from the erotic philosopher Socratesdescribes in the Republic, who, “having his intellect truly turned toward thebeings,” does not have “leisure . . . to look down toward human affairs”(500b–c).23

For Timaeus, as we shall see, looking “down” is a precondition of looking“up”; paradoxically, only the soul that has already been formed by theeducation whose perfection is philosophy is capable of erotic ascent to thebeings. Timaeus teaches that the work of philosophy is making thingswhole, or fashioning a decorous and fitting arrangement of parts—a taskwhose difficulty Plato repeatedly underscores.24 This task starts with the indi-vidual soul, which is initially unfit to philosophize because of the disorderintrinsic to it as a matter of necessity. And while the work of philosophy isundeniably “musical” and erotic, guided as it is by the wholeness (andwhole-someness) of the domain of Being toward which the Demiurge himself looksin crafting the sphere of Becoming (28a–29a), it cannot dispense with force.

23Unlike this lofty philosopher, Socrates labors in the Republic to refashion theaffairs of human beings by founding a city in speech. That necessity limits the achieve-ment of the good is evident fromSocrates’acknowledgement that this citywill probablynever exist in actuality and is, in any case, doomed to decay (Rep. 499c–d, 592a–b,545d–46a).

24One way in which the dialogue calls attention to this difficulty can only be notedhere. As Kenneth Dorter shows in The Transformation of Plato’s Republic (Lanham, MD:Lexington Books, 2006), 351–68, the inquiry repeatedly omits a crucial fourth mediat-ing term, “one of the two means between the source from which we come and therealm of becoming in which we live—either between truth and thought, gods andearth dwellers, creator and creation, or wholes and parts” (363–64). Dorter connectsthis theme with the “missing fourth” of the Timaeus’s opening line.


For only by the simultaneously intelligent and spirited application of forcecan the necessary be brought into harmony with the good.

On “Yesterday’s” Speeches: Timaeus and Republic

The tensions and oppositions at the heart of the Timaeus start to come to lightin the first words of the dialogue: Someone—“our fourth,” one of yesterday’s“feasters” and today’s “hosts”—is missing, and Socrates wants to knowwhere he is. This humble beginning is a harbinger of things to come. Wefind ourselves, as always, in time, “today,” and the most evident feature ofwhat pertains to today is that it differs from yesterday in ways that are notentirely predictable. Socrates had anticipated the exchange of hosts andguests in accordance with prior agreement—we learn that he had yesterdayentertained his companions with a feast of speeches, and today he expectsto be feasted in return—but he (literally) did not count on a host’s involuntaryabsence due to illness and the resulting need to “fill in the missing one’s part”(17a). Thus, Plato indicates at the earliest possible moment that necessity, orwhat Timaeus will later call “the wandering cause” (48a), does not alwayscooperate with the plans intelligence fashions. What was well-ordered andcomplete in prospect may turn out to be incomplete today, and, likeTimaeus, we may feel compelled, if only by a sense of justice, “not to fallshort in any way” in making up for the deficit (17b). To generalize, thingsfall apart in unexpected ways, and we struggle to restore what has beenlost and repair what has been broken in the passage of time. This struggleimplies, however, that we have in view an arche, a “beginning” and “rulingprinciple” that governs the process of restoration and repair. Our access tothis beginning is by way of recollection, whether this be understood literallyor philosophically; unfortunately, recollection is itself subject to decay, asTimaeus suggests when he asks Socrates to review “from the beginning”(ex arches) what he yesterday “ordered” today’s hosts to speak about, “justto make it more secure for us” (17b).25

Socrates’ summary of the “head” or “chief” part (to kephalaion) of yester-day’s speeches, namely, the part about the regime (peri politeias, 17c), isclearly meant to recall the regime he fashions in speech while a guest in thehome of Kephalos in the dialogue called “Politeia.”26 Socrates’ guests oftoday cannot, however, be identified with the unknown audience to whichhe narrates the conversation of the Republic, as the two Athenian festivalsthat coincide dramatically with the Republic and the Timaeus took place in

25Sallis notes that the “palintropic operation” of beginning by referring back to aprior beginning “will determine the movement by which the Timaeus will carry outits vigilant interrogation of beginnings, a movement of return to beginnings”(Chorology, 13).

26Cf. Sallis, Chorology, 14, 23.


different months.27 Today’s summary of yesterday’s speeches, in other words,is reminiscent of another dramatically past or future speech that is itself therecollection of a speech that took place “yesterday” (Republic 327a). Today’ssummary, nevertheless, presents a radically incomplete and distortedversion of the Republic’s regime. Most important, Socrates fails to mentionthe musical education of eros in the regime. In fact, he leaves out everythingafter the second wave of book 5, including the whole discussion of philoso-phical eros as well as (ironically) the very head of the city in speech—thephilosopher-kings, together with the Forms and the Good in whose lightthey exercise their political craft. Socrates seems to have omitted thesedetails in the speech with which he feasted Timaeus and the others, forTimaeus praises the accuracy of his summary. Yet Plato calls our attentionto these omissions in more than one way. Socrates’ comparison of the cityhe has described to a painting or an animal at rest (19b–c) suggests, in thewords of one commentator, “that his presentation . . . has portrayed the cityeither as lifeless (a mere drawing) or else as not displaying its vitality.”28

Less subtly, Socrates asks, “Are we still yearning for [pothoumen] somethingfurther in what was said, my dear Timaeus, something that’s being leftout?” (19a).Socrates’ question must strike the thoughtful reader as an invitation for

Timaeus to speak about the work of directing erotic desire through educationand about philosophical eros in particular. Because this invitation is merelyimplicit, however—because, in other words, it is up to Timaeus to recognizethe deficiency of the regime adumbrated in Socrates’ summary—the questionsuggests that Socrates is interested in testing his guest’s philosophicalnature.29 Timaeus’s literal-minded response (“Not at all; on the contrary,these were the very things that were said, Socrates”) leaves untouched thequestion of the adequacy of what was said. Timaeus seems satisfied toreceive Socrates’ speech without interrogating its content and to regard it,once it is rendered secure or stable (bebaios) by recollection, as a sufficientarche for his task of filling the missing one’s part.30 What is more, he will

27The Bendideia, which Socrates observes in the Republic, were celebrated inThargelion; the Greater and Lesser Panathenaea were celebrated in Hecatombaeon(Clay, “The Plan of Plato’s Critias,” 50 n. 3).

