The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820)

I read Thomas Taylor’s English of Proclus for the claims a later writer can set beside Plato’s own telling of the island, the war, and the floods. The copy is a library scan of Volume I only. The title page reads The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timæus of Plato, in Five Books; containing a Treasury of Pythagoric and Platonic Physiology. Translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor. Two volumes. Vol. I. London, printed for and sold by the author, No. 9, Manor Place, Walworth, Surrey, by A. J. Valpy, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, 1820. The year is on the title page. The book is out of copyright, and the sentences below are his. A later leaf says the scan was reproduced by the Duopage process in the United States. That leaf is not the title page, and it prints no year.

Page numbers below are the printed numbers. In this scan, printed page 4 of the commentary is file page 22, and that gap of eighteen pages holds through the close. Printed page 472 is file page 490. The title page itself has no number.

I set this beside Timaeus and Critias, which is the dialogue he is explaining. He calls the companion dialogue the Atlanticus. I do not fill in Volume II. The title promises five books in two volumes. This volume has Books I, II, and III, and it stops in Book III. I do not describe Books IV and V, and I do not bring in later maps of the Atlantic.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timæus of Plato, in Five Books; containing a Treasury of Pythagoric and Platonic Physiology. Translated from the Greek by Thomas Taylor. The title page prints Timæus with the ligature.
• Author: Proclus. Taylor’s introduction, in a footnote, sends the reader to his own translation of Proclus on the first book of Euclid for the life.
• Edition I read: Two volumes. Volume I only. London, sold by the author at No. 9, Manor Place, Walworth, Surrey, printed by A. J. Valpy, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, 1820.
• Length: The commentary in this volume is printed on pages 1 to 472, and the last words on page 472 close Volume I. Book I is pages 1 to 172. Book II is pages 173 to 386. Book III runs from page 387 to page 472 and is not finished here.
• What he claims: The Timaeus is a physiology of the whole world, in the Pythagorean manner, and it is the mundane partner of the Parmenides. Before that physiology, the resumption of Socrates’ polity and the narration of the Atlantic island unfold the world through images. The war of the Atlantics with the Athenians is an image of division, and especially of the two opposed ranks of things. He will not leave the story as a mere fable. With Iamblichus and with his teacher Syrianus, he takes it as an account of transactions that actually happened, and he also reads every part of it as an image of the contrariety that runs through the world. The ancient Athenians are the pupils of Minerva. The Atlantics are the progeny of Neptune. Athens is given nine thousand years, Sais eight thousand, and Athens a thousand years of priority. The island lay before the Pillars of Hercules, greater than Libya and Asia together, with a passage to other islands and to the opposite continent. Ten kings, five pairs of male twins from Neptune and Clites, ruled it and lands inside the pillars. In one dreadful day and night, earthquakes and deluges sank the warlike race of Athenians and the island, and the sea is now innavigable from the mud. He thinks a reader who shrinks the earth to a narrow measure has no right to call the magnitude a fiction.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• History, and not only history. Crantor, whom he calls the first interpreter of Plato, took the narration as mere history. Plato was derided as not the inventor of the Republic, but as copying what the Egyptians had written, and as believing the Athenians once lived by that polity. Crantor adds that the prophets of the Egyptians say these particulars are written on pillars which are still preserved (p. 64). Proclus, with Iamblichus and Syrianus, keeps the events and still refers them to the scope of the dialogue (p. 65). On page 165 Socrates, as this text prints him, calls the relation not a mere fable, but a true history of transcendent magnitude.
• The other ancient readings, which he will not leave as the whole account. Amelius makes the Athenians the fixed stars and the Atlantics the planets, fighting because their circulations are opposed, the fixed stars winning by the one convolution of the world. Amelius leans on the Critias, where the Atlantic island was divided into seven circles. Proclus says he knows no one else of that opinion (p. 64). Origen refers the war to daemons, some better and some worse. Numenius refers it to souls, the better ones pupils of Minerva, the worse ones under the god of generation, that is Neptune. A mixed reading sets souls against daemons. Porphyry puts the fight before souls enter solid bodies, against material daemons adapted to the west, which the Egyptians call the place of noxious daemons, and he lines this up with Osiris and Typhon, or Bacchus and the Titans (pp. 64, 65).
• Who tells it, and why it was not a poem. Solon is the wisest of the seven. The chain of hearers is Solon, the elder Critias, then the Critias of the dialogue. Plato’s mother Perictione comes in on the side of Glauco. Solon brought the history from Egypt and did not finish it in verse, because he came home to sedition. He also went so that the Athenians would keep the laws they had sworn not to break. He had been with Croesus. On his return he became master of a city in tumult through the Pisistratidae (pp. 68 to 78).
• Sais, not a colony story Plato himself tells. The greatest city of the Saitic province is Sais, from which Amasis came. Its goddess is Neith in Egyptian and Athena, or Minerva, in Greek. Callisthenes and Phanodemus say the Athenians were the fathers of the Saite. Theopompus says the people of Sais were a colony from Athens. Atticus says Theopompus changed the history through envy. Plato, Proclus insists, only says the Saite were very friendly to the Athenians and in a certain manner allied to them (p. 82). In the adytum the Egyptians set an inscription. Taylor’s note says the closing clause, that the fruit she brought forth was the sun, is found only in these commentaries, and he prints the Greek of that clause (p. 82).
• Named priests. From the histories of the Egyptians, Solon met Pateneit at Sais, Ochlapi at Heliopolis, and Ethimon at Sebennytus. Proclus thinks the speaker may have been the priest of Sais (p. 85).
• Greek memory, and how short it is. Athenian antiquity goes to Erichthonius. Argive antiquity goes to Phoroneus and Niobe, then Iasus and Pelasgus. Deucalion and Pyrrha were preserved on Parnassus in a deluge and restored the race. Thessalian antiquity goes to them. Some begin the Argive race at Inachus and the Athenian at Cecrops, and both of those are prior to Deucalion (p. 85). The Greeks are always children because destructions keep renewing them. Eudoxus is cited for the claim that the Egyptians call a month a year, which would empty the long count of wonder. Proclus does not accept that as a reason to dismiss the priest. Iamblichus is cited for Assyrian memorials of seven and twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus says, and also of the whole returns of the seven rulers of the world (pp. 84, 85).
• Many destructions, two great kinds. The greatest are by fire and water. Famine, pestilence, earthquakes, and wars are lesser and partial. Wholes stay in a natural condition. Parts of the earth go preternatural by temperament, by position, by habitude to the heavens, and by the gods of climates. Man as a form always remains (pp. 89, 90). The Phaeton story must include a real conflagration. He rejects the idea that the Sun sometimes hands his chariot to another. Porphyry takes Phaeton for a comet, whose path points to tempest, dryness, pestilence, or fertility. Domninus, his associate, takes a mass of dry exhalation kindled by the sun, with the rain afterward as the lament of the Heliades (pp. 92, 93). A further reading makes Phaeton a solar soul falling into generation. He reports the Chaeronean Plutarch on an island of Britain, held sacred and used as an asylum, whose people say that prodigious rain or thunder means some more excellent nature has failed (p. 95).
• Egypt spared, and not forever. The priest calls fire and water purifications, not corruptions. The Nile saves Egypt from the burning. Rain is not the story of the whole land. Aristotle is cited for the increase as the work of the river. Porphyry reports an old Egyptian opinion that the water issued upward. Eratosthenes says rains. Iamblichus will not stop at that inquiry. The first cause of safety is the will of the presiding gods. The second is the air, the seasons there being contrary to those in the regions from which the Nile flows (pp. 100, 101). From this the Egyptians infer that their land will never suffer a deluge or a conflagration. Proclus, with Aristotle, says every part of the earth becomes sea in the infinity of time, and the same place is continent at one time and sea at another. The Nile itself may fail if the winds weaken or the mountains fall. The oracles, he says, have succeeding cities destroyed by a wind from under the earth (p. 102). Where neither intense cold nor immoderate heat prevails, the race of men is always preserved, sometimes more and sometimes less. Deucalion was saved when the climate of Greece was deluged (p. 102).
• The numbers. The priest gives the Athenians nine thousand years and the Saitans eight thousand, and he measures lives by the thousand, as the writings in the temples do. Porphyry says daemons also measure time by that number (pp. 122, 123). Athens has the seed of its race from Vulcan and the Earth, by a priority of a thousand years. Proclus will not have the Athenians literally sprung from the soil. Earth here means every material cause. The fable is that Vulcan, in love with Minerva, emitted his seed on the earth, and the race blossomed from there (pp. 120, 121). Iamblichus asks how a god can be allotted a place from a definite time without also losing it. His answer is that the allotments stay, and what time measures is the benefit to the participants, which rites call the birthdays of the gods (p. 122).
• The war itself. A mighty power rushed from the Atlantic sea over Europe and Asia. Plato brings it from the west, where the Persian expedition had come from the east, so that Athens stands as from a centre. He will not put the war straight onto the gods, because Socrates had blamed the poets for that the day before. The Athenians stand in for Minerva and the Olympians. The Atlantics stand in for the Titans and Giants. Atlas was one of the Titans, set in the west to hold the heaven (pp. 144, 145). Inside the pillars is the better rank. Outside is the worse. The Atlantic sea is arranged as matter (pp. 146, 147).
• The island, and a historian he names. At that time the Atlantic sea was navigable, and the island before the Pillars of Hercules was greater than Libya and Asia together, with an easy passage to other islands and from those to the opposite continent which surrounded the true sea (p. 148). Certain historians of the external sea, in their own times, knew seven islands there sacred to Proserpine, and three others of immense extent, one sacred to Pluto, one to Ammon, and the middle one to Neptune, a thousand stadia in magnitude. The inhabitants of that middle island preserved from their ancestors the memory of the Atlantic island, prodigiously great, long dominant over the islands of that sea, and itself sacred to Neptune. Marcellus writes this in his Ethiopic History (p. 148).
• Size of the earth. Plato does not measure the earth as the mathematicians do. In the Phaedo the inhabited part is a cavity, and there are many habitable parts like ours. Heraclitus is cited for an Atlantic mountain reaching the aether and casting a shadow of five thousand stadia, hiding the sun from the ninth hour until it sets. Athos casts a shadow as far as Lemnos, seven hundred stadia off. Marcellus is not alone on the height. Ptolemy says the Lunar mountains are immensely high. Aristotle says Caucasus is lit for a third of the night after sunset and before sunrise. The sacred rumour of the Egyptians also says the whole earth is elevated (pp. 151, 152).
• Ten kings and the march. The power was great. There were ten kings who begat five male twins. The island ruled the other islands, parts of the continent, and some parts within the Pillars of Hercules. All of that, he says, is clearly related in the Critias (p. 152). The twins were five times begotten from Neptune and Clites. That is how this translation prints her name. The first of the ten was Atlas, and in the Atlanticus he gave his name to the island. The collected power tried to enslave the Egyptian region, the Athenian region, and every place inside the mouth. The Athenians were conspicuous for virtue and strength. They led the other Greeks or, when deserted, still won, freed those not yet enslaved, and procured liberty for everyone dwelling within the pillars (pp. 152 to 156).
• The end of both sides. In one dreadful day and night, prodigious earthquakes and deluges merged all that warlike race of Athenians under the earth, and the Atlantic island was absorbed and disappeared. The sea is now innavigable from the impeding mud the island left (pp. 156, 157). Taylor’s footnote says the text of Plato in this place, as Proclus gives it, is very erroneous beside the editions of the Timaeus. An earthquake a little before Proclus’s own time shook Egypt and Bithynia. He gives no year for it. A deluge after an earthquake is not strange. Aristotle gives the cause. About Achaia, an earthquake and the waves deluged Bouras and Helice. Aristotle, in the Meteors, says there was mud in the external sea beyond the mouth, and that the place was marshy (p. 157). Proclus also reads the sinking as the Orphic fall into Tartarus. Earthquakes and deluges are Neptune’s way of working. Thunders and lightnings would have been Jupiter’s. He says this is not fiction of the kind Homer uses for the Phaeacians and for the Greek wall. Many parts of the earth are deluged by the sea, and what Plato says is not impossible (pp. 157, 158).
• What the Atlanticus was still to tell. Critias has given the sum. The particulars, the polity of the Atlantics, the principle of their generation, the turn to injustice, and how the Athenians went to war, belong to the fuller narration. The Atlanticus as Proclus has it gathers the gods to punish the Atlantics and ends on Jupiter’s address. He thinks the preparation, the going out, and the victory are already contained in that gathering. The order of the dialogues is the Republic, then the Timaeus, then the Atlanticus (pp. 165 to 170). Longinus would have cut the Egyptian narration and the Atlantics as superfluous. Porphyry and Iamblichus keep the preface. Proclus ends Book I with them (p. 172).

