Plato

I read Lord Arundell of Wardour's The Secret of Plato's Atlantis for the place he gives Atlantis, the dates he will keep, and the secret he thinks Plato was using.

I set him beside the book he is answering, Donnelly's Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, and beside Plato's own Timaeus and Critias.

Title: The Secret of Plato's Atlantis.

What he claims: Plato's Atlantis is not a lost continent in the Atlantic, and its sinking is not the universal deluge.

What is not in Hanno he takes from general or family tradition, above all the deluge, which he keeps as the deluge of Moses and of widespread custom, not as Plato's subsidence.

Plato, he thinks, states no fact about Atlantis that is not taken from it, except what Plato drew from general or family tradition.

Hanno and Plato.

500, and Plato was born circa B.C.

He reads the Athenian Apaturia, when he says Plato was ten, as the same kind of custom as Catlin's Mandan O-kee-pa, witnessed in 1832 (pp.

Jowett's view, which he prints, is that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato, and that "nine thousand years ago" for the war is slightly inconsistent with the same date for the foundation of the city (p.

For Plato's dialogue, see Timaeus and Critias.

In his words, there was a deluge, but a deluge as revealed according to Plato, and not according to Moses.

He quotes Donnelly's own heads, from the existence of a large island opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean, a remnant of an Atlantic continent, through Plato's description as history, Atlantis as the place where man first rose from barbarism, the overflow to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian, and Atlantis as the true antediluvian world: Eden, the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields, the garden of Alcinous, the Mesomphalos, Olympos, and Asgard.

Atlas, son of Japetus, brother of Menoetius (he notes "Mnesius" in Plato and "Menu" in Lenormant), and, in Apollodorus, son of a mother named Asia, he sets beside Nimrod and the tower that was to prop the heaven so it would not fall and inundate them again.

Plato, he notes, has a fertile plain, not a garden.

He then stacks the eastern pictures he wants the reader to set beside Plato.

Against that he sets Plato, as Donnelly prints him.

He asks the reader to decide whether Atlantis belongs with the one historic narrative, or whether all the others grew out of the slender reminiscences in Plato.

The news, spread over 9000 years, would have come by many people, not by one family, and none of the records tell the event in the way the geology, or Plato, would require.

If those are the same diluvian traditions, Plato's Atlantis would contain diluvian traditions from before the alleged subsidence, which he calls impossible.

Ergo, I should infer, a conclusion at which I shall arrive more definitely by another route, that Atlantis was, in the main, only general tradition taking form and embodiment in the mind of Plato.

The evidence so far is enough, he thinks, to go back to Plato and ask what the fragment really imports.

The document he sets beside Plato is the voyage of Hanno, posted up in the temple of Kronos.

500, and Plato was born circa B.C.

The Greek translation, he says, may reasonably be presumed to have been accessible to Plato in Sicily or in Cyrene.

The second contention is the exception: what Plato drew from general or family tradition.

Over the whole is the glamour of Plato's style.

The allotment of the earth to the gods he sets beside Pheroneus, "the father of mankind" in Clement of Alexandria, who distributed the nations, "idem nationes distribuit" in Hyginus, and whom Plato calls "the first." Hanno sailed with sixty vessels and thirty thousand colonists.

Plato's plain, the fairest of all and very fertile, is the plain in which Poseidon settled his children.

The warm and cold springs under the central island, and the food springing abundantly, he says Plato has moved a little earlier than Hanno's order, so as to give Poseidon at Atlantis the same feat as at Athens, where in the reign of Cecrops he called forth a well on the Acropolis with his trident.

Alternating sea, land, and lakes, he suggests, became Plato's zones, two of land and three of water.

Plato's wealth of Atlas breaks off, abruptly, into elephants and animals of lake, marsh, river, mountain, and plain.

Plato's palace island has a diameter of five stadia.

Plato's three harbours he sets beside the lake with three islands.

Plato's lofty coast, the level plain, the mountains and fragrant woods, and then the bull sacrificed to Poseidon, the fire, the azure robes, and the judgment by night near the embers.

Plato's fragment ends with the fading of the divine nature, Zeus gathering the gods into his most holy habitation in the centre of the world, and the words "he spake as follows," with nothing after.

He even pairs "the chariot of the gods" with Plato's gathering of the gods, and with the Chaldaean deluge tablet George Smith published, the gods ascending to the heaven of Anu.

He does not mean a fraud on Plato's contemporaries.

His gloss is that Plato has brought an interesting document from foreign parts and will interweave it with their traditions if they approve.

In the last chapter I ventured to contend that the Periplus of Hanno was the main foundation for Plato's myth of Atlantis.

Jowett, as he quotes him, lists the places where interpreters have looked, without regard to Plato's description and without suspecting a fabrication: America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Sardinia, Sweden.

If Plato had known the full extent of exploration beyond the Pillars and had still asserted a lost continent, the opinion would have weighed.

All Plato says, in the words he quotes, is that after the subsidence the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable because of the quantity of shallow mud.

The conception arose as a myth in Plato's mind, but a great deal of floating tradition was used, and that residuum remains after the mirage goes.

Two facts, then, are in evidence: (1) that when Plato was ten years old, at a feast called the "Apaturia" or the "registration of youth," he heard a discourse delivered which collected various diluvian traditions; and (2) that under strangely different circumstances of time and place Catlin came upon a curious ceremony professedly commemorative of a universal deluge, in which again a principal feature or interlude was a ceremony which might be exactly described as a registration of youth.

He calls the ten-year-old Plato.

The Apaturia of Plato's time did not show those horrors, but other Greek festivals did.

On the other side, the deluge of Genesis would be only one line of the tradition of the submersion of Atlantis, "that great deluge of all," as Plato calls it.

Against that, he has pointed to a document which Plato's narrative closely matches, and which could have been the foundation of the fiction if the narrative is not to be taken literally.

If Atlantis is Plato's fiction, every imported tradition will be located there.

Jowett's conclusion, which he prints, is that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato.

If the war story is a confused and exaggerated tradition of the Persian war, Plato imported it.

Plato was in Egypt, if Valerius Maximus is followed, as Lewes and G.

Those institutions had fallen since Pericles, and Plato might have wanted an indirect way to revive their authority.

A column of orichalcum he sets beside the brazen column of the Latin League, still preserved in the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a fact that might have reached Plato earlier.

Some gave that court to Solon and some to Cecrops, both in the line of the ancestors Plato's speakers claim.

Plato's kings also judge in the open air, and when darkness has come and the sacrificial fire is cool they put on azure robes, sit on the ground, and at daybreak write the sentences on a golden tablet and deposit them with the robes.

In Plato the ten are left alone in the temple of Poseidon, hunt the bulls with staves and nooses, not with weapons, lead the bull to the column, strike it on the head, and slay it over the sacred inscription.

He says the extracts are taken somewhat at random, but that pieced together they exhaust Plato's disclosures about Atlantis.

He then asks, the Hanno basis and the later imports being conceded, whether some of the original figment might still have come down in family tradition from Solon, as Plato says, and been reconstructed by Plato.

It might have been brought to Solon or to the priests of Sais by a circumstance like Plato's use of Hanno: the circumnavigation of Africa in the reign of Necho or Nako, which he dates B.C.

Even on that conjecture, if Plato had not seen Solon's manuscript since he was ten, he might have rebased the fiction on the narrative more recently in his knowledge.

The legend would then have had a different shape from Plato's.

The descriptions in Plato, he says, fit the dimensions of Salamis better than those of a lost continent, just as they fit Hanno's islands.

It is the text he has been quoting, Professor Jowett's Plato, volume ii, pp.

Plato's own dialogue is on Timaeus and Critias.

The appendix ends, in brackets: here Plato's story abruptly ends.

It is his reason for the bull in the Mandan dance, in the Amphictyonic sacrifice, and in Plato's temple of Poseidon.

He has placed Plato's story on a Carthaginian voyage along the African coast and the islands beyond the Pillars, and he has placed the flood, the bull, the first legislator, and the ten-year-old's feast on the deluge he still calls universal.

The findings are in The Secret of Plato's Atlantis.

^395 A7q""*" ^""""'^ Library Secret of Plato's Atlantis.

THE SECRET OF PLATO'S ATLANTIS.

Plato's Atlantis : Mr.

Conjecture as to the probable Basis op Plato's Atlantis 22 III.

.85 Appendix B : Plato's Atlantis 89 Appendix C : Theory as to the Prominence of the Bull in Tradition 100

Plato's atlantis—mb.

It is entitled Atlantis': the Antediluvian World* and, in fact, announces that the Deluge, in which we have hitherto believed and have called universal, at any rate to the extent of the destruction of all mankind,t did not really occur, but that the subsidence of the island or continent of Atlantis at some indefinite period was attended by very similar circumstances, and that it is the tradition of this catastrophe which has somehow spread through all countries, which has created the impression of a universal deluge ; in other words, that there was a deluge, but a deluge as revealed according to Plato, and not according to Moses.

That the description of this island given by Plato is hot, as has been long supposed, fable, but veritable history.

PLATO S ATLANTIS.

Donnelly is necessarily limited to the data found in the fragment of Plato.

Plato commences with this statement : "The tale, which was of great length, began as follows.

Noah, as handed down in Libyan mythology, following in this the lines of tradition.* And looking to the diffusion of this worship ofPoseidon in Africa, including Egypt, Carthage, Ethiopia, Mauri-tania, and throughout the Phoenician colonisation, we seem to understand Plato's statement that Atlantis once "had an extent greater than Libya and Asia." "For many centuries," says Lenormant, " the Pelasgi of the Archipelago, Greece, and Italy, the Philistines of Crete, the Sicilians, the Sardinians, the Libyans, the Maxyans of Africa, in spite of the distance of sea separating them, united in a close confederation, maintaining a constant intercourse, and thus explaining the Libyan element, hitherto inexplicable, in the most ancient religious traditions of Greece, the worship of the Athenian Tritonis and of the Libyan Poseidon." Atlantis takes its name from Atlas—" the king." We hear of Atlas first in Hesiod, as son of Japetus ; his brother was Mencetius ("Mnesius," Plato; "Menu," Lenormant), and, according to ApoUodorus, his mother's name was Asia.

PLATO S ATLANTIS.

This reads very much like the tradition that the descendants of Japhet were to dwell in the tsnts of Canaan ; and the belief of Atlas having been subdued by Perseus the Grecian hero—the friend ofAthene—may account for that part of the speech put into the mouths of the Egyptian priests by Plato : "Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your State in our histories ; but one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour ; for these histories tell of a mighty power which was aggressing wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end.

So far from this being the case, the salient features of the tradition which arecommon to the other legends are barely discernible in the description of Plato, e.g.

Compare this with Plato's description of Atlantis : " On the side towards the sea, and in the centre of the whole island, therewas a plain which is said to have been the fairest ofall plains, and very fertile.

that " Plato states that the Egyptians told Solon that the destruction of Atlantis occurred nine thousand years before that date, to wit, about nine thousand six hundred years before tlie Christian era.

16 PLATO'S ATLAll»TIS.

Moreover, if the intelligence of the calamity, which was ultimately to take the form of the diluvian tradition, was to be extended piecemeal over the whole human race even in 9000 years, it could scarcely have been through one man or one family, but through many ; and it would seem none of the records or traditions tell of the event in the manner it is supposed to have happened, either according to the geological evidence, or according to the revelation of Plato.

If these are commo%diluyian traditions of Kronos and Poseidon,^ it must follow that in Plato's account of Atlantis we may have diluvian traditions hefore the alleged period of its subsidence, quod est impossibile.

Ergo, I should infer, a conclusion at which I shall arrive mors definitely by another route, that Atlantis was, in the main, only general tradition taking form and embodiment in the mind of Plato.

In Plato's description.of Atlantis prominence is naturally given to the horse, as is appropriate in any mythological legend which commences with Poseidon.

CONJECTURE AS TO THE PEOBABLE BASIS OF PLATO'S ATLANTIS.

The evidence which has now accumula,ted will justify our reverting to Plato's fragment with a view to discover, if possible, what its real import may be.

Plato's Atlantis, so far as I know, has never been compared and confronted with a'document, the authenticity of which is recognised by Heeren and Lenormant (it will be found in extenso in F.

500, and Plato was born circa B.C.

Z4 • PLATO'S ATLANTIS.

• be presumed to have been accessible to Plato during his residence either in Sicily or in Cyrene.

I think that I shall be able to show that Plato does not state any fact respecting Atlantis which has not been taken from this document except (2)—for 1 think the ^eptions are sufficiently important to justify a second ^ertion respecting it—unless what Plato drew from the well of general or family tradition.

Over the whole there is the glamour of Plato's style and imagination.

In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife jiamed Luoippe, and they had an only daughter who was called Cleito " (Oritias : Professor Jowett's Dialogues of Plato, ii.

380), to whom the distribution of mankind was attributed, " idem nationes distribuit" (Hyginus, 143), and whom Plato calls " the first." Hanno sailed about 500 B.C.

Assuming that Atlantis was idealised from the narra- * In Appendix A and Appendix B I give in extenso the description.of Atlantis in Plato's Critias (Jowett's tran?,), and the translation of the Periplus of Hanno from Heeren's Hist.

It will be noticed that Plato, after the passage about Poseidon (as above), gives a description of a plain, and Hanno's account commences thus : "When we had passed the Pillars of Hercules on ©ur voyage, and had sailed beyond them for two -days, we founded the first city, which we named ' Thymiaterium.' Below it lay an extensive plain." The passage in Plato about Poseidon refers to the foundation of his first city.

Now, the description of Mamora very well corresponds with Plato's descriptions.

Bochart'st conjecture is that it was so called because " situated in a plain," which corresponds to the fact ; and Plato describes the plain in which Poseidon (Neptune) " settled,his children " "as the fairest of all plains, and very fertile." Plato "then proceeds abruptly to inform us that " Poseidon next, as he was a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the centre island, bringing the streams of water under the earth, which he caused to ascend as springs, one of warm water and the other of cold ; and making every variety of food to spring up abundantly on the earth." Here Plato a little anticipated Hanno's narrative—apparently for the purpose of introducing the earliest Athenian legend concerning Poseidon, for he is made to perform at Atlantis the same feat with * Lempri^re's Tour to Morocco (Pinkerton), xv.

If they came upon a country where sea and land, land and lakes, alternated, it might have suggested to Plato's imagination "the alternate zones of sea and land." Plato says, "And we are further told that Poseidon, when he broke up the ground, ....

made alternate zones of sea and land, larger and smaller;' encircling one another." It is next stated in Plato that Poseidon proceeded " to beget five pairs of male children, dividing the island of Atlantis into ten portions." " The eldest, who was the king, he named Atlas, and from him the whole island and the ocean received the name of Atlantic." The name of Atlas is here imported and transferred to the island by Plato from the traditions of Atlas on the mainland.

Plato then descants upon the wealth and possessions of Atlas ; but before his eloquence has expended itself, he abruptly and incongruously says, as if.in recollection of some- fact, " Moreover, there were a great number of * Compare supra, p.

Plato (p.

this lake had three islands larger-than Cerne, whence, returning back, we came again to Cerne." If Hanno's narrative lies at the foundation of Plato'p fragment of Atlantis, it is natural that what ie central in the one should be central in the others, and, accordingly, that what was the.head-quarters in the one should figure as the palace of Poseidon in the other.

Crossing the water harbours, which were three in number" (Plato).

This lake had three islands." Several pages follow in Plato in description of the city—" the nature and arrangement of the rest of the country," and " th§ relations of their governments one to another "—to which nothing in the short narrative of Hanno corresponds, and forwhich the explanation must he sought elsewhere.

We were then afraid, and our divjners ordered us to abandon the island." Plato describes Atlantis thus: "The whole country was described as being very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain.

When day came, we discovered it to be a large hill, called the chariot of the gods." Plato's fragment—and it is a circumstance to be noted that both are fragmentary—terminates with the following passage, which, apart from the argument, may be acceptable :

If it were worth while, I might show a further coincidence in the approximation of the term used by Hanno, "the chariot of the gods," with the expression of Plato, "collecting all the gods into his most holy habitation."* As I have said, there is nothing more ; but if I have succeeded in demonstrating that what is known as the * Comp.

Periplus of Hanno is the foundation of Plato's Atlantis, the discovery, if I may so term it, will at any rate supply the reason why the Critias (Atlantis) was never completed, which has remained a difficulty even to Professor Jowett.

Why the Critias [Atlantis'] was never completed, whether from accident or advancing age, or from a sense of the artistic difficulty of the design, cannot be determined " (Professor Jowett's Introduction to Plato's Dialogues, ii.

It rather seems to me as if Plato was !

In the last chapter I ventured to contend that the Periplus of Hanno was the main foundation for Plato's myth of Atlantis.

If Plato had spoken with full and exact knowledge of what wasknown in his days as to the extent of the exploration beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and had deliberately asserted his .opinion as to the existence of " a lost continent," his opinion would have had great weight.

Although the conception of Atlantis arose as a myth in the mind of Plato, there • is every indication that a great deal of floating tradition was used in its fabrication, and this "residuum" will remain after the dispersal of the "mirage." There is one statement which strangely falls in with the lines of tradition, andwhich can scarcely escape observation when attention is directed to Plato's narrative, viz.

Before proceeding in the inquiry it may be well to have Plato's words before us : " I will tell you an old-world story which I heard from an aged

36 PLATO S ATLANTIS'.

Two facts, then, are in evidence : (1) that when Plato was ten years old, at a feast called.the "Apaturia" or the "registration of youth," he heard a discourse delivered which collected various diluvian traditions ; and (2) that under strangely different circumstances of time and place Catlin came upon a curious ceremony professedly commemorative of a universal deluge, in which again a principal feature or interlude was a ceremonywhich might be exactly described as a registration of youth'.

PLATO S ATLANTIS.

." The Apaturia, it will be remembered, was the feast of the "registration.of youth," at which Plato tells us he was told the legend of the subsidence of Atlantis; which, as I contend, was only a form of the tradition of the universalDeluge.

The Apaturia, it is true, did not, at any rate in the time of Plato, present the horrible features of the Mandan ceremony ; but in other Grecian festivals there are evidences of scenes quite as revolting as those which Catlin witnessed, and enacted apparently upon the same motives * In the first instance it is the alarm of the woman in the Mandan ceremony which brings about the intervention of the man with the medicine or mystery pipe, who curbs the evil one, as in the legend Aphrodite decoys the giants to the caverns in which Heracles (who, according to an interpretation of certain legends as Hercnles might be called " the first or only man," like the mystery man) is concealed.

On the other hand, it is contended that the Deluge of Genesis was only one line of the tradition of the submersion of Atlantis, which would give a measure of its magnitude—" that great deluge of all," as Plato calls it.

As against this, I have pointed to a document to which Plato's narrative very closely corresponds, and which, if his narrative is not to be accepted literally, might easily have formed the foundation for the fiction.

There still remain passages in Plato's discourse which have to be cleared up before the ground can be said to be exhausted.

This power came forth from the Atlantic Ocean " If Atlantis is a fiction of Plato's, every .tradition imported into his discourse will naturally be located in Atlantis.

589) is that " we may safely conclude that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato." I have in a previous chapter hazarded the conjecture that it was founded on the narrative of Hanno.

I will now consider, in the first place, how far the statements in Plato's discourse that do not correspond to facts in the narrative of Hanno were imported by Plato himself, and secondly, how far they may have been transmitted through Solon.

If the statement we are now considering was a confused and exaggerated tradition of the Persian War, it must have been imported by Plato ; and I may suggest that the confusion and exaggeration may have come about in this way, and if so without being entirely due to the imagination of Plato.

If Plato was himself in Egypt, as Valerius Maximus (Lewes's Hist, ofPhil., G.

Collins's Life of Plato) tells us he was, or even during his residence at Syracuse, he might "have heard the statements, such as were not derived from Hanno, which he attributes to Solon.

Now, if we recollect that Plato's visit would have taken place during the Persian domination in Egypt,* * The Persian rule in Egypt may be broadly said to have extended from B 0.

In chapter ii., when, discussing Plato's Atlantis with reference to the report of Hanno, I omitted to advert to a digression on the laws and institutions of the island of Atlantis, " as I considered that it would be better reserved until we came to the consideration how far other traditions might have been imported.

." bears a close resemblance to what is recorded of the Amphictyonic council and to the Areopagus—institutions which had fallen into comparative insignificance since the time of Pericles, and whose authority Plato might not unnaturally seek indirect

Plato tells us that the laws were engraved on a column of orichalcum ; and it is recorded that the terms of the Latin League—an analogous confederation—were engraved " on a brazen column," which was preserved in the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a fact which might not impossibly have come at earlier date to the knowlege of Plato also.

." Plato adds, " There were many special laws which the several kings had inscribed about the temple." This is, perhaps, intended to cover the introduction of certain other customs which may be identified with what has come down to us of the mode of proceeding of the Areopagus.

if any one had any accusation to bring against any one ; and when they had given judgment, at daybreak they wrote down their sentences on a golden tablet, and deposited them as memorials with their robes " (Plato's Atlantis, Jowett).

I should have mentioned—and it should be remarked also in the almost inseparable connection of the ox or the bull with the diluvian commemorative customs—that " before the Amphictyons proceeded to business they sacrificed an ox, and cut his flesh into small .pieces, intimating that union and unanimity prevailed _in the several cities they represented." Plato says when the Atlanteans gathered together, " before they passed judgment they gave their pledges to one another in this wise : there were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon, and the ten who were left alone in the temple, after they had offered prayers to the gods that they might take the sacrifices which were acceptable to them, hunted the bulls without weapons, but with staves and nooses, and the bull which they caught they led up to the column." " When, therefore, after offering sacrifice according to their customs, they had burnt the limbs of the bull, they mingled a cup and cast in a clot of blood for ea.ch of them.

." Although it may be objected that these extracts are taken somewhat at random from Plato's narrative, yet, on being pieced together, they will be found to exhaust all the disclosures of Plato respecting Atlantis.

We will now consider (it being conceded that the basis of Plato's fiction was the Periplus ofHanno, and that he has imported more recent facts, as, for instance, the incidents of the Persian War) whether something of the original figment of Atlantis might not have been handed down, as

Plato says it was, in family tradition from Solon', and reconstructed or adapted by Plato.

It is curious, however, that it might have been brought prominently to the notice and speculation of Solon or the priests of Sais under circumstances very similar to those of which we have evidence—in the case of Plato as regards Hanno, viz.

Even if we adopt this conjecture, yet if Plato had not seen the ms.' of Solon ("My great-grandfather Dropidas had the original writing, which is still in my possession, and was carefully studied by me when I was a child") since he was ten years old (" I will tell an old-world story, which I heard from an aged man ; for Critias was, as he said, at that time nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten years old "), he might naturally have based or rebased the fiction on the narrative more recently within his knowledge than that which had faded from his recollection.

In this case the legend must have taken a different shape from that in which it was presented by Plato.

Plato says that Solon devived his information from the priests of Sais, " the city from which Amasis the king was sprung." If this is intended to mean that he visited Sais when Amasis (Aahmes) was king, he must

Jowett's Plato, ii.

And when he had called them together he spake as follows :'' [Here Plato's story abruptly ends.]

PLATO S ATLANTIS.

J.08 PLATO'S ATLANTIS.