28Sallis, Chorology, 28. Noting that Socrates’ “words become highly erotic” in propos-ing that his guests give an account of the city at war (cf. his references to “affection”[pothos] and “appetite” [epithumia] at 19b), Sallis adds: “Thus it is that, as Socratescalls for setting the city in motion, his very discourse becomes erotic and affective; itbecomes a discourse of desire, mirroring precisely that for which it calls” (27, 28).

29This is unsurprising. As Mitchell Miller argues in The Philosopher in Plato’sStatesman (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), Socrates engages in just such a testof the Stranger from Elea in the Sophist and Statesman.

30Timaeus has thus not yet distinguished himself from Critias, for whom the rel-evant arche is, in Pradeau’s words, “the premier exploit of the first of cities, Athens,”


undertake this task “eagerly” (prothumos), literally, “with thumos to the fore”(17b). As we shall see in the next section, Timaeus’s account of the cosmicorigins of human life gives pride of place to thumos and the virtue ofcourage. Does his disavowal of “yearning” for something further alsosuggest a certain philosophical forgetfulness—a lack of erotic responsivenessto the transcendent archai of philosophical inquiry?Let us take a closer look at the details of Socrates’ summary. According to

Socrates, the chief part of yesterday’s speeches concerned the best regime andthe sort of men of which it would be composed. He does not say what elsemight have been discussed. About the regime, he mentions first that he andhis interlocutors separated off the farmers and all other artisans from the war-riors, making the latter alone guardians of the city. In this way, “exactly inaccordance with nature, we gave to each man the one sole occupation thatwas suited to his very self” (17c–d). The assumption that nature providen-tially produces men suited to each of the jobs that has to be done in the cityhearkens back to the first city in speech of the Republic—the one thatGlaucon says would be fit for sows (cf. 370a–c). Socrates and his companionsof yesterday seem, at least initially, to have been oblivious to the fact thathuman beings, unlike bees in a hive, are not fitted from birth to assume thenecessary tasks of political community. This realization suggests they mayhave also failed adequately to attend to the fundamental political problemof how to produce good citizens from the raw material of recalcitranthuman nature. In the Republic, this problem arises only with the appearanceof the second or “feverish” city (372e ff.), which is also the first recognizablyhuman city because it reflects a range of thumotic and erotic aspirations thatwere not present in the city of pigs. Yesterday’s obfuscation of our distinc-tively human nature leads one to wonder whether today’s speeches willtake full account of these aspirations. What Socrates says in the immediatesequel fails to assuage one’s doubts on this score. The guardians of the city,he maintains, would be “gentle in dealing out justice to the people ruled bythem, since they were by nature friends” (18a). Yet in the Republic, Socratesmore plausibly assumes that such civic friendship does not arise naturally;he accordingly finds it necessary to introduce a number of measures—foremost among them, the Noble Lie—that are designed to minimize therisk that the guardians will tyrannize the rest of the citizens (414b ff.).31

While we admittedly know nothing of the speeches it purports to sum-marize, Socrates’ summary presents a fanciful view of nature’s providence

the knowledge of which is secured by a chain of speakers who remember and repeatthe Egyptian priest’s Atlantis story (Le Monde de la Politique, 26–27).

31While Socrates mentions many of these measures later in the summary (18b–e), hedoes not connect them with the potential viciousness of natural erotic and thumoticdesires.


and a politically sanitized picture of the human soul. Thus, the summaryanticipates a major theme of the Timaeus: the tension between, and potentialconfusion of, genesis and poiesis, or what comes to be by nature and what isartfully fashioned in speech and deed. Timaeus’s paradoxical characterizationof the cosmic Demiurge as both the “father” and the “maker” of the all (28c)points toward the possibility that such confusion might be ingredient in hisown demiurgic activity as the author of a story (muthos) about the cosmosthat is both “likely” and “fitting” (eikos, 29d), and so, among other things,suitable to its audience and to the occasion of its telling.32 We may note inthis connection that the very notion of a demiourgos is political, designatingas it does a craftsman who comes from the ranks, and whose work reflectsthe common needs, of the people or demos. As the artful product of ademiurge, the cosmos may be presumed to be intrinsically suited to theachievement of at least the rudimentary ends of life in a human community.Like Socrates’discourse of yesterday, Timaeus’s cosmic poem seems designedto answer to the needs of political animals.To return to the summary, although Socrates makes no mention of the

Noble Lie, he reminds Timaeus that the souls of the guardians had to beboth spirited and philosophic so that they would be gentle to friends andharsh to enemies. This remark recalls Republic 375e–376b, where Socrateslaughably asserts that dogs are both spirited and philosophic because theyare harsh toward strangers and gentle toward those they know. This is theonly mention of philosophy in Socrates’ summary, and while philosophyproper—the eros for wisdom—is not introduced in the conversation of theRepublic until the so-called third wave of book 5 (473c ff.), the summaryalludes to nothing in the Republic after 466e.33 Socrates does go on to recallthat the guardians had to be educated by means of both gymnastics andmusic (18a), but he says nothing more about music; in particular, its role intraining the souls of the young to take pleasure in noble and beautifulthings (cf. Rep. 401e) goes without comment. In the remainder of hissummary, Socrates reminds his companions of certain features of theregime that are meant to promote virtue, including the abolition of private

32Cf. Hadot’s reflections on the Timaeus’s twin themes of “the World as Poem, thePoem as World.” Especially germane is his observation, with respect to 68c–d, thatnatural objects are “the product of a secret of fabrication that is inaccessible to man.That is why man cannot imitate Nature in the order of real production, in the orderof effective genesis, but only in the order of discourse. More precisely still, thissecret production of God is a mimesis, that is to say a reproduction by theDemiurge of an eternal model. The only means of access man has to this secretproduction, is to ‘imitate’ it in words, that is, himself to effectuate a mimesis of this[divine] mimesis.” (“Physique et Poesie dans la Timee,” 124, 131–32). Osborne exploresthe resemblance between Timaeus’s speech and the Demiurge’s world-making in“Creative Discourse in the Timaeus.”