Taylor’s introduction

Taylor’s introduction argues that Proclus is the largest link in the chain of Plato’s interpreters, that these commentaries have come down mutilated, and that they scarcely explain a third part of the Timaeus. He thinks Proclus left no part of the dialogue without elucidation. He names Olympiodorus on the Meteors of Aristotle, and Marinus, who says the commentaries were written in the flower of Proclus’s age and preferred by him beyond his other works. The part that survives, Taylor says, is the part on the demiurgic, paradigmatic, and final causes, the corporeal world, soul and its harmonic ratios, partial souls, the elements, and the heavens. He even says the reasoning shows every planet surrounded with satellites, and he points those claims to pages in Volume II, which is not this copy.

He spends the rest of the introduction defending Plotinus and the Platonists down to Justinian against the charge that they filled Plato with jargon. He says a real student needs mathematics, logic, physics, and Aristotle, and the character Plato asks for in the seventh book of the Republic. He notes upwards of eleven hundred emendations of his own, forced by the sense, and a Latin version of part of the third book by Nicolaus Leonicus Thomaeus, printed at Venice in 1525, from which he recovered words and whole sentences. None of this is an Atlantic claim. It tells you how he wants the commentary read, and that the English in front of me is a corrected text, not a smooth reprint of one Greek edition.

Names, and the glossary of terms

Before page 1 he lists the philosophers Proclus quotes, with a short notice of each, and he explains the words he will use for Proclus’s technical language. Solon is in the list as the legislator. The note on Olympiads says the games were restored by Iphitus about 777 years before Christ, and that each Olympiad contained four years. The glossary is Taylor’s own key. It glosses words such as anagogic, apocatastasis, the genesurgic, generation, the Demiurgus of wholes, and philopolemic, which he says is an epithet of Minerva as a lover of war. It adds no Atlantic island, no war with Athens, and no flood.

Book I

Book I is the preface of the Timaeus. It runs from the design of the dialogue through the persons, the summary of the polity, and the whole Egyptian narration, and it stops when Socrates hands the discourse to Timaeus. The Atlantic war, the island, and the floods are not a digression inside it. They are the second half of the book, and the first half keeps pointing at them.

The design, and the war as an image

He says the Timaeus embraces the whole of physiology. Plato was impelled by the Pythagorean Timaeus on nature, and Taylor has prefixed that treatise to the commentaries, though this volume as I have it opens on Proclus himself. Physiology before Plato either stopped at matter, or added form and still missed the true causes. Plato, following the Pythagoreans, gives the producing cause, the paradigm, and the final cause, and only then form and a recipient. The good, the intelligible animal, the maker, form, and the subject nature are all delivered because the subject is the whole world.

The order of the dialogue matches that. The beginning indicates the universe through images. The middle delivers the fabrication. The end weaves partial natures to wholes.

For the resumption of the discourse about a polity, and the narration respecting the Atlantic island, unfold through images the theory of the world.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 4

If you look at union and multitude, the polity Socrates summarizes is an image of union, and the war of the Atlantics with the Athenians, which Critias narrates, is an image of division, especially of the opposition according to the two ranks of things. If you divide the world into heaven and the region under the moon, the polity is likened to the celestial order, because Socrates says its paradigm is in the heavens, and the war of the Atlantics is likened to generation, which lives by contrariety and change. These images come before the whole of physiology.

On page 26, when Socrates begins the summary of the best polity, he says the concise narration of a polity places the reader iconically in the fabrication, but the history of the Atlantics does it symbolically, because fables indicate many things through symbols. The pages between that and the story itself are his commentary on the guardians, the auxiliaries, the mercenaries, common marriages and common children, and the women sharing the work of the men. He reads those classes as celestial gods, attendant daemons, and the powers that bind a material nature to partial souls, and again as fixed stars, planets, and material natures. That stretch adds no second telling of the island. It is the polity which, on his own division, is the image of union, waiting for the war which is the image of division.

He also settles the absent fourth person. The older interpreters guessed at a name. His teacher Syrianus says the hearers grow fewer as the audition grows more venerable. Many heard the polity in the Piraeus. Four received the narration Socrates gives of it. Three remain in the Timaeus. He will not make the absent man a piece of the Atlantic story.

The persons, and whose story it is

Timaeus of Locri, in a city whose legislator was Zaleucus, is praised for wealth, birth, office, and the summit of philosophy, and Proclus makes him the image of the one Demiurgus. Critias is generous, philosophic after a fashion, called an idiot among philosophers and a philosopher among idiots, and one of the thirty. Socrates is not to be blamed for praising him now. The praise is only that he is not ignorant of the present matter. A tyrannical turn, Proclus says from the fable in the tenth book of the Republic, can belong to a soul that governed with the gods and now chases apparent power. Critias is the middle fabrication for three reasons. He speaks after Socrates. He narrates the Atlantic history, the Atlantics being the progeny of Neptune. And his own life has the ruling and wide-reaching character of that middle rank (p. 59). Hermocrates, a Syracusan general who wanted to live by law, is the third fabrication, the one that arranges the last and most disorderly parts.

Another arrangement, which he allows if the first is dropped, puts Timaeus as the paradigm, Socrates as the efficient cause, Critias as the formal cause, and Hermocrates as matter, fit to hear and not to speak. The summary of the polity was made so that a rightly constituted city could be shown at war. Both that summary and the Atlantic war refer the reader to the one fabrication of the world (p. 61).

Crantor, Amelius, Origen, Numenius, and Porphyry

Critias is about to repeat a narration surprising in the extreme, yet in every respect true, once delivered by Solon, the wisest of the seven. Proclus stops on the whole narration about the Atlantics before he takes the words one by one.

With respect to the whole of this narration about the Atlantics, some say, that it is a mere history, which was the opinion of Crantor, the first interpreter of Plato, who says, that Plato was derided by those of his time, as not being the inventor of the Republic, but transcribing what the Egyptians had written on this subject; and that he so far regards what is said by these deriders as to refer to the Egyptians this history about the Athenians and Atlantics, and to believe that the Athenians once lived conformably to this polity.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 64

Crantor adds, that this is testified by the prophets of the Egyptians, who assert that these particulars [which are narrated by Plato] are written on pillars which are still preserved.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 64

Others call it a fable of things that never existed, useful only as a sign of perpetual or generated natures. He says they are not attending to Plato. What is in every respect true is not partly true and partly false, and it is not false on the surface and true only in a hidden sense. A thing of that kind would not be perfectly true.

Others do not deny that the transactions happened, and they take them now as images of contrarieties that already exist in the universe. War, they say, is the father of all things, as Heraclitus also asserted. Of these, some refer the analysis to the fixed stars and the planets.

Of this opinion, therefore, is the illustrious Amelius, who vehemently contends that this must be the case, because it is clearly said in the Critias, that the Atlantic island was divided into seven circles.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 64

He knows no one else of that opinion. Origen refers the analysis to certain daemons, some more excellent and some less, some superior in multitude and some in power, some vanquishing and some vanquished. Others refer it to the discord of souls. The more excellent are the pupils of Minerva. The inferior kind are subservient to generation, and they pertain to the god who presides over generation, that is to Neptune. That is Numenius. Others mingle Origen and Numenius and say the narration is souls against daemons, the daemons drawing down and the souls being drawn down. With them a daemon is of three kinds, divine, or according to habitude, or depraved and noxious. The war of this last kind is waged against souls as they descend into generation. What ancient theologians refer to Osiris and Typhon, or to Bacchus and the Titans, Plato from piety refers to the Athenians and Atlantics. Before souls descend into solid bodies, those theologians and Plato deliver their war with material daemons adapted to the west, since the west, as the Egyptians say, is the place of noxious daemons. That is Porphyry, and Proclus would be surprised if Porphyry differed here from Numenius (pp. 64, 65).