The Atlantis of Plato—Plato’s Account Examined— The Evidence from Geology—The Biological Evidence _—The Evidence from Pre-history—The Third Atlan- | ean Invasion—The Evidence from European Trajition—The Evidence from American Tradition— ~The Evidence from Central American Archaeology ~The Evidence from Central American Archaeology | continued)—The Evidence from Egypt—Egyptian ‘and American Comparisons—The Evidence from — Old Peru— The Geography and Topography of Atlan- ‘tis—The Flood—Atlantis Restored.

Tue ATLANTIS OF PLATO .

The Atlantis of Plato 3 time and opportunity.

That hypothesis, I maintain, rests not on Plato’s account alone, or indeed, on any one class of evidence, but on the great mass of testimony, tradition, and scientific argument which has accumulated throughout the ages on its behalf.

This is the narrative of Plato alluded to above, which has been retold so frequently of late years that it must be fairly familiar to everyone in the least interested in the problem of the drowned continent.

In the dialogue known as The Timeus Plato makes a certain Critias tell Timzeus and Socrates that Dropidas, his great-grandfather, had handed down writings and traditions concerning the Athenians of the early world.

In a single day and night of heavy rains all the warlike men of Athens sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis “‘ in like manner ” disappeared beneath the sea, “‘ and this is the reason why the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is such a quantity of shallow mud in the way, and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.” Further details of the story of Atlantis as told to Solon by the priests of Sais are furnished by Plato in the dialogue known as The Critias.

The Atlantis of Plato 5 Plato makes Critias say that the names of the Atlanteans referred to in the account had been “ Egyptianised ” by the priests, and later Hellenised by Solon himself.

The Atlantis of Plato 4 this glowing edifice.

Zeus regarded them with disfavour, and convening a council of the gods, spoke as follows :— Here Plato’s account ends abruptly.

Other notices in classical authors which refer to Atlantis are, for the most part, probably based on Plato’s account.

The Atlantis of Plato 9 exceede the stature of us twise, and yet the length of their life is not equale to ours.” He related many other wonders of the two cities, Machimus the warlike and Euseues the peaceful, and how the inhabitants of the former to the number of ten millions once made an attack on Europe, coming first to the land of the Hyperboreans.

Strabo says that Poseidonius (151-135 B.c.) remarked that as the land was known to have changed in elevation the account of Plato ought not to be regarded as fiction, and that such a continent as Atlantis might well have existed and disappeared.

BEFORE proceeding further, it will be necessary to make a careful and critical examination of Plato’s account of Atlantis.

Plato, it seems to me, set down the story of Atlantis much in the same spirit as Geoffrey of Monmouth set down the tale of Arthur, or Homer that of Troy.

Unless ’T err greatly, Plato in his Critias and Timeus drew upon similar sources.

He makes Critias say that his great-grandfather Dropidas “had the original writing,” which Solon had set down after his conversation with the priests of Sais, and a long experience in dealing with traditional material leads me to the conclusion that the sneer of Jowett _ in his commentaries on the Timeus and Critias 1 that Plato invented “a noble lie,” is much more in keeping with the fearful spirit of Victorian scholarship than with the more liberal propensities of that of our own day, which are all in favour of regarding the writers of antiquity as equally worthy of credence with those of modern times, if ordinary critical care be exercised in dealing with the material they have handed down to us.

Nor do I believe that Plato in these extraordinary dialogues intended to allegorise as did Sir Thomas More in his Utopia, or Mr Wells in his Men Like Gods.

That he did not invent Atlantis is obvious from the following considerations :— He makes Socrates declare that the tale is ‘ ‘ suitable to 1 See the Introductions to his Dialogues of Plato, and especially vol.

Plato’s Account Examined 13 the festival of the goddess’ (Pallas Athene), and that it has the very great advantage of being fact and not fiction.

It is without the bounds of possibility that a Greek of Plato’s period and opportunities should have been aware of the resemblance between the Egyptian and Hellenic forms of Neith-Athene unless he had received the information through an Egyptian source.

412-485) reports that Crantor, the first commentator on Plato (c.

See The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timeus of Plato, translated by Thomas Taylor, London, 1820.

Plato’s statement that the Atlantic was not, in his time, regarded as navigable is, as will be shown, strictly in accordance with what is known of the maritime history of his day.

I will preserve the geological justification of Plato’s account for the chapter in which it is dealt with in detail, and will pass on to consider his chronology.

Plato’s Account Examined 5 Neolithic pottery.

There is, of course, not the slightest incumbency upon the most meticulous or most irresponsible protagonist of the Atlantean hypothesis to accept Plato’s chronology.

And can we upbraid Plato for a lack of knowledge of the circumstances of Hellenic prehistory ?

Plato’s chronology is substantially correct, so far at least as that part of it which deals with the date of the Atlantean invasion is concerned.

Plato naturally treats of the ‘“‘ mythical” period of Atlantean history as a Greek writer of his time might be expected to do.

Atlas, the son of Poseidon, is mentioned by several Greek writers as the founder of Mauretania, the land in the neighbourhood of the Pillars of Hercules, and this may have seemed to Plato good evidence of his Atlantean connection.

Plato’s Account Examined 17 Gardens at Babylon, since identified.1 But a perusal of a recent plan of Carthage reconstructed by M.

Paul Aucler has led me to observe a marked resemblance between the plan of that city and Plato’s description of Atlantis.

I therefore incline to the view that when Plato described Atlantis as he did, he was naturally unaware that he was also practically describing the more modern Carthage that was yet to be, even though the general plan of that city had been laid down long before his time.

Plato’s Account Examined 19 in the territory of Atlas, and that no consideration of Atlantean civilisation can, in my view, afford to dispense with the substantial degree of proof afforded by the existence of a city of this architectural character so close to the Atlantean scene.

Nor do they approximate to any architectural style to be found in Greece in Plato’s time.

Enough has been said for the present to establish the fact that Plato’s account of Atlantis was by no means an effort of the imagination.

Plato’s account of Atlantis is of the same class as that of Geoffrey of Monmouth regarding Arthur, or that of Homer regarding Troy—an admixture of partially authentic tradition and facts drawn from documentary evidence.

Although the Atlantean hypothesis by no means rests upon the account of Plato alone, still, as proof already adduced and to be adduced shows and will show, there is no good reason to doubt the substantial and general accuracy and historicity of that account.

Plato’s statement regarding a prehistoric Athens was probably instigated by patriotic motives, and his statement that the Athenians repulsed the invading Atlanteans probably preserves the memory of a foreign defeat in the /Egean at an early date.

Plato gives the story of Atlantis an Hellenic setting as a Greek of his period would naturally do, but he affords reasons for his employment of Hellenic names for Atlantean personages.

Plato’s Account Examined 21 involved process, which would scarcely have occurred even to the most imaginative of story-tellers.

Plato could not have been aware that this description could apply to a future Carthage, therefore it seems probable from this and other considerations still to be brought forward that Carthage was planned in accordance with an ancient Atlantean design which had long been in vogue in North-Western Africa and Western Europe.

It is manifest that these conclusions by no means exhaust the inferences to be drawn from Plato’s account.

But they have at least the merit of novelty, and, I venture to think, provide fresh material of considerable critical value worthy the attention of future investigators, and go far to confirm Plato’s honesty of purpose.

Plato’s account but furnishes the clue.

No man with any real experience in dealing with traditional material can doubt that Plato’s account of Atlantis is founded on sources much more ancient, and that these again owed their origin to a persistent folk-memory of a mighty series of upheavals, the geological proof concerning which will be found in the following chapter.

We must remember that it is not by any means incumbent upon us to attempt to justify Plato’s account word for word.

It is obvious that we are dealing with a great world-memory, of which Plato’s story is merely one of the broken and distorted fragments, and we must seek to justify its broad contentions not by reference to any solitary and possibly fallible account, but by all other reasonable means as well.

But the most significant consideration which emerges is that this expert evidence is almost entirely in favour of the existence of a comparatively recent land-mass, or masses, in the Atlantic, and taking into consideration the whole of the evidence and the nature of its sources, I fail to see how it can reasonably be disputed that at a period probably no earlier than that mentioned by Plato this ancient continent was still in existence, but in process of disintegration— that an island of considerable size, the remnant, perhaps, of the African “ shelf,” still lay opposite the entrance to the Mediterranean, and that lesser islands connected it with Europe, Africa, and another similar island-continent which occupied the present site of the West Indian Islands, the whole forming a continuous archipelagic chain such as is described by Plato.

The last great fragment, finally engulfed, and no longer having left any other vestiges than the four archipelagoes, would be the Atlantis of Plato.” M.

Plato gives the date of the destruction of Atlantis at gooo years before Solon’s day, or about 9600 B.c., but it is probable that men were making their way from the partially wrecked continent into Europe many thousands of years before that date, although one of those migratory impulses chanced to synchronise with the precise period he mentions.

As I have observed, we can scarcely credit that part of Plato’s narrative which speaks of Atlantis as a port frequented by the world’s shipping—at the date 9600 B.c., and a fortiori, not at 25,000 B.c.

Like the people of Plato’s Atlantis, they seem to have had an especial reverence for the bull, the figure of which is so frequently depicted on the walls of their caverns.

It invaded Europe and the Mediterranean basin at a date which, broadly speaking, can well be collated with that given by Plato in his Critias and Timeus.

But I will not stress this point, weak as it must undoubtedly seem to many, because, as I have already said, I do not rest my hypothesis of the former existence of an Atlantic continent on the tale of Plato alone.

‘The fact that the date of the coming of the Azilian-Tardenoisians, as given by the best authorities, synchronises generally with the date Plato gives for the destruction of Atlantis may be purely coincidental.

These were their ancestors, who, leaving Atlantis nine thousand years before Plato, had impressed their domination on Western Europe, Italy, and North Africa to the frontiers of Egypt.” He concludes, too, that they entered Spain, Gaul, Britain, Corsica, and Sardinia.

The Cré-Magnons had a special reverence for the bull or bison, the salient animal in Atlantean worship according to Plato’s account.

In dealing with Plato’s account I have already outlined that of Theopompus and the legend of Ogygia.

And the gods ordered four roads to be made to the middle of the earth for them.” Before I proceed farther I should like to indicate several points of resemblance between this chronicle and Plato’s narrative, which are, to say the least, remarkable as coincidences, if nothing more.

It seems to me that if Quetzalcoatl can be equated with Atlas, Tlaloc and his wife Chalchihuitlicue can almost as readily be compared with Poseidon and Leucippe, the original figures in Plato’s narrative.

It is evident that at the place where Plato’s narrative breaks off he was about to tell us how Zeus first warned the Atlanteans, and later punished them.

The history of Tollan is strongly reminiscent of that of Atlantis as told by Plato.

But one circumstance points very clearly to the fact that the Maya had been used to build their larger structures on plains surrounded by mountains—such a site, in short, as Plato describes as that of Atlantis.

‘This picture, I - take it, is a memory of the Atlantean story, much as told by Plato.

We have, then, traced the Poseidon, Cleito, and Atlas of Plato’s story, or deities strongly resembling them, in Central America.

True, we can only infer that the old gods of Atlantis came to be regarded after the catastrophe as gods of destruction, but from the closing remarks of Plato’s account it is safe to draw the inference that the Atlanteans had so offended Zeus that he intended to destroy them.

That religion, we may remember from the account of Plato, was connected with the bull.

We may recollect that in Plato’s account of Atlantis ten golden statues of the Atlantean gods or kings are spoken of as standing in front of the Temple of Poseidon.

Always we find in these myths the mountain or hill, and the holy place on which statues _ are raised, as in Plato’s story of Atlantis.

In the neighbourhood he met a very beautiful girl, Choque Suso (the Cleito of Plato ?) weeping bitterly.

This myth agrees almost in every detail with that of Plato.

IN my remarks with reference to the plan of the city of Carthage in Chapter II and its resemblance to that of Atlantis as described by Plato, I have already alluded to the circumstance that the design of the Atlantean capital appears to have been copied far and wide.

Starting, then, from a knowledge of the Atlantean design as described in Plato, we find that is reflected not only in that of Carthage, but in numerous other ancient sites scattered over the length and breadth of those areas where we might expect to find architectural remains approximating to the Atlantean model—on the one hand along the entire stretch of the Mediterranean, and on the other along the sea-coasts of the Western Atlantic, to Britain and Ireland.

What one fragment lacks in certain details the other exhibits, and the resemblance of all as well as the fitting together of the broken pieces of the puzzle carry us back with unerring precision to the original prototype as described by Plato.

The plan of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the Aztec prototype of Mexico City which illustrates the Letters of Cortes to the Emperor Charles V, bears a startling resemblance to Plato’s description of Atlantis.

The Azores are situated on its extreme eastern “ coast.” Plato tells us that “‘ the whole country was very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about, and surrounding the city, was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended toward the sea.” I agree with Donnelly that ‘“‘ one has but to look at the profile of the Dolphin’s Ridge” as revealed by the deep-sea soundings of the Challenger .

On 14th February 1909 a communication appeared in The Times, pointing out that both in outline and detail the prehistoric civilisation of Crete corresponded to Atlantis as described by Plato.

“ After all, in nine hundred years in an unhistorical age a collapse so sensational might well have been taken rather too literally.” The facts of Cretan history, however, do not at all agree with Plato’s story.

This alone _ disposes of the belief that Crete came in a later day to be regarded as the Atlantis of Plato.

I would suggest that no city or civilised state of Atlantis existed at the period alluded to by Plato—g6o0o0 B.c.

This is scarcely correct, for Plutarch, Plato, and Diodorus Siculus all speak of Osiris as connected in some manner with the idea of deluge.

‘Time, environment, and other circumstances, have conspired to alter their several details, but not their general tendency; but it is remarkable that out of the whole mass of tradition thus presented can be pieced together practically every single detail as found in the accounts of Plato.

The story of the Lost Atlantis is recorded in the Timceus and, with many fanciful amplifications, in the Critias of Plato.

"No one," says Professor Jowett, in his critical edition of The Dialogues of Plato, "knew better than B

Plato how to invent ' a noble lie ' " ; and he, -unhesitatingly, pronounces the whole narrative a fabrication.

But in the vagueness of all geographical knowledge in the days of Socrates and of Plato, this Atlantic domain is confused with some Iberian or western African power, which is stated to have been arrayed against Egypt, Hellas, and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean Sea.

The elements of oral tradition are aptly set forth in the dialogue which Plato puts into the mouth of Timseus of Locris, a Pythagorean philosopher.

The story, as it thus reaches us, is one of the vaguest of popular legends, and has been transmitted to modern times in the most obscure of all the writings of Plato.

The publication of that work gave a fresh interest to the vaguest intimations of a dubious past ; while it superseded them by tangible disclosures, which, though modern in comparison with such mythic antiquities as the Atlantis of Plato's Dialogues, nevertheless added some five centuries to the history of the New World.

But in reality all memory of the land which lay beyond the waters of the Atlantic had faded as utterly from the minds of Europe's mariners, in that fourteenth century, as in the older days when Plato restored a lost Atlantis to give local habitation to his ideal Eepublic.

The most definite narrative of this vanished continent is that already referred to as recorded in the Timceus of Plato, on the authority of an account which Solon had received from an Egyptian priest.

This ocean-world of fancy or tradition, Plato revived as the seat of his imaginary commonwealth ; and it had not long become a world of fact when Sir Thomas More made it anew the seat of his famous Utopia, the exemplar of " the best state and form of a public weale." "Unfortunately," as the author quaintly puts it, " neither we remembered to inquire of Eaphael, the companion of Amerike Vespuce on his third voyage, nor he to

But we have little other data than such hints as the busts of iEschylus, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other leaders of thought may supply.

C, 148, 180 Jossakeeds, 224 Jowett's, Professor, Dialogues of Plato, quoted, 1 Jugs, double-necked, 223 Julian calendar, 34 Kablunet, 65 Kalapurgas, 227 Kane, Paul, 121, 130, 227, 228, 312, Dr., 144, 323 Kanienga, 174 Karlsefne, Thorfinn, 41, 49, 58, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 71 Karlseven, 54 Keel-ness, 61

Charles, 24, 227, 260 Pictou harbour, 54 Picture-writing, 33, 40, 233, 238, 239, Pierce, William, 320 ' ' Pinta," the, 75 Piraeus, lion of, 42 Plato's Critias, quoted, 1, 2, 75 Point Oken, 122 Population, and number of villages, 275 ; coloured, 311, 318, 324, 329 Porpoise, brain of, 341 Port Dover, implements at, 101 Potomac, rock at the, 57 Pottawattomies, 318 Pottery, 153, 167, 168, 171, 189 ; 192, 194, 218, 219, 220, 240, 262, 267, 271, 273, 282, 388 Powell, York, 62 Powhattan, 269 Pre-Aryan Man, 130 et seq.

Isaac, 30, 358 Tchudi, Yon, 391 Thelariolin Zacharee, 224 Temagamic, Lake, 125 Temissaining, Lake, 126 Texas reserve, 296 Thales, a Greek astronomer, 33 The Snake Land, 243 Thlinkets, 204, 207, 210 Thomsen of Copenhagen, 81 Thomson's, Professor Wyville, Depths of the Sea, quoted, 5 Thorbrandson, Snorre, 58 Thorfinn, 58, 61 Thorgilsson's Iselandinga Vok, 71 Thorhall, 59, 60 Thorvald, 58, 61, 62, 63 Thurnam, Dr., 343, 353, 360, 365, 366, 367, 373, 375, 376, 378, 384, 385 Tiedemann, 362, 375, 376, 380, 386, Timceus of Plato, 1, 15, 75 Timucuas, 173 Tin-mines of Spain and Cornwall, 9 ;

The H£story of Atlant£s may, in the light of our present knowledge of Plato's sunken island, appear as a somewhat presumptuous title for a work, the object of which is to present a general outline of what is known concerning Atlantean civilisation.

Preface Vlll Athenian festival, has a very definite bearing upon the credibility of Plato's narrative, pre-dating it as it did by more than a century.

I have also demonstrated that, so far from being mythical, the Egyptian sources from which Plato drew his material were very real indeed, and that he himself visited Egypt.

CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATLANTEAN AND OTHER HISTORIES -INSPIRATION IN HISTORICAL SCIENCE- THE UsEs OF ANALOGY-FouNDATIONs OF ATLANTEAN HISTORY-PLATO'S NARRATIVE NOT ALLEGORICAL -THE VALUE OF TRADITION-THE ATLANTEAN PAGE COMPLEX-SPECIAL NEEDS OF ATLANTEAN REsEARCH I CHAPTER II THE SOURCES OF ATLANTEAN HISTORY I .

The Writings of Plato PLATo's "TIMJEUS" AND ITS CoNTENTs-His "CRITIAS" -HIS ACCOUNT OF ATLANTIS, ITS TOPOGRAPHY, ITS CAPITAL CITY, PoPULATION, CANALS AND TEMPLES -ITS GOVERNMENT, EcONOMY AND RELIGION • 7 CHAPTER III THE SOURCES OF ATLANTEAN HISTORY II.

EXAMINED MODERN THEORIES ON THE SUBJECT OF THE SOURCES­ PLATO'S STATEMENTS REGARDING THE AUTHENTI­ CITY OF His AccouNT-PLATO IN EGYPT-SOLON's EGYPTIAN VISIT-CONNECTION OF SAIS WITH ATHENS-ARCHlEOLOGICAL FACTS SQUARE WITH PLATO's AccouNT-CLUE To THE HISTORICAL CHARACTER oF PLATo's AccouNT-THE PEPLUM oF PALLAs-JusTIFICATION OF PLATo's STATEMENTS­ ATLANTEAN AssOCIATIONS IN THE ODYSSEY­ TESTIMONY oF CLASSICAL AuTHORS REGARDING IMPASSIBILITY OF ATLANTIC OcEAN-MOORISH EVIDENCE-DETAILS OF THE H CRITIAS "-ELEPHANTS AND COCONUTS IN ATLANTIS-WORSHIP OF THE 'v BULL-THE " CRITIAS" NOT AN ALLEGORY OF THE PERSIAN WAR-THE ACCOUNT OF DIODORUS­ AMAZONS AND AziLIANS-CLASSICAL "GEOLOGICAL" OPINION REGARDING ATLANTIS-PHILIP SMITH ON ATLANTEAN THEORY-PLATO'S CHRONOLOGY-M.

TERMIER's EssAY-PLATo's THEORY "HIGHLY PROBABLE "-PROF.

Contents SIDERABLE ISLAND ABOVE WATER" - EVIDENCE FROM BIOLOGY-ANIMAL LIFE ON THE AZORES­ EUROPEAN CHARACTER OF THEIR REPTILIA-SLUGS AND MOTHS OF THE ATLANTIC I SLANDS-AUTHOR'S FORMER CONCLUSIONS TABULATED-THE SARGASSO • PAGE SEA-THE SITE OF ATLANTIS 52 CHAPTER VI THE RACES OF ATLANTIS WAS ATLANTIS INHABITED ?-THE GSNITCH STADIUM OF PENCK AND BRUCKNER-THE AzrLIAN RAcE­ DISCOVERY OF ITS REMAINS IN FRANCE-ITS CuLTURE-ITs "ALPHABET"-SPREAD OF THE AziLIAN RAcE-PYGMY FLINTS-THE CAPSIAN CuLTURE-WHENCE CAME THE AzrLIANs?-PERIOD oF THEIR ARRIVAL AGREES WITH PLATo's DATE FOR ATLANTEAN INVA SION-THE CR~-MAG NON RAcE-" P ALJEOLITHIC GREEKS "-THEIR ExTRA­ ORDINARY ART-A HIGH TYPE OF HUMANITY-'-""' BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE-PAINTING AND SCULP- "" TURES SUPERIOR TO THE EGYPTIAN-SUCCESSIVE INVASIO NS OF EUROPE FROM THE ATLANTIC­ PROFESSOR MACALISTER ON EXTRA-EUROPEAN ORIGIN oF THE CR~-MAGNON RAcE-RELATIONSHIP WITH THE GUANCHES OF THE CANARY ISLANDS., THE VESTIGES OF ATLANTIS-RIPLEY'S THEORY OF THE CR~-MAGNON LANGUAGE-ORIGIN OF CRO-MAGNON MAN-OF AziLIAN MAN 75 CHAPTER VII THE STONE AGE IN ATLANTIS CAN BEST BE RECONSTRUCTED FROM THE LIFE OF ITS COLONISTS IN EUROPE-AREA AND POPULATION OF ATLANTIS-EARLY HUMAN SOCIETY IN ATLANTIS -TEMPLES THE CENTRES OF LIFE-COSTUMES AND ORNAMENTS OF EARLY ATLANTEANS-TOOLS AND WEAPONS-THE SOLUTREAN CULTURE-STONE HOUSES BUILT-RETURN OF GLACIAL CONDITIONS V -MAGICAL IMPLEMENTS-ATLANTIS THE HOME ""V OF MIGHTY ARTISTIC IMPULSES-KNOWLEDGE /

THE SoNs OF PosEIDON-ATLAS-URANus AND His CHILDREN-DIODORUS APPLIES WAR OF GODS AND TITA NS TO MYTH OF ATLANTIS-CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES IN ATLANTIS-NO IcE AGE IN ATLANTIS-AZILIANS THE RACE OF PosEIDON-Po s EIDON THE CuLTURE-BRINGER - His ORIGINAL HoME-SKETCH OF HISTORICAL EVENTS IN ATLANTIS- THE SEVERAL CATACLYSMS­ PoSEIDON, AND TALES SIMILAR TO His MYTHS­ DIODORus ON THE KINGS OF ATLANTIS-BASILEA "THE GREAT MoTHER"-ATLAS THE AsTROLOGER -CITY OF ATLANTIS PROBABLY FOUNDED IN HIS REIGN - QUESTION OP ATLANTEAN ARCHITECTURE­ AziLIAN STRUCTURES IN SPAIN-ANGLO-SPANISH SCHOOL OF ARCHJEOLOGY-ATLANTEAN ARCHITEC­ TURE IN ANDALUSIA-SATURN AND jUPITER DISPUTE THE THRONE OF ATLANTIS-THE ELEMENTS OF UNRE ST BEGIN TO MANIFEST THEMSELVES IN jUPITER'S REIGN-POSEIDON, ATLAS, SATURN AND jUPITER POSSIBLY THE FOUNDERS OF DYNASTIES- "'-./NoT GoDs, BuT MEN DEIFIED AFTER DEATH­ ZEus DISPLEASED WITH THE ATLANTEANS-END OF PLATo's AccouNT-DissENSIONS AT HoME DIVERTED BY CONQUEST ABROAD-INVASION OF EUROPE.