33Lampert and Planeux, “Who’s Who in Plato’s Timaeus-Critias,” 88.


property, the requirement that they spend their lives in one another’scompany, the abolition of the family, and the pretence of a marriage“lottery” (18b–e). Although readers of the Republic will recognize thatthese measures are designed to supplement the Noble Lie and to keep the“feverish” desires of the guardians in check, Socrates fails to mention thesethings in the present context. Socrates concludes by noting that guardianswill make sure that unworthy offspring are handed over to the rest of thecity, while worthy offspring from the class of farmers and other artisanswill be moved into the guardian class (19a).In the Republic, Socrates makes it clear that philosophy is essential to both

the health of a regime and the virtue of an individual soul. “Unless politicalpower and philosophy coincide . . . there is no rest from ills for the cities,”he tells Glaucon in book 5 (473d). Socrates explains in book 6 that the philo-sopher’s truthfulness, justice, moderation, liberality, and courage, amongother virtues, are byproducts of his erotic quest for wisdom (485c–87a)—aquest that leads him to the Forms and the Good, through intellectual inter-course with which he “knows and lives truly” (490b).34 Socrates’ summaryin the Timaeus, however, no more than touches on erotic longing; in doingso, it furthermore suggests that eros is merely a physical desire that needsto be controlled by various institutional measures. And whereas the adjective“philosophical” does appear once in the summary, it refers only to the alliancebetween thumos and reason, not to the passion for wisdom. In the city thusadumbrated, virtue is necessarily manly and “gymnastic” rather than“musical”; it springs not from the soul’s harmonious attunement to what isnoble and beautiful but from the forceful suppression of wayward desire.Put another way, virtue is self-mastery, not inner balance—enkrateia ratherthan sophrosune, to borrow Aristotle’s terminology.35 Excellence of city andsoul is to be achieved by the cultivation of the essentially polemical arts ofprivate and political self-discipline. Perhaps this is why Socrates desiresto see the citizens at war: if we may judge by his summary, victory inwar—and in particular, the suppression of faction within the city and thepsyche—are the paramount goals of their education.

Timaeus’s Spirited Discourse

Socrates’ emphasis on war and gymnastic virtue harmonizes well with thetemperament of his Dorian companions. Timaeus’s speech further unfoldsin a context that underscores the perpetual threat to the structures of

34Conversely, when Er visits the afterworld, he sees a soul that in its former life par-ticipated in virtue “by habit, without philosophy” choosing a future life of tyranny(Rep. 619b–d).

35On the difference between the enkrates (the man of moral strength) and the sophronor temperate man, see Nicomachean Ethics 1146a9–16.


orderly existence posed by both human and nonhuman nature, the formermanifesting itself especially in war and civil strife and the latter in floods,fires, earthquakes, and the like. The stage is thus set for Timaeus’s accountof cosmic and human genesis, which emphasizes the problem of masteringdisorderly motion. Given also that Timaeus intends to take his bearings bySocrates’ summary of yesterday’s speeches, it is not surprising that hepresents virtue essentially as the ability to succeed in war, understood asthe forceful attempt to reassert or defend order in the face of disorder.A few examples may suffice to indicate the general direction of Timaeus’s

approach to these issues. When the Demiurge began to fashion the cosmos,Timaeus explains, he “took over all that was visible, and, since it did notkeep its peace but moved unmusically and without order, he brought itinto order from disorder, for he regarded the former to be in all ways betterthan the latter” (30a). Later, we learn that the initial step in the process ofordering the visible sphere involves configuring that which is “withoutratio and measure” by means of “form and numbers,” and thus producingthe basic elements of fire, water, earth, and air (53a–b). Two fundamentalkinds of causes (aitiai) are visible in the Demiurge’s primordial work: the dis-orderly motion of the visible sphere is a function of “the wandering cause”that Timaeus associates with “necessity,” while the order imposed on it bythe Demiurge is “crafted through intellect” as it looks to the good (30a,47e–48a). Taken as a whole, Timaeus’s eikos muthos is a “story of intellect”interwoven with a “story of necessity.”36 If he does not succeed in seamlesslyjoining the strands of these two stories, it is because what is necessary andwhat is best, what must be and what intellect desires, are never fully inharmony; the Demiurge is able to bring order to the visible sphere not abso-lutely, but only “to the best of his power.”37 The intelligent application ofpower to the wandering cause, in turn, involves varying degrees of force.Timaeus describes the rule of intellect over necessity as a kind of “thoughtfulpersuasion” (48a). Yet when the Demiurge fashioned the cosmic soul out ofthe Same, the Other, and Being, he found that “the nature of the Other wasloath to mix”; he, therefore, “joined it to the Same with force” (35a–b).Human souls are produced “in somewhat the same mode” from the leftoveringredients that went into the cosmic soul, “yet unblended no longer to thesame extent but rather in second and third degree of purity” (41e). We maysurmise that, as in the case of the cosmic soul, the ontological integrity ofthe human soul—its very identity as a being of a particular sort—arises

36Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus, 27. Note the “new beginning” Timaeus makes inturning to the story of necessity (48b).

3730a. The tension between the two kinds of causes is visible in Timaeus’s declara-tion that “it’s a necessity that the lover of intellect and knowledge pursue first thecauses that have to do with the thoughtful nature, and second all such things thatare moved by others and come to be movers of other things only out of necessity”(46e, emphasis added).


from the artful application of force. This observation paves the way forTimaeus’s subsequent comparison of the embodied soul to a city strugglingwith the threat of civil war.While Timaeus’s polemical or gymnastic understanding of virtue is rooted

in his appreciation of the exemplary activity of the Demiurge, it is givenurgency by his sense of the cataclysm that occurs when a soul is “by neces-sity” implanted in a body (42a). The Egyptian priest tells Solon that floodsrepeatedly wipe out a great part of learning and cultural memory amongmankind. Something similar happens in microcosm when the intellect,which the Demiurge himself has fashioned, is joined with the body and thenonrational parts of the soul. When “the circuits of the immortal soul” are“bound within a body subject to inflow and outflow” as though “boundwithin a prodigious river” (43a), they are assailed by a flood of sensations,emotions, and desires, including “forceful affections,” “erotic love mixedwith pleasure and pain,” and “terror and anger and whatever goes alongwith them and all such things that by nature tend to be contrary and set atodds with each other” (42a). Furthermore, the soul is “washed over” by a“food-supplying wave” and assailed by a “stream of increase and nutriment”(43b, 44b). Because of these multiple affections, which cause “the mostwidespread and greatest commotion,” the soul “becomes unintelligent”; itscircuits “seem to master but are in fact mastered” (44a–b).38

As bad as this situation may be, it gives rise to nothing less than the humanvocation. The Demiurge explains this to the yet-to-be embodied intellects ofhuman beings:

If they were to master these [sensations and forceful affections], theywould live in justice, but if they were mastered by them, then in injusticethey would live. And he who has lived well throughout his appropriatetime would make his way back to the dwelling of his lawful [sunnomou]star and would have a life that was happy and habitual [sunethe] tohim. But he who had failed to live well would, in his second birth, takeon woman’s nature. If in that form he still did not refrain from evil,then in whatever mode he might make himself bad, he would alwaystake on some such bestial nature in the similitude of that mode of lifethat was born in him. And he would keep changing and would notcease from his labors until he had reached the following point: notbefore he should draw along with the circuit of the Same and Similarthat was in himself the vast mob of fire and water and air and earththat had later grown over it and, having mastered by reason thatroaring and irrational mob, reach the form [eidos] of his first and bestcondition [hexeos]. (42b–d)

38With regard to Timaeus’s employment in these passages of the images of inflow,outflow, river, wave, and the like, cf. the exploration of the sea as a Platonic imageof disharmony in Anne Gabriele Wersinger, Platon et la dysharmonie: Recherches sur laforme musicale (Paris: J. Vrin, 2001), 7–14.