What Iamblichus and Syrianus keep

Iamblichus, he says, corrects those men excellently. The correction is not a rejection of the story.

According to him, therefore, and also to our preceptor Syrianus, this contrariety and opposition are not introduced for the purpose of rejecting the narration, since on the contrary, this is to be admitted as an account of transactions that actually happened; but, as we are accustomed to do, we must refer that which precedes the subject of the dialogue, to the scope itself of the dialogue.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 65

The contrariety derived from human affairs is to be extended, in a similar form, through the whole world, and especially through generation. All things are from the one and from the duad after the one, united and also opposite, as sameness is opposite difference and motion is opposite permanency. If the polity is analogous to the world, the war has to be surveyed in every nature. The polity answers to existence. War answers to the powers of those essences, and, as Plato says, to their motions. You may divide the world into incorporeal and corporeal, the incorporeal into the more intellectual and the more material, the corporeal into heaven and generation, heaven into contrary periods, and generation into opposite powers. Or you may take the opposite life in the mundane gods, in daemons, in souls, or in bodies. The analogies transfer from men to things.

He then reads the divine oppositions in Homer as the same pattern. Apollo is opposed to Neptune, Mars to Minerva, the river Xanthus to Vulcan, Hermes to Latona, and Juno to Diana. Neptune and Apollo fabricate generation, one totally and the other partially. Juno and Diana supply life. Minerva and Mars cause the contrariety through existence and life. Hermes and Latona preside over two perfections of souls. Vulcan and Xanthus lead the corporeal constitution. Venus is left by herself to illuminate union, and she fights on the worse side because, in that rank, the one is less excellent than multitude. Plato, like the theologians, delivers a multitudinous contrariety before the one fabrication of the world. He will not narrate Titan wars or Giant wars to Socrates, who the day before had blamed the poets for devising that kind of thing. He takes the transactions from history so that he need not say the gods fight, ascribes the battles to men, and through a cautious analogy transfers them to the gods as well (pp. 65 to 67).

Later, when the war is actually launched, he says Iamblichus, against a more partial analysis, thought the words should be understood according to the apparent meaning, though in the preface Iamblichus himself had given help toward the solution. Proclus asks that man to be propitious, and then goes on with the analogies anyway (p. 147). I leave both reports as they stand. He does not cancel the sentence on page 65.

On the word “surprising” he is careful. It can mean contrary to expectation, or paradoxical, or wonderful. Here it means what deserves admiration, because what follows speaks of deeds great and admirable. “Narration” (logos) marks truth. In the Gorgias a fable differs from a logos because the latter is true and the former is not. Solon is called the wisest of the seven as a man related to Plato, said to another Athenian, in the Panathenaea, and as a sign that the narration extends to all wisdom. There is nothing absurd in calling one man the wisest of those in his own order.

The evidences he lists for Solon’s wisdom are the legislation, the pretended insanity at Salamis, the armed attack on Pisistratus, the conference with Croesus, and the reply that his laws were not the most beautiful but powerful, and that he knew laws more excellent than those. There is also the tripod dragged up in a net. The oracle said it should go to the wisest. It passed along the seven until Solon, and he sent it back to the god. Taylor notes that Diogenes Laertius tells the same story of Solon in the life of Thales. Solon is said to have found that the lunar month does not consist of thirty days, and so first called the last day the old and the new. The discovery that the numbers of the days turn back from the twentieth is ascribed to him. Some say that before Anaxagoras he showed that intellect presides over the whole of things (pp. 67, 68).

Solon, his family, and the history he did not finish

The race, as Proclus gives it, is this. Execestides had two sons, Solon and Dropides. Dropides had Critias, whom Solon addresses in a poem, telling him to heed his father. Calleschrus and Glauco were the sons of that Critias. The Critias of this dialogue was the son of Calleschrus, which he takes from the Charmides, where Critias calls the father of Charmides his uncle. Charmides and Perictione were the children of Glauco, and Perictione was the mother of Plato. So Glauco was the uncle of the younger Critias, Charmides was the uncle of Plato, and Solon was the brother of the great-grandfather of Critias. Iamblichus makes Glauco the son of Dropides at once. The Platonic Theon makes Critias and Glauco the sons of Calleschrus. Proclus thinks the Charmides rules those out, and then says that to a man who attends to things the pedigree is of no consequence (pp. 68, 69).

The Apaturia, which the boy Critias remembers, was a festival of Bacchus, from the duel of Melanthus and Xanthus the Boeotian, and the victory of Melanthus by deception, when the Boeotians and Athenians were at war for Oenoe. It lasted three days. The first was called Dorpia, from many sacrifices, the victims drawn upward. The second was a day of banquets. The third was Cureotis, when boys of three or four years were enrolled in their tribes, and the sharper boys sang poems for a prize of memory. After Ion there were four families. From Clisthenes there were ten. He ties the festival, whose pretext was an Athenian victory, to the hypothesis that the Athenians conquered the Atlantics, and that intellectual natures subdue material ones. Deception fits mundane forms that leave the immaterial and become apparent. The enrolment of the boys imitates partial souls entering their allotments. The poems of Solon are not popular poetry. They mingle philosophy with it (pp. 74, 75).

The old Critias laughed and said that if Solon had not taken poetry as a casual affair, and if sedition and other fluctuations had not made him neglect the history he brought from Egypt, neither Hesiod nor Homer nor any other poet would have had greater glory. Proclus takes two things from the apparent sense. The messenger of this history should neither deceive nor be deceived. Solon was most wise, so he was not deceived, and he was intimate with those about Critias, so he would not deceive. The boy who heard it should not be so old that the tale seems recent, nor so young that he forgets. And Solon went to Egypt not only for the Atlantic history, but so that the Athenians, while he was away, would obey the laws he had bound them by an oath not to break. In that same absence he was with Croesus. On his return he mastered the city, which was in tumult through the Pisistratidae (pp. 76 to 78).

Why did Solon want the Atlantic war in verse? Because, Iamblichus says, natural works and the mundane contrariety subsist through imitation. Why did sedition stop him? Because material motions impede the productive powers. The affair is the one that ought most justly to be the greatest and most renowned this city ever accomplished, though length of time and the destruction of those who did it have kept the fame from the present age. Proclus calls it greatest as an image of all contrariety, and most renowned as contributing to the visible fabrication. Orpheus, he says, calls the works of nature renowned (pp. 78, 79).

Sais, Neith, and who is allied to Athens

The narration moves from the wider to the narrower. Egypt, the river, Delta, the Saitic province, Sais sacred to Minerva. He will not call Egypt simply matter, or simply the whole earth, or simply the intelligible. In this passage he likens it to the whole invisible order which is the principle of visible natures. Delta is a triangle. The Nile is arranged as the zodiac, and as a symbol of the life poured on the whole world. Sais is referred sacerdotally to the Bear, not because it stands under that constellation and not because of cold, but as sharing a peculiar efflux of the god of that constellation. Hence Sais is not shaken by earthquakes, because it has a firm seat from the place about the pole (pp. 80, 81). That is a claim about the city, and it is also an analogy. I keep both.

The greatest city is Sais, and Amasis came from it. The presiding divinity is Neith in the Egyptian tongue and Athena, or Minerva, in Greek. The inhabitants were very friendly to the Athenians, and said they were in a certain manner allied to them. Amasis is taken as analogous to Solon, because he attended to wisdom and justice beyond the other Egyptian kings. Then the historians divide.

Callisthenes and Phanodemus relate that the Athenians were the fathers of the Saite. Theopompus says the opposite, that they were a colony of the Saite people. Atticus says Theopompus altered the history through envy, and that some of the inhabitants of Sais came to renew their alliance with the Athenians. Proclus returns to Plato’s own limit. The Saite were very friendly to the Athenians, and after a certain manner allied to them. The alliance is not wholly perfect. Some may share more of the same providence, and some less, and some may share one power of the goddess while others share another (p. 82).

The same goddess, proceeding from intelligible and intellectual causes through the supercelestial orders into parts of the heaven and into distributions on earth, is allotted places adapted to herself. The Greeks say she was generated from the head of Jupiter.

But the Egyptians relate, that in the adytum of the Goddess there was this inscription, I am the things that are, that will be, and that have been.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 82

The inscription goes on. No one has ever laid open the garment by which she is concealed. The fruit which she brought forth was the sun. Taylor’s footnote says the former part is in Plutarch on Isis and Osiris, and that the fruit which she brought forth was the sun is only to be found in these commentaries. He prints the Greek of that clause. Of the signs of the zodiac, the ram is ascribed to her, and the equinoctial circle, where a power that moves the universe is established. Plato calls her a lover of wisdom and a lover of war. The Athenians call the tutelary goddess of the city Archgetes, or the leader (p. 82).

Nations differ by the places they inhabit, by the temper of the air, by habitude to the heavens, by spermatic powers, and still more by the gregarious government of the gods and the diversity of tutelary powers. From those he says you will find differences of colour, figure, voice, and motion. People who migrate often change colour and voice by dwelling in the new country, as plants change with the soil (p. 83).

Greek antiquities, and why the Greeks are children

Solon was honourably received, and when he asked the priests who knew ancient affairs better than others, he found that neither he nor any Greek had any knowledge of things of that kind. The remembrance of such transactions contributes to political virtue and to the theory of mundane periods. He then offers the Greeks’ own oldest stories, to draw the older stories out.

The particulars, however, respecting Deucalion and Pyrrha, that a deluge taking place, they were preserved in Parnassus, and how migrating from thence, they restored the human race, are manifest, and also that antiquity with the Thessalians is as far as to these.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 85

With the Athenians the archaeology goes to Erichthonius, a native of Athens. With the Argives it goes to Phoroneus and Niobe, the most ancient with the Greeks. Argos descended from Niobe, and from him Iasus and Pelasgus, from whom Argos was called Pelasgic. According to some, the Argive race begins from Inachus and the Athenian from Cecrops, each of them prior to Deucalion. The Egyptians participate in antiquity in a remarkable degree, because they survey the heavenly bodies without impediment through the purity of the air, and because they preserve ancient memorials, not being destroyed either by water or by fire. The Assyrians, Iamblichus says, have preserved the memorials not only of seven and twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the seven rulers of the world. Set beside those, the celebrated archaeology of the Greeks is the smaller thing (pp. 84, 85).