••• Contents Xlll CATACLYSM FROM THESE SOURCES-THE "WHIRLING CASTLE'' - THE ATLANTEAN CIRCULAR PLAN - ATLANTIS AND AVALLON-PLATO'S ACCOUNT AND THE WELSH SAN GREAL-SUBMERGED LOCALITIES OF BRITISH CELTS-ATLAS, ALBION AND IBERIUS -THE MYTH OF GERYON-BRITISH PARALLELS WITH ATLANTIS-PLUTARCH ON THE LESSER ISLANDS OF BRITAIN-ATLANTEAN MEMORIES IN PAGE IRISH TRADITION • • • • • I 22 CHAPTER X ' THE TRADITIONS OF ATLANTIS ATLANTEAN TRADITION IN EuROPE-THE ISLE OF v SEVEN CITIES-THE LEGEND OF Y s-DARDANUS - DEUCALION, THE GREEK NOAH- ATLANTBAN PARALLELS IN AMERICAN MYTH-THE CATACLYSMS OF AzTEc TRADITION-PERUVIAN AND BRAZILIAN FLOOD-MYTHS-BRINTON ON AMERICAN TRADI­ TION OF DELUGE-A MIXTEC LEGEND-MEXICAN v MYTHS-TLALOC COMPARED WITH POSEIDON­ DIVINE VISITATIONS ON THE TOLTECS-QUBTZAL­ COATL THE CULTURE-BRINGER-HIS CONNECTION WITH ATLANTIS-COMPARED WITH ATLAS • 145 CHAPTER XI LIFE IN ATLANTIS v RECONSTRUCTION OF CONDITIONS ON ATLANTIS-CANALS -DESERT REGIONS- ARCHITECTURE- THE PLAN OF THE CITY OF ATLANTIS-THE PYRAMID AN ATLANTEAN FORM-FOOD-SUPPLY-COSTUME AND DRESs-LITERATURE AND WRITING-THE AZILIAN ALPHABET- OBviousLY PicTuRE-WRITING- No REASON TO DENY ATLANTEANS THE ART OF PICTURE­ WRITING-MANNERS AND MORALITY OF ATLAN­ TEANS-REMINISCENCES OF THEIR PROFLIGACY IN EARLY MYTH • • x6o OHAPTER XII THE ATLANTEAN STATE AND POLITY THE ATLANTEAN LAWS UNCHANGEABLE-ATLANTEAN GOVERNMENT CLOSELY ASSOCIATED WITH RELIGION,

175 C HAPTER XIII THE RELIGION OF ATLANTIS SIX- YEARLY RITES ATTENDING DELIBERATIONS OF THE -..1 KINGS-IMMOLATION OF THE SACRED BULLS-A MEXICAN ANALOGY-THE BULL-CULT OF THE AURIGNACIANS-BULL- WORSHIP IN EGYPT AND THE 0SIRIAN CULT-SPREAD OF THE WORSHIP OF 0SIRIS-APIS THROUGHOUT EUROPE TO BRITAIN­ AN ATLANTEAN GENESIS FOR THE BULL-CULT­ PLATO'S AccOUNT PERHAPS SOPHISTICATED BY HELLENIC PRACTICE-THE BULL THE BEAST OF PosEIDON-A PROVISIONAL ATLANTEAN pANTHEON -PosEIDON's ORIGIN-THE DEFINITE AssociATION OF ATLAS WITH HIS BROTHER TITANS, THE TUTE­ LARY DEITIES OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND-INVASION OF OLYMPUS BY TITANIC GODS FROM THE WEsT, AN ALLEGORY OF THE INVASION OF THE MEDITER­ RANEAN AREA BY THE GoDS OF AN ALIEN RELIGION -PERSISTENCE OF THE NAME OF ATLAS AND HIS IsLAND-NOTICES OF THE TITANIC PANTHEON THE MEMORIALS OF AN ANciENT AND POWERFUL RE­ LIGION-SANCTITY OF THE WESTERN OcEANIC AREA TO THE MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLES-LOCALITY OF THE FoRTUNATE IsLANDS AND THE GARDENS OF THE HESPERIDES-THE IDEA OF THE CONTINUED EXIST- ~ ENCE OF SoULS AFTER DEATH IN THE WEST ARISING OUT OF THE MEMORY OF ATLANTIS-THE LOCATION ....J IN THE WEST OF THE ISLAND OF THE DEAD BY THE PEOPLES OF WESTERN AND MEDITERRANEAN EUROPE A PROOF THAT THEY REGARDED IT AS THE ANCIENT HOME OF THEIR RELIGION AND CULTURE-MAN'S PARADISE ALWAYS REGARDED AS THAT SPOT WHENCE HE ORIGINALLY CAME-A WELL-FOUNDED MEMORY OF THE FoRMER EXISTENCE OF A GREAT RELIGION IN THE ATLANTIC REGION-THE ATLANTBAN PAN­ THEON ASSOCIATED WITH THE CONSTELLATIONS­ THE IDEA OF A COSMIC SYMPHONY IN THE WRITINGS

Contents XV PAGE OF PLATO-THE ASSOCIATION OF THE ATLANTEAN ~ RELIGION WITH AsTROLOGY-AsTROLOGY OF THE '­ AZTECS-PROBABLE EMANATION FROM ATLANTIS- - THE AzTEC ToNALMATL-EQUATION OF THE AzTEC CALENDAR-GODS WITH MEMBERS OF THE ATLANTEAN p ANTHEON-QUETZALCOATL THE INVENTOR OF THE - MEXICAN ASTROLOGICAL SYSTEM-HIS WESTERN ORIGIN-THE OLDER EPONYMOUS GODS OF EUROPE -EUROPEAN GIANT-LORE-CONNECTION OF THE TITANS WITH EARTHQUAKE-THE AZILIAN GIANT­ WoRSHIPPERS-BATTLE OF THE Gons AND TITANS -APPETITE OF THE TITANIC GODS GIVES RISE TO THE PoPULAR CONCEPTION OF THE 0GRE-IMMOLA · TION OF HUMAN BEINGS ASSOCIATED WITH THE ATLANTEAN TRADITION-DRUIDISM POSSIBLY TH' LAST PHASE OF AN IMPORTED ATLANTEAN RELIGION -A TLANTEAN TRACES IN DRUIDIC RELIGION- THEOSOPHISTS AND BRITISH LORE • I 8o CHAPTER XIV ANIMAL LIFE IN ATLANTIS ANALOGIES FROM THE ATLANTIC ISLANDS-THE CLIMATE OF ATLANTIS-ISLAND-NAMES IN THE AZORES GROUP -MIGRATIONS OF THE RABBIT-ATLANTIS AS THE v­ CRADLE OF ALL ANIMAL LIFE-MIGRATIONS OF THE EEL, THE LEMMING AND OF CERTAIN BuTTERFLIES TO AND FROM THE ATLANTEAN AREA-THEMES· ATLANTIC AREA AND ITS BIOLOGY-THE ELEPHANT IN ATLANTIS-M.

If, on coming to the end of this book-should he reach the end-the reader cannot agree that a very fair case has been made out for the former existence of Plato's island-continent, he will at least admit that the mere interest of the subject is sufficiently intriguing to permit of hypotheses being erected in its favour.

But that a basis of indisputable fact lies at the roots of the Atlantean theory the writer stoutly main­ tains, and he pleads that in face of such an array of testi­ mony as he has brought together it is merely childish to refuse belief to the main details of Plato's story.

It is possible to take Plato's account of Atlantis, piece by piece, and compare the statements made therein with similar historical and archreological data, to the complete vindica­ tion of his narrative.

And let it be said at once that Plato did not intend his account of Atlantean affairs as allegorical or mythical.

Introductory 5 The bare idea of an Atlantis as described by Plato has been met with derision by generations of archreologists, simply because no direct documentary evidence relating to its existence survived.

Do we find in the countries which must have been contiguous to Atlantis the vestiges of such civilisa­ tion as Plato only too briefly outlines?

We have now to consider the uarrative of Plato concerning Atlantis, and then to compare it with other and later classical allusions to the mysterious island-continent in the Atlantic.

CHAPTER !iii THE SouRcEs oF ATLANTEAN HISTORY I-THE WRITINGS OF PLATO THE Tt'maus and Critias of Plato constitute not only the fullest, but by far the most important body of historical evidence regarding Atlantis which we possess .

As the available translations of those passages in Plato's works which have reference to Atlantis seem to leave a good deal to be desired, I have carefully compiled a new version of them, basing my account of the Timaus on the translations of Jowett (The Dialogues of Plato), and of R.

Plato's account of the Tt'maus is in dialogue form .

Again as regards knowledge, you see how cautious our law is in its underlying principles, examining the laws of nature till it arrives at divination and medicine, the object of which is health, drawing from these i In Plato's time Egypt was regarded as a part of Asia.

So all this power gathered itself together, and your country and ours and the I Plato here means, of course, North Mrica and Asia Minor.

The next passage in Plato's works which has reference to Atlantis is his Critias, which purports to be an account by a person of that name of the circumstances of life in Atlantis, as recounted by Solon to Dropidas, the speaker's great-grandfather .2 Nine thousand years before Solon's day, or about 96oo B.C., war broke out between the nations within the Pillars of Hercules and those beyond them.

1 Plato probably means that its most thickly inhabited part had a southerly aspect.

Here Plato's account ends, and it is believed that death interfered with its conclusion.

DIODORUS SICULUS, a historian, of Agyrium, in Sicily, who flourished contemporaneously with Julius Cresar and Augustus, has vouchsafed us nearly as much informa­ tion regarding Atlantis and its history as did Plato himself.

Elsewh ere, in the fourth chapter of his Fifth Book, Dio­ dorus confirms in a measure the statement of Plato con­ cerning the submergence of a portion of the Greek penin­ sula.

Diodorus does not mention the name of the island; and he differs from Plato by referring to it as still existing.

151-135 B.c.) says that, as the land was / \ known to have changed in elevation, the account of Plato l { 7'-~ I ,1' ought not to be regarded as fiction, and that such a continent as Atlantis might well have existed and disappeared.

And on this point he does well to cite the statement of Plato that it is possible that the story about the island of Atlantis is not a fiction.

Concerning Atlantis, Plato relates that Solon, after having made inquiry of the Egyptian priests, reported that Atlantis did once exist, but disappeared-an island no smaller in size than a continent; and Poseidonius thinks that it is better to put the matter in that way than to say of Atlantis: 'Its inventor caused it to disappear, just as did the Poet the wall of the Achreans.' " Pomponius Mela (b.

"Did we bring it aboi.it, that ten thousand years ago, a vast number of men burst forth from the island which is called the Atlantis of Neptune, as Plato tells us, and utterly ruined and blotted out countless tribes ?

The notions of the Alexandrian School with reference to "{ ' Plato's account are to be found in the Eighteenth Book of Ammianus Marcellinus, who mentions the destruction of Atlantis as an historic fact.

Plato's account, he thght, was a legacy of the origal Mosaic tradition, but Atlantis was to be looked for in the east, and was the land of the ten generations of Noah.

The hint was avidly seized upon by Huet, Bochart and Vossius, an eager trio, who by ingenious misreadings of the Pentateuch, bemused their credulous contemporaries into an acceptance of Plato's island as the theatre of patriarchal history.

For him Sweden was Atlantis, and Upsala the capital of Plato's shadowy Utopia.

Its inhabitants during the torrid period, he maintained, were the Atlanteans of Plato, who upon the gradual cooling of the region, betook themselves to Asia, carrying with them their scientific knowledge and religious beliefs, which they scattered broadcast among the nations.

The Atlantis of Plato De Sales disposed of by identifying it with the Ogygia of Homer, the magical island of the enchantress Calypso, situated "between Italy and Carthage," and this, he averred, had been destroyed by an earthquake, the island of Sardinia remain­ ing as a fragment of the wreckage.

Plato, seizing upon this fiction, had adopted it to later events,

Plato's Atlanteans who besieged Athens, were, according to Bartoli, the Persians, and the whole story a mythic representation of their struggle with He lias and their final overthrow.

Treatises on the subject began to appear shortly after the discovery of America, and extraordinary .efforts seem to have been made to attach the name of Plato's island to the new continent.

Bacon in his Nova Atlantis identified America with Plato's isle, although certainly in such a spirit of fantasy as might be employed by Sir J.

In I 689 they published an atlas representing the primitive geographical divisions of America, its parti­ tion between the ten royal families who had issued from Poseidon, the father of Atlas, and displaying those portions of the Old World which, according to Plato's story, they had succeeded in colonising.

Even Stallbaum, the serious critic of Plato's Timceus and Critias, upheld the identity of America with Atlantis, and thought it probable that the ancient Egyptians had a knowledge of the Western

Many of these later authors agreed in thinking that Atlantis had formerly existed, as stated by Plato, but were at variance regarding the circumstances of the events which occurred thereon, and the marvels of which he spoke.

Kircher, Ginguene, Mentelle and others believed that the Atlantic Islands were the remains of the sunken continent, and Buffon argued that Ireland, the Azores and America had once been portions of the great isle of Plato.

As regards Plato's account, many of his commentators, from Proclus to Jowett, have given it as their considered opinion that it was merely a fable, "a noble lie," invented by Plato.

"It appears to me," says Archer-Hind, "impos­ sible to determine whether Plato has invented the story from beginning to end, or whether it really more or less represents some Egyptian legend brought home by Solon." 1 Elsewhere he remarks upon the improbability of the story.

Yet he rebukes Stallbaum for adopting Proclus's misinterpretation of Plato's words that his tale is ''not a mere figment of the imagination, but a history of facts which actually occurred." Plato is, indeed, abundantly clear on this point.

Socrates in the Timteus is made to say : "The fact that it is no fictitious tale, but a true history, is surely a great point.' In the Cr£tias Plato further makes Critias say that his I Timreus, p.

Plato, then, took more than usual care to stress the historicity of his account .

Proclus in his dissertation on the Timceus says that Plato also visited Egypt and conversed at Sais with the priest Pateneit, at Heliopolis with the priest Ochlapi, and at Sebennytus with the priest Ethimon.

Now the second Critias, according to a genealogy preserved by Prod us, was a cousin-german of Plato's mother.

Ast and Kleine, in their critiques on Plato's works, give it as th<:;.ir belief that it was he who first brought the Atlantean tradition from Egypt.

Plutarch expressly upholds Plato's statement that Solon intended to write a poem on Atlantis, but was compelled to renounce his intention on account of his great age.

In the Timceus Plato eloquently expresses his regret that he had not carried out his plan.

323) gives it as his considered judgment that Plato, knowing himself to be related to Solon, had piously attempted to carry out the intention of his blood-relation, and for this purpose had employed the traditional material which had come down to him as the basis of his narrative.

Crantor, who died thirty-three years after Plato, and

But, if Plato's account had not been inherited from Solon, and had its Egyptian form not been current in Sais, there were thous­ ands of Greeks there who could have contradicted it, and that some negative of the kind would have reached Athens sooner or later seems very clear, when we recall the extra­ ordinary interest which Plato's tale certainly aroused in the ancient world.

With regard to a totally different aspect of Plato's account, it is extraordinary how well the circumstances of his story fit in with those which the science of archreology assures us must have obtained in early Europe.

It is sufficient to say here that the approximate date of Plato's account of the Atlantean invasion agrees with that at which the Azilian- Tardenoisian peoples, the ancestors of the Iberian race, undoubtedly swarmed into Europe, and those European and Mrican regions which he regarded as tributary to Atlantis.

That there was no Athens existing at that date (96oo B.c.) of which Plato speaks, is certain.

"In later times," said Solon's Egyptian informant, "after there had been exceeding great earthquakes and floods, there fell one day and night of destruction; and the warriors in your land all in one body were swallowed up by the earth, and in like manner did Atlantis sink beneath the sea and vanish away." Here it is noticeable that the Greeks are destroyed by a terrestrial, and the Atlanteans by a marine agency, and I believe that we have in this passage a clue to the true historical character of Plato's account.

Now one of the scholiasts of Plato states that the victory of the Athenians over the Atlanteans was actually represented in a symbolical pep­ lum or woman's garment, dedicated at the Lesser Pan­ athenrea, or festival of Athena.

The Panathenrea, it may be mentioned in passing, was founded at least 125 years before Plato's time, so that, if we can rely on the scholiast's statement, the tradition of the Athenian war with .the Atlanteans, whether mythological or historical, must have been well known to the Athenians more than a century before Plato's day, and this would at once dispose of the oft-repeated assumption that he deliberately manu­ factured the story.

"That it was entirely an invention of Plato's," remarks the shrewd Philip Smith, in his article on "Atlantis " in William Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, is hardly credible ....

The legend is found in other forms which do not seem to be entirely copied from Plato." This reminds us of Strabo's quota­ tion from Poseidonius, that it is more reasonable to believe that Atlantis once existed and then sank, than to say that I "its inventor caused it to disappear." · It may be said that if the statement regarding the pep­ lum is true, Plato merely took a local myth for the basis of his tale.

It is manifest that Plato must have known of the Athenian version depicted on the peplum.

It was, as Socrates says in the dialogue of the Timceus, speci­ ally appropriate to this festival of the goddess, owing to its connection with her," sure proof that Plato knew of the Athenian associations of the Panathenrea.

Indeed, it is quite possible that Plato had this intention quite as much in view as the illustration of his political thesis.

temporary of Plato, states in his Periplus that Cerne, an island on the African Atlantic Coast, ''is twelve days coasting beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where the parts are no longer navigable because of shoals, of mud and of sea­ weed.

Aristotle was at one time a pupil of Plato, and this would seem to afford good proof that the latter's statement was founded on the best available information, and was .probably acquire.£~ from Phrenician or Greek seamen.

Historical Sources Examined 4 7 However, the deities mentioned in the account of Diodorus can readily be associated with Egyptian forms, and it may have been_that Critias or Plato merely fell back on the names current in the local Athenian version of the Atlantean legend connected with the Panathenrea.

The climate of Atlantis appears, according to Plato's account, to have corresponded closely to that of the Canary Islands, but two circumstances combine to give it a distinctly Mrican aspect : the state­ ment that large herds of elephants roamed the marshland, and that "a fruit with a hard rind" affording both meat, drink and ointment, flourished there.

to criticise the passages in Plato's account which allude to them .

But it may be remarked in passing that Plato's observations upon them are in consonance with what we know of the early "AEli_an~~ civilisation_o.f_Spain and ---Southern France.

In these areas the bull was worshipped and the ceremony attending its sacrifice, which Plato des­ cribes, might well have been illustrative of some dim folk­ memory of a barbaric rite of the Azilian era, which in some of its aspects continued to survive to "classical" times, and the last vestiges of which still linger in the sport of bull-fighting.

Plato's account of Atlantean history breaks off short, and was probably left unfinished because of his death.

But Plato's account, considered as a whole, is in itself the best refutation of such an assumption.

Indeed, the island Hesperia, inhabited by the Amazons, agrees much more closely with the details of Plato's account, as regards its site, except that it is described as destitute of corn.

But the statement of Diodorus that "it is reported" that an Atlantic tract was swallowed up by the sea, is valuable as illustrating the fact that nearly four hundred years after Plato's time the belief in the founder­ ing of an Atlantic region was widely current.

We should also not ignore the statement of a writer so comparativ ely early as Poseidonius that the account of Plato ought not to be regarded as fiction, as the earth was known to have undergone changes, a statement in which he is backed by Strabo, and which shows that in the late pre-Christian era geological opinion in support of the Atlantean theory was beginning to take shape.

But still, important parts of the legend are thus left un­ accounted for; its mythological character, its derivation from the Egyptian priests, or other Oriental sources; and what is, in Plato, its most important part, the supposed con­ flict of the Atlanteans with the people of the Old World." This shrewd writer has, in these remarks, probed down to the very root of the argument.

As regards Plato's chronology, it can be shown that this is by no means based on improbability when all the circumstances of the Azilian invasion of Europe are taken into account.

The argument that Plato's date is erroneous

An octonal system may well have been employed in early Europe, just as a system equally dissimilar to the decimal was employed in ancient America, but that it has any possible bearing on Plato's chronology, I fail to see.

But the Egyptian system of chronology, on which Plato's account must manifestly have been based, was certainly decimal in character, and the substitution of months •for years in estimating Atlantean chronology is by no means an innovation.

"Geologically speaking," he says," Plato's theory of Atlantis is highly probable ....

If there is any truth in Plato's thrilling account, we must look for Atlantis off the western coast of Africa, and here we find that five of the Cape Verde Islands and three of the Canaries have rocks that are unmistakably like those common to the continents.

What evidence there may be to show that this fracturing and breaking down of western Africa took place as suddenly as related by Plato, or that it occurred about Io,ooo years ago, is as yet unknown to geologists." Professor R.

· is that this ~odern expert evidence is almost entirely in favour of the existence of a comparatively recent land-mass or masses in the Atlantic, and if we take into considera­ tion the whole of the evidence, and the nature of its sources, it does not seem beyond the bounds of human credence that at a period probably no earlier than that mentioned by Plato in his Critias, viz.

It is of no avail to demonstrate its presence in the Miocene, Pliocene, or Pleistocene epoch, or, indeed, at any time prior to the development of a well organised civilisation among men, or, as Plato appar­ ently reasons, between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.

The tale to be investigated is of a flourishing insular growth of artificial human society on a large scale, not so very many thousands of years ago, evidently removed from all tradition of engulfment and hence dreading it not at all, but sending forth its conquering armies until the final defeat and annihilating cataclysm.'' The reader will observe that I have not "tried to pile up proofs of a great land-mass existing at some time in the Atlantic Ocean," otherwise than to permit him to follow the general argument with clarity, but that I have confined most of the geological evidence to that part of it which deals with the possible existence of Atlantis at the period indicated in Plato's myth.

Babcock's statement which relates to the condition of "human society on a large scale" to be found in Atlantis, I have never subscribed to this notion, but have, in my former works, indicated that I believed such human society as Atlantis boasted to be of a comparatively primi­ tive character.1 The protagonist of the Atlantis theory need not rely solely upon the evidence of Plato , as Mr.

We will recall that Plato in his Critias, speaking of the foundering of the continent of Atlantis beneath the waves, remarks that ''the sea in these regions has become impassable.