In this passage, justice is equivalent to self-mastery, which is presented asthe mastery of a great “mob” or “crowd” (polun ochlon) that is “roaring”and “irrational” (thorubode kai alogon).39 Lest we miss the political imagery,Timaeus goes on to say that the gods bind the divine circuits of the soulwithin the head, which “despotically rules [despotoun] all the parts withinus”; later still, he compares the head to an acropolis or “citadel,” fromwhich reason issues commands to the thumotic part of the soul so as to“forcibly keep down the class of desires” (70a). The soul is like a city that ison the verge of being overwhelmed by the factional conflict that stemsfrom its association with the body.40 The body introduces into the soul thedisease of constitutional disorder, against which the best defense is gymnasticexercise; such exercise makes possible the maintenance of due proportion inthe motions of soul in relation to those of the body, as well as of the parts ofthe soul in relation to one another (86b, 88b–c, 89e–90a). Therefore, Timaeusmakes it clear that justice and self-mastery depend crucially on the manlyvirtues of toughness and courage, a point reinforced by his teaching thatwomen are nothing but men who failed to live well in a former incarnation.“Among those who were born men,” he explains, “all that were cowardly andlived an unjust life were, according to the likely account, transplanted in theirsecond birth as women” (90e).41

Timaeus’s remarks at 42b–d are also noteworthy because they suggest thathis likely story is an example of the very activity of spirited reordering thathe elevates in this passage to the status of man’s vocation. On one hand,the Demiurge prepares the way for the work of self-mastery by providing acosmic paradigm for the imposition of order on disorderly motions. Whatis more, the soul’s very understanding of orderly motion is derived from itsobservation of the orderly motions of the cosmos (47b–c). In spite of the

39Cf. Socrates’ description in the Republic of the “uproar” (thorubos) of praise andblame that occurs when many men come together as a multitude (plethos), whichcan sweep away a young man’s education like a “flood” (492b–c).

40Indeed, Timaeus virtually identifies the lower two-thirds of the soul—its thumoticand appetitive parts—with the body. Although he notes the priority of soul to body at34b–c, when it comes to the nonrational parts of the soul he mentions the body first.The Demiurge, he explains, “handed down to the young gods the task of moldingmortal bodies, and—once they had fashioned whatever was left over of the humansoul that still had to be added, along with all this entailed—of ruling and steeringthe mortal animal.” Consider also that, when Timaeus gets around to identifyingthe “mortal” parts of the soul, he begins by specifying where they are located in thebody (69d–70b).

41Timaeus’s emphasis on manly virtue seems to pick up on Socrates’ remark that, inthe regime described “yesterday,” the natures of the women “were to be tuned to themen and so made similar to them” (18c). This conflicts with his claim in the Republicthat “men and women have the same nature with respect to guarding a city, exceptinsofar as the one is weaker and the other stronger” (456a).


Demiurge’s forethought, however, Timaeus makes it clear that man is not bynature at home in the cosmos. The “star” to which a just soul returns is saidto be not its natural dwelling but its home in accordance with law or customand habit (sunnomou, sunethe: 42b). This point is made in more than one way.Prior to explaining “the laws of destiny” (nomous . . . tous heimarmenous)and showing the souls “the nature of the all,” the Demiurge had mountedeach of them in a star as “in a chariot” (41e). Presumably, just souls returnto these same stars, which they inhabit in their “first and best condition.”But the chariot image is appropriate, for each star is already ensouled;human souls cannot, thus, be naturally united with the stars but can only,so to speak, hitch a ride on them.42 While the stars are the closest thing wehave to a home, clearly, they are so not by nature but only by nomos.43

In sum, Timaeus implicitly corrects the simple-minded conception of pro-vidence with which Socrates begins his summary. Whereas Socrates speaksas if human beings are automatically fitted by nature for political existence,Timaeus teaches that we may live an orderly human life only by subduingour inner turmoil and fighting against the depredations of the naturalworld.44 Nor can we fail to notice that Timaeus demonstrates the artfulmastery of disorderly motion in the course of telling his muthos. Socrates atone point calls his likely story a nomos, by which he seems to mean both a“law” and a “song” (29d).45 It is Timaeus’s elaborate song that in the firstinstance makes a home for man, transparently fashioning nature by meansof myth into a domain that will, in principle if not always in practice, bereceptive to our ordering activity. In this receptivity, Timaeus locates the pro-vidential character of the cosmos. He sings of the Demiurge, who bringsmusical order to the unmusical motions of the visible sphere when hefashions fire, water, earth, and air from elementary triangles (53c–57c),when he joins these four together in due proportion so as to fashion the“body of the all” (31b), and when he harmonizes the coursings of thecircles of the Same and the Other in the soul (35b–36d). These coursings

42An anonymous referee notes that Plato uses the same word, ochema (“chariot”), todescribe the body (44e); we accordingly “get the impression that the human soulswaps vehicles: a star in its life outside the body, or a body in its incarnated phase.”

43What is unclear is whether Timaeus’s characterization of one’s star as sunnomosrefers to the “law” by which the Demiurge assigns one’s soul to it, or to the lawsand customs in accordance with which we habituate our souls to virtuous motion,thus fashioning a settled disposition (hexis) and bringing form (eidos) out of chaos.

44This teaching, as noted above (p. 11), is much closer to that of the Republic thanSocrates’ summary is.

45Cf. Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus, 59 n. 17. Brisson (Platon: Timee/Critias, 220 n. 115)understands the word in a musical sense and cites as a parallel Rep. 531d, anotherpassage that speak of a “prelude” (prooimion) as well as a “song” (nomos).According to the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws, a nomos is a melody accompaniedby the kithara (700b).


are severely perturbed when the human soul is joined with body; the soul isthen, using Timaeus’s image, turned upside down and rendered unintelligent(43e, 44b). Yet this unavoidable perturbation is itself implicitly providential,for it directs and focuses our primary human energies. Timaeus’s nomosinstructs us literally to make virtue out of necessity by striving to reestablishthe orderly motions implanted in our souls through the “forethought of thegods” (44c).