Solon, however, met at Sais with a priest called Pateneit; but at Heliopolis, with a priest called Ochlapi; and at Sebennytus, with one whose name was Ethimon, as we learn from the histories of the Egyptians.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 85

Perhaps it was the priest of Sais who then said, O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children, nor is there an aged Greek among you. The repetition of the name indicates circulation from the same to the same. Juvenility is want of wisdom. That want comes from the frequent destructions, so that before they become truly ancient they become juvenile again, or it comes because ancient deeds are not preserved and their knowledge stays with present events. With the Egyptians, past transactions are always present through memory. The remembrance is through history. The history is from pillars, on which things paradoxical and worthy of admiration, in actions or in inventions, are inscribed (pp. 85, 86).

He answers a doubt. Heraclitus says a very learned knowledge of past transactions does not produce intellect. And if Eudoxus is right that the Egyptians call a month a year, a long count of such years is nothing wonderful. Aristotle says memory and sense cannot be the makers of science, but Proclus says they contribute to the reminiscence of wholes. By relating many similar circumstances you produce one form, and from concordant returns in history you go back to the one cause. Callippus framed observations of the affections of the air that way, and astrology took the celestial motions that way (p. 86).

Fire, water, and Phaeton

The reason the Greeks are always children is the multitude and variety of destructions of the human race, which have been and will be again. The greatest arise from fire and water. The lesser arise from ten thousand other contingencies. There is always generation and always corruption. In the heavens that is a mutation of figures and a motion of perpetually generated bodies. In matter, generation evolves its own circle, and different elements dominate at different times. Wholes keep a natural order. Parts sometimes follow them and sometimes tend preternaturally, by a different temperament, then by position, then by habitude to the heavens, and also by the gods who preside over climates, some rejoicing in motion and some in permanency. Man is always, the earth is always, and each of the elements always is. What cannot be administered together with the universe cannot abide in it. The law of Jupiter expels it (pp. 87 to 89).

Why are the greatest destructions through fire and water, and not through earth and air? Fire proceeds through other things and divides them. Water moves more easily than earth and is less easily broken up than air. Earth and air are nearer to us. We are pedestrians and allied to earth, and we live and breathe in air, so those two are less destructive. They also hurt us by suffering first. Putrid air makes pestilence. Earth torn open makes absorptions. Pestilence is a passion of air. Chasms and earthquakes are passions of earth. Fire and water can operate on us without first being distempered themselves. So deluges and conflagrations are the greatest destructions. Famine and pestilence, earthquakes and wars, are partial, and may come from other causes. The effective cause is the order of the universe, and before that the junior fabrication, which the Greek fables assert and which the Egyptian tradition indicates by saying, mystically, that the sun assumes different forms in the signs of the zodiac (pp. 90, 91).

The Phaeton story is referred to the Greeks and to Solon’s knowledge. It has the form of a fable, and it indicates the mutation of the bodies revolving in the heavens about the earth, and a destruction of terrestrial natures, through long periods, from the devastations of fire. Proclus takes the fable three ways, historically, physically, and philosophically.

Historically, Phaeton was the offspring of the Sun and of Clymene the daughter of Ocean. He drove his father’s chariot off the track. Jupiter, fearing for the universe, destroyed him by thunder. He fell about Eridanus. The fire from him burnt everything the earth nourished. His sisters the Heliades lamented him. A conflagration has to be admitted, because the whole narration is introduced for the sake of it. The cause is neither an impossibility nor something that happens easily. It would be impossible if someone fancied that the Sun sometimes drives his own chariot and sometimes commits the job to another. It would be too easy if Phaeton were simply a comet whose dissolution produced intolerable dryness. That supposition, he says, is generally adopted. Porphyry says signs may be taken from the motion of comets. Toward the south, tempest. Toward the north, dryness from excessive heat. Toward the east, pestilence. Toward the west, fertility. The disappearance of the comet is called the destruction by thunder (pp. 91 to 93).

Physically, he prefers Domninus. Sometimes so much dry exhalation collects that the solar heat kindles it, and it burns the part of the earth under it. Because the inflammation comes from the Sun, the fable calls Phaeton his offspring, and calls the offspring male because fire is male and earth female, the one form and the other matter. The path was not parallel to the Sun’s, so he did not keep his father’s track. The dissolution of the cloud is the fall. The extinction is the thunder of Jupiter. The abundance of rain after great conflagrations is the lament of the sisters, the wet exhalations (p. 93).

Philosophically, partial souls proceed from the father of wholes and are sown about the mundane gods, so that each becomes not only soul but a soul of a certain kind, Martial or Jovian or Lunar. The same peculiarity reaches herbs and stones. There is a stone and a herb suspended from the solar power, whether you call them heliotropes or by another name. Undefiled souls stay with their gods. Others descend without being filled with the vice of generation. Others are defiled. Phaeton, abiding on high, drove his father’s chariot, meaning a vehicle of the solar series. When he fell into generation he was destroyed by the thunder of Jupiter. Thunder here is a symbol of fabrication, not the cause of the dissolution of the spirit in which the soul is carried. There are many transpositions of souls, some in order and some heaped together with tumult. Descending souls put on aerial or aquatic garments, and some keep empyrean ones as far as the earth. Through such souls the gods produce conflagrations, or pestilence, or other calamities, using them as ministers. The Heliades are solar souls, lamenting not only from pity but from providence. Eridanus and the fall into it are the lapse into the river of generation. Theologians signify the extension of solar providence to mortals through tears. Descents happen through impotency. Vehicles as well as souls take the peculiarity of the leading gods. Destructions are effected by the providence of the gods. Jupiter caused the conflagration by hurling the thunder (pp. 94 to 96).

He reports, from Plutarch on the failure of the oracles, that in one of the islands of Britain, which appears sacred and is treated by its rulers as an asylum, the inhabitants often say, when prodigious rains or thunder and lightning take place, that some one of the more excellent natures fails. They mean souls transferred into bodies, and souls that relinquish a certain generation. He does not deny that such things befall descending souls, especially magnificent ones of a more daemonic rank, which is what the fable obscurely signifies Phaeton to have been (p. 95). This is not an Atlantic island. It sits inside the conflagration.

The priest himself unfolds only so much of the fable as the discussion needs. Abundant destructions of terrestrial natures come through fire, from the mutation of the bodies that revolve in the heavens about the earth. Mutation may mean that earthly things have become incommensurate with the celestial effluxions. What can sustain the dividing power of Mars is preserved. What is too weak for it is dissolved. Or the mutation is the various configuration of the celestial bodies, which are letters of their informing souls. Copious destructions need a concurrence, a habit of the things that suffer, a conspiration of the agents, an aptitude of matter, and instruments and times. They happen through long periods. Wholes that remain for the mundane period are incorruptible. Individuals dissolve easily. Between them, a genus, a city, and a nation have periods, some longer and some shorter, as Aristotle says (pp. 96 to 98).

Those who dwell on mountains, or in lofty and dry places, perish more abundantly in a burning than those who dwell near rivers or the sea. Porphyry transfers this to souls. The irascible part, effervescent, is one destruction, and Homer’s Agamemnon has eyes shining like fire. The epithymetic part, deluged by the moisture of generation, is another, and Heraclitus says a moisture is another death of intellectual souls. Iamblichus refuses the ethical reading and stays with the physical one. In a conflagration the lofty places are farther from the exhalations of water, so the air is dry and becomes fuel. In deluges the hollow places are destroyed more abundantly, because heavy things tend downward (pp. 98, 99).

The Nile, and what a deluge leaves behind

To the Egyptians the Nile is a saviour in other respects, and also because it liberates them from this destruction by fire. It is the cause of geometry, of fruits, and of avoiding conflagrations. Its water preserves their bodies, and the divinity that holds the river elevates their souls (p. 99).

When the gods purify the earth by water and deluge its surface, the herdsmen and shepherds on the mountains are preserved, and those who dwell in the cities are carried to the sea by the inundation of the rivers. The efficient cause is the gods. The same may be said of conflagrations. Purification is sometimes by water and sometimes by fire. In Orpheus, Jupiter is exhorted to bring purifications from Crete, and the theologians arrange Crete for the intelligible. Fire and water produce without deliberation, each by its own tendency. There has to be a prior cause that uses them for a good. The priest, knowing this, calls the destructions through water and fire by a sacerdotal name, purifications, and not corruptions (pp. 99, 100).

In Egypt the water descending from on high does not pour with desolation on the plains. The whole of it can return from the bosom of the earth. Hence the traditions preserved there are said to be most ancient. Rain sometimes happens, but not in the whole of Egypt, usually about the lower parts. Aristotle says this is evidently the work of the river. The upper parts do not receive an afflux of that kind. Porphyry says it was an ancient Egyptian opinion that the water issued upward by the ascent of the Nile, which is why they called it the waterer of the earth, and that “returned from beneath” means the water is loosened from its own fountains, not that snowmelt makes the quantity. Proclus asks where, in the southern places the Nile flows through, there is a collection of snow. Others, with Eratosthenes, say the increase is from rains poured in. Iamblichus says it is not requisite to investigate in that way. He assigns a twofold cause by which the Egyptians avoid both excessive dryness and deluges. The first is the will of their presiding gods and the boundary from the first fabrication. The second is the temperature of the air. The seasons there are contrary to those in the regions from which the Nile flows, and in those regions dryness and great rains reciprocate. The uninterrupted rain, and the magnitude of the mountains that hold the fountains, keep the increase going. Theophrastus is cited for rain from the pressure of clouds against a mountain. Clouds need not be seen about the cataracts. The stream is poured first not from those, but from the Lunar mountains, named from their altitude. This is aimed at the Egyptian oration of Aristides (pp. 100, 101).

And looking to the infinity of time, it must not be denied that the water of the Nile may fail.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 102

What if the annual winds blow less vehemently and do not drive the clouds against the mountains? What if the mountains fall?

What also, if the mountains should fall, in which there is a collection of clouds; the wind from subterranean places bursting them, through which, likewise, the oracles say, that succeeding cities shall be destroyed?