Babcock, in his Legendary Islands of the Atlantic," that Plato would not have written thus unless he relied on the established general repute of that part of the ocean for difficulty of navigation." Maury, writing about x8so, describes the Sargasso Sea as being ''so thickly matted over with Gulf Weed that the speed of vessels passing through it is often retarded.

Exact observations as to its limits and their range, extending back for fifty years, assure us that its mean position has not been altered since that time." A venerable tradition associated the Sargasso Sea with the sunken continent of Atlantis , and numerous writers have asserted their belief that in its area the former site of Plato's submerged island is to be found.

.The island, says Plato, (1) was situated in front of the ~ Pillars of Hercules, otherwise the Straits of Gibraltar; (2) It was greater than Libya (the Greek name for Medit­ erranean Mrica) and Asia (Asia Minor only in Plato's time) combined.

Supposing it to have lain, as Plato says, directly in front of, and at no great distance from, the Hispano-Mrican coasts (as the fact that part of it was called "Gadiric," implies) then we must think of a land­ mass which extended westward at least to the 45th parallel of longitude, and from north to south, nearly from the 45th parallel of latitude to about the 22nd parallel of latitude, as shown on the accompanying map.

If we regard the Canaries as its south-eastern extremity (and it could not have come much farther in this direction without touching the Mrican coast), and the Azores as the northern limit of the Atlantean land-mass proper at the period in question, and prolong it westward towards the 45th parallel of longi­ tude, we have not only an area commensurate with that mentioned by Plato, but with those natural features which strikingly demonstrate its former presence.

to about 96oo B.C., when it became finally submerged, according to Plato.

Naturally it may have undergone some shrinkage during that period, as it certainly had during the period antecedent, but surely Plato must have had at his disposal some information of a very definite character to permit him to make a statement so clearly in accord, as I have shown, with the natural features of the Atlantic basin, submarine and supermarine.

Gattefosse in his La Verite sur L' Atlantide, have taken these features sufficiently into consideration along with Plato's account in

Scott-Elliot's map, is a world away from the Hispano-Mrican coast, as, allowing for the former exist­ ence of the Mrican ''shelf" and for Plato's statement, it could not possibly have been, and the same applies to M.

If the island-continent lay," before the mouth of the strait," as Plato says, and the quicksands left by its submergence hindered navigation at the very mouth of the strait, as Aristotle and Scylax of Caryanda assert, the island which caused the debris must logically have been in close proximity to the Straits of Gibraltar .

Vincent, which was compiled not only from Plato's account, .

He thinks that the "sea" alluded to by Plato as having been opposite Atlantis was the Tyrr­ henian Sea, and casts doubts on Plato's chronology.

Now both writers obviously refer to an earthquake which occurred in 426 B.C., or the year before Plato's birth.

Plato must, therefore, have known of the occurrence.

Homer alludes to it as "Oceanus." Plato himself calls it "Atlantic," as if it were a name with which he was well acquainted.

IF we regard the Atlantean continent as a reality and not as a mythical or fictional region, and consider the account of it as given by Plato as enshrining an ancient folk­ memory of events which actually occurred, we are faced with the necessity for proving not only by the facts of geology that it formerly existed, but that it was inhabited by men who had reached a fairly advanced type of civilisa­ tion.

In view of the whole circumstances, and in a case where actual written records are not available, this is a task of no little difficulty and complexity, but I hope to be able to show that Plato's account fits in so accurately with the proven findings of modern archreology and ethnology as to render it a matter of considerable risk altogether to deny it.

Plato tells us that at a ~ate which we may roughly take to be 9,640 years before Christ a host of invaders "marched in wanton insolence upon all Europe and Asia together, issuing yonder from the Atlantic Ocean." Now did any such invasion actually occur about the period mentioned, and does anthropological science cast any light upon such an exodus or folk-movement?

They invaded Europe at a period which, broadly speaking, can be successfully collated with the date given by Plato.

And who were those "earlier inhabitants?" Were they of a character so civilised, did they possess such an art as would in any way identify them with the ''Athenians" of Plato's Egyptian priest?

Ivory, says Plato, was one of the principal constituents of the great temple of Poseidon, and he also remarks that elephants abounded on the island-continent.

We recall that Plato alludes to the admixture of the divine Atlantean race, the original lineage of the gods, with the sons of earth, with ordinary mortals.

He calls the Iberians the "Mediterranean Race," and states that not only did they overflow the Mediterranean area, but penetrated to · Britain and Ireland, France and elsewhere.1 The Azilian or proto-Iberian age on Atlantis must then have been one and the same with that stage of moral and cultural degeneration which Plato speaks of, and his Atlantean invaders identical with the Azilians or proto­ Iberians.

The worship of the bull was, however, maintained, and the ritual was probably similar to that described by Plato .

Is there any good reason then, to deny to Atlantis an even longer existence than Plato assumes?

~ But at this stage it may be said that such a theory would render Plato's account of Atlantis as a great and flo~rishing civilised community much more ready of acceptance .

Let us beware how we describe these ancient sculptors and limners, lest posterity, with a more just sense of aesthetic values, accords to them an eminence which it may not accede to ourselves I And if this ancient art ranks so highly as all enlightened students of aesthetics admit, can we deny to that Atlantis from which it emanated much of the wondrous culture which Plato, obviously the mouthpiece of a much more venerable tradition, claimed for it?

IT is from the writings of Diodorus the Sicilian, as well as from those of Plato, that we are enabled to glean the little we know concerning the royal line of Atlantis.

Plato, indeed, assures us that such a succession existed, but he leaves us in the dark concerning the names of any of its members, with the exception of the sons of Poseidon:

We should remember, however, that Plato expressly states that these names had been Egyptianized from the Atlantean language by the priest of Sais, and subsequently Hellenised by Critias, so that there is little hope that they were transmitted in anything like their original form.

So far Plato.

The Kings of Atlantis 105 Kings of Atlantis as given by Plato and Diodorus may not at one time have belonged to veritable historical persons?

We find that Plato's divine race, the sons of Poseidon, were descended on the female side from an autochthonous or aboriginal strain .

Now it is most unlikely that Plato could have personally manufactured a tale which fits in so precisely with the circumstances of other and later culture-hero tales.

Now, no such myth, so far as I am aware, was current concerning the Mediterranean islands, or could have been available to Plato.

In the account of Diodorus it is clear that Uranus stands for Poseidon as given in that of Plato.

Plato provides us with no further details concerning the Kings of Atlantis, after telling us that they reigned there "for generations." Not so Diodorus, who, it would seem , had access to a tradition or traditions of greater scope, so far as this particular part of the Atlantean story is concerned.

She was the goddess and along with her, as in the Atlantis of Plato, went the bull, as will be made clear when we come to consider Atlantean religion in its proper place.

Indeed this may be gleaned from Plato's account, which tells us that," for many centu­ ries they did not lose sight of their august origin, they obeyed all the laws, and were religious adorers of the gods their ancestors." Four reigns could not cover such a length of time, and we are driven to the conclusion that the personages named were the first monarchs of new dynastic lines.

This is all the more probable because they have the names of "Classical" gods, bestowed upon them by Plato"s informant in default of being able to supply their Atlantean or Egyptian names in a form understand­ able to Greek hearers.

"In the course of time," says Plato, "the vicissitudes of human affairs cor­ rupted little by little their divine institutions, and they began to comport themselves like the rest of the children of men.

Then Zeus, the King of the gods, beholding this race once so noble, growing depraved, resolved to punish it, and by sad experience to moderate its ambition." It is here that Plato's account in the Cr£tias ends, and I believe it to have remained unfinished because of his death.

After that all is darkness, so far as Plato is concerned.

But there is little doubt that his account would have narrated the terms of the god's strictures and warnings, and have proceeded to acquaint us with its results, which, I believe, would have informed us of the manner in which revolution at home was put an end to by the politic resolve of the governing bodies, royal and spiritual, to divert the public attention to conquest abroad-a policy which ended in the great invasion of Europe recorded by Plato in his Timaus, and by archreology as the invasion of the Azilians.

But that the invasion in question was not the first, is made clear by the statement of Plato that the Kings of Atlantis "governed Libya as far as Egypt, and Europe to the borders of Etruria." This, as I have shown, corresponds generally to the spread of the Azilian or proto-Iberian race, but

The reader will recollect that, in Plato's account, the city of Atlantis was said to be divided into zones or circles of land and water, and in a previously published work, The Problem of Atlantis, I brought a great deal of proof to bear that the circular plan of Atlantis was copied in many subsequent city-sites .

The passage which summed up these resemblances is as follows:- "Starting then from a knowledge of the Atlantean design as described in Plato, we find that is reflected not only in that of Carthage, but in numerous other ancient sites scattered over the length and breadth of those areas where we might expect to find architectural remains approximating to the Atlantean model-on the one hand along the entire stretch of the Mediterranean, and on the other along the sea-coasts of the Western Atlantic to Britain and Ireland.

Atlantis, it is needless to say, has been again and again identified with the Island of the Hesperides which contained the sacred apples, so that the association of Avallon with that insular paradise equates the British with the Platonic locality, and A vall on stands revealed as the Atlantis of Plato.

Let us compare Plato's account with that in the Welsh Seint Greal.

(1) In the Welsh account Peredur rode through wild forests, "from one forest to another." Plato says that the country surrounding Atlantis was deeply afforested.

134 T he History of A tlantis (3) Around the Revolving Castle "flowed a large river." "The plain," says Plato, "was encompassed by a mighty ditch or fosse, which received the mountain streams and the outfio·w of the canals." (4) Caer Sidi is "The Revolving or Circular Place." Atlantis was also built in circular form.

The landowner in Atlantis, says Plato, "was bound to furnish the sixth part of a war­ chariot, so as to make up ten thousand chariots, two horses and riders upon them, a light chariot without a seat, and an attendant and charioteer, two heavily-armed infantrymen, two archers, two stingers, three stone­ shooters, three javelin-men, and four sailors, to make up the complement of twelve hundred ships." (6) "They" (the multitudes, the plebeians) "know not the brindled ox with the thick head-band." "Near the temple of Poseidon in Atlantis," says Plato, "grazed the sacred bulls, and these the ten kings of the island periodic­ ally offered up in sacrifice .

Thus we find practically all the broader and more general circumstances of Plato's account of Atlantis duplicated in British tradition-the belief in the sub­ mergence of a former insular marine locality situated in the West, its destruction by flood, volcanic or seismic agency, its possession of a city built in a certain peculiar manner, and having a religious cult connected with cattle.

Plato tells us that a great race-course existed in Atlantis.

Some writers even suggested that Antillia was Atlantis itself, and that its quadrilateral shape resembled that of Atlantis as described by Plato.

But Humboldt indicated that Plato had ascribed this form to a particular part of Atlantis only, and not to the whole island.

These Peruvian myths bear a close resemblance in detail to that part of Plato's account which deals with the wooing of Cleito, the enclosure of the hill, and the making of an irrigation zone.

The legends of the Tupi-Guarani of Brazil pteserve a similar tradition to that of Plato, so far as its catastrophic part is concerned : "Monan, the Maker, the Begetter, without beginning or end, author of all that is, seeing the ingratitude of men, and their contempt for him that had made them thus joyous, withdrew from them, and sent upon them tata, the divine fire, which burned all that was on the surface of the earth.

The architecture of Tollan, as described by Ixtlilxochitl and others, bears a striking resemblance to that of Atlantis as described by Plato, the seismic or cataclysmic circumstances are present in both accounts, and the sinfulness of the denizens of both regions is a significant circumstance.

We find, then, that Plato's account of Atlantis by no means stands alone, but has many equivalents in European and American tradition; and that these traditions were drawn from actual colonial settlement in more than one of the regions where they flourished will be seen when we come to deal with the subject of the Atlantean colonies.

Plato's account speaks of canals more than a thousand miles long and roads which evidently stretched far inland.

It is possible to gather a general idea of the style of architecture in vogue, both from the account of Plato, and the researches of the Anglo-Spanish School of Archreology at Huelva in Spain, already alluded to.

Plato states that the style of architecture affected by the Atlanteans was "barbaric," and this to a Greek certainly meant "Oriental." He tells us that the exterior of the great temple of Cleito and Poseidon was garnished with silver, that its pinnacles glittered with gold, and that the interior was roofed with ivo.ry, gold, silver and orichalcum, or copper.

I have also shown elsewhere1 that the general archi­ tectural plan of the city of Atlantis, as described by Plato, appears to have been copied far and wide.

The food supply of the Atlanteans has been outlined by Plato.

Plato, in stating that the laws of Atlantis were engraved on a column of orichalcum implies that they possessed some system of writing.

Plato, indeed, paints rather a black picture of the morals of the Children of Poseidon.

As I have said before, it seems perfectly possible that Atlantis may have survived until a considerably later date than Plato fixed for its submergence, and if this be so, we have a period of time in which its people may have advanced from the comparative state of barbarism which undoubt­ edly distinguished them in Azilian times to a condition of much greater mental complexity than was possible in that era.

FROM the account of Plato we receive a very full description of the type of government which obtained in Atlantis.

We observe, too, from Plato's account that the govern­ ment of Atlantis was closely connected with its religion, that it must have been of a sacerdotal character, and that the kings also acted as priests or hierophants.

What we read in Plato and other authors regarding the state and polity of Atlantis has little or no reflection in any Mediterranean form of government as described by the classical writers of antiquity.

We must recall that we draw our classical knowledge of things Atlantean from an Egyptian source, and in the account of the priest of Sais, as furnished in Plato, it cannot be said that we discover much that would lead us to think that it had been modelled on Egyptian ideas.

True, the various provinces of Atlantis might reflect the nomes of ancient Egypt, and the military economy of Atlantis certainly bears some slight resemblance to that of the Nile country, but on the other hand the Pharaoh was supreme in Egypt and such a conference of kings as is mentioned in Plato's account would never have been possible in a state whose monarch was regarded as a deity, and whose provincial governors, even though vested with a great degree of power, would never have presumed to place themselves on anything like equality with the reigning monarch.

And this, it seems to me, is perhaps one of the strongest justifications of the reality of the Atlantean account, of its basic probability, that we find in it such conditions as by no means obtained in any of the states, Mrican, Asiatic or European, as were contemporary with Plato, if perhaps a few minor resemblances be excepted.

We find, however, that in those countries where the Atlantean power planted its first possessions, a condition of things very much more resembling those reflected on Plato's account .

Indeed the entire tract from the Iberian peninsula to Orkney was in the earliest historical period governed by a dispensation resembling that reflected in Plato's account so closely that it might well have stood for its exemplar.

In­ deed the whole circumstances of the bull-cult, as drawn from the comparative study of its phenomena in Spain France, Britain, Crete and Egypt, are eloquent of its origin in sunken Atlantis, where, according to Plato's details, themselves drawn from an Egyptian source, we also find the worship of the bull in full celebration.

How far Plato's account of bull-sacrifice in Atlantis was sophisticated by a similar sacrifice in the Hellenic worship of Bacchus may be gauged from a brief study of the Bacchic ceremony.

"That a feast of raw flesh of some sort was traditionally held to be a part of Bacchic ceremonial," says Miss Jane Harrison in her Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion " is clear." Fir­ mini us Matern us, the Christian father, says of the Cretans: "They tear in pieces a live bull with their teeth, and by howling with discordant shouts through the secret places , of the woods, they simulate the madness of an enraged animal." If the bull-eater did not inhabit Athens in the days of Plato, he must have been known there at least, and it seems not improbable that Plato coloured his.

Moreover, we find him in Plato's account most definitely associated with Atlantis, where we are told his temple was the chief seat of worship in the island.

This notion, of course, if it is brought out anywhere in the writings of antiquity, appears in those of Plato.

Wherever the Atlantean tradition is to be found, indeed, the idea of the immo­ lation of human beings is likewise to be encountered, and although w_e discover in Plato's account nothing at all which would justify us in saying that the Atlanteans as a race were prone to human sacrifice, it is not too much, in view of what is said regarding their exceeding wickedness, to suppose that they may have been addicted to practices of the kind, especially when we find the rites of the holo­ caust, and especially of infant sacrifice, associated with the religious beliefs of the people who seem to have emanated from the sunken continent.

One species of the Monk Seal inh~bits the Mediterranean and another the West Indies, while the Siren is to be found in the estuaries of West Mrica, along the South American coast and among the West Indian islands, and the inference drawn is that their ancestors must have spread along some coastline which "united the Old World and the New at no very distant period." Plato assures us that the elephant was a denizen of Atlantis.

serves to reveal the historical value of Plato's account.

If they did not, it is most unlikely that the Egyptian tradition, as handed down by Plato, would have alluded to them «it all.

The last great fragment, finally engulfed, and no longer having left any other vestiges than the four archipelagoes, would be the Atlantis of Plato.

Plato's account seems to enshrine a very clear memory of the Azilian or proto-Iberian invasion of Europe from an Atlantic country.

"1 It must be clear that if Atlantis actually sunk about 96oo B.c., as Plato's account would give us to understand, all Atlantean colonial settlement on European soil must have ceased with that period, and if that be conceded, we must regard all Atlantean expansion in the Mediter­ ranean and other European areas as identified with Azilian or Iberian expansion.

Let us see what can be said for the existence of an Atlantean civilisation of considerably later date than that given by Plato for the final submergence of the island-continent, a culture which had either recaptured the ancient spirit of the pre-Aurignacian times, or which had developed from the Azilian type, and continued to exist into the " historical " period of European archreology.

The period possible for the existence of such a civili­ sation must naturally fall many centuries later than Plato's date of 9,6oo B.C., to permit of the development of a civilization more advanced than the Azilian, and, judg­ ing from the analogy of the growth of Egyptian culture, it will not be exceeding probability to place it somewhere about sooo years B.c.

The theory has been put forward that Plato's account of Atlantis was, indeed, a mere reminiscence of the fall of the Minoan civilization of Crete.

Early Minoan civilisation dates, roughly, from about 3,400 B.C., and certain of its phases bear a strong resemblance to Plato's picture of life in Atlantis.

In Plato's account of Atlantis practically all the details of the Atlantean complex may be discovered, and the same holds good of the myth of Quetzalcoatl.

Plato's dialogues are on this site at Timaeus and Critias, and there is already a note on his map of the world before the great flood.

In the second book he treats Plato's Atlantic island as a true history, not a fable, places it in the ocean between Spain and Africa and America, prints a map, and says the island was swallowed with its people by a flood or by earthquakes.

In the dialogue he calls Critias, Plato says that by the drawing of lots among the gods an island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic ocean, much larger than Africa and Asia, fell to Neptune.

Nine thousand years had passed from Plato's age to the age when that land was still in being.

On the next page he says the nine thousand years Plato counts down to his own time are an Egyptian comment.

The plate is captioned as the site of the island of Atlantis, once swallowed by the sea, drawn from the mind of the Egyptians and from Plato's description.

That is the step into Plato.

Plato teaches it in the dialogue entitled Critias.

Plato itaque in suo Dialogo, qui Critias intitulatur, sortitione Deorum, Neptuno obtigisse refert Insulam quandam ultra Herculeas Columnas in Oceano Athlantico sitam, Africa et Asia multo majorem; atque Solonem ab Aegyptiorum Sacerdotibus, (qui istius regionis situm, hominumque in ea viventium nomina, rerumque gestarum seriem monumentis suis descripserant) edoctum, Graeci juris reddidisse.

Between Plato's age and the age when the Atlantic land was still surviving, nine thousand years had intervened.

He says Plato takes the proof of it from the antiquity of Greece, produces the Isthmus as the first bound, and from there the destruction of Epyrum and Cytherona, running on until it ends at the sea.

The margin beside the Critias sentence names the Cratylus: Plato in the Cratylus, on the Atlantic island.

He then quotes Plato on a region stretched out from another continent like a promontory.

I am not supplying the rest from Plato.

The next leaf is the Greek side of the same story, which he has from Plato, and then the Egyptian expedition, which he will not retell in full.

He has Plato say that the deep bed of the sea lies open, and that the vase of the deep sea which surrounds it on every side, since many and great floods of nine thousand years came between, and that is the whole time from then to our age, left no part of the land in our time without the changes that follow when higher places flow down.

Plato, he says, brings this in to show the destruction of the Atlantic island, by an insignificant transmutation of part of the land, which the Greeks fable to have happened in Greece, over an interval of nine thousand years, by a triple flood.

He says Plato thinks the same thing happened in the Atlantic land.

He then says he will examine Plato's opinion on the decrease of mountains and the drying of rivers more copiously elsewhere, and that he now returns to the Atlantic island.

Plato tries in many ways to show it, while he curiously describes the site of the island, its quality, the customs and genius of the men, and the manner of governing it, when cities, camps, fortifications, and the apparatus of workshops had been built, not only of a wonderful extent, but furnished with gold, ivory, and precious stones, with which the temples of the gods were adorned, and with the greatest abundance of everything.

Certainly the Greeks, swollen in a strange way with glory, ascribe this expedition into the Atlantic land to the oldest and most autochthonous of the Athenians, as Plato says, and especially to the strength of their affairs and the skill of their right hands, so as to darken, by this memorable history, the oldest glory of the Egyptians.

Plato himself confesses that Solon learned the history from the Egyptians, who had written it in their monuments, as a monument, more perennial than cedar, of antiquity and of Egyptian strength.

What Plato says, that nine thousand years had flowed away down to his own time, by which he proves that these things happened, is likewise a comment of the Egyptians.

The cartouche reads: site of the island of Atlantis, once swallowed by the sea, from the mind of the Egyptians and from Plato's description.

He says Plato, looking at these things more deeply, recognized in the Phaedrus the perennial flames, the incredible waters both hot and cold, and many great rivers of water and of fire.

The findings are in The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato.

Lee 4 tad rch ile {7 -ὁ THE er ee / COMMENTARIES OF PROCLUS ON THE TIMAZUS OF PLATO, IN FIVE BOOKS 5 CONTAINING A TREASURY OF | 5001 PYTHAGORIC AND PLATONIC PHYSIOLOGY.

OF that golden chain of philosophers, who, having themselves happily penetrated, luminously unfolded to others the profundities of the philosophy of Plato, Proclus ts indisputably the largest and most refulgent link.

This is likewise more than probable, from what Marinus says in his life of him, ‘that he was a man laborious to a miracle ;” for it cannot be supposed that such a man would leave the greater part of one of the most important dialogues of Plato unelucidated, and particu- Jarly as these Commentaries were written by him (as the same Marinus informs us) in the flower of his age, and that he preferred them beyond all his other works." Fortunately however, the most important part of this work is preserved ; or that part in which the demiurgic, paradigmatic, and final causes of the universe are-unfolded ; the corporeal nature of it is represented as fabricated with forms and demiurgic sections, and distributed with divine numbers ; and soul is produced from the Demiurgus, and is filied with harmonic ratios, and divine and fabrieative symbols.

Charles Burney, on being once asked by me, whether he had ever read these Commentaries, candidly replied, ‘that they were too much for hin; atthe same time eaclaiming, ‘‘ What a giant was Proclus compared to Longinus!” ‘This confession, as the Doctor had never studied the philosophy of Plato, displayed a degree of good serse, which is seldom to be met with in a grammarian and philologist, om such an occasion; aud his cundour is still more remarkable, when it is considered that he had been a Reviewer.

of Plato can desire.

And this leads me to make some remarks on the iniquitous opinion which, since the revival of letters, has been generally entertained of the writtigs of Proclus and other philosophers, who are distinguished by the appellation of the latter Platonists, and to show the cause from which it origmated, The opinion to which T allude is this, that Plotinus and his followers, or in other words, all the Platonists that existed from his time to the fall of the Roman empire, and the destruction of the schools of the philosophers by Justinian, corrupted the philosophy of Plato, by filling it with jargon and revery, and by ascribing dogmas to him, which are not to be found in his writings, and which are perfectly absurd.