Partisanship and Moderation in the Eikos Muthos

As we have seen, Timaeus unfolds his likely story in a context that emphasizeswar and the struggles of man against nature, and his muthos in certain import-ant respects reflects and extends these emphases. But here one must proceedwith caution. The Timaeus begins by calling attention to the problem of thearche, and Timaeus seems initially prepared to regard Socrates’ summary ofyesterday’s speeches as an adequate beginning and ruling principle for hisown speech. First impressions to one side, however, he does not uncriticallyaccept this Socratic beginning.Whereas Socrates largely passes over the thumo-tic and erotic desires that oppose virtuous habits, Timaeus’s account of thehuman vocation gives pride of place to the struggle against the disorderlymotions of the soul in its connection with the body. Furthermore, whereasSocrates speaks as if nature itself solves the fundamental political problemsof the division of labor and the cultivation of civic friendship, Timaeusteaches that the unity of the soul (and by implication that of the city), as wellas the cooperation of its parts, can be wrested from the natural disorder ofthe psyche only though the intelligent application of force.We can now appreciate more fully the connection between the discussion

of the best regime with which the Timaeus begins and the cosmologythat follows. Timaeus’s cosmology is meant to clarify our human nature,but his speech makes it clear that political existence and the prepoliticalnature of human beings cannot be understood apart from one another. AsJean-Francois Pradeau observes, the “dynamic equilibrium” of the motionsof soul and body that characterizes the human being as such is not givenby nature, but is produced by “a certain type of education and political insti-tutions.” Put another way, anthropology is completed only by politicalinquiry, for “human nature is (by nature) political.”46

46Pradeau, Le Monde de la Politique, 146, 148. Cf. 44a–c with 87a–b: Bad regimes anda bad education—or what might better be called a bad “regimen,” meaning the activi-ties, habits of nutrition, exercise, study, etc. characteristic of a particular form of socialand political existence—produce disease (i.e., disorder and disproportion) in body andsoul; good ones, as Timaeus explains in the sequel, produce the opposite. These pas-sages echo the basic insight of Republic, book 8. To the extent that what one doesmakes


This is not all, for Timaeus also responds critically to Critias’s display ofthumos at the beginning of the dialogue. His cosmic nomos is simultaneouslypolitical and philosophical; laying down the law and singing of what is aretwo sides of the same coin. The eikos muthos turns out to be “fitting” in an unex-pected sense: in elaborating the proper relation of the soul to the whole, itimplicitly cuts Critias’s partisan ambition down to size. Furthermore, it is inthe work of fitting together the parts of the whole that Timaeus reveals aSocratic, erotic openness to the ultimate archai of human life.Critias’s tale of Solon’s visit to Egypt is designed to aggrandize not only the

ancient Athenians, but also his family and, most of all, himself. Although theindividual, the family, and the city are all merely parts of the whole, Critiasaggressively attempts to inflate them beyond their proper boundaries. His sol-ution to the problem of the arche is a personal one. It is his city, a city older eventhan Egyptian Sais (23d–e), with which Socrates’ spirited and philosophic citi-zensmust be identified. It is his relative, Solon, the wisest of the wise, whomwehave to thank for the tale of the ancient Athenians. It is Critias who makeshimself conspicuous as the architect of the speeches that will render appropri-ate thanks to Socrates and praise to Athena on her feast day (25d–26e). Finally,it is Critias who, in finishing off the account that Solon brought fromEgypt, willimplicitly show himself to be a greater poet not only than Solon, “the noblest ofall poets,” but even greater than Homer and Hesiod—the most ancient poetswho sang of the first things (21c; cf. Rep. 377c–378a).Critias hopes to eclipse the ancient poets by telling the tale of a war that is

greater and more ancient than any other, including the Trojan War. But it isTimaeus who is the true rival of Homer and Hesiod, and of Solon to boot.Timaeus’s story of the Demiurge’s fabrication of the soul and impositionof musical order in the sphere of Becoming brings order and hierarchicalstructure to the relations of the gods as well, whom he conceives as followingthe commands of intellect.47 Like Solon, Timaeus is a lawgiver as well as apoet—except that his poetry and his legislation are one and the same.48

Like Solon, Timaeus understands lawgiving to be a public service ratherthan a means of personal glorification.49 Solon, unlike Homer, can point to

one human, we may note, Timaeus ultimately finds a place for Critias’s conception oftruth as deed, as “historical” accomplishment (see above, n. 13).

47Timaeus’s theology is thus the sort that Socrates would approve for his citizens,who must not be exposed to harsh tales about warring gods (Rep. 377d ff.) such asthose told by Hesiod and Homer. Cf. Lampert and Planeaux, “Who’s Who in Plato’sTimaeus-Critias,” 120–21.

48He thus seems to unify the three terms Socrates introduces at 19b–20c: philoso-pher, statesman, poet.

49Solon prudently leaves Athens after handing down new laws (cf. Herodotus,History, 1.29)—a fact of which Critias incidentally reminds us by speaking of hisvisit to Egypt.


a city that he has benefited (cf. Rep. 599d–e); while Timaeus may aspire to beable to do so as well, the benefit of his legislation need not be restricted to asingle city.50

If the love of one’s own reaches a feverish pitch in the character of Critias, itis less pronounced in his companions. Hermocrates is a loyal Syracusan, buthe appears to transcend partisan attachments in a way that Critias does not;in his first appearance in the pages of Thucydides, he successfully urgesthe Greek cities of Sicily to set aside their differences and unite againstAthenian aggression for the sake of their common salvation (PeloponnesianWar 4.58–4.65).51 For his part, Timaeus advances a genuinely cosmopolitanvision. The nomos that he attributes to the Demiurge is designed to rootmen, not in a particular political community, but in the cosmos as awhole.52 While Timaeus’s speeches and deeds, like those of his companionsin the dialogue, emphasize thumos, he shifts the focus of thumotic energyby simultaneously expanding and contracting its horizons. Socrates’summary of yesterday’s speeches outlines a city in which the family, whichplays such a large role in Critias’s preliminary telling of the story ofAtlantis, is absent. Socrates’ citizens do not reflect on what might liebeyond the boundaries of the regime. The regime itself is the arche thatgoverns their speeches and deeds, and they perfectly fulfill the Heracleiteaninjunction that “the people should fight for the law [nomos] as for their citywall” (frag. 44). Timaeus’s likely story differs from the speeches of Socratesand Critias in that it is silent about both family and city. Timaeus’s cosmicsong (nomos), in effect, gives Socrates’ citizens a much greater nomos forwhich to fight than that of the city, for he sings of the oldest and most author-itative of all laws, one that governs all mankind. The primary battlefieldtoward which he turns our attention, however, is neither cosmic nor political,but personal and microcosmic. It is the individual soul itself.For all of his political imagery, Timaeus focuses on the cosmos and soul—

beginnings of human life that are both greater and smaller than the polis.Nevertheless, his use of political imagery exemplifies the very problem hehopes to address, namely, the inflation of a part beyond its proper boundswithin the whole. If Critias improperly aggrandizes himself, his family, andhis polis, Timaeus does the same with human life. In designating the first