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 102

The Egyptians infer that their land will never experience either a deluge or a conflagration. That it should fail from other causes is not wonderful. Aristotle observes that every part of the earth becomes sea in the infinity of time, and the same place is at one time continent and at another sea (p. 101).

Every place free from deluges and conflagrations has the race of men remaining, more or less numerous. Someone may say the race fails in a different way.

For at present there are none who inhabit these very places of the Attic land [which were formerly so populous], though neither a deluge nor a conflagration has happened, but a certain dire impiety, which has entirely obliterated the race of men.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 102

In my copy of the original of these Commentaries, a certain annotator observes in the margin, that "Proclus alludes, in what he here says, to the Christian religion."

Thomas Taylor. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 102

That Christian reading is the annotator’s, printed by Taylor. It is not a sentence of the commentary itself. Proclus’s own next alternative is that Plato here calls climates places, so that every climate has men even without a deluge or a conflagration, at one time more and at another less. Some will also be saved in a deluge, as Deucalion was, when the climate of Greece was deluged. Domninus reads the sentence as every habitable place, neither too cold nor too dry from heat, always having a greater or lesser number of men. Mathematicians say some places are uninhabitable from excess of heat or cold. Orpheus is quoted for a seat of men apart from the immortals, where the sun’s mid axis turns, between excessive cold and heat (pp. 102, 103).

Whatever has been transacted by the Egyptians, or by the Athenians, or in any other place, if it is beautiful or great or uncommon, is described in the Egyptian temples and preserved. With other nations, oblivion of ancient transactions comes not through the failure of men, but because after frequent destructions only illiterate and rustic persons remain. From a deluge, herdsmen and shepherds are left and the inhabitants of cities are destroyed. Those who remain are illiterate and without the Muses, so they cannot transmit the former period in writing or keep it in verse. They become oblivious, and through oblivion they return to the life of children. An ignorant old man, Aristotle says, does not differ from a child in understanding. The same pattern is applied to souls newly descended, oblivious of intelligibles through the deluge arising from matter (pp. 104 to 106). In accustomed years a celestial effluxion rushes on them like a disease. Deluges are excited from the celestial periods and have water for their matter. What is corruptive of a partial nature is evil to that nature and good to the whole. Such destructions are accomplished according to circulations that have an order inside the whole period (p. 105).

The priest compares Solon’s antiquities to puerile fables. The fables of the wise are about eternal things. The fables of children are about small temporal things. The histories of Solon look to the small. The histories of the Egyptians have an extended survey and contribute to science (p. 106).

One deluge, a small seed, and the city before the water

For the deluge of Deucalion is much celebrated by the Greeks, though as the Egyptian says, there were many others prior to it.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 107

That is his comment on the priest’s rebuke, that Solon mentions only one deluge of the earth, though there had been many. Next the priest says Solon is ignorant of a most beautiful and excellent race who once inhabited his country, from whom he and the whole city descended, though only a small seed of that people remained. The posterity were for many ages destitute of literature and became as it were dumb. Proclus takes the small seed as the connection of the former period to the one that follows, in the world as in Athens. Solon, so far as he is an animal, has his genus from those men. So far as he is a partial intellect receiving the narration of a war, he is analogous to the divinity who carries the productive principle of mundane contrariety down from intelligibles to the sensible region (p. 107).

Prior to that greatest destruction by water, there was a most excellent city of Athenians, surpassing all others in war, governed by the most equitable laws, whose deeds and polities are the most beautiful of all under the heavens that the priests have heard of.

Plato does not perhaps mean by the greatest destruction, the deluge of Deucalion, but some one of the deluges prior to it.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 108

The city is most warlike and most law-governed as an imitation of its guardian goddess, who is both philosophic and philopolemic. The Athenians take the warlike from the philopolemic, and equitable legislation from the philosophic.

By the most beautiful deeds he means the victory over the Atlantics.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 108

By the most beautiful polities he does not mean that they changed many constitutions. One polity may be called a number of many polities, as one world connects many worlds. If each life is a polity, the common life is the communion of many partial lives. It is the most beautiful of those under the heavens because it is the first imitation of the polity of the world. The paradigm is in the heavens (p. 108).

He then stops again on the whole deed. It is neither called a fable nor a mere history. Some receive it as history and some as fable. The objectors say the development of such narrations looked to Plato like the work of a laborious and not very fortunate man, that Plato teaches most of his dogmas with perspicuity and is not as enigmatical as Pherecydes, that the cause of inserting the narration is known to be the delight and allurement of the reader, and that to analyse everything is to suffer what the slippery readers of Homer suffer. The other side refers the development to physical harmony, from what Plato says of Phaeton, that it has the form of a fable and manifests a natural event, and from the Egyptians, the fathers of this relation, who signified the arcana of nature through fable. Proclus’s own sentence is that all these particulars are a history, and also an indication of the mundane contrariety and the whole order of things. The history narrates the past transactions of men. Symbolically it comprehends what is in the universe. He then divides that contrariety down the divine orders, from bound and infinity to the straight and the circular, and he says that according to each division the goodness of better natures, wanting to fill what is subordinate and to take away depravity, produces war, while the desire of less excellent natures to pull a portion away excites the apparent opposition (pp. 108 to 110).

The pages that follow, before the thousand years, are this same division carried into the words “selecting the places.” One divinity can be allotted both Athens and Sais. Partial souls cannot dwell in two bodies at once. A divine power can be participated in different places, more by sameness in one and more by difference in another. Allotments of the gods are perpetual. Homer is quoted for a lot in ocean that belongs always. Perpetual allotments exist before temporal ones. The terrestrial gods have the terrestrial allotments, the aquatic the aquatic, the aerial those of the air, and these gods ride in ethereal vehicles before visible bodies (pp. 118, 119).

Nine thousand years, and a thousand years between the cities

Yours, the priest says to Solon, by a priority of a thousand years, receiving the seed of your race from Vulcan and the Earth. Vulcan is of the demiurgic series, not the vivific or the connective. He fashions from brass, uses the bellows, and is the artificer of sensible works, not of psychical or intellectual ones. He was hurled from Olympus to the earth. The receptacles of the mundane gods were elaborated by him. He is the fabricator of every corporeal substance, preparing visible seats for the gods, filling fabrications with corporeal life, and imposing forms on the grossness of matter. He is lame in both feet because he fabricates the last things, bodies, and because the universe, as Timaeus says, is without legs. Innate heat is Vulcanian. Matter is also necessary. The gods in the heavens borrow parts from the universe, to be returned, for the generation of mortal animals. Plato delivers that through earth. In seed there are productive powers from the reasons of Vulcan, and a subject from earth.

For by earth, we must now understand every material cause; not that the Athenians sprang from the earth; but because it is usual to call all generation earth, and every thing material, earthly.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 120

Fire is the instrument. Earth is lifeless until fire excites it. According to the fable, Vulcan in love with Minerva emitted his seed on the earth, and from there the race of the Athenians blossomed. Vulcan is always in love with Minerva, imitating her intellectual nature in the fabrication of sensibles. Minerval souls especially receive vehicles from him (pp. 120, 121).

The thousand years may be said historically. They also signify that the life of the Athenians is more elevated than that of the Saitans. A thousand years are the measure of a perfect period of generation, because a thousand is a cubic number. Of Minerval souls that descend, some are assimilated to Minerva in the highest degree, and others subsist next after them (p. 121).

Iamblichus doubts the times. If Minerva was first allotted Athens and afterwards Sais, a beginning in time implies an end in time. Was the place without a ruler before, which would leave something in the universe destitute of divinity, or was it under another god, which would have gods and daemons trading allotments? He dissolves it. The allotments are perpetually established. The participants at one time derive advantage from the guardianship and at another reap none. Those participations are what time measures, and sacred institutions often call them the birthdays of the gods. Proclus adds that this is like souls. Every soul has a tutelary god, and certain souls choose lives adapted to other gods. Allotment is twofold, one essential and one according to habitude (p. 122).

An account of the transactions of Sais for eight thousand years is preserved in the sacred writings. The priest assigns nine thousand to the Athenians, from history, and eight thousand to the Saitans, measuring the lives of the citizens by the thousand, conformably to the writings in the temples.

For by this number, as the philosopher Porphyry says, daemons also measure time.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 123

For eight thousand is a cube on a cube; but nine thousand is a tetragonic superficies on a cube.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 123

The first number, on his arithmetic, gives depth to a surface through the indefinite duad. The second keeps the surface in itself, in similitude and perfection, from the triad. To remain in oneself and adorn what is secondary is the symbol of a better life. To descend, and to be assimilated to secondary natures, is the more imperfect life. He also says nine thousand fits those whose hypostasis is from Earth and Vulcan, a thousand being terrestrial as a cube, and nine pertaining to Vulcan, who in Homer fashioned many artificial forms for nine years (p. 123).

Porphyry’s other interpretation is rejected by Iamblichus, and Proclus reports it anyway. Porphyry takes Vulcan as the intellect that presides over art, and earth as the lunar sphere, which the Egyptians call ethereal earth. Souls that subsist from divinity and participate of the artificial intellect are sown in the body of the moon. A myriad of years is the period of the soul ascending and descending through the five stars, so that each may have two thousands, not successive. Nine thousand years leave them still terrene, approaching the myriad. Iamblichus says the discussion is not about lives, and that it is absurd to bring in the periods of the Phaedrus. It is about the different measures of Minerval participation. Proclus then spells out what would follow if one stayed with Porphyry. On high the soul lives intellectually and Saturnally. She descends to a political, Jovian conception, then to anger, which is Martial, then to desire and venereal lives, and at last to physical reasons, which are Hermaic. Bound to a body, she lives the sequence again upward, physically, epithymetically, under anger, politically, and at last intellectually. If she is restored, the myriad is terminated. In generation, even at her best, she lives short by the thousand. Nine thousand is the symbol of that, adapted to the best polity of the Athenians (pp. 124, 125).

The priest will briefly unfold the laws and the most beautiful of the deeds of those citizens of nine thousand years ago, and when there is leisure he will discuss every particular from the sacred writings themselves. Proclus reads “briefly” as the union of many powers, the laws as images of a divided fabrication united by intellect, and the most beautiful work as the orderly distribution carried to one beautiful end (p. 125).