For since the philosophy of Plato, as 1 have elsewhere shown, is the offspring of the most consummate science, all the dogmas of it being deduced by a series of geometrical reasoning, some of them ranking as prior, and others as posterior, and the latter depending on the former, like the propositions in’ Eucla, certain preparatory disciplines are requisite to the perfect comprehension of these doctrines.

[16 must also be an adept in the writings of Aristotle, as preparatory to the more sublime speculations of Plato.

And in addition to all this, he must possess those qualifications enumerated by Plato in the 7th book of his Republic; viz.

Hence, they have presumed to decide on the excellence of works, with the true ments of which, as they were thus unqualified, they were wholly unacquainted, and to calumniate what they could not understand, They appear likewise to have been ignorant, that Plato, conformably to all the other great philosophers of antiquity, wrote in such a way as to conceal the sublimest of his doctrines from the vulgar, as well knowing, that they would only be profaned by them without being understood; the eye of the multitude, as he says, not being sufficiently strong to bear the Jight of truth.

“it is needless to mention, that it is unbecoming to speak of the most divine of dogmas before the multitude, Plato himself asserting that all these are ridiculous to the many, butin an admirable manner are esteemed by the wise.

With the Peripatetics likewise, some are esoteric, and others exoteric; and Parmenides himself, wrete some things co.formable to truth, but others to opinion; and Zeno calls some assertions true, but others adapted to the necessary purposes of life.” The men therefore, who have defamed the latter Platonists, being thus unqualified, and thus ignorant of the mode of writing adupted by the great ancients, finding from a superficial perusal of the most genuine disciples of Plato many dogmas which were not immediately obvious in his writings, and which were to them incomprehensible, confidently asserted that these dogmas were spurious, that the authors of them were delirious, and that they had completely corrupted and polluted the philosophy of their master.

It may also be added, as Olympiodorus justly observes, that the writings of Plato like those of Homer, are to be considered physically, ethically, theologically, and in short, multifariously; and that he who does not thus consider them, will in vain attempt to unfold the latent meaning they contain.

By the latter Platonists however, they have been explored in this way, and he who is capable of availing himself of the clucidations of these most benevolent and most sagacious men, will find the arduous sublimities of Plato accessible, his mystic narrations conformable to scientific deductions, and his apparent obscurity, the veil of conceptions, truly * Ore de azxpern ra Oewrara των Soyparwy ἐστιν, εἰς ἀκοὰς φερομέναᾳ τῶν woAwY, οὐδὲν dec λεγειν, avrov WAarwios εἰπονῦτον, ws παντα ravra καταγέλαστα μεν ἐστι τοις πολλοῖς, θαυμαστως δὲ alia τοις ovgus.

With respect to the following translation, 1 have only to observe, that [have endeavoured to the utmost of my ability to unite in it faithfulness with perspicuity, and to preserve the manner as well as the matter of the original, Independent of the difliculties snseparable from such an undertaking, and which arise from the abstruseness of the subjects that are discussed in this work, the original abounds with errors, not of a trifling, but of the most important nature; errors, which so materially affect the sense, that no one can read these Commentaries, unless he corrects them, and yet no one can correct the greater part of them, unless he is well acquainted with the philosophy of Plato.

good than the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was never imparted by divinity * This translation forms the last part of the Opuscula of Thomzus, printed at Venice in the year 1525 ; which work is so scarce, that Fabricius in his account of the Life and Writings of Proclus, (Biblioth.

* According to Plato in the 7th Book of his Republic, “that which springs up spontaneously, should not be forward to pay any one for its nurture.”

ArIsToTLF, the disciple of Plato, was born in the first year of the 99th Olympiad.

Crantor SoOtensis, the first interpreter of Plato, also a fellow disciple with Nenocrates of Plato, and an auditor of Polemo.

Hrraciipes Ponticus, a disciple of Plato and Speusippus.

Procius MaLtores, is mentioned by our Proclus as one of the ancient philosophers, Pytnacoras, the father of philosophy, flourished about the Goth Olympiad, Severus, a Platonist, but the time in which be flourished is not known, Socrates, the celebrated preceptor of Plato, was born in the 4th year of the 77th Olympiad.

Xenocrates, a disciple, and successor of Plato.

those who are not entirely illiterate, For this very treatise of the Pythagoric Timawus Concerning Nature, is written after the Pythagoric manner; and Plato being thence impelled, applied himself to write the Timwus, according to Sillographus." On this account we have pretixed the treatise of Timaus to these Commentaries, in order that we may know what the Timeus of Plato says that is the same with what is asserted in the treatise of Tinzeus (the Loecrian], what it adds, and in what it dissents.

But that the dialogue deservedly embraces a design of this kind, and that Plato alone preserving the Pythagoric mode in the theory concerning nature, has prosecuted with great subtilty the proposed doctrine,—ought to be considered by those who are more sagacious and acute.

the eflective, paradigmatic and final cause ;—this being the case, among the multitude of physiologists prior to Plato, that directed their attention to matter, there was ἃ diversity of Opinion respecting the subject of things, For Anaxagoras, who appears to have seen, while the rest were asleep, that intellect is the first cause of generated natures, made no use of intellect in his explaination of things, but rather employed certain airs and iethers as the causes of things that are generated, as Soerates says in the Phiedo.

But of those posterior to) Plato, who were the patrons of a sect, not all, but such of them as were more accurate than the rest, thought fit to survey physical form in conjunction with matter, referring the principles of bodies to matter and form.

Plato however alone, following the Pythagoreans, delivers indeed, as the cons causes of natural things, a tiiversal reeipient, and material form, which are subservient to causes properly so called, ino the generation of things.

TIMZEUS OF PLATO.

Justly, therefore, are all these delivered, and investigated with accuracy by Plato; and the remaining two, form and the subject-matter, suspended from these.

But that Plato very properly delivers all these causes of the fabrication of the world, viz.

nook 1.) TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

But that Plato directs his attention likewise to this, is evident froin what he says near the end of the dialogue, that it is necessary that the intellect of him who intends to obtain a happy life, should be assimilated to the object of his intelleetion.

} The ends also of fabrication are subtilely elaborated by Plato, according to genus and species, and also what pertains to meteors, together with productions in the earth, and in animals.

Aud in these things especially, Plato has something in common with other physiologists, For they were conversant with the most material, and the ultimate works of nature, neglecting the whole heaven, aud the orders of the mundane Gods, in consequence of directing their attention to matter; but they bade farewell to forms and primary causes.

It also appears to me that the demoniacal Aristotle, emulating as much as possible the doctrine of Plato, thus arranges the whole of his discussion concerning nature, perceiving that the things which are common to every thing that has a natural subsistence are, form and a subject, that from whence the principle of motion is derived, motion, time, and place; al!

which are delivered by Plato in this dialogue, viz.

But with respect to the things peculiar to substances according to an essential division, of these Aristotle discusses in the first place such as pertain to the heavens, ina way conformably to Plato; 50 far as he calls the heaven unbegotten, and a fifth essence.

Lor what diflerence is there between calling it a fifth clement, or a fifth world, and ἃ fifth figure, as Plato denominates it?) But in the seeond place, he discusses such things as are commoy to every thing that has a generated: subsistence, And) with respect to things of this hind, Plato deserves to be admired, for having surveyed with much accuracy the essence and powers of them, and for having rightly preserved their harmony and cgntrarieties.

And of these, such indeed as pertain to meteors, Plato has delivered the principles, but Aristotle has extended the doctrine respecting them beyond what is fit.

But such as pertain to the theory of aumals, are distinguished by Plato according te all final causes and concauses, but by Aristotle are scarcely, and bat in few Instances, surveyed according to form.

It is universally acknowledged, then, that Plato receiving the treatise of the Pythagoric Timiwus, which was composed by him after the Pythagoric manner, began to write his Timwus.

Again, it is - also acknowledged by those who are in the smallest degree conversant with the writings of Plato, that his manner is Socratic, philanthropic, and demonstrative.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

But Plato defines its peculiarities by geomc.tical figures, and leaves the causes of all these primordially pre-existing in the intelligible and demiurgic intellect.

As we have therefore spoken concerning the scope and management of the dialogue, have shown low admirable the character of itis, and what is the whole of the hypothesis, and have indicated the adaptation of the persons to the present discussion, twill be proper that, betaking ourselves to the words of απ, we should investigate every par- Hieular to the utinost of our power, Since, however, the word nature, being diflerently understood by different: per-sons, disturbs those who love to contemplate the conceptions of Plato, let us in the first place show what it appeared to him: to he, and what his opinion was of Its essence.

Others again called the whole of things nature, as some prior to Plato, of whom he speaks ino the Laws.

Plato, however, does not think fit to give the appellation of nature primarily, either to matter, or material ' For ore δὴ here, it is necessary to read οἱ dy,

ROOK 1] TIM-LEUS OF PLATO.

The next to this [or that which is of itself.) is the demiurgie intellect who abides Cas Plato says] in himself in his own accustomed manner.

And the next to this Cor itself] is the intelligible cause of all things, which is the paradigm of the productions of the Demiurgus, and which Plato on this account thinks fit to call animal itself.

As we have therefore shown what nature is according to Plato, that it is an incorporeal essence, inseparable from bodies, containing the reasons or productive principles of them, and incapable of perceiving itself, and as it is evident from * It appears to me, that the words roy αἰσθητὸν κόσμον, are wanting bere in the origival.

BOOK 1 TIMA:US OF PLATO.

For since the whole of philosophy is divided into the theory concerning intelligible and mundane natures, and this very properly, because there is also a twofold world, the intelligible and the sensible, as Plato himself says in the course of the dialogue,—this being the case, the Parmenides comprehends the discussion of intellizgibles, but the Timaus that of mundane natures.

The divine Iamblichus, therefore, says rightly, that the whole theory of Plato is comprehended in these two dialogues, the Timieus and Parmenides.

For it is requisite after having been exercised in discussions about the best polity, to be !ed to the knowledge of the universe; and after having contended with strenuous doubts about forms, to be sent to the mystic theory of the unities (of beings.) Tlaving however, said thus much, it is now time to consider the words of Plato, and investigate their meaning to the utmost of our ability.

person of those who having been received by me yesterday at a banquet of discussion, ought now to repay me with a similar repast δ᾽ Plato here, together with the grace and beauty of the words, raises and exalts the whole period.

Praxiphanes however, the disciple of Theophrastus, blames Plato, first because he makes an enumeration of one, two, three, ina thing which is Manifest to sense and known to Socrates.

name we are ignorant, the enumeration of those that are present contains a representation of the one that is wanting, as desiring that which rema‘nas, and as being in want of a part of the whole number, Plato therefore indicating this, represents Socrates “enumerating the persons that were present, and requiring him who was wanting, For it he had known him, and had been able to manifest him by name, he would perhaps have said, J see Critias, and Timeus, and Hlermocrates, but that man I do not see.

ποῦκ 1 TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

This also Socrates establishes, calling on them to become both guests and hosts, those that fill, and those that are filled, those that teach, and those that learn, Others, therefore, have written arts concerning disciplines through which they think they shall improve the manners of those that are instructed by them; but Plato delineates the forms of appropriate manners, through the imitation of the most eveellent men, which have much greater efficacy than those which are deposited in mere rules alone.

Hence too, there is much in Plato about the feast of discourse.

From these things also, you may survey such theological conceptions as the following: These men generated all things through the first numbers, and which also rank as rulers and leaders; and from three Gods, gave subsistence to all mundane natures, Of these three, the monad, duad and triad, are indicative; so that it is requisite to begin from these, and that be why surveys nature inwardly should look to these, Farther still, the concauses of mataral Chings were also contemplated) by other philosophers, as by Anaxagoras and Zeno; bat the final, the paradigmatic, and the producing ' cause, were peculiarly investigated by Plato, These causes therefore are manifested through the above numbers, Phe final, indeed, through the monad ; for it presides over numbers in the order of the good.

‘Phe Platonic Prolomy however, thinks that the absent person was Clitophon: for in the dialogue which bears hiv name, he is not thought deserving of an answer by Socrates, But Dereyilides is of opinion that it was Plato: for he was absent through illness, * See the beginning of the 7th book of the Republic.

For to say that it was either Theaxtetus or Plato, on account of illness, does not accord with the times.

And thus much for what is said by the more ancient interpreters, What, however, our preceptor [Syrianus] has decided on this subject, must be narrated by us, since it is remarkably conformable to the mind of Plato.

Does not this also accord with Plato, who assigns infirmity as the cause of the absence of this fourth person?

Plato, therefore, is accustomed to do this in many places.

ΠΕ ΕΌΒ OF PLATO.

ποοκ 1.) TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

For some, making a stop at the word polity, define the scope of it to be conformable to the inscription, and adduce Plato as a witness that it is concerning a polity.

noox 11] ΤΙΜ ΖΚ OF PLATO.

This very thing also was ina remarkable degree adopted by the Pytharoreans, Who investigated the similitades of beings from analogies, and betook themsclves from images to paradigms ; which likewise is now in a prefatory manner eflected by Plato, who points out to us, and gives us to survey in human lives those things which take place in the universe.

ὩΣ τοι Oe PRI πὰς Ὁ κ SEER OE 9 Be τον ἐών pooK 1] TIMGEUS OF PLATO.

Plato, however, appears to have divided the city into two parts, and to have established as one genus, that which is agricultural and that which pertains to the arts, which is called demiurgic τ but that which is belligerent, as another; not that he now recapitulates the military polity, as Longinus says, but because through the word dedligerent, he comprehends the auxiliaries and the guardians.

Unless it should be said, that Plato now ' For ro δαιμὸν φυλον in this place, it is necessary to read τὸ δαιμονὼν φυλον.

TIMMUs OF PLATO.

What, therefore, the works are of the military tribe, ‘Timaus clearly shows in what follows : “Ἱ mean that they ought to be only guardians of the city, so as to protect it from the hostile incursions both of external and internal enemies ; but yet in such a manner as to administer justice mildly to the subjects of their government, as being naturally friends, and to behave with warlike fierceness towards their enemies in battle.” In these words Plato is willing that the euardians and auxiliaries should be judges of those that act ill within the city, but contenders against those that are out of it; in one way the auxiliaries, and in another the guardians, as we have before observed.

aha noox 1.) TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

TIM.LUS OF PLATO.

For through these things Plato elsewhere calls divine souls Sirens, and shows that the celestial motion is harmoniously elegant ; for gymnastic is indeed in them.

Βοοκ 1] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Of women too we asserted, that they should be educated in such a manner that their natures might be aptly conformed so as to be similar to those of men; with whom they should perform im common both the duties of war, and whatever else belongs to the business of life.” Plato very properly thought that the virtues of men and women are common, since he evinces that both have one human form, but not the male one, and the female another.

This, however, is denied by others, who assert that there is a diflercnce according to form between men and women, though Plato has shown that itis both possible and advantageous for women to have the same virtues as men.

In order, however, that we may admire in a greater degree the conceptions of Plato, we must betake ourselves to wholes, and to the order of the universe, where we may survey a wonderful conspiration of the male and female nature.

If therefore we before rightly assimilated the guardians to the celestial Gods, but the auxiliaries to dwmons their attendants, and who are ministrant to their providential energies, Plato very properly embraces in these genera, a similar conjunction of the mate with the female, and imparts to both common virtue, and common employments ; just as Nature binds these genera to, and causes them to procreate the same things in conjunction with each other, But she does not divide the one from the other, since whatever is generated from both is unprolitic, when either of them is separated ; though there is a greater difference in the physical organs than in the lives of these; yet at the same time in these also, Nature makes the work of them to be common.

Moreover, it is easy conformably to Plato, to show how what is here said of marriages and children being common, applies to: women.

Pn αν .......ὅ BOOK 1.] TIMZUS OF PLATO.

For that the same Goddess is conjoined with diflerent Gods, or the same Gud with many Goddesses, may be assumed from mystical treatises, and from what are called Sacred Marriages in the mysteries, which Plato as much as possible imitating in what he ordains about politics and marriages, calls the marriages sacred.

But that they might from their birth acquire a natural disposition as far as possible the best, we decreed that the rulers whom we placed over the marriage rites should, through the means of certain lots, take care that in the nuptial league, the worthy were mingled with the worthy ; that no discord may arise in this connexion, when it does not prove prosperous in the end, but that all the blame may be referred to fortune, and not to the guardians of such a conjunction.” Plato particularly assumes in his Republic similitude, sameness, and geometrical, In conjunction with arithmetical equality, ino order that the similitude of it to the heavens, as in sensibles, or to the intelligible, as in supereclestial lives, may be perfectly preserved.

Longinus, however, doubts here, whether Plato was of opinion, that souls are emitted together with the seed: for in order that they may become most excellent, he conjoins similars with similars.

Our preceptor, however, thinks that in’ the first place it should be observed, that Plato himself adds, “ In order that they might acquire a natural disposition as far as possible the best.” For children receice a physical stmilitude from their parents, and participate of a certain dignity and excellence from their begetters, according to the physical virtues.

But why does Plato conceive it is better to think that Fortune is the cause of this distribution to the citizens?

δας A καράβι, ει, RN αὶ Boox 1] 'TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

words it may be beheld in motion, engaged in warlike actions, and contending with others, And it appears, says he, from hence, to be manifest that Plato does not admit that the habit of virtue by itself, but.

And in short, this is eflected by circumstances, as the Stoies also are accustomed to say, “ Give circumstances, and take the man.” For that which is not subdued by things which enslave others, manitests a life in every respect worthy, — Perhaps, however, it is absurd to refer the cause to these things alone, though they have a political reason, and not to look to the whole scope of Plato, according to which the God who adorns the polity in the heavens, Is ling also that generation should be governed by the celestial Gods, and that the war of forms in matter should always subsist ; in order that the cirele of generation may adambrate the celestial circulation.

BOOK t.] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Longinus says, that Plato here decorates and beautifies his diction, through similitudes and the gracefulness of the words.

For Plato, he observes, pays attention to the selection of words, and does not employ them casually.

It may, however, be said, that Plato made choice of this form of words from a mode of diction which was at that time common and usual, and that he was very attentive to what was customary.

Bat some blame Plato for employing metaphors in’ the use of words 5 though with respect to composition, all admire him, At the same time, however, it may be inferred, not from this cireumstance alone, but from such care and industry as are exhibited in the present words, that he paid great attention to diction.

Origen, however, grants indeed, that Plato is attentive to the grace of diction, not as regarding that which is pleasing, as the end of it, but that he employs this.

ROOK 1 TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

Longinus, however, and Origen, donbt, whether Plato comprehends Homer among the poets, when he says, that he has not only the same opinion of the poets then existing (for this is nothing novel), but likewise of those of former times, so that Porphyry informs us that Origen passed three whole days exclaiming, blushing and toiling, asserting that the hypothesis and the doubt were great, and being ambitious to show that the imitation in the poetry of Homer is sufficient for virtuous actions, For who speaks more magnificently than Llomer, who, representing the Gods as contending and fighting with each other, does not err in his imitation, but speaks loftily conformably to the nature of things?

It appears, therefore, to me, that Plato divides poetry into the divinely-inspired, and the artificial, And having made this division, he refers the magnificent diction and sublimity derived from inspiration, to the Gods.

For thas we deride most of those, except Plato, who have written the Apology of Socrates, as not preserving the Socratic manner in their composition.

TIMZUS OF PLATO.

We, however, say, that Plato everywhere changes his mode of diction, so as to be adapted to his subjects; and in unusual things, studies mutations of expression.

BOOK 1.J TIM.ZUS OF PLATO.

If, however, Plato calls the city of Timaus Lo-cris, it not being usual with the Greeks thus to denominate it, but to call it Locri only, in order to distinguish it from the Locris opposite to Eubcea, we must not wonder.

For Plato changes many things for the purpose of signifying in a clearer manner the thing proposed.

See the oth Book of my translation of Proclus on the Theology of Plato.

ORAS Os < AMO βε" BOOK 1.] TIM.£US OF PLATO.

With respect τὸ 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 Exyptians had written on this subject; and that he so far regards what is said by these deriders as to refer to the Exyptians this history about the Athenians and Atlanties, and to believe that the Athenians once lived conformably to this polity.

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

Others again, say, that this narration Is a fable, and a fictitious account of things, which by no means had an existence, but which bring with them an indication of natures which are perpetual, or are cenerated in the world 5 not attending to Plato, who exclaims, “ that the narration is surprising in the extreme, yet ts in every respect true.” For that which is in every respect true, is not partly true, and partly not true, nor is it false according to the apparent, but true according to the inward meaning; since a thing of this kind would not be perfectly trac.

“......5....ὕ..ὄ BOOK 1.} TIMAUS OF PLATO.

For they say, that one kind is that of divine dwmons ; another, of diemons according to habitude, to which partial sonls give completion, when they obtain a damoniacal allotment; and another is that of depraved diemons, who are also noxious to sonls, Daemons, therefore, of this last kind, wage this war against souls, in their descent into generation, And that, say they, which ancient theologists refer to Osiris and Typhon, or to Bacchus and the Titans, this, Plato, from motives of piety, refers to the Athenians and Atlantics.

Before, however, souls descend into solid bodies, those theologists and Plato, deliver the war of them with material daemons who are adapted to the west; since the west, as the Egyptians say, is the place of noxious demons.’ Of this opinion is the philosopher Porphyry, respecting whom, it would be wonderful, if he asserted any thing different from the doctrine of Numenius.

Moreover, if we consider the polity of Plato as analogous in every respect to the world, it is necessary that we should survey this war as existing in every nature.

For the polity is analogous to existence and essences, but war, to the powers of these essences, and as Plato says, to their motions, We must, like- ' For exc καὶ ἡ dusts, here it is necessary to read ἐπεὶ καὶ Svors, and for caswricor, κακωτίκων, 3.

And Plato, as well as theologists, rightly perceiving that this is the case, have delivered a multitudinous contrariety prior to the one fabrication of the world, and parts * cae is omitted in the original, aud the omission of it, reuders the latter part of the sentence very ambiguous.

ne cacao EE HOOK 4.) TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Their mode, however, of narrating them, is adapted to them, but the present mode to Plato; the latter, in conjunction with the political science, being more moderate, but the former, in conjunction with the telestic art, being more replete with divine inspiration, And thus much concerning the whole of the text.

ΤΕ is also very properly said, that “ Solon was the wisest of the seven wise men ;~ as being asserted of one who was related to Plato; as being said to another Athenian, and in the Panathenaie 5 and as indicating that the ensuing narration extends to all wisdom.

But he once declared to our grandfather Critias (as the old man himself informed us) that great and admirable actions had once been achieved by this city, which nevertheless were buried in oblivion through length of time, and the destruction of mankind.” The history of the race of Solon, and of the alliance of Plato to him, is as follows: The children of Execestides were, Solon and Dropides, and of Dropides Critias was the son, who is mentioned by Solon in his poems, where he sings, Bid Critias with the yellow locks, Attention to his father pay, * The same story is also told of Solon, by Diogenes Laertius, in his life of Thales.

But Charmides and Perictione were the offspring of Glauco: and Perictione was the mother of Plato.

And Charmides was the uncle of Plato, but Solon was the brother of the great-grandfather of Critias.