50Timaeus’s philosophical muthos is, nonetheless, arguably more fitting for thePanathenaea than Critias’s tale: in teaching that both intelligence and force arerequired to harmonize the necessary and the good, it integrates the two signal attri-butes of Athena—a goddess celebrated as both “a lover of war and a lover ofwisdom” (24c).

51Welliver sees Hermocrates, in a more negative light, as an accomplice of Critias(Character, Plot and Thought 18–21).

52It is, therefore, misleading to claim that in the Timaeus Plato “styles a cosmologyfor a new Athenian imperial politics” (Lampert and Planeaux, “Who’s Who inPlato’s Timaeus-Critias,” 120).


and highest god a demiourgos, and in effectively reading his cosmic nomos intothe book of nature, he implies that the end of politics—the production andmaintenance of a virtuous community—is the very principle that guidesthe construction of the cosmos.53 Yet Timaeus simultaneously calls attentionto his overestimation of the importance of the human things, for he makes itclear that the principle that guides the work of the Demiurge is the perfectionof the cosmos as a whole—a goal that is not only inconsistent with human per-fection but actually requires that a significant number of human beings livelives that are deformed by cowardice, injustice, and other vices.54 TheDemiurge explains that he must refrain from fashioning any part of thehuman soul besides the intellect, which is divine; were he himself to craftthe rest of the soul along with the other mortal kinds of animals, “theywould be made equal to gods” (41c; cf. 39e–40a). The only animals fashionedby the lesser gods are male human beings; in order that the cosmos embracewithin itself all of the various kinds of animals and thus “be sufficientlyperfect,” some of these must fail to impose order on the motions of theirsouls and so be reincarnated as women, birds, four-footed land animals,snakes, and fish (41b–c, 90e–92c).55

When it comes to populating the cosmos with various kinds of animals,the good at which intelligence aims (the perfection of the cosmos) coincidesbeautifullywith necessity (the inevitable failure of some human souls to actua-lize the vocation assigned to them by the Demiurge). But we must not forgetthat this happy coincidence—the harmony of intellect and necessity—issecured only by the Demiurge’s initial application of force to the “unmusical”motion of the visible sphere (30a).56 Timaeus advises us to pursue both

53As Kalkavage observes, Timaeus even “casts his vote” for the Forms (51d); “this isan emphatic reminder that cosmological discourse is governed by Timaeus by a certainpolitical or statesmanlike attitude toward even the highest objects of contemplation”(Plato’s Timaeus, 31).

54It is perhaps worth noting that the insistence that the gods have a special concernfor human well-being seems to be rooted in thumos. Cf. book 10 of the Laws, in whichthe prominent role of thumos in the context of a discussion of the gods suggests thatanger in response to the experiences of loss, terror, and injustice is a primary foun-dation of the belief in special providence. For further discussion, see ThomasPangle, “The Political Psychology of Religion in Plato’s Laws,” American PoliticalScience Review 70 (1976): 1059–77.

55Because the continued existence of the human race depends on sexual reproduc-tion, and hence on the existence of both men and women, it also follows that thewell-being of the human animal is inconsistent with even such perfection as may inprinciple be attained by the souls fashioned by the joint work of the Demiurge andthe lesser gods.

56Cf. Kalkavage’s observation that “musicality comes in [to the cosmos] only afterthe god has used force or violence to mix the forms of Same and Other (along withbeing) in order to get the soul-stuff that is subsequently made into the Pythagoreanscale (35a ff.).” (Plato’s Timaeus, 23).


necessary and intelligent causes in investigating the cosmos (46e); shouldwenot also do so in reflecting onhis speech about the cosmos? Timaeus inflatesthe significance of human life beyond its proper bounds, but he also makes itclear that he has done so. Might the very transparency of his partisanshipbe intended to call attention to his judicious sense of the limits imposed bynecessity—in this case, the necessity inherent in human dispositions—onwhat is best?57 And might this judiciousness provide us with a clue to hisunderstanding of the beginnings of philosophical inquiry?I believe these questions should be answered in the affirmative. On one

hand, Timaeus’s emphasis on spiritedness, war, and courage suggests thathe is cut from the same cloth as Critias, a political man whose aspires,above all, to the glory won through victory. On the other, Timaeus implicitlystrives to moderate and redirect the sort of thumotic ambition that Critiasdisplays in spades. In a word, he tries to put Critias (and perhaps alsoHermocrates) in his place, while simultaneously deflating Critias’s thumoticunderstanding of the world and refitting its implicit truth within his ownaccount. Timaeus speaks the language of war and manliness to make itclear that, in human life, order must be secured by force, but also becausehe must do so if he wishes to engage the attention of fundamentally politicalmen.58 It is not thumos that drives his engagement with Critias, however. Hisemployment of the vocabulary of thumos—or rather, deployment, as this is, insome sense, a tactical choice—points beyond the horizon of politics to thedomain of Being that is accessible only to philosophical eros.

Eros and the Good in Timaeus’s Cosmic Song

To pick up the traces of philosophical eros in the Timaeus requires patience. Inhis summary of yesterday’s speeches, Socrates mentions several measuresdesigned to control sexual desire, but he is silent about philosophical eros.Timaeus appears to follow his lead, for his explicit remarks about eros seemto focus on corporeal appetite. At 42a–b, he mentions “eros mixed with plea-sure and pain” as one of the disturbances of the embodied soul (along withsensation, thumos, and fear) that must be mastered if one is to live justly.At 69c–d he speaks of “all-venturing love” (epicheiretei pantos eroti) in thecontext of enumerating the “affections terrible and necessary” of the“mortal form” of the soul. Finally, when he returns to eros near the veryend of the dialogue, he presents it as an unruly sexual appetite (epithumia:

57That necessity imposes limits on intelligence is subtly reflected in Timaeus’s state-ment that the pursuit of the causes associated both with intellect and with necessity isitself “a necessity” (46e).