The laws, and the classes of the city

The priest says, compare their laws with ours, and you will find here many paradigms of what then subsisted in your city. He calls images paradigms because the Saitans participate secondarily of what the Athenians participate primarily, and because what is secondary by nature is first in our knowledge. Socrates described a polity. The priest describes laws. A polity is the union and common bond of the life of citizens. Legislation is order proceeding into multitude. The one is more analogous to the providential cause, the other to fate (pp. 125, 126).

The race of the priests was separated from the rest. In Socrates’ polity there were three genera, guardian, auxiliary, and mercenary. Here there are the double of these. The sacerdotal and the military. The demiurgic, or the artificers. The pastoral, the venatic, and the agricultural. The hexad is a triangle from the triad, and both numbers are adapted to Minerva. If you add the presiding over wisdom, you get the heptad, which is also Minerval. The feminine nature of the heptad is celebrated, and that it is produced from the monad alone (p. 127).

The sacerdotal genus is subordinate to the guardian genus. In the Politicus Plato arranges the priests under the politician and does not give them political power. The military genus is subordinate to the auxiliaries, because it pursues war alone. The mercenary tribe is divided into the remaining genera. Porphyry’s analogies are reprehended by Iamblichus as neither Platonic nor true. Porphyry had made the priests archangels, the soldiers souls descending into bodies, the shepherds souls frustrated of human intellect but inclined to animals, the hunters powers that enclose souls in bodies, with Diana and a multitude of venatic daemons, and the husbandmen powers over fruits. Iamblichus says archangels are nowhere mentioned by Plato, that the military genus is not souls verging to bodies, that daemons who govern mortal nature are not derived from men, and that the soul is not conjoined to the body as if caught in a net. Taylor notes that it is singular for Porphyry, who called the Christian religion a barbarously bold wickedness, to have adopted a theory Iamblichus calls full of barbaric arrogance (pp. 128, 129).

Iamblichus’s own analogies are similitude, not identity. Priests answer to secondary essences that honour the causes prior to themselves. Shepherds answer to powers that govern the life verging to body. Hunters answer to powers that adorn secondary natures by investigating real being. Husbandmen answer to powers that give efficacy to the seeds descending from heaven to earth. Soldiers answer to powers that subvert what is atheistical and corroborate what is divine. Syrianus, whom Proclus follows, makes three pairs. Sacerdotal and military. Fabricative and agricultural. Pastoral and venatic. The wisdom that the Egyptian celebrates above the rest is a monad exempt from the hexad. These orders may be seen among men, first among the Athenians and second among the Saitans, each genus separated and doing its own work (pp. 129, 130).

The artificers, shepherds, hunters, and husbandmen each stay at their own employment and do not mingle arts. That produces accuracy, and also need, so that the builder needs the husbandman, the husbandman the shepherd, the shepherd the hunter, and the hunter the builder. Separation is accompanied by union (p. 131). The warlike genus was separated by law from all the others and ordered to engage in nothing but war. The same armour, shields and darts, was used by each. The priest says, these we first used in Asia, the goddess in those places, as also happened to you, first pointing them out. Proclus extends that energy of Minerva from the paradigms downward. The pages on prudence, on the place the goddess selected, and on her being a lover both of war and of wisdom, are his account of why the Athenian region is fit for such souls. Porphyry places Minerva in the Moon and derives the Eleusinian mystagogues, lovers of wisdom and of war, from Musaeus the offspring of the Moon, and the race of the criers from the Hermes about the Moon. Iamblichus blames this as not preserving the analogy. War here entirely subverts a disorderly and material nature. Wisdom is immaterial and separate intelligence (pp. 131 to 141).

Homer, he thinks, makes her an associate with the Greeks against the Barbarians in the same pattern as Plato here makes her an associate with the Greeks against the inhabitants of the Atlantic island, so that more intellectual natures may rule the more irrational. Mars also loves war, but with a separation adapted to the things themselves. Minerva connects contrariety. Strife, fighting, war, she always loves. Victory was co-arranged with her. She is philosophic as demiurgic intelligence, and the gods call her Metis. She is philopolemic as connecting the contrarieties in wholes. She preserves Bacchus undefiled, vanquishes the giants with her father, and alone shakes the aegis without waiting for Jupiter’s mandate (pp. 141, 142).

The ancient Athenians, using these laws, and formed by good institutions in a still greater degree than the priest has mentioned, inhabited this region, surpassing all men in every virtue, as becomes the progeny and pupils of the gods. Proclus says we learn from history that the affairs of the Athenians are more ancient than those of the Saitans, that the establishment of their city is prior, and that their laws are more proximate to Minerva. Making the life of the Athenians one and continued, the text conjoins Solon to the ancient inhabitants. They inhabited this region. The paradigm is one (pp. 142, 143).

The power that came out of the Atlantic sea

Many and mighty deeds of the city are recorded in the Egyptian temples. One surpasses all the rest in magnitude and virtue. The priest had promised the laws and the deeds. The laws were delivered by a division of genera. The deeds remain, and among them one deed prior to the many, by which the whole form of the polity is exhibited. Porphyry understands the great deeds as what souls accomplish against matter and material modes, and he calls daemons material modes. There are, on his view, two species of daemons, one of souls and one of modes, the latter noxious to the soul. The interpreter after him, Iamblichus, corrects him for these dogmas (pp. 143, 144).

The writings relate what a mighty power the city once tamed, rushing from the Atlantic sea and spreading with hostile fury over all Europe and Asia. If the war is mere history, nothing of the encomium is omitted. If one is willing to pass from partial natures to wholes, the theological accuracy is kept as well. Panathenaic orations amplify the Persian expedition and the Athenian victories by land and sea. Plato, praising the Athenians, does not deliver the Persian invasion or any similar deed. He introduces the Atlantic war against the parts we inhabit, rushing from the external sea with a force capable of destroying those parts, and he says the Athenians were victorious and subdued this power. The Persian expedition came from the east. The Atlantic war comes from the west, so that you survey the city of the Athenians as from a centre, chastising a barbaric multitude pouring in from each side. In the ancestral institutes, and in the mysteries, the Gigantic war is celebrated, and the victory of Minerva over the Giants, because with her father she vanquished them and the Titans. He does not think it safe to introduce war against the gods at once. That is what he blames in the ancient poets, and it would be absurd for Critias or Timaeus, who had heard Socrates against the poets the day before, to ascribe wars and seditions to the gods. Through the analogy of human to divine concerns, he delivers this Atlantic war before the fabrication of the world, the Athenians instead of Minerva and the Olympian gods, the Atlantics instead of the Titans and Giants. The name of the Athenians refers to the Olympian coordination that fought under Minerva. The name of the Atlantics refers to the Titanic gods. The mighty Atlas was one of the Titans. After the laceration of Bacchus, the other Titans had different allotments, but Atlas was established in the western parts, sustaining the heavens (pp. 144, 145).

The victories of Minerva are celebrated by the Athenians, and there is a festival from her having vanquished Neptune, the genesiurgic subdued by the intellectual, the inhabitants of the region betaking themselves to a life according to intellect after the procurement of necessaries. Neptune presides over generation. Minerva guards an intellectual life. The Athenians, bearing her name, are analogous to her. The Atlantics, inhabiting an island and called the progeny of Neptune, preserve an analogy to that god. The Atlantic war indicates the middle fabrication, in which the second father, Neptune, filled by Minerva and the other invisible causes, governs diviner natures more powerfully and subjects the multiplied and more material to intellectual natures. The gods themselves are eternally united. The beings they govern are filled with this kind of division (p. 145).

Habitations within the pillars of Hercules are analogous to the whole of the more excellent rank, and those outside to the inferior, which has one continued and variously proceeding life. Within, on every division, is the better. Without is the less excellent. The true sea of dissimilitude, and the whole of a material life proceeding into interval and multitude, are there. You may arrange it Orphically, Olympians subduing Titans, or Pythagorically, two ranks from on high with the better adorning the subordinate, or Platonically, from the Philebus, much infinity and much bound. Heraclitus, looking to this, said war is the father of all things, and he did not speak absurdly (p. 146).

Porphyry again refers the theory to daemons and souls and mentions the fabulous Titanic war, some of it probable and some not. Iamblichus, against those who adopt a more partial cause, is of opinion that what is said is only to be understood according to the apparent meaning, though in the preface he had delivered auxiliaries for the solution. Proclus notes that, asks the divine man to be propitious, and then interprets anyway. The Atlantics are arranged according to all the total natures of the inferior rank. Their insolence and injustice answer to progression, division through diminution, and proximity to matter. Matter is infinity and baseness. The theologist says of that rank that their mind is replete with evil counsels and their heart is insolent. The rushing from external parts is a defection remote from the gods. The Atlantic sea is matter, whether you call it the abyss, or the sea of dissimilitude, or something else. From that sea the island is denominated, as matter receives the names of the inferior rank, infinity, darkness, irrationality, immoderation, the principle of diversity, and the duad. The inferior rank, so characterised, is adorned by the better order, which you may call Minerval. The Titans are connected by the Olympians, difference by sameness, motion by permanency, the irrational by the rational, generation by the heavens. These are not two divided first principles. They are kindred. The one precedes all contrariety. After it a duad is unfolded, and the monad is more excellent than the duad, or, Orphically, aether than chaos. Among the mundane gods the Olympian genus is under the monad and the Titanic under the duad. The subordinate are vanquished by the more divine, and the world is one, harmonised from contraries. Philolaus has it from things that bound and things that are infinite (pp. 146 to 148).

The island, the pillars, and Marcellus

The lemma is the navigable sea, the island before the mouth called the Pillars of Hercules, greater than Libya and Asia together, and the passage to the neighbouring islands and from them to the opposite continent which surrounded that true sea.