But by likewise adding, ‘ and an intimate Jricnd,” he indicates, that there was not merely a communion of race, but a sameness and similitude of lite, in the ancestors of Plato.

“Jn particular, he informed me of one undertaking surpassing in magnitude all the rest, which I now think proper to relate to you, both that I may repay my obligations, and that by such a relation I may offer my tribute of praise to the Goddess in the present solemnity, by celebrating her divinity, as it were, with hymns, justly, and in a manner agreeable to truth.” Longinus doubts what was the intention of Plato in the insertion of this narration, For he does not introduce it either for the purpose of giving respite to the auditors, or as being in want of it.

And he dissolves the doubt, as he thinks, by saying, that it is assumed by Plato prior to: physiolozy, in order to allure the reader, and soften the severity of that hind of writing, But Origen says, that the narration is indeed a tietion, and so far he agrees with Numenius and lus followers, but he does not admit: with Loneinus, that it was devised for the sake of pleasure.

{0 does not, however, add the cause of the fiction, We, therefore, have frequently said, that it contributes to the whole theory of mature 5 and we likewise sav, that in these words, Plato calls the one and common productive principle of the twofold co-ordinations ino the world, and the one contrariety which pervades through wholes, the greatest and most admirable of works, as containing the other fabrication of things in infrangible bonds, this) fabrication consisting of participations of the contraries, bound and infinity, as Philolaus says, and as Plato also asserts in the Philebus.

1 will acquaint you with that ancient history, which 1 did not indeed receive from a youth, but from aman very much advanced in years.” Longinus here again observes, that Plato pays attention to elegance of diction, by narrating the same things differently.

Origen, however, docs not admit that Plato is studious of artificial delight and certain ornaments of diction, but that he pays attention to spontaneous and unadorned credibility, and accuracy in imitations.

BOOK 1.) TIM.LZUS OF PLATO.

For these observations are worthy the conceptions of Plato, and not a solicitous attention to diction.

ΤΙΝῸΣ PLATO.

Upon hearing this, the old man (for I very well remember) was vehemently delighted ; and said, laughing —If Solon, O Amynander, had not engaged in poetry as a casual affair, but had made it as others do a serious employment ; and if through seditions and other fluctuations of the state in which he found his country involved, he had not been compelled to neglect the completion of the history which he brought from Egypt, I do not think that cither [Hesiod or Homer, or any other poet, would have acquired greater glory and renown.” ° / Here again, the lovers of diction may indicate to their admirers, that Plato * The word Aoyovs is, | conceive, omitted in the original in this place.

For Plato, if any one, was a most excellent judge of pocts, as Longinus also admits.

Heraclides Ponticus therefore says, that Cheerilus and Antimachus being at that time most renowned, Plato preferred the poems of the latter to those of the former, and that he persuaded Heraclides at Colophon, to collect the poems of Antimachus.

Tn vain, therefore, is it futilely observed by Callimachus and Duris, that Plato was nota sufficient judge of poets.

From these things, however, as images, Plato manifests, that what is primanly demiurgic, and every thing effective, have other primary energies ; but that their secondary energy is the production of secondary things.

200K 1.) TIMEUS OF PLATO.

For “ wisdom,” says Plato, “ and true opinions are most desirable things to himwho has arrived at old age.” Again, the assertion of Critias, that he very well remembers, exhibits to our view the salvation of eternal productive powers, and the stable energy of secondary causes, about such as are first.

If, however, some one omiiting the survey of things, should consider through what cause Plato introduced’ these particulars, according to their apparent’ meaning, he will very properly find that they contributed to the thing proposed.

For the design of Plato was to narrate the Atlantic war.

Origen, however, doubts how Plato calls Solon most free: for this is not an encomium adapt ed toa poet.

TIMEUS OF PLATO.

Porphyry, however, says, that Longinus did not perceive, that, in consequence of the undertaking being the greatest, but not yet celebrated, Plato adds, “ ought most justly to be most renowned.” But we, directing our attention to things, say, that Plato calls it the greatest undertaking, as bringing with it an image of all contrariety, extending itself every where.

Plato appears, through this, to investigate the whole forin of contraricty, how it was effected, or may be known, and from what causes, tous invisible, itis suspended, Before, therefore, he recurred through relatives to the narration of Solon; but now he investigates the superior histories of it, or, that ITmay speak clearer, the principles of the fabrication of this contrariety.

With respect to Delta also, itis produced from the Nile, being divided about the Saitic province, so as to make its egress from one right line to the right and left, and to the sea, the sea forming the hypothenuse of the triangle, which Plato calls the Saitic province 5 indicating, in what he here says, that it is that about which the stream of the Nile is divided.

BOOK 1.} TIMLUS OF PLATO.

But Plato only says thus much concerning them, “that the Suite were very friendly to the Athenians, and after a certain manner allied to them.” \t is possible, however, that he might say this on account of the tutelar Goddess of the city being the same with the Minerva of the Athenians.

She is very properly, therefore, called by Plato a lover of wisdom, and a lover of war, and he now denominates her the leader of these allotments in the earth.

βοοκ 1.) ᾿ TIMGEUS OF PLATO.

ἢ Ἷ Ϊ KOUK 4.) TIMAUS OF PLATO.

ὑσιωυττε Ble ee σνεατασος στ Klean guest {in Plato] says, that those who live in the Saturnian period, proceed from being older to being younger; but those that live in the period of Jupiter, proceed ina contrary direction, And _ in this dialogue, Timieus says, respecting the soul, that the Demiurgus produced it more ancient than the body, and on this account constituted it of amore principal nature.

TiIMAUS OF PLATO.

TIMEUS OF PLATO.

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 conflegration has happened, but acertain dire impiety, which has entirely obliterated the race of men." Or it may be said that Plato now calls climates, places.

> ee NEN STI ΝῊ nook 1 TIMEUS OF PLATO.

For the words, “where neither intense cold, nor immoderate heat prevails,” appear to signify, where nether of the contrarics being excessive, impedes habitation, And, in short, since Plato had before observed, that the transactions of the Egyptians were said to be most ancient, he very properly adds, that in reality, every climate which is commensurate to the habitation of men, has always men more or less numerous.

And this likewise Plato now asserts, when he says, “where neither intense cold, nor immoderate heat prevails, the race of men iy always preserved, though it is somedimes more, and at other times less numerous.” With other nations, however, there is an oblivion of ancient transactions, not through the failure of men, but in consequence of frequent destructions taking place, certain illiterate and rustic persons alone remain.

TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

But Plato says, “in accustomed ycars,” because such like destructions are accomplished conformably to certain circulations, Which also have themselves a certain consecutive order with reference to.

And thus it happens that you become juvenile again, and ignorant of the transactions of ancient times, as well of those among us, as of those in the regions which you inhabit.” - For from a deluge, Plato says, that herdsmen and shepherds are left, but that the inhabitants of cities are destroyed.

ὄπα BOOK 11] ΤΙΣ 5 OF PLATO.

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

And some assert-ing, that, in the first place, the developement of these, and such dike narrations, appeared τὸ Plato himself tobe the province of a certain laborious and not very fortunate man;' and in the second place, that what is delivered by Plato is not a thing of such an enigmatical mature, as the doctrine of Phereeydes, but that he teaches with perspicuity concerning most of his dogmas, Neither, therefore, say they, should we force him to analyse, since the man proposes to instructus without ambiguity.

And in the fourth place, that fwe analyse all things, we shall safler the same as those who ina slippery mannerare conversant with) Tomer, Others again think that the developement of this history should be referred to physical harmony, from what Plato savs of the narration about Phaeton, thatat has mdeed the form of a fable, bat: that at} manifests a certain matural event; saice the Ug yptians also, who, as Plato says, were the fathers of this relation, obscurely signified the arcana of nature through fable.

So that the developement of this narration * Plato says this in the Phwdrus of the man who does uot adapt the eapliations of fables to divine concerns, but interprets them plysically,

nooKx 1} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Po which may be added, that Plato himself elsewhere accuses those who speak every thing from what is at hand, in order, says he, that they may render their wisdom manifest, even to shoemakers.

So that he who delivers true assertions through enigmas, is not foreign from the mind of Plato.

> > The second triad of the above order is denominated [Jeaven, by Plato in the Phadrus.

® Aud the third triad of this order, is called by Plato in the Phadrus, the eub-celestial arch.

See my translation of Proclus on the Theology of Plato,

3 i SNP ORES BOOK 1.] TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

For all the teachers of physiology begin from contraries, and make these to be principles; which Plato also knowing, delivers to us, through symbols and enigmas, what the contrariety is of the genera in the universe, and how less are subjugated to more excellent natures, through the intellectual energy of Minerva.

Farther still, Plato very properly calls the polity the work of the Athenians, because it is requisite that such an analogy as this which the junior fabrication connects, should proceed through all things ; but that total powers should by a much greater priority eflect this, from which also the junior fabrication being filled, gives subsistence to mundane intellects, to souls andbodies, conformably to the pec ularity of itself.

TIMEUS OF PLATO.

A better image however of this, is that which in the narration of Plato, and in enigmas, represents to us the whole contrariety of things, and of the works of Minerva; which narration contributes to the whole (deseriptive) fabrication of the world, in the same manner as the veil to the splendid precession of the Goddess, and the whole of the solemnity.

That we may however recur to the thing proposed to be considered, ‘the Egyplian priest directly imitates the unenvying providence of the Demiurgus, about which Plato a litde farther on says, “ FHe was good, but envy never subsists in him who ts good, about any thing.” For the orders which exist proximately with him, Tim.

TIMMUS OF PLATO.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

"οὐκ 1.} TIMASUS OF PLATO.

For that which mature cllects by verging to bodies, this God fashions divinely and exemptly, excitine nature, and using her as an instrument to her own fabrication, Por innate heat is Vuleanian, being generated by Vulean as subservient to corporeal production, The productive cause therefore of generated natures is referred, ino what) Plato says, to this God.

Since however matter is necessary to things that are generated; for the Gods in the heavens borrow parts from the universe, as things which will be again returned, for the generation of mortal animals; this also Plato delivers to us, ina very adimirable manner, through earth.

Ce a ea BOOK 1.] TIMUS OF PLATO.

Boox 1] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

cove nia Dae BOOK 17} TIM.LUS OF PLATO.

* For Plato himselfin the Politicus arranges the priests under the politician, and does not impart to them political power.

* Plato asserts this of the guardians, in bis Republic,

ΔἸ] this administration therefore of snblunary damons is said by Plato to receive many demiurgic distributions, in consequence of looking to the efleet which now is, or is becoming to be.

For archangels are not any where mentioned by Plato, uor does the military genus pertain to souls verging to bodies.

aI LTT OE 800K 1] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

For Plato, likewise, denominates the lapse of the soul into generation, a dissemination, But to sow is most adapted to husbandmen, as is, also, to collect productions of nature.

For Plato, in the Politicus, delivers to us certain divine shepherda.

The same method was likewise adopted by shepherds, hunters, and husbandmen.” The whole of this tetractys has, indeed, the third order, according to a section of the genera into: three, but is now enumerated by Plato as the second; in order that through this, whats said may imitate the universe, inowhich the last is the middle, comprehended on all sides by more divine natures.

AE EERIE ESE OE nook 1] TIM.TEUS OF PLATO.

TIM US OF PLATO.

nook 1] TIM:GUS OF PLATO.

parses ce BOOK 1.) TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

But this is effected through a certain quality, or rather each portion of place possesses a power of this kind from its allotted divinity ; and Plato calls this adaptation, excellence of temperature; since there are many physical, psychical, deemoniacal, and angelical powers in each portion of place, but each unity of the allotted divinity unites and mingles all these in an unmingled manner.

Since however the Seasons are allotted from the Father, the guardianship of these portions of place and allotments, to whose care, as Llomer ' says, “the mighty Heaven and Olympus are committed,” and according to which, the co-adaptations of souls similiar to places is effected ; hence Plato suspends this excellent temperature froin the Seasons, the whole of it deriving from thence its subsistence.

We must not however wonder, if Plato praises the excellent: temperature of the visible Seasons.

But whether he accords with the words of Plato, may be surveyed from what has been said.

We shall show, therefore, from the following words of Plato, how that which excels in prudence is of a more Minerval characteristic.

ee poor 11] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

139 In what is here said, Plato delivers to us the most accurate conception respecting this greatest divinity, unfolding to those who are sufficiently able to perceive his meaning, the indications of theologists, Different interpreters however betake themselves to diflerent arrangements of the Goddess ; some indeed narrating their opinion more enigmatically, but others more clearly, yet not confirming what they assert.

If, however, it be requisite that the conceptions of these men should become manifest, and prior to these, that what is delivered by Plato should be shown to accord in the highest degree with theologists, we must assert as follows : deriving what we say from a supernal ongin.

| : ἃ Book 1.) TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Hence, also, Ε think Homer represents her as an associate in battle with the Greeks against the Barbarians; just as Plato here relates that she was an associate with the Greeks against the inhabitants of the Atlantic island; in order that every where more intellectual and divine natures may “rule over such as are more irrational and vile.

We should, also, discuss the remaining appellations of the Goddess, if, what we have already said might not appear to be prolin through my sympathy with the discussion, Again, therefore, recurring to the thing proposed we must say, that Plato calls both these divinities, Love and) Minerva, philosuphers, not for the same reason; but he thus denominates the former, as being the middle of wholes, and as leading to intelligible wisdom ; and the latter as the summit of wholes, and as the union of demiurgic wisdom, Por the Demiurgus is “ Metis the first generator and much-pleasing Love.” And as Metis, indeed, he brings forth Minerva; but as Love, he generates the amatory series.

Fl IN IIE ti Hn ον οί Seu sient nook 1] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

For these dogmas, however, he is corrected by the interpreter that came after him.' “ Por these writings relate, what a mighty power your city once tamed, which rushing from the Atlantic sea, spread itself with hostile fury overall Europe and Asia.” Plato in what is here said, neither omits any thing of encomiastic «augment, if the war of the Athenians against the Atlanties is considered as a mere history 5 nor fails in theological accuracy in Conjunction with caution, ifany one is) willing to pass from partial natures to wholes, and to proceed from images to paradigms.

As itis usual, therefore, in Panathenaic orations to celebrate most amply the Persian expedition, and the victories of the Athemians both by land and sea, with which more recent orators fill their orations 3 Plato in praising the Athenians, neither delivers the Persian invasion nor any other similar deed, but introducing the Atlantic war against the parts inhabited by us, and which rushed from.

Since, however, the Persian expedition came from the east against the Grecks, and particularly against the Athenians, Plato introduces the Atlantic war from the west, inorder that you may survey the city of the Athenians as from a centre, castgating a Barbaric multitade pouring against ton each side in’ a disorderly manner.

“To which may be added, that in the institutes delivered by the ancestors of the Athenians, and also in the mysteries, the Gigantic war is celebrated, and the victory of Minerva over the Giants, because in conjunction with ber father she vanquished these and the Titans, Plato, however, does not think it safe immnediately to introduce war against the Gods; for this is the very thing which he Hlamesintheancient poets; and itwould beabsurd that Critias or’Timwus, who were auditors of what Socrates said against the poets on the preceding day, should ἐν ον By the divine Jamblichus.

ἥ ERE φπδν FNRI S PO ES ih ROOK 1.] TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Betaking ourselves, therefore, to the interpretation of the words of Plato, we think it fit to remind ourselves, of the beforementioned forms of analysis; and that we must arrange the Atlantics according to all the total natures of the inferior co-ordination.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

ee nook 1.] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Hence Plato says that the Atlantics spread themselves externally, as being more remote from the one and nearer to matter; but that they inbabited an island larger than both Libya and Asia, as proceeding into bulk and interval.

“Tn this Atlantic island there was a combination of kings, who with great and admirable power subdued the whole island, together with many other islands and parts of the continent; and = besides this sube jected to their dominion all Libya as far as to Migypt, and Lurope as far as to the ‘T'vrrhene sea.” lu what is here said it is requisite to recolleet the Platonic hypotheses about the earth, that Plato does not measure the magnitude of it conformably to mathematicians ; but apprehends the interval of it to be greater than they admit it to be, as Socrates says in the Phaedo; and that he supposes there are many habitable parts similar to the part which we inhabit.

And he who looks to the whole magnitude of the earth, bounded by its elevated parts, will infer that it ix truly immense, according to the assertion of Plato.

For these methods measure the carth according to the surface which ts ithabited by us ; but Plato says that we dwellin a cavity, and that the whole earth is elevated, which also the sacred rumor of the Eguplians asserts, Aud thus much concerning what is related of the magnitude of the Athintic istund, in order to show that it is not proper to disbelieve what is said by Plato, though it should be received as a mere history.

ἐυσοωκαν eae Ste BooK 1.] TIMUsS OF PLATO.

Plato also appears to have called the power of the Atlantics great and admirable, because Thaumas and Bias are said by ancient theologists to have belonged to this order.

The words of Plato likewise, have a great augment, in order to exhibit the work of the victors in a greater and more splendid point of view.

154 PROCLUS ON ΤῊΝ {noox 1, Plato docs not say that there was once sedition among divine natures, or that subordinate subducd more excellent beings.

“Then it was, O Solon, that the power of your city was conspicuous to all men for its virtue and strength.” Plato opposes to the power of the Atlantics, the power of the Athenians ; preferring this appellation, as heing adapted to the middle fabrication.

net TAR ες“ “νυ RS nooK τι] TIMEUS OF PLATO.

But the most ample liberty, is an indication of the divine and iiberated order, proceeding from on high to all things; which liberty the Athenians imparted to the Greeks, by vanquishing the Atlantics; or rather the Olympic, by subduing the ‘Titanic genera, For thus the demiurgic will is accomplished, and the worse is vanquish-ed by the better co-ordination; in partial natures indeed the Atlantics by the Athenians, but in wholes, the Titans by the Olympian Gods,“ Though they are robust, and oppose the better order, through pernicious pride, and insolent improhity,” says the theologist; whom Plato emulating, asserts that the Atlantics insolently proceeded against the Athenians.

πο ses er στον ROOK 1.} ἘΠΕ OF PLATO.

That these particulars however, have reference to the admirable and orderly distribution of the universe, we shall be convinced by recollecting what is said by " The text of Plato in this place is in the Commentaries of Proclus very erroneous, as the Jearned reader will immediately perceive by comparing it with any of the editions of the Timzus.

‘Titanic Gods," terminates the whole ordorly distribution in the extremities of the universe, and imparts to these also the undefiled providence of the Gods, — Plato, therefore, knowing this, and delivering to us wholes in images, extends and leads into the invisible, these twofold genera, and through this disappearing, imitates the Orphic precipitation into Tartaras, Por in order that the last of things may be adorned, and participate of divine providence, it is requisite that both the superior and inferior co-ordination, should extend their production from on high as far as fo the mundane extremity.

Since however these things are adorned, both the invisible and visible fabrication receiving their completion, on this account Plato says, they happened in one dreadful day and night, aight indicating the invisible causes, but day the visible, and the dreadfulness, signifying opposing power, the inflexible, and that which proceeds through all things.

The mention also of fortune and divinity, and the excitation of our reasoning powers, are worthy of the theory of Plato.

nooK 1] TIM-EUS OF PLATO.

TIMZUS OF PLATO.

partes πον 5 ν BOOK ν.} ΤΙΝ Ό5 OF PLATO.

So that such things as Plato discusses about the magnitude of the Atlantic island, 1uust not be rejected as fabulous and _ fictitious on account of those who enclose the earth in a very narrow space.

“ Hence it is requisite that you should speak with good Fortune, but that I on account of my discourse yesterday, should now rest from speaking, and be attentive to what you have to say.” Plato does not, like the Stoics, assert, that the worthy man has no need of Fortune; but he is of opinion that our dianoetic energies, since they are complicated with corporeal energies, according to external progression, should be inspired by good Fortune, in order that they may proceed fortunately, and that their effect upon others may be friendly to divinity.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

And if, indeed, Plato beginning from the end proceeded to the ‘Timeus, which is first by nature, it will be asserting, what is usual to say, that for the sake of doctrine, things that are first to us, though posterior by nature, are first’ delivered ; but that now he appears to have arranged the middle as the first, and the first as the middle.

And if, indeed, this arrangement had been adopted by those who are studious of ornament, it would have been less wonderful; but now Plato himselfappears to have acted in this manner, Προ, therefore, there is a recapitulation of the polity, as having been already summarily narrated in the shortest: manner, In answer tu this doubt it must be said, that if all hypotheses were assumed from the nature of things now in existence, or which were formerly, it would be necessary that the.

Perhaps, likewise, Plato wished to indicate this to us, that such things as divine (human) souls, and which are ascending to the intelligible, produce, these are some time or other effected on the earth, according to certain prosperous vicissitudes of circulations, As Critias therefore asserts this, bearing testimony to Socrates, we must say that those true ancestors of ours of which the priest spoke, perfectly accord with those citizens which Socrates mentally conceived, and our opinion is not to be rejected that they were those who existed at that time.

Plato also manifests through these things, (hat the soul when she is of herself [and does not depend on another] is superior to every physical hypostasis, and runs above Fate ; but when she verges to actions, is vanquished by physical laws, and is in subjection to Fate.

ete AEN SRAM δος σον, TL ον BOOK 1.] TIM EUS OF PLATO.

172 PROCLUS ON THE TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

I mean, he connects with the words, ‘ J now therefore stand prepared to receive the promised feast,” the words, “ But now consider, Socrates, the manner of our disposing the mutual banquet of discussion.” But Porphyry and Jamblichus show that this preface accords with the whole design of the dialogue, the one indeed more partially, but the other with more profound intuition ; so that we also shall here finish the book in conformity to Plato, having adopted their order.

noon tJ TIMALUS OF PLATO.

It is fit however, that transferring what he says to what is more usual and more known to the reader, we should render his meaning clear, and assign arguments concerning prayer which accord with the doctrme of Plato.

TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

179 other to pray than he who is transcendently good, as the Athenian guest {in Plato} says.

wisdom] in the impulse to every undertaking, whether small or great, always invoke divinity.” Do you see what kind ofan hypothesis Plato refers to the Timwus; what kind of an auditor of it he introduces, viz.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

And thus this must be determined, It is usual however to doubt, why Plato here adds ina certain respect: for he says, “© Those who are about to speak ina certam respect concerning the universe.” And the more superficial indeed of the interpreters say, that the universe is δὲ a certain respect unbegotten, and in a certain respect generated.

Though Plato does not coarrange ἡ τὸ πὴ ina certain respect, with the words unbegotten and gencrated, but with the words about to speak.

Gods: for Plato says, “ that the soul speaks, being moved to itself.” Those words which are surveyed in science, are of another kind, And those are of another kind which are allotted the third hypostasis from intellect, and which proceed externally for the sake of discipline and communication with others.

For it is one thing to use them intellectually, another scientifically, and another, for the sake of discipline; and xy indicates these differences of words, Again therefore, with respect to the words, “whether it was generated, or is without generation,” those interpreters read the former with an aspirate, but) the latter with a soft breathing, who say that) Plato speaks about the universe, so far as it mR?

And the Platonic Albinus thinks, that according to: Plato the world being perpetual, δ has a beginning of generation, by which also it is more redundant than being; sinee this indeed always is, but the world in addition to existing always, has a beginning of generation, in order that it may exist always, and be generated.

[This therefore is asserted by Albinus], thenueh Plato no where in what follows says, that the universe is ina certain respect generated, and ina certain respect unbegotten.