58The self-important tone Critias adopts in the Critias nevertheless suggests thatTimaeus has little success in moderating the Athenian. Cf. Welliver, Character, Plot andThought, 22–28.


91b). In a detail Kalkavage finds particularly telling, Timaeus observes that,for the male, the satisfaction of this appetite results in the emission of thevery “marrow” of which the brain itself is constituted.59

On the basis of the foregoing passages, we might be entitled to concludethat Timaeus has no sense of genuinely philosophical longing and regardseros simply as an enemy of reason.60 At 46e, however, he remarks that the“lover of intellect and knowledge” (ton de nou kai epistemes erasten) must inves-tigate necessary as well as intelligent causes. This remark does more thanmerely acknowledge the existence of a noncorporeal, intellectual eros. Itimplies that Timaeus regards himself as a lover of intellect and knowledge,inasmuch as he goes on to conduct an investigation of necessary as well asintelligent causes. It indicates that intelligence is limited by necessity in itsengagement with the sphere of Becoming, and that the work of eros is funda-mentally integrative insofar as it attempts to arrive at a synoptic understand-ing of the relationship between the necessary and the good. It further suggeststhat Timaeus’s account of the cosmos mimetically displays the Demiurge’soriginal intuition of wholeness as he crafts the visible sphere on the modelof the domain of Being (28a–29a).What is presupposed by the integrative work of eros? The activity of fitting

together elements into a decorously ordered whole originates with theDemiurge, who begins with “the all” (to pan, 29a), a totality that is not yetan integrative whole (not yet a holon), and fashions it into a genuinekosmos—a unified arrangement of parts.61 It is on another level the work ofTimaeus himself, whose speech answers to the Demiurge’s foundationaldeeds. Just as the Demiurge fashions the visible sphere from fire, earth, air,and water, mixes Being, the Same, and the Other together to form the soul,and causes the soul to be joined with the body, Timaeus tries to weave aunified story out of the disparate causes of necessity and intelligence.Timaeus’s discourse allows the internal harmony of cosmos to show forth,in part because it imitates the synthetic, demiurgic activity in which thisharmony originates. But what guides his philosophical and mythologicalweaving? What sort of understanding illuminates the work of crafting thecosmos as a whole, whether in deed or as reflected in speech?The same question is raised by Socrates’ account of the work of the philo-

sophical craftsmen of the virtues in book 6 the Republic, whose activity isstructurally analogous to that of the Demiurge in the Timaeus as he goes

59Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus, 129 n. 174; cf. 91a–b with 73b–d.60But see Jill Gordon, “Eros in Plato’s Timaeus,” Epoche 9 (2005), 255–78, which

argues that 42a–b describes the original capacities of the “noetic or divinely-orderedsoul” prior to its embodiment, and that we are, therefore, to understand eros as “one ofthose self-ordering capacities that keeps the human soul in harmony with its ordered,i.e., noetic, origins” (259). I am not sure the passage will bear the weight of Gordon’sinterpretation.

61For the distinction between a pan and a holon, see Theaetetus 204a–b.


about molding the sphere of Becoming on the model of Being. Like a painterwho looks toward a “divine pattern,” such craftsmen would shape the dispo-sitions of human beings by “look[ing] away frequently in both directions,toward the just, fair, and moderate by nature and everything of that sort,and, again, toward what is in human beings, and thus, mixing and blendingthe practices as ingredients, they would produce the image of man” (501b).These philosophical craftsmen are guided by an understanding not only ofthe unity of the virtues within the individual soul and the city as a whole,but also of theway inwhich thatwhich comes tobe andpasses away (thenecess-ary cause, in the language of the Timaeus) can best be made to fit the nature ofthat which is always. Socrates accordingly goes on to clarify this integrativeunderstanding through the images of Sun, Line, and Cave, each of which isdesigned to illuminate a different aspect ofwhat he calls the “Good” (507c–17a).I do not propose to offer anything like a sustained interpretation of

Socrates’ remarks about the Good. I merely wish to suggest that theseremarks point toward a certain fundamental kinship between Socrates andTimaeus. This kinship surfaces when one considers the close resemblancebetween the philosophical and dialogical work of Socrates in the Republicand of Timaeus in the dialogue that bears his name.David Lachterman has identified in the Republic four arguments or lines of

thought leading toward the Good, the most comprehensive of which is “theargument from Wholes and Parts.”62 From its very first words, Lachtermanobserves, the Republic presents the reader with the phenomenon of many-ness—“many different desires or aspirations, many different definitions ofjustice, many different opinions concerning the best life.”63 It thereby raisesthe question of whether there is anything to unite these many desires, defi-nitions, and so forth—“to unite them, not by way of identifying them withone another, at the price of their relevant and intrinsic differences, butrather . . . of so fitting them to one another that each has a character incompany with the others that no one of them has on its own.”64 This is theunity of wholeness, and Socrates’ discourse in the Republic is, above all,characterized by the pursuit of wholeness—the integration of the parts ofthe city, the parts of the individual soul, the instances of a single Form(which is, as a Form, a “structural assemblage or collection of parts”), and,finally, of the community of Forms themselves.65 This unifying philosophicalwork, Socrates indicates, is made possible by the Good, which he identifies asthe highest object of erotic aspiration—“that which every soul pursues andfor the sake of which it does everything” (505d). Lachterman characterizes

62Lachterman, “What is ‘The Good’ of Plato’s Republic?” 149.63Lachterman, 149–50. Cf. Polemarchus’s question to Socrates at 327c: “Do you see

how many of us there are?”64Lachterman, 150.65Lachterman, 150–52.


the Good as “the source that enables the Forms to fit with one another in theway that bests suits each and all of them” and, thus, “gives the intelligibledomain its intactness, its integrity.” For as the source of the decorous arrange-ment of Forms into an ordered whole or kosmos, the Good—whose illumina-tive power Socrates likens to the light of the sun—allows the Forms to showforth in the intrinsic character they already possess, and thus “enables eachand every one of them to do the work for which it is suited by its own inherentnature.”66