That such and so great an island once existed, is evident from what is said by certain historians respecting what pertains to the external sea.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 148

For according to them, there were seven islands in that sea, in their times, sacred to Proserpine, and also three others of an immense extent, one of which was sacred to Pluto, another to Ammon, and the middle (or second) of these to Neptune, the magnitude of which was a thousand stadia.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 148

They also add, that the inhabitants of it preserved the remembrance from their ancestors, of the Atlantic island which existed there, and was truly prodigiously great; which for many periods had dominion over all the islands in the Atlantic sea, and was itself likewise sacred to Neptune.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 148

These things, therefore, Marcellus writes in his Ethiopic History.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 148

If that is the case, and such an island once existed, what is said about it may be received as a history, and also as an image of a certain nature among wholes. He had used the analogy more generally. Now he divides the inferior rank into most total, middle, and last genera. The Atlantics answer to some, the other islands to others, and the opposite continent to the last. The deep and the Atlantic sea answer to matter. The Atlantics spread themselves externally, more remote from the one and nearer to matter, and they inhabited an island larger than Libya and Asia, as proceeding into bulk and interval. Things remote from the one are diminished in power and transcend in quantity. Things nearer the one are contracted in quantity and possess an admirable power. Magnitude here signifies diminution and extension. The sea was then navigable because more total natures proceed as far as the last of things and adorn matter, and then stop. What remains beyond is infinite. There is a passage from the Atlantic island to the other islands and from these to the opposite continent because the progression is continued and no vacuum intervenes. The Atlantic was one, the other islands many, and the continent the greatest. The monad fits the first genus, number the second, magnitude the third. “Opposite” means the greatest possible distance from the more excellent natures. “About that true sea” means a hypostasis about matter. In the Politicus he calls it the sea of dissimilitude. The Pillars of Hercules separated the internal from the external habitable part so that the two ranks should be separated without confusion. He denominates flourishing demiurgic production, and the divine separation of genera which always remains stably the same, the Pillars of Hercules. Hercules is Jovian. The one prior to this, who is divine, is allotted the guardian order of the generative series (pp. 149, 150).

The waters within the mouth have the form of a port with a narrow entrance. The mouth itself is a true sea. The land which surrounds it may truly be called the continent. The inner waters indicate the better rank, converted to themselves. The mouth is the cause that defines and separates the two portions. The narrow entrance means that interval proceeds from the worse rank. The port is an existence exempt from the confused motion of material natures. An elevation to the more intellectual natures in the universe is a port to souls (pp. 150, 151).

Ten kings, the march, and the liberty inside the pillars

In the island there was a combination of kings who with great and admirable power subdued the whole island, many other islands, and parts of the continent, and besides this subjected all Libya as far as to Egypt, and Europe as far as to the Tyrrhene sea. Plato does not measure the magnitude of the earth as the mathematicians do. He apprehends its interval to be greater, as Socrates says in the Phaedo, and he supposes many habitable parts similar to ours. Hence an island and a continent of this magnitude in the external sea. If the earth is naturally spherical, it is so according to the greater part. The portion we inhabit shows great inequality by cavities and prominences. Elsewhere there is an expanded plane and an interval extended on high. According to Heraclitus, he who passes through a region very difficult of access will arrive at the Atlantic mountain, whose magnitude the Ethiopic historians say reaches the aether and sends a shadow as far as five thousand stadia. The sun is concealed by it from the ninth hour until it sets. Athos, a Macedonian mountain, emits a shadow as far as Lemnos, seven hundred stadia away. Marcellus, who wrote the Ethiopic history, relates that height, and he is not alone. Ptolemy says the Lunar mountains are immensely high. Aristotle says Caucasus is illuminated by the solar rays during the third part of the night after setting, and for the third part before rising. He who looks to the whole magnitude bounded by the elevated parts will infer that it is immense, as Plato says. Mathematical methods measure the earth according to the surface we inhabit. Plato says we dwell in a cavity, and the whole earth is elevated, which the sacred rumour of the Egyptians also asserts. Proclus draws the moral for the island. It is not proper to disbelieve what Plato says, though it should be received as a mere history (pp. 151, 152).

But with respect to the power of this island, that there were ten kings in it who begat five male twins, and that it ruled over the other islands, certain parts of the continent, and some parts within the Pillars of Hercules, all these particulars are clearly related in the Critias.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 152

The power is great and admirable, referred to the universe, because it proceeds to everything and comprehends the whole of the second rank. It is held together by ten kings, because the decad comprehends the rulers of the two ranks, and the Pythagoreans say all opposites are comprehended in the decad. They were twins, so there are five duads, twins five times begotten from Neptune and Clites, because the measures of justice also give this rank an orderly distribution, of which the pentad is an image. The progression of this rank is through the duad, as that of the better rank is through the monad. All of them are descendants of Neptune, because the connection of contraries, and the mundane war, belong to the middle fabrication. This god presides over the contrariety that exists everywhere, and he rules generation and corruption and every kind of motion. They subdued the Atlantic island as comprehending the first and most total genera of the worse rank, the other islands as comprehending middles, parts of the continent as adorning the last of things, and certain parts of the internal habitable region because the last parts of the better are subservient to the first parts of the worse. Certain daemons are in subjection to certain heroes, and partial souls of the intelligible portion are frequently slaves to fate. Such also is the Titanic order to which Atlas belongs. The first of these ten kings was called Atlas, and, as it is said in the Atlanticus, gave the name to the island. The summits of the second rank are adorned by the Olympian gods, of whom Minerva is the leader, and they subdue the essence that terminates in the worse rank, irrational souls, material masses, and matter itself. The power is called great and admirable also because Thaumas and Bias are said by ancient theologians to have belonged to this order, or because the whole second rank is the progeny of infinity, as the better rank is the offspring of bound. He celebrates the power of the Atlantics as he celebrates the virtue of the Athenians, and that virtue belongs to bound (pp. 152, 153).

Then all this power, collected into one, endeavoured to enslave our region and yours, and every place within the mouth of the Atlantic sea. He does not say there was once sedition among divine natures, or that the subordinate subdued the more excellent. Let those things be true in human affairs. The narration indicates that the most total genera of the second rank proceed through all things. There is everywhere a separating and a uniting power. In more excellent natures they subsist unitedly and with one impulse. The Atlantics, wishing to subdue every place within the mouth, all their powers collected into one, and at the same time vanquished by the Athenians, are an image of that (pp. 153, 154).

Then the power of the city was conspicuous to all men for its virtue and strength. Virtue indicates the alliance to the philosophic nature of Minerva. Another theology, not the Orphic only, calls her virtue, and Taylor’s note says he means the Chaldaean. Strength indicates the philopolemic nature. To the Atlantics he attributes power alone, and this continually, because they are arranged under infinity. The Athenians vanquished this power through virtue, because they belong to the rank of bound (p. 154).

Its armies surpassed all others in magnanimity and military arts. In its contests, whether assisted by the rest of the Greeks, over whom it sometimes presided, or deserted by them and in extreme danger, it remained triumphant. It liberated from danger those not yet enslaved, and procured the most ample liberty for all who dwell within the Pillars of Hercules. As he had divided the inferior rank into first, middle, and last, so he divides the superior. The Athenians are analogous to the first genera, the other Greeks not yet enslaved to the middle, and those now slaves to the last. The Minerval series vanquishes the series of Neptune. The middle genera eternally preserve their own order. They also liberate from slavery those that are enslaved, recalling them to union. Some things are always in matter, some always separated from it, and some are sometimes under the material genera and sometimes in a separate life. In the drama that pertains to us, we are at one time under the Titanic order and at another under the Olympian, and our course terminates at one time in generation and at another in the heavens. That happens to partial souls through the permanent providence of the gods. The most ample liberty is the divine and liberated order proceeding from on high, which the Athenians imparted to the Greeks by vanquishing the Atlantics, or rather the Olympian by subduing the Titanic genera. The theologist says, though they are robust and oppose the better order through pernicious pride and insolent improbity. Plato, emulating him, asserts that the Atlantics insolently proceeded against the Athenians (pp. 155, 156).

Earthquakes, deluges, and the mud

The lemma begins at the foot of page 156. In succeeding times, prodigious earthquakes and deluges taking place and bringing desolation, in the space of one dreadful day and night, all that warlike race of Athenians was at once merged under the earth, and the Atlantic island itself, being absorbed in the sea, entirely disappeared.

And hence that sea is at present innavigable, from the impeding mud which the subsiding island produced.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 157

Taylor’s footnote on that page says the text of Plato here, in the commentaries of Proclus, is very erroneous, as the reader will see by comparing it with any edition of the Timaeus. I report the sentences as this volume prints them, and I do not correct them from another edition.

For it is not wonderful that there should have been an earthquake so great, as to have destroyed such a large island; since an earthquake that happened a little before our time, shook both Egypt and Bithynia, and it is not at all paradoxical, that a deluge should follow an earthquake.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 157

This usually happens in great earthquakes, as Aristotle relates, who at the same time adds the cause. Where a deluge takes place together with earthquakes, the waves are the cause of the passion. The spirit which produces the earthquake is not yet able to drive the sea back. It stops the sea, much sea collects, and then the contrary spirit enters under the earth and produces the earthquake, while the sea deluges the place. About Achaia there was an earthquake with an ingress of the waves, which deluged the maritime cities Bouras and Helice. No physiologist, he says, will reject the narration who considers the affair rightly. That the same place may become pervious and impervious, continent and sea, is admitted by physiologists according to Aristotle, and history demonstrates it. Aristotle also relates, in his Meteors, that there was mud in the external sea, after the mouth, and that the place was marshy. If the Greek phrase means marshy, it is not wonderful. Rocks concealed under the sea, with water on their surface, are called breakers. Why should anyone contending for the truth of these things be disturbed? (p. 157)

He then takes the same event as the completion of the orderly distribution. Orpheus, delivering the demiurgic opposition of the Olympian and Titanic gods, terminates the whole distribution in the extremities of the universe. Plato, knowing this, extends these two genera into the invisible, and through this disappearing imitates the Orphic precipitation into Tartarus. The better rank is shaken and enters under the earth, which means proceeding stably and solidly. The worse disappears, which means becoming material, disorderly, and formless. Under the earth is a symbol of the firm. In the sea is a symbol of the mutable and flowing. They happened in one dreadful day and night. Night indicates the invisible causes, day the visible, and the dreadfulness the opposing and inflexible power. Because these are accomplished according to demiurgic powers, earthquakes and deluges took place, which are adapted to the middle fabrication. If he had wished to signify Jovian powers he would have said thunders and lightnings. Since he delivers Neptunian energies, he assimilates them to earthquakes and deluges. This god is called earth-shaker, and the source of marine water. “In succeeding time” means a progression in order. It is not proper to say that he who destroys an argument takes away the subjects, as Homer says of the Phaeacians and of the wall the Greeks raised. The things now asserted are not fictitious, but true. Many parts of the earth are deluged by the sea, and what he says happened is not at all impossible. Nor does he relate it as a mere history. He introduces it to indicate the providence which proceeds through all things and extends to the last of things (pp. 157, 158).