EUS OF PLATO.

Hence, the paradigm contains intelligibles in intellect, but mtroduces sense to the worlds, as the Oracle says; or as Plato, “ such ideas therefore, as intellect perceived to be inherent in animal itself, so many he diancetically saw this universe ought to possess.” Moreover, the distinction between beings and things generated, Is consentaneous to what has been before said.

Was it nade as if it were the section of a certain whole inty parts, or as genus is divided into species, or as the division of one word into many significations, or as that of essence Into accidents, Or vice versa, '-This word is not to be found in any edition of the ‘Timus of Plato; but from this comment of Proclus, it appears that it originally belonged to it.

ἘΙΜΞΟΒΟΟΣ PLATO.

For what word is there which Plato assuming as common, divides into perpetual being, and that which is generated ; unless some one should say that τι, 1.

What then shall we say?) Must it not be this, that Plato does not now make any division whatever, but that he proposes to detine separately what cach of these two, perpetual being, and that which is generated, is?

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

We however, cannot know which of these assertions it is fit to adopt, unless we examine each of them by itself, Let us then consider from the beginning, what power each of the words fof Plato] possesses in itself.

It was also doubted by some that preceded us, why Plato did not demonstrate ἐλ αν there is such a thing as perpetual being, prior to the inquiry what it is.

After all that has been said, however, the most true solution of the doubt 15, that Plato now assuming as an hypothesis that there is perpetual being, defines it.

μονρ γα ρα τον BUOK 11.} TIMAUS OF PLATO.

That the paradigmatic cause, therefore, is ta be arranged in perpetual being, is clearly evident from Plato when he says, “ According to which of the paradigms did the artificer fabricate the world?

But that this is also true of the Demiurgus, is evident from this; that Plato calls the soul, which the Demiurgus constitutes, the first of generated natures, and delivers the generation of it.

Hence also Plato says concerning him, “ Afler this manner therefore was there truly an eternal reasoning of the God.” And how is it possible that being a divine intellect he should not rank among eternal beings?

For there Plato arranges the one being prior to whole, and prior to the intelligible all; though the whole and the all are intelligible.

Here, however, Plato clearly ealls the paradigm’ perpetual being, and a whole, and all-perfect.

Will it not, therefore, be better to say, that there is indeed such an order of being, as that divine man (lamblichus] has delivered, and such as Plato elsewhere surveys; but that now Plato thus denominates every cternal world?

For this latter ty better than ἐπ creer, as subsisting between dhe one and eternity, and prior Co eternity being denominated one ΠΟΙ Vf, therefore, it be requisite that I should say what appears to me to he the truth, Plato now precedancously asstanes every thing which is clernally being ; beginning, indeed, from the nature of animal itself, Pur dus ts pronwarily elcrnal ; but ending in partial intellects, But the one being, he perhaps omits, in consequence of its existing as the?

Hence Plato will now speak in reality of every intelligible, that intelligible is mot assumed which is oceult, is) the highest, and does not depart from the one.

nook 11.} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Not as some assert, that perpetual being is said, for the sake of perspicuity, to be without generation ; nor according to others, that Plato was willing to speak of it both affirmatively and negatively ; but that it is necessary perpetual being should be intellectually perceived subsisting by itself, remote from al!

Why then it may be said, did not Plato add, always, and that which is generated, in the same manner as dei, or at a certain time, in order that he might have whatts generated entirely opposed to perpetual being?

May we not say that Plato devised this mode of expression, Jooking to the various nature of that which is) generated, and taking away from eternal being the existence ata certain time, and the perpetuity ofa generated nature?

ROOK II.) TIMZEUS OF PLATO.

ποοκ 11.} TIMEUS OF PLATO.

199 Plato in the same manner as georetricians, employs definitions and hypotheses prior to demonstrations, through which he frames his demonstrations, and antecedently assumes the principles of the whole of physiology.

For as the principles of music are different from the principles of medicine, and ina similar manner there are diferent principles of arithmetic and mechanics ; thus also there are certain principles of the whole of physiology, which Plato now delivers to us; [and these are as follow :] Zrulu existing being ts that which may be comprehended by intelligence in conjunction with reason.

But since, as we have before observed, Timeus does not resemble other physiologists, being a Pythagorean physiologist, and Plato exhibits in this dialogne the highest science, hence he afterwards very divinely proves ¢hat truly existing being is.

It appears also to me, that Aristotle in his Physics, imitating Plato, assumes one * For παραξειγμα airioy here, read παραξειγματικον αἰτιον.

Aristotle, however, shows that the universe is unbegotten, from the hypotheses ς but Plato that it is generated.

And this, indeed, will again be considered, Why, however, does Plato, who is accustomed to employ, when speaking of intelligibles, the terms αὐτὸ ἐπεί, and ὁπερ that which, now assume neither of these, but rather prefers the term ass aleays, as connascent with being.

BOOK 11.j TIM.£2ZUs OF PLATO.

Tleuce, if Plato had been speaking about participants and things participated, and: for this purpose had required being, he would have inquired what being thself is.

is comprehensive ofall intelligible animals, is eternal; but time was generated together with heaven, as Plato says in the course of the dialogue.

After what manner however, js that which is generated never being, concerning which Plato speaks clearly in the Sophista?

This, however, ix to accuse both themselves and Plato of unskilfulness in) dialectic.

And through the addition of ¢ru/y Plato indieates that so far indeed as it is generated, it is not; but that so far as it brings with it an image of being, so far it is not generated.

Por these detinitions, however, it is usual to accuse Plato, in the first place, indeed, that he does not assume genus, as the rules of definitions require.

But [in defence of Plato] habitude, to consider things themselves by themselves.

as we said before, Plato wished to use these axioms and hypotheses in the demonstrations which he intended to make, it was necessary that they should be known and manifest to us.

᾿ Itis requisite, however, to observe how Plato proposing to himself the problems, renders each of them manifest, both affirmatively and negatively.

voox tt] TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Now, however, Uius nuch must be assumed, thatit is participated indeed by ad other proammate damontacal souls, but tllumimates ours, when we convert ourselves tott, and render the reason whichis inus intellectual, And as tn the Phadrus Plato calls thts the governor of the soul, and says that tt alone intel.

lectually perceives real being, but that the soul percetves tt together with thas mtellect, when she is nourished by intellect and science ; thus also it must be satd that this mtelligence 1s prior to soul, and is truly that intelligence (mentioned by Plato) but that itis participated by soul when reason energizes intellectually, Hence Plato says in the following part of this dialogue, that intellect ts indeed in the Gods, but that a certain small genus [ο΄ πιο] participates of tt.

nUOK 11 TIMAELS OF PLATO.

Plato in the following Mart of this dialogue says, that ¢his reason in the same manner as science, ts mgencrated in the soul, when it is moved about the intelligible.

ΠΟΟΚ 11.} TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

This power, therefore, Plato calls opinion, and on this account, he denominates that which is sensible doxastic.

But sense is simply irrational, On this account, Plato in’ the Republic calling this power opinion, shows that it is a medium between hnowledge and ignorance: for it is indeed a rational knowledge, but it is mingled with irrationality, knowing sensibles in’ conjunction with sense, But sense is alone irrational, as ‘Timwus also denominates it; i the first place, because it is also inherent in irrational animals, and is characteristic of every irrational life; for by these things, what is said in the Theatetus distinguishes it from science.

TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Now, however, this alone is evident from what has been sald, that every thing corporeal, is of itself, or in its own nature generated and corrupted, but never truly is, as Plato also says in the Politicus.

But, in short, the opinion of Plato concerning criteria, may from these things be assumed.

others that it,is reason, and others that it is intellect; Plato divides the essence of the criteria conformably to things themselves, attributing intellect to intelligibles, dianoia to dianoetic objects, opinion to doxastic objects, and sense to sencibles.

ROOK τι TIM.EUS OF PLATO, 215 former should) be wholly eternal, but the latter wholly temporal.

Porphyry, therefore, rightly observes, that Plato now defines the extremes, viz.

reason, and making it to be spurious reason, and of the two downward terms sense, and making it to be insensible sense, you will then have the manner in which Plato thought matter may be known, viz.

BOOK 11.} TIMAUs OF PLATO.

Plato, therefore, conjoining that which is generated to cause, which he does in the conclusion, very properly uses the term from necessity.

anok wd TIMEUS OF PLATO.

For the demiurgic is attributed to veneration as Plato says in the Philebus, “ that the demiurgic refers to that which ts gencrated.” Hence, prior to the world, there are different causes of different things, but there are not demiurgic causes of generated natures.

But on account of these being attributed in a two-fold respect, either proximately or remotely, there are four modes, And again, on account of all these subsisting ina two-fold respect, either as simple or complicated with each other, there are eight modes, Through these also being two-fold, either in energy, or in capacity, there are sixteen modes, But on account of causes being predicated in a four-fold respect according to Aristotle, but according to Plato, causes subsisting in a threefold,’ and con-causes also, though in a different way, in a three-fold respect,—hence according to the former, there will be sixty-four modes of causes ; [but according to the latter there will be forty-eight modes of causes,] and the same number of con-causes.

For thus the assumption will become perfectly methodical ; though that of Plato is usually omitted by the interpreters, who having enumerated causes * These causes are, the producing, the paradigmatic, and the final ; and the con-causes are, maller, matcrial causes, and form.

But Plato alone, following the Pythagoreans, rightly says that every thing which ts generated, ix generated by a cause, and places over generated natures, Fate and God.

HOOK ti] TIM.UEUS OF PLATO.

From these, therefore, Plato says other things, and also bodies derive their subsistence, All that is said here therefore, is analogous to all that is said in the Philebus, viz.

nook 1] TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Some however doubt, how Plato assumes as a thing acknowledged, that there is a Demiurgus of the universe who looks to a paradigm: for there is not a De miurgus of it say they who directs his attention to that which is invariably the same.

Plato however and the Pythagoreans celebrate a separate and exempt Demiurgus of the universe, a producing cause of all things, and a providence that is attentive to the welfare of wholes; and this with the greatest propriety; for if the world, as Aristotle says, aspires after intellect, and is moved towards it, whence does it derive this desire ?

HOOK τι} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

In opposition to Aristotle, indeed, much has been said by many ; but our business, at present, is to explore what Plato says.

But Plato does: not speak after this manner, but says that intelligible paradigms are the paradigms of beautifal eflects, hut generated paradigms, of such as are pot beau-Tim.

the demiurgic choir, For the peculiarity and the mode of production, and of looking to the intelligible, extend diflerently to diflcrent natures, as far as to these, Itis also necessary to admire this in Plato, that he does not sity that what is generated on ' Por a\q@ here, itis necessary to read adiwo.

Some, again, do not produce according to the whole of the intelligible; but some are divided according to the four primary causes ; others proceed into a greater number; and others make the last forms the paradigms of their productions, Hence through these, there is one shepherd of men, but another of horses, as Plato says in the Politicus, and in a similar manner in’ other forms.

“Let therefore this universe be denominated by us, all heaven, or the world, or whatever other appellation it may be especially adapted to receive.” This is the last of the axioms, giving a name to the subject [of discussion) conformably to geometricians, When they speak about the gnomon in parallelograms, for they say any one thing consisting of two complements ts to” be called a gnomon, For since Plato intends to call the same thing both heaven and the world, in order that you may not think he disturbs the doctrine, by employing at different times different names, he previously determines something about the ' Vor ews yap hese, read eres yup.

ὍΟΟΚ 11.) TIM-ZUS OF PLATO.

The wide-spread heav'n in wther and the clouds Fell to the lot of Jove." Hence Plato very properly determines concerning these names, prior to the whole theory, calling the universe heaven and the world, and saying all heaven, that you may not fancy he says, ὦ divine body alone is denominated by us the world, or by whatever other name it may rejoice to be called.

This also Plato says in the Cratylus, where he embraces what ig asserted by Homer on this subject, who adwits that names of the same things with the Gods, are different from those that subsist in the opinions of men, Xanthus by Gods, by men Scamander σα} ὦ," And, Which the Gods Chalcis, men Cymindis call.

Plato therefore knowing that this pre-eaists in the world, omits the divine and ineffable name itself, which is diflerent from the apparent name, and with the greatest caution introduces it as a symLol of the divine impression which the world contains.

nook Oh] ἍΜ ΟΝ OF PLATO, 931 the father; but the name world, as indicative of its progression ; and heaven, of its conversion, But through the three, you have the final cause, on account of which itis full of good; abiding ineflably, proceeding perfectly, and converting itself to the good as the antecedent object of desire.

But since most of the Platonists understand by the words περὶ πάντοὸς, that Plato means about erery thing, conformably to what is said inthe Phiedrus, but Porphyry understands the words as signifying about the universe, it being fit to speak first concerning the universe, and to show whether itis naturally unbegotten or generated,—it is requisite to Know that the former interpretation has in a greater degree the spontancous.

Afterwards having shown that the world is alone generated according to its body, he grants it according to a certain other thing to be unbegotten, according to which also itis ἃ God, as will be evident as we proceed, Such therefore being the inquiry, Plutarch, Atticus, and many other of the Platonists, conceiving the generation here mentioned to be temporal, say that the inquiry is, whether the world is unbegotten or cenerated according to time, Por they assert that prior to the fabneation of the world, there was a disorderly motion, But time entirely subsists together with motion ; so that there was time prior to the universe, Time, however, was also generated together with the * As the dialectic of Plato is perfectly scientific, as we have shown in the notes on the Parmenides, and employs the dividing, defining, analysing, and demonstrative methods, it is evident that instead of διαλογιίκαις μεθοδοιν in this place, we should read διαλεκτίκαις μεθυδοι».

But the interpreters of Plato that follow Crantor, say that the world is said to be generated, as being produced by another cause, and not being self-begotten, nor self-subsistent.

For it has been before observed by us, that Plato defined the extremes to be, that which 15.

The intention indeed lof Plato is to show, that the world is simply generated, as having its essence, power, and energy, and also its perpetuity co-extended with the whole of time.

For the expression always was, signifies with Plato the intelligible, as we have before observed.

TIM.TUS OF PLATO.

If therefore, perpetual being manifests the eternal, but that which has a principle of generation signifies that which is produced by another cause ; for such is that which is always generated ; but Plato always inquires, whether the world always was, or has the principle of acertain generation ;—this being the case, an inquiry of this kind will be the same asx an investigation.

[If therefore Plato had inquired whether the universe has all the gencrations,} or not all," we should say that he investigated whether itis generated according to time, or has not a temporal principle of generation.

ὙΠ OF PLATO.

Unless he should say, indeed, that the world 15 visible and tangible, but that what was moved in a confused and disorderly manner, is not now visible, but was so prior to the fabrication of the world; since Plato also speaks in this manner when he says, “ every such thing as was visible, and was moved in a confused and disorderly manner.” But in the words before us he says, “ for it is visible and tangible, and has a body.” He shows therefore that every thing which is visible and tangible, was generated, but not that which was visible and tangible.

In addition to which we may also say ‘that Plato calls this very disorderly thing itself generated, For he says that prior to the generation of the world, there were \ three things, being, place and generation, subsisting in the vestiges of forms.

It is not proper therefore to say that it was unbegotten according to time, and that the universe was generated ; but either both were generated according to Plato, or both were unbegotten.

Hence, as that which is composite is to that which is simple, and as time is to eternity, so is generation to essence, Tf, therefore, a simple and uniform essence is eternal, the essence which is composite, multiform, and conjoined with time, is generation, For it is divinely said by Plato, that the world originated from a certain principle, For thet which is generated ina portion of time began from a temporal, from a producing, from a final, from a material, and from a formal cause.

and has a body in order that you may also assume the middle plenitudes which it contains, And this again is asserted by Plato conformably to the oracle, which says: /é ts an tnitation of intellect, but that which is fabricated has somethings of body.

ΤΙ EUS OV PLATO.

Plato, therefore, does not subvert the perpetuity of the universe, as some who follow the Aristotelian hypotheses faney he does.

Farther still, Plato conjoins the soul of the universe immediately on its being generated, with body, and does not give to it life prior to the corporeal-formed nature, but as soon as itis constituted incloses it in body.

Por Plato in the Laws clearly says, Ghat tre ds infinite aecording to the past, and thatin this infinity there have been myriads on ΔῊΝ εἰν of barren and fertile periods of men.

nook χε] ΓΜ ΠΝ OF PLATO, 243 the Deminrgus of the world, in another way, who say that the world once was not.

Por this is mdeed ina certain respect true, yet is not sufficient to the theory of Plato.

rook αι] TIMZUS OF PLATO.

this Plato opposes perpetual being.

Por thus Plato in the Republie calls it a divine generated thing, But inthis dialogue, he thinks fit to denominate the world, a blessed God.

Elence itappears to me that Plato is not satistied with the term sensible ma order to demonstrate that the world is generated, but adds also that what is sensible is the object of opinion 5 since sense indeed knows the energy of sensibles, in consequence of suffering by them, but opinion knows also.

At the sume time, this exhibits tous the caution and reverence of Plato: for having that which is consequent [τὸ the being generated], vet he does not add it; which he ought to admire who thinks that the world was generated according to Plato in time.

Look wd TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Plato and Aristotle} are not at variance.

At the same tine, however, they differ, because Plato says, that the essence of the universe is co-extended with all time, but Aristotle supposes that it simply always exists, infers this to be necessary through many arguments, and ascribes to it temporal infinity, asserting at the same time that eternity is stable infinite power.

Hence Aristotle himself is compelled to acknowledge that the world is in a certain respect generated, Both likewise assert that itis the same in number, but) Plato conformably to principles, says that it is venerated.

Lor such things as Plato asserts of the ove, Aristotle ascribes to intellect,’ viz.

But such things as Plato attributes to the demiurgic intellect, Aristotle ascribes to the heavens, and the celestial Gods: for according to hin, falrication and providence are from these.

Such things also as Plato ascribes to the essence of the heavens, Aristotle attributes to their circular motiun; departing indeed from theological principles, but dwelling more than is fit on physical * Aristotle in his metaphysical discussions ascends no higher than intelligible intellect, which is with him the first cause.

BOOK 11,} TIMAUS OF PLATO.

249 productive powers.’ Since, however, the demoniacal Aristotle is very copious in discussing the reciprocations of the generated with reference to the corruptible, and of the unbegotten with reference to the incorruptible, he must be reminded, that Plato much prior to him assents to these axioms; in the Republic indeed asserting that corruption follows every thing which is generated; but in the Phadrus, that the unbegotten is also incorruptible.

How is it possible, therefore, since Plato gives generation to the universe, that he should not also introduce corruption to it; or that corrupting that which is moved in a confused and disorderly manner, he should not give generation to it prior to corruption?

And we shall see as we proceed, what kind of arguments Plato uses on this subject.

For every thing which is perfected, is perfected from that * This is because he discussed metaphysics physically, justas Plato discussed physics metaphysically.

noox τι TIMEUS OF PLATO.

It is not however wonderful, if Plato calls the cause of every thing generated, _ acertain cause.

It is also well that Plato says one’ cause precedes the whole of generation, For multitude is co-arranged about one principle, and the many unities about the one.

Plato, how ever, dismisses indeed these causes, but supposes that there is one cause which is the first of all causes.

See the 6th Book of my Translation of Proclus on the theology of Plato.

It has been rightly observed by some prior to us, that Plato having shown that the world was generated by a cause, immediately after ascends to the God who is the Demiurgus of it, in a manner worthy of his intellectual conceptions, Vor it seems that the artificial nature of the progeny, introduces a rational and divine cause, and not accident or chance, which are neither causes, nor have an hypostatic power, nor in short, sustain the well-ordered progression of beings.

Hence Aristo indeed, is said to be the father of Plato, but the builder of a house is the maker or fabricator of it, as not himself generating the matter of which it consists.

It also comprehends all the mundane causes * and the whole divinity of the world, about which the number of the mundane Gods proceeds ; likewise, the one divinity, the divine soul, and the whole bulk of the world, together with the divine, ' For o\ns here, it is necessary to read vAys, because matter according to Plato proceeds from the father Phanes, or animal itself, and not from the Demiurgus.

ποοκ 11.]} TIMA:US OF PLATO.

It is ditticult therefore, as Plato says, to discover the Demiurgus of this universe.

Rook 11.} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

For since the essence of other things is not naturally adapted tobe spoken of, either through a name, or through definition, orthrough science, butis seen through intellection alone, as Plato saysin his Epistles, inwhat other way can itbe possible to discover the essence of the Demiurgus, than by intellectual energy?

But father with Plato {in the text] is arranged as the second to maker, Farther still, Numenius co-arranges that which is exempt, ' from all habitude, with the natures that are under and posterior to it.

In the third place; it is not right to divide father and maker, since Plato celebrates one and the same God by both these names.

For one divine fabrication, and one maker and father, are every where delivered by Plato.

And by following names, to divulse the one cause fof the world,] is just as if some one, because Plato calls the universe both heaven and the world, should say there are two fabrications, the one heaven, and the other the world; just as here, Numenius says there is a two-fold demiurgic God, the one father, but the other maker.

But Atticus, the preceptor of Harpocration, immediately makes the Demiurgus to be the same with the good, though the Demiurgus is called good by Plato, but not the good.

He supposes, therefore, that there are these three intellects and Demiurgi, and says that with Plato there are three kings, and with Orpheus also three, Phanes, Heaven, and Saturn.

It is worth while, therefore, to observe to him, that every where Plato is accustomed to recur from multitude to the unities, from which the order in the many proceeds, Or rather, prior to Plato, unity always precedes multitude according to the arrangement itself of things.

How, likewise, is this conformable to Plato, who continually denominates the Demiurgus a God and intellect, but never calls him soul?

1 omit to say that this very thing itself requires much confirmation, whether Plato knew that there is a certain imparticipable® soul.

TIM.ZUS OF PLATO.

For where are the kings that are prior to Jupiter, and are the fathers of Jupiter?) Where are the kings, according to Plato, whom he thinks fit to arrange above the world next to the onc?

For how can the Demiurgus be the whole’ of perpetual being, if indeed perpetual being has been already defined by Plato; but he now says that it Is difficult to find the Demiurgus, and when found, impossible to speak of him to all men?

Let ux, however, concisely relate the opinion of our preceptor (Syrianus] on this subject, as we think that it especially accords with the conceptions of Plato.

OF PLATO.

Hence also he is said by Plato to be both maker and father, and neither father alone, nor maker alone, nor again father and maker.

But concerning the latter Plato says, “ Of whom I am the Demiurgus and father of works.” In the Politicus likewise, he makes mention of the doctrine of the Demiurgus and father; because with the former [i.

Plato, therefore, admitting a Demiurgus of this kind, suffers him to be ineffable and without a name, as having an arrangement prior to wholes in the portion of the good.” Yor in every order of the Gods, there is that which is analogous to the one.

inspired] from thence ; whom Plato himself likewise elsewhere follows.

For Plato also says, that animals were generated, bound with animated bonds.

a ROOK 41.} TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

205 which are above the world,' a golden chain; which Plato emulating says, “ That the Demiurgus placing intellect in soul, but soul in body, fabricated the universe 5” and that he gave subsistence to the junior Geds, through whom also he adorns the parts of the universe.

That Plato, however, had these conceptions respecting the mighty Jupiter, is manifested by him in the Cratylus from names: for he there shows that he is the cause and supplier of life to all things.

Farther still, Plato in the Laws represents total Justice to be the attendant of Jupiter, in the same manner as the theologist.