Lachterman’s reflections help us to see that the Timaeus is, in its own right,an argument from Wholes and Parts. In articulating the whole as a tunefulensemble or complex harmony, Timaeus’s cosmic song is a musical evocationof the Good. The beauty of this song is a seductive invitation to eros and,therefore, constitutes a rather profound response to Socrates’ suggestionthat his summary of yesterday’s speeches might leave one yearning forsomething more. This is not all, for one of Lachterman’s most intriguingsuggestions concerns the way in which Socrates’ understanding of theGood translates into a certain sort of comportment in dialogue. The Forms,Socrates remarks, are “set in a regular arrangement” and so “neither do injus-tice to one another nor suffer it at another’s hands, but remain all in order[kosmoi] according to reason” (500c). So, too, Socrates “is presented to us asone capable in deed of ‘doing justice’ to the partial and one-sided opinions,appearances, and desires of his interlocutors, that is, as one who can findthe right or fitting place for each part so that all can, in principle, be fittedtogether precisely with one another.” Lachterman goes on to explain thatthis involves “making plain how a part is falsely inflated into the semblanceof a whole, while, at the same time, trying to bring out how the whole has tofind room for that same part, once it has been suitably deflated.”67 Theseobservations alert us to a Socratic dimension of Timaeus’s speech. Just asthe Demiurge puts things in their proper place by imposing limitation andorder on the unruly motion of the visible sphere, Timaeus does the samewith the disordered opinions and desires that characterize men in generaland his companions in particular. This fundamentally political work is ananalogue of the Demiurge’s mathematical and technical “persuasion” of thevisible sphere to assume rational form. Timaeus’s rhetorical deflation andinflation of opinions and desires so as to fit them together into an orderedwhole turns out to be part and parcel of his project of making humanbeings at home within the cosmos.None of this should cause us to forget that souls, being more recalcitrant

than bodies, require a mixture of persuasion and force, and that even this

66Lachterman, 156–57, emphasis in original.67Lachterman, 150. Examples include Socrates’ “refutation” and subsequent “recup-

eration” of the various definitions of justice offered in book 1 by Cephalus,Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus.


combination may fail to correct their disorderly motion. This reflection bringsus back to the question of the beginnings of thought and action, a questionwith which the Timaeus itself begins. Timaeus’ eikos muthos is a “fitting” talein a double sense: it attempts to fit itself simultaneously to the measures ofthe necessary and the good, the latter imposed by intelligence, whichstrives for what is best, and the former by the given circumstances of ourexistence, or what one might call “the human condition.” His attempt to inte-grate these two kinds of causes into a coherent speech indicates that he is opento the measure of measures, the Good, in aspiring to which eros is promptedto do good by attempting to fulfill its daimonic role of “bind[ing] together theall itself to itself” (Symposium 202e).For Timaeus, the ultimate beginning in the order of Being is the Good. He

appropriately begins his cosmic song by speaking of the goodness of theDemiurge. While the Demiurge is not himself the Good, he is the first andgreatest knower and doer of what is good. His goodness, which we mayhope to imitate, consists in bringing order to the disorderly and unmusicalmotion of the visible sphere by looking to, and mimetically reproducing, aneternal model.68 Insofar as Timaeus imitates the Demiurge’s paradigmaticactivity in the medium of speech, his emphasis on thumos and manly virtueat the expense of erosmust be understood as more than a calculated responseto the immediate rhetorical context in which he finds himself. He makes itclear that in human life—in the order of Becoming—necessity is decisivelyprior to goodness. Just as the cosmos can be made musical only after theDemiurge uses force to compel the parts of the cosmic soul to mix with oneanother (35a–b), the human soul’s erotic engagement with what is, presup-poses the thumotic imposition of force to master its own disorderlymotions. Put another way, the musical and philosophical education of erosis made possible only by an initial exercise of gymnastic virtue—a pointthat Socrates seems to anticipate when he prefaces his remark that Timaeushas reached “the very peak of all philosophy” with the observation that he

68Cf. A. E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,1928), 77: “[I]t is the activity of the soul, acting for the sake of what it believes to begood, by which the actual course of nature is made . . . an ‘imitation’ of the perfectorder of the Forms.” “Good was he,” Timaeus says of the Demiurge at 29e, “and inone who is good there never arises about anything whatsoever any grudge; and so,being free of this, he willed that all things should come to resemble himself as muchas possible.” Sallis’s comment on this passage is instructive: “[T]he first word of thebeginning, that is, the beginning of the beginning that Timaeus accepts as his wayof beginning, is: good. If one puts in play Socrates’ declaration in the Republic thatthe good is the beginning itself, the beginning of the whole, the beginning of every-thing (Rep. 511b), then one can trace at this point in the Timaeus a fourfold compound-ing of the beginning: the beginning (the first word) of the beginning received asTimaeus’ way of beginning is the good, which is the beginning itself (Chorology, 56,emphases in original).


comes from “a city with excellent laws” (20a). Thus, the human situation con-trasts sharply with that of the Demiurge, whose forceful imposition of orderin the visible sphere follows from his desire that all things be as good as pos-sible (29d–30a). For the Demiurge does not exercise self-mastery: while thesouls of human beings need to be bought into order before they can experi-ence and act on intellectual love, the Demiurge is by nature reasonable andgood.

Conclusion: The Beginning of Philosophy

I have suggested that the Timaeus is, on one level, an extended meditation onthe fact that the archai uncovered by philosophy are first in the order of Being,but not in the order of Becoming. Timaeus makes it clear that he is moved by alove of wisdom of the sort Socrates describes in the Republic. But he teachesthat this love cannot come to fruition apart from the will to order. In spiteof the confusion it has engendered among commentators, Timaeus’s cosmo-politanism must be distinguished from the imperialism of men like Critias,for Timaeus’s ambition is essentially directed inward, toward the soul. Hisaccount of the primary role of thumos in mastering the anarchic and unmusi-cal motions of the soul implicitly corrects Socrates’suggestion, in book 6 of theRepublic, that the philosopher’s all-consuming erotic passion for wisdombrings virtue in its train (485a–87a). In the dialogue that bears his name,Timaeus shows himself to be genuinely philosophical; given the aforemen-tioned correction, however, there is room for debate about the extent towhich his understanding is essentially Socratic.The Timaeus leaves us with the troubling thought that the goodness of the

initial and necessary imposition of force in human life is visible only in hind-sight, from which it follows that what at first passes for good order may, infact, fall far wide of the mark. Like the Timaeus itself, human life begins inthe murky middle of things—a thought that leads one to wonder how philos-ophy ever gets started in the first place. The same question, we may note, israised by the Myth of Er with which the Republic concludes.69 In answer,we may perhaps be justified in observing that, while the Timaeus fails toexplain how philosophy is possible, it provides ample evidence of itsactuality.

69See Jacob Howland, The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy (Philadelphia: Paul DryBooks, 2004), 155–60.


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Partisanship and the Work of Philosophy in Plato's Timaeus