What remains after both ranks have been adorned is an impervious place of the sea. This is the mud Socrates mentions in the Phaedo when he teaches about the subterranean places. The Titanic order, driven by Jupiter as far as Tartarus, fills what is there with deiform guards (p. 159).

A true history, and what the Atlanticus still owes

Critias has given the sum of what the elder Critias repeated from Solon. When Socrates was speaking yesterday about a polity, Critias was surprised, recollecting the history, and perceived how divinely, from a certain fortune, Socrates had collected many things agreeing with Solon. The Athenians are praised, and the polity of Socrates is shown to be possible through the life of the ancient Athenians, and productive of the greatest good to those who belong to it, which is what Socrates thinks fit to demonstrate in the Republic. The Egyptians are benefited by the Athenians through warlike works. The Athenians are benefited by the Egyptians through sacerdotal narrations (pp. 159, 160).

Critias heard the history from the old man with great delight, and on that account it was fixed in his memory like letters deeply burnt in. He ties that to the age of children, who retain impressions because the same things appear greater then. The day after the feast of the Cureotis he repeated it to his friends. He is now prepared to speak not only summarily but so as to descend to every particular he heard. They will transfer to reality the citizens and the city Socrates fashioned yesterday as in a fable. That city is no other than this Athenian city, and the citizens are no other than the ancestors the Egyptian priest described. The affair will harmonize in every respect. It will not be foreign to say that Socrates’ citizens are the people who existed at that time (pp. 163, 164).

Critias first discusses the war summarily, and afterward means to explain every particular, narrating all the polity of the Atlantics and the principle of their generation, how they turned to injustice, how the Athenians proceeded to war, from what apparatus, from what legations, through what ways, and with whom they were arranged. The genuine polity of Socrates is an imitation of the first fabrication, fashioned as it were in a fable. The hypothesis of the Athenians indicates, as in images, the second fabrication, where the more partial appears, and what remains consists of contrariety, motion, and place (p. 165).

Socrates asks what other discourse they should receive in preference. Critias’s discourse, through a certain affinity, is adapted to the present sacrifice to the goddess.

And besides this, we should consider, as a thing of the greatest moment, that your relation is not a mere fable, but a true history of transcendent magnitude.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 165

Socrates approves it first as adapted to the festival of the Athenians, for the Atlantic war is an image of mundane wars, and as a hymn to the sacrifice to Minerva. Sacrifice imitates her practical energy. The hymn imitates her theoretic energy. He approves it secondly as bearing witness to the possibility of his polity. It was sufficient that the scheme existed in the heavens and in one man. If it once prevailed among the Athenians, the possibility is demonstrated. From these words Proclus assumes again that the narration about the Atlantics is not a fiction, as some have supposed, but a history, yet having an affinity to the whole fabrication of the world. What Plato discusses about the magnitude of the Atlantic island must not be rejected as fabulous because of those who enclose the earth in a very narrow space (pp. 165, 166).

Timaeus, the most astronomical of them, and eminently knowing in the nature of the universe, is to speak first, from the generation of the world to the nature of men. Critias after him, receiving the men Timaeus has produced and Socrates has educated, will introduce them according to the narration and law of Solon, as members of this city, no other than those Athenians described as unknown to us in the sacred writings. Timaeus is at once a summit and a middle. He speaks after Socrates and Critias in the preface, and prior to Critias and Hermocrates in what follows. He generates the men, Socrates educates them, and Critias arms them. Someone may ask what is left for Hermocrates after generation, education, and actions. Proclus says Hermocrates is the adjutor of Critias in the words, the deeds being Critias’s. In the Atlanticus, Critias assembles the gods to consult about the punishment of the Atlantics, and says that Jupiter thus addressed them. He terminates the dialogue as if delivering the imitation of the words to Hermocrates. There is no absurdity in his not discussing the remainder of the deeds. Having assembled the gods to chastise the insolence of the Atlantics, he has everything consequent already comprehended, the preparation of the Athenians, their egress, and their victory (pp. 167, 168).

Why was the Timaeus not placed before the Republic, since men must be generated before they are educated? His answer is that the hypothesis of Socrates subsists in words and surveys the universal, while the hypothesis after it discusses beings and things in generation. The deliberate choice of virtue is free. The energy directed outward requires the mundane order, and hence the Atlanticus is posterior to the Timaeus. When the soul is of herself she runs above fate. When she verges to actions she is vanquished by physical laws. The men of the Republic are first educated, then ascend to the contemplation of beings, then descend to a providential attention to the city. Conformably to that, the Republic stands before the Timaeus, and the Timaeus before the Atlanticus. Porphyry’s aid is that those who want the whole theory should first be instructed in its form, so as to become similar to the object. The auditors of the Timaeus ought first to have been benefited by the Republic (pp. 169, 170).

Timaeus is most astronomical not as a measurer of visible courses. A Chaldaean oracle, which Taylor quotes in a note, says not to measure the earth, the sun, the moon, or the procession of the stars for your own sake. Timaeus astronomizes above the heavens, contemplating the invisible causes which are properly stars. He begins from the generation of the world and ends in man because man is a microcosm. The men are introduced by Critias conformably to the law of Solon, because Solon narrates that the Athenians were once thus governed, and established laws for how children ought to be introduced into the polity and the tribes, how they ought to be registered, and by what judges they should be tried (pp. 170, 171).

As far as this, the preface of the Timaeus is complete. Severus did not think fit to interpret it. Longinus does not call the whole superfluous, but only such particulars as are introduced about the Atlantics and the narration of the Egyptian, so that he joins Socrates’ readiness for the feast directly to the mutual banquet, and drops what lies between. Porphyry and Iamblichus show that the preface accords with the whole design, the one more partially and the other with more profound intuition. Proclus finishes the book in conformity to Plato, having adopted their order (p. 172).

The rest of Book I after the persons, and before this close, is the commentary I have just set out. I did not find a later Atlantic passage hiding past page 172. The war, the island, and the floods are this book.

Book II

Book II opens by repeating what the preface was, and then leaves it.

The preface of the Timæus consists of two heads; a recapitulation of the polity of Socrates, and a concise narration of the war of the Athenians against the Atlantics, and the victory which they obtained over them.

Proclus. The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato (1820), p. 173

Each of those, he says, contributes to the theory of the world. The polity by itself is adapted to the orderly distribution of the heavens. The narration of the war and the victory is a symbol of the mundane contrariety. The former images the first fabrication, the latter the second. Or the former is the formal cause and the latter the material. Or the polity is the heavens and the war is generation. The former is Jovian. The latter pertains to the allotment of Neptune. That is a summary of Book I, not a new history. He names no new island, no new measure of the island, and no new deluge.

From there the book is the physiology the preface was waiting for. Timaeus turns to invocation and prayer, imitating the maker, who before the fabrication approached the oracle of Night. Taylor prints the theologist’s lines in which Night tells Jupiter to receive all things in aether and to place the heaven in the midst of aether. The commentary then takes up being and becoming, the sense in which the world is generated, the one Demiurgus, the intelligible animal as paradigm, and the world as one, only-begotten, and most beautiful. He argues against reading the generation as a start in a moment of empty time. Plutarch of Chaeronea and Atticus come in on matter and on the disordered motion. Proclus will not leave matter as a second principle beside God, ungenerated by any cause. From the Philebus he has God exhibiting bound and infinity, and matter as the last infinity. Body, soul, and intellect, the vestiges of forms in the corporeal, and the world made according to a paradigm, fill the book out to page 386. The “Athenian guest” who appears in it is the speaker of the Laws, not the ancient city at war. Book II adds no Atlantic claim beyond that opening reminder.

Book III

Book III begins on page 387. The treatise has surveyed the world according to wholeness, similar to all-perfect animal, only-begotten, animated, and endued with intellect. It now surveys the world according to the division in it, soul from body, and the more formal things from the rest. Intellect is entirely unbegotten. Body is entirely generated. Soul is a middle essence, generated with reference to intellect and unbegotten with reference to body. Plato gives an all-various generation of body, produces soul both from itself and from the total fabrication, and does not devise a generation of intellect in words. The book then goes through the elements, the reason there are four, earth as the cause of solidity, the three means and the physical analogy that binds them, what the heaven is made of, the bond by which the world is held, the sphere as the figure that fits, and the world’s knowledge of itself.

By the close he is still on the body of the world. If the universe had smell it would need respiration. Taste refers to nutriment, and the world is not in want of nutriment from outside. It nourishes itself from its own parts. Natures above the moon have increase and consumption only by analogy. The moon is an isthmus. The heavenly bodies are not nourished from exhalations. There is no body outside the world and no vacuum outside it, a point on which he says Aristotle agrees, while also preserving the world as only-begotten. The world needs no hands, because there is nothing for it to receive or resist, and no feet, because it cannot move in a straight line where there is no external vacuum. Of the seven local motions it receives the circular, the one about intellect and wisdom. That is the sixth demiurgic gift. He blames Severus for admitting the fabulous reversals, the circulations in which the world would be both generated and unbegotten, and he points to Syrianus on the Politicus for the way that fable should be read. On page 470 he refuses Atticus’s fancy that “the god that would at a certain time exist” means a beginning according to time. The world has an essence conjoined with time. Time was generated together with heaven. The world is temporal, and time is mundane. “Once” is the temporal always set beside the eternal, not a first morning. The last paragraph gathers the smooth and even body, everywhere equal from the middle, whole and perfect from perfect bodies, and returns the only-begotten to its paradigm. Page 472 ends the volume.

I found no Atlantic island in Book III, no war of Athenians against Atlantics, and no deluge. The contrariety he mentions is the contrariety of the rectilinear motions, which the circle does not share, and the bond of the elements. That is not the war Critias narrated.

Book IV

This volume ends before Book IV. Taylor’s introduction points some of his astronomical claims to Volume II. I do not have that volume, and I do not describe Book IV.

Book V

Book V is not in this copy. The title page says the commentaries are in five books and in two volumes. I stop where printed page 472 stops.