As, therefore, we have shown that all the Grecian theology attributes the total fabrication of things to Jupiter, what ought we to conceive of these words of Plato?

the Curetic order, thus also Plato says, that he is surrounded with terrible guards.

Who the Demiurgus therefore is, and that he is a divine intellect, the cause of total fabrication, is evident from what has been said; and likewise that Jupiter himselfis celebrated as the Demiurgus both by Orpheus and Plato.

BOOK 11.) TIMAEUS OF PLATO.

It appears, therefore, that such things as the theurgist [Julian] ascribes to the third divinity of the rulers, these Plato assigns to the Demiurgus ;* such as to fabricate the heavens, iaclosing them in a convex figure; to establish the numerous multitude of inerratic stars; to give subsistence to the heptad of planetary animals; and to place earth in the middle, but water in the hosoms of the earth, and air above these.

one, and as many, and as divided both into wholes and parts, and that he is celerated as the maker and father of the universe, and as the father of Gods and men hy Plato, Orpheus, and the Oracles ; generating indeed, the multitude of Gods, but ~ending souls to the generations of men, as Timeus himself also says.

ROOK 11.] TIM.EUS OF PLATO, 269 either assumes the paradigm of the things which he fabricates, externally, or himself produces them from the paradigm in himself.

Every thing, therefore, which makes ought to have the reason of the thing that is made, if it intends to make in an orderly manner, Hence Plato perceiving this, at the same time that he admuts the eflective cause, introduces the paradigm of the universe ; just as Aristotle also by subverting the paradigm, co-subverts likewise the maker.

— Plato therefore, taking it for granted that there is a paradigm, investigates through these things what the nature ofitis, and employing the before-mentioned definitions, discovers the object of his inquiry, through the three former hypotheses.

For Plato having said that the Demiurgus is intellect, denominates the paradigm intelligible.

To say, therefore, that it is not seen by him, does not accord with Plato and the nature of things.

So that the paradigm is prior to, and in the Demiurgus; intelligibly indeed prior to him, but intellectually in him, The words of Plato also appear at one time to make the paradigm different from, and at another the same with the Demiurgus.

So that in some places Plato says that the Demnurgus is the same, and in others, that he is differentfrom the paradigm, and very properly makes each of these assertions.

And Plato asserts that the Demiurgus looks to the paradigm, indicating through sight intellectual perception.

For if it be requisite clearly to unfold the doctrine of our preceptor, the God who ts called Protogonus by Orpheus, and who is established at the end of intelligibles, is animal itself,’ with Plato.

Very properly, therefore, does Plato now say that the Demiurgus looked to the paradigm, in order that becoming all things through the intellectual perception of it, he may give subsistence to the sensible world.

Some however doubt why Plato inquires whether the world was fabricated according to that which is generated, or according to that which is intelligible ; for there is not any other generated nature in order that the universe might be fabricated with relation to it.

For what other generated nature is there besides the universe?) We may dissolve this doubt however, by recollecting what has been frequently said, that Plato calls soul generated, so far as it participates of time.

And since it was neither perpetual being, nor place ; for three things (as Plato says] were prior to the generation of the universe, viz.

For it is supposed that the Demiurgus assumed that disorderly nature, and perceives animal itself; so that Plato very properly inquires to which of these the Demiurgus assimilates the universe, whether to that which he assumes, orto that which he sees.

Some of the interpreters however say, that Plato does not inquire concerning the Demiurgus, according to which of the paradigms he made the world, but that he asks as with reference to us who know that there are twofold paradigms, with relation to which of these the universe was generated.

But others say that Plato adduces that which is gene-rated, forthe sake of a perfect division, in order that he may not appear to prevent the object of investigation, whether the mundane paradigm js eternal.

Others again say, that since of sensibles, some are preternatural, but others according to nature ; and of these, some have the images of certain venerated natures, but others are the similitudes of them ;—hence Plato wishing

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Plato therefore following what the theologist here asserts, continually uses the words τέχτὴνάμενος and erexryvara, Which signify fabricative energy, when speaking of the demiurgic production, But the words, “ according to that which sub sists with invartable sameness,” indicate the eternal paradigm of the universe, which is the first of eternal natures, and is established at the end of the first intelligibles.

For Plato clearly says, that prior to the generation of the universe there were these three

Hence these things are more concordant with Plato, and with our unperverted cpinions about the universe.

Indeed, if this world is beautiful, and the Demiurgus of it 1s good, it is evident that he looked to an eternal paradigin; but if he is not good, which it is not lawful for any one to assert, he looked to that which was generated.” In the first place, it is requisite that we should understand the logical method of Plato, in order that we may see how demonstratively it proceeds.

Por if that whieh is beautiful was generated according to a generated paradigin, but that which is so generated is not beautiful, through one of the axioms, then it will follow that what is not beautiful is beautiful, Why therefore, did not Plato immediately in the hypotheses assume these axioms, viz.

ROOK 41} TIMEUS OF PLATO.

Hence Plato employs Themis* as a guard to what he says, who collects the Gods themselves to the Demiurzus, and does not sufler them to be divulsed from the goodness of the father.

The propositions therefore, being such, and receiving their beginning from the dividing art, let us see what Plato afterwards adds.

For Plato uses the word Oeyss, or ἐσμ μέ, in this place.

For the same thing will not be surveyed by the better and the less excellent nature, Plato therefore, indicating these things, and through these latently assisting the position that the para- * Instead of ro Anyor here, it is necessary to read ro λοιπὸν.

a Book It] TIMEUS OF PLATO.

It must be admitted therefore, that these three things are, as it is said, demonstrated by geometrical necessities ; and through these we are reminded after what manner names are assumed by Plato.

Hence also, Plato asserts that the fabricators of mortal natures are damons.

I however, should be ashamed of myself, if L were in want of such an artifice as this, forgetting what was a little before said, in which the Demiurgus now delivered to us by Plato, was shown to be the fountain and monad of every demiurzic order.

On account of this therefore, he is the best of causes, because he is allotted the first order among the demiurgi of the universe ; Plato here, directly emulating Homer, who calls the Demiurgus the father of wholes, and the supreme of rulers; and he thus denomiaates him though he mentions the Geds * Itappears to me that the word xpocéus must be supplied in this place.

TIMALUS OF PLATO.

Because therefore Jupiter is the most ancient and venerable of demiurgi, he is celebrated by Tomer as the supreme of rulers, but by Plato as the best’ of causes.

Por though the world is, as Plato says, most beautiful, and a blessed God, yet when compared with the intelligible, and the place which is there, it is deservedly called a cavern and a den.

For these reasons therefore, the Demiurgus is thus celebrated in the present: words by Plato.

For since itis possible for an artificer to make conformably to a paradigin, but the thing fabricated may not become the image of the paradigm in consequence of not being vanquished by the fabricating cause; in order that vou may not fancy that this is alse the ease with the world, Plato has shown that the Demiargus indeed looked to a paradigm, and that being most excellent he looked to the most divine paradigm, trom what he said respeeting the universe being fabricated conformably to the itellt- ἐπ αἷς its gible, But that the universe also is vanquished by form, and traly paradigm, he manifests from what is now said.

nook 11} TIMAUS OF PLATO.

And thus much concerning these particulars, We ought not however, to wonder if Plato calls the world an image.

Por beginning from a principle according to nature as from a root, Plato delivers afterwards explanations of cause homologous to this principle.

BOOK "1 TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

“After this manner therefore, we must decide about the image, and the paradigm of it.” These three particulars are connascently consequent to each other, the things, the conceptions, and the words, According to the things and the conceptions therefore, Plato assumes the first hypothesis; but according to the words he makes this definition, Por when he separates that which is generated from being, he adheres to the theory of the things.

And it seems that the Platonists Albinus and Gaius, and their followers, took occasion from hence to define in how many ways Plato dogmatizes ; and that he does this in a twofold respect, either scientifically, ov from probability, and not according to one mode, nor as if all discussions had one accuracy, whether they are concerning beings, or things which subsist through generation ; but such as is the nature of things, such also is that of the words which are divided) in con- Janction with things.

ΤΙΝ OF PLATO.

BOOK 11} ΤΙΜΊΕῦΘ OF PLATO, 249 as we assert conjectural and artificial things tobe, May we not say, that words of a conjectural nature are adapted to these, which words are different from those that are assimilative?

Farther still, this also must be considered, that Plato is now speaking about physical images, and that on this account he gives a twofold division to words.

But in the Protagoras, it is clealy shown by Plato that we do not contain the reasons or productive principles of the arts,* and much less of things artificial, ' See the 10th book of the Republic, where he speaks of the ideas of a bed and a table.

Plato, however, did not intend to signify in what he there says, that there is an idea of each of these in the intellect of the Demiurgus of the universe; or, in short, that there are ideas of things artificial; but he calls by the name of idea, the reason or productive and forming principle which subsists in the dianoctic power of the artificer, This reason also he says, is the offspring of deity, because he conceived, that this very artificial principle itsclf, is imparted to souls from divinity, Proclus, in the Parmenides, well observes, that an argument.

Plato, however, now divides words into those which pertain to the discussion of the intelligible, and those which are concerning the image of the intelligible.

Plato, therefore, clearly divides language and knowledge conformably to the objects of knowledge 3 and Parmenides though obscure on account of his writings being poetical, yet at the same time indicating these things, he says, “that truth ts full of splendor and immutable, but that the opinions of mortals have no real credibility.” And again, “ that there are two paths, one of which has a real existence, so that itis not: possible for it ποῖ to exist.

ROOK tJ TIM:ALUS OF PLATO.

The faith, however, which Plato now mentions appears to be diflerent from that spoken of him in the Republic, in the section of a line, For there the faith is an irrational knowledge ; whence also itis divided from eonjecture, but is arranged according to sense, The faith however of which he now speaks is rational, but is mingled with irrational knowledge, as it employs sense and conjecture.

Neither, however, does Plato deny that scientific language may be employed about the Demiurgus, nor about any other of the natures that subsist always invariably the same.

For in what does Plato differ from other physiologists, except in exhibiting the science pertaining to divine natures?

Plato however in many places admits the truth of beings, conformably to theologists.

ΠΟΟΚ 41.} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

We summarily, say, therefore, that Plato at one time defines science, by an explanation of causes alone ; at another time, by the subjects of tt, possessing anessence perfectly stable, tovether with an caplanation of cause ; and at another, by the principles not being hypotheses.

TIMTUs OF PLATO.

295 which Plato employs in what he says.

But the Stoics say that there is the same virtue of Gods and men, being very far from emulating the piety of Plato, and the modesty of Socrates.

This also is evident from those that are conversant with them, who collect the same things respecting them from diferent hypotheses 5 some things, indeed, through eccentrics, others through epicyeles, and others through evolvents, (in all these} preserving the phenomena, What then, some one may say, are we to be satisfied with Plato im physiologizing, and in affording us arguments no less probable than others?

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

For our language, which the word pugog a fable (used here by Plato] indicates, is replete with crassitude and irrationality, and it is necessary to pardon human nature, * You speak most excellently, O Timawus, and we shall receive what you say, in every respect as you advise.

nook uJ TIMLUS OF PLATO.

Hence also, as it appears to me, Plato does not investigate inthe beginning, if there is a final cause of the composition of the world, but as if this was acknowledged by all men, he inquires what the final cause is.

And as far as to this is: the ascent to those who love to conteniplate truth, Tt is ustal however, to call the final cause δέον ot account of which ; the paradigmatic cause ποτ ον wth relation to which, the demiurgic cause vg ov, by which ; Whe instremental cause av ov, (rough which ; form x25 ὁ, accord: mg lo which ; and matter 22 ov, or evan, from which, ov in which, These causes also received the same appellations from Plato limsclt, Por now investigating the final cause he says, on account of what cause.

Bat concerning the demiurgic cause, he says, that which is generated, Is from necessity gene-rated by a certain cause, And as we proceed, we shall point out the rest from the words themselves of Plato; except: that at present also it must be said, that these appellations are adapted to the discriminating setenee of the philosopher, What however is generation, and) what is the universe?

Some indeed by generation understanding the sublunary phice, call the universe the whole world, Bat these entirely wander from the meaning of Plato.

Iv however, it should be said that Plato calls the heaven the universe, because it Is the greatest part of the world, for the rest is stall ee because itis the most divine and principal part, and as it were the summit of the universe; for the head also is called the whole, as, Peucer, dear Lead ;' and Plato also says, that the world was surrounded with the remaining bulk of body for the sake of this;—yet at the same time, the philosopher is accustomed to call this likewise generation.

BOOK Ih] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

504 Which is adorned trom matter fas the subject], they denominate the universe, by Whom many things written by Plato, must necessarily be rejected.

Plato adds the particle dhis, inanifesting by it that which is sensible and partial.

he who comjosed and he constituted) employed here by Plato, the former copulates the present and past times, and the Jatter indicates: the perfection cand the perpetuity of the fabrication.

In the first place, therefore, as Plato when Investigating the mundane form, and inquiring whether the world was generated, or is unbegotten, adds prior to the whole demonstration, “ if was generated ;” and as when exploring the paradigmatic cause, he previously adds, “if ts manifest to every one, that “ἀρὰς generated with relation to an eternal paradigm,” adducing the conclusion prior to the whole of the reasoning ;—thus also proposing to discover the final cause after all the others, he adds, “ he was good,” imitating intellect through this enunciation, and the at once collected comprehension of.

TIMLEUS OF PLATO.

Whowever Amelias divalses the three Deunurgt from the one Demiurous, we must not admit it, while we follow Plato, Por the same Demiurgus Ip cood, so far as he is a God, and on account of goodness he produces all things by his will, and is intellizible ‘intellectually 3 for such is the demiurgic being.

ΒΟΟΚΊΙΙ.] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

But if any one ofsecondary natures should be said to be a God, or good, itis among the numher of things deified, and rendered good, and is a God through participation, and not on account of its own proper essence, nor from itself, This participation therefore, Plato is accustomed to call indigence ;* just as in the Banquet, he calls Love the want of things beautiful and good.

TIMAUs OF PLATO.

Plato therefore manifests that good is in these, when he says, “ Zhat God led that which was disorderly into order, through his wish to communicate good.” From all that has been said, therefore, it is easy to infer, that the Demiurgus produces eternally; that the world is perpe tual, according to a perpetuity which is extended through the whole of time; that it is always generated with arrangement ; and that it rs not always incorruptible, but is always ; generated or becoming to be so, im Consequence of always receiving good.

Ilence Plato thinks it is necessary, that those who assert something concerning the most proper and powerful principle, should be prudent men, and that their auditors should receive what they say with the greatest) rectitude.

TIMAZUS OF PLATO.

Hence too, Plato adds, “ he who especially.” For the assertion concerning this principle must be especially received from prudent men.

"οὐκ 41.) TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

We must say, however, conformably to the doctrine of Plato, according to our preceptor, that the habitude of divinity with respeet to things subsists ina different manner from that of ours.

HOOK I] TIM.-EUS OF PLATO.

But if certain persons accuse him as the cause of evil, because he gave subsistence to partial natures, they take away the fabrication of the worid, subvert the prolific power of wholes, and confound the nature of things first and last, ‘That we assert these things, however, conformably to the opinion of Plato, may be easily seen from his writings.

But inthe Republic, Plato assigns no other cause of good than God, and says that certain other causes of evils are to be investigated 5 through which he manifests that evils do not derive their subsistence from divinity, For it is not, says he, the province of fire to refrigerate, nor of snow to heat, nor of that which is all-good to produce evil, And he asserts that certain partial causes of these are to be admitted, and such as are indefinite, For itis not in evils as im things that are wood, viz.

But in the Thewtetus he says, thatit is neither possible for evils to be abolished, nor for them to be in the Gods, but that they revolve from necessity about the mortal nature, and this place of our abode.” If, therefore, evil revolyes necessarily in the mortal place, it will not be according to Plato, that which in no respect whatever has a subsistence, and which is exempt from all beings.

TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

WOOK 11.} ΤΙΝ OF PLATO.

Again, Plato in the Laws defines what punishment is, viz.

BOOK 11.] TIMAUS OF PLATO, 321 Plutarch of Cherona and his followers, and also Atticus, understand what is here said literally, as testifying for them the generation of the world froma certain time.

They likewise say, that Plato wishing to indicate the providence proceeding from the Demiurgus into the universe, and also the supply of intellect, and the presence of soul, and the numerous and mighty goods of which they are the causes to the world, previously surveys how the whole corporeal-formed composition is when considered itself by itself, disorderly and confused.

We may also observe, in addition to what is here rightly asserted, that since the demiurgic production is twofold, the one being corporeal,’ but the other decora- Ϊ } Ϊ tive, Plato beginning from the latter, supposes with the greatest propriety, that // * For Lwxparcns here, it is necessary to read cwparins.

A little after this however, Plato delivers to us the demiurgic providence about the fabrication of bodies.

For then the Demiurgus is represented as fashioning the whule of a corporeal nature, which Plato now says he assumed 5 the Demiurgus being the maker, the adorner, the artist, and the manual artificer.

For Plato clearly says, that the Demiurgus fashioned the whole of the corporeal nature within soul.

The present discussion however, says that it is perpetual, but investigates whether itis unbegotten and not generated by a cause, and whether according to Plato, two principles of wholes are to be admitted, matter and God, neither God producing matter, nor matter God ; in order that the one may be entirely perpetual, and without God, but the other entirely immaterial and simple.

BOOK 11.} TIMAMUS OF PLATO.

323 conception of Plato is on this subject.

For that the Demiurgus is mot the first’ who gave subsistence to matter, is evident from what Plato says further on, viz.

But since every where sensibles are analogous to intelligible causes, and Plato constitutes the former from the latter ; as for instance, the equal which is here, from the equal itself, the similar, from similitude itself, and after the same manner all sublunary animals and plants,—it is evident, that he hkewise produces the infinity which is here, from the first infinity, Just as he produces the bound which is here from the bound which is there.

For as Plato produces twofold causes from the one, viz.

It is prohable therefore, that Plato derived from Hermes an opinion of this kind concerning matter.

But Plato also produces it according to second and third principles, viz.

BOOK 11.} TIM.ZUS OF PLATO.

These things, however, we have elsewhere more fully discussed.* Let us therefore return to the words of Plato, and survey the meaning of each.

But the Demiurgus is the cause of order, Hence also Plato says, that ‘the Demiurgus received matter now advancing to the participation of forms.

where, separating the Demiurgus from the world, Plato says, that it was moved by a certain fate, and an essentially connascent desire.

But Plato following Orpheus, says, that order is firstin the Demiurgus, and the whole prior to parts.

It deserves however not to be omitted, that Plato here imitates the theologists, in supposing the existence of a confused and disorderly nature prior to.

So likewise Plato presupposes these two things, the unadorned and that which is effective of ornament, that the former of these may be adorned, and participate of order, They however speak theologically.

But Plato philosophically transfers order from the Gods to the subjects of their government.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

The second head therefore after this, is that which shows that Plato refers all things to one principle.

ΟΟΚ it.J ΤΌΘ OF PLATO.

In the third place, therefore, neither do the principles which they assume_pertainany thing to Plato.

On what account, therefore, did Plato hypothetically introduce this privation of order?

Hence Plato, wishing to indicate the order which accedes to bodies from something different from themselves, shows that disorder is con-subsistent with their motions, without a divine cause.

To this we reply, that itis not said after this manner according to hypothesis, that the unadorned ought to be admitted prior to the adorned, but that Plato saw that which 1s formless prior - τὸ forms, though it is never separate from them, Thus too, that which is invested with form, though yet without distinction, is assumed prior to order, though it never was prior to it, but is consubsistent with order, The fourth head, in addition to those that have been already considered, is that in which Plato demonstrates the mode of fabrication ; a divine intellect εἰς fecting this by its very being, which he infers through many arguments.

ΤΙΝΒΟΒ OF PLATO.

This word which is used here by Plato, signifies both the Goddess of justice, and lawful,

“ By a reasoning process, therefore, he found that among the things which are naturally visible, no whole work destitute of intellect: would ever be more beautiful than a whole work which possesses intellect.” Amelius in a wonderful manner endeavours to prove that Plato knew the different demiurgic causes, and continually passes in a silent way from one of these causes to another; exhibiting, on account of their connexion, no one of the * Novy 1s erroneously printed here for νυν.

TIM.E@S OF PLATO.

Let no one therefore fancy that Plato makes the division of forms to be into those that possess and those that are deprived of intellect.

in the intelligible world] are, as we have said, intellects, where also Plato calls all things in every respect Gods.

Again however, let us survey how Plato says, that secondary energize on account of more principal causes, the latter being more perfect than the former, bul the former being suspended from the latter.

The Demiurgus likewise, seems, in what is here said, to behold all the paradigms, which Plato calls naturally visible, not those only Which are in animal itself, but also such as are more partial than the four ideas which are there.

But according to Plato, the psychical order isa thing of this kind, intelligible, and atthe same time the first of generated natures, eternal and temporal, impartible and partible.

pooK 11} TIM-EUS OF PLATO.

Much more therefore, must it be said, that soul is in the universe.” Hence Plato very divinely admits that there is a twofold intellect, the one being imparticipable and demiurgic, but the other participable, and inseparable ?

He also gives to the universe a twofold life, the one connascent, but the other separate; in order that the world may be an animal through the life which is in it, animated through an intellectual soul, and endued with intellect through much-honored intellect jisclf, But Aristotle only admits the half (of this doctrine of Plato}, since he takes away * imparticipable intellect from his philosophy.’ For the first: intellect with Jum, 15 the intellect of the inerratic sphere; but he cuts off the intellectual soul, which is the medium between intellect and the animated body of the universe 5 and immediately conjoins intellect with the living body.

With respect to Plato however, Is not his method admirable?

§ Por an explanation of the intellect: to which Aristotle asceuded, also why he says nothing about that which is beyvnd intellect, and why he appears to dissent in many things from Plato, but does not in reality, see my Diasertation On the Philosophy of Aristotle.

nook 11} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Hence, Plato establishing imparticipable prior to participable intellect, and placing the causes of all things in it, he produces from thence, intellects, souls and bodies, from which he gives completion to the sensible world.

For Plato says that soul was constituted on account of intellect.".

And inthe third place, the Demiurgus constitutes this intellect; but the soul as Plato says, gives subsistence to the intellect which is according to habit, throneh the motion of the circle of sameness about the intelligible.

To which we may add, that it is right to assume, that in the Demiurgus there is a royal soul, and a royal intellect, as Socrates says in the Philebus, subsisting according to the reason of cause [or causally]; and that according to these fountains of these two-fold genera, the Demiurgus now places intellect in soul, and soul in body, not because better are in less excellent natures, nor that intellect is in want of a certain seat, or that the soul of the universe is in a certain thing, For these things are unworthy of wholes and divine essences; through which the world is called by Plato, a blessed God.

This second mode therefore, Plato delivers to us shortly after, when he places body in soul, and analogously soul in body.

Nor docs Plato speak after this manner, and Orpheus after another; but fit be reyuisite to give my opinion, the conceptions of the theologist become manifest through what is here said.

For as Plato before observed, it is impossible fur intellect to accede to any thing without soul, But this is similar to what is asserted by Orpheus ; by whom also Dionysius is called the sweet offspring of Jupiter.

Soul therefore says [in the Chaldean Oracles,] concerning Jupiter fabricating the universe : +} soul reside after the paternal conceptions, hot, and animating all things.’ For the father of Gods and men placed our intellect in soul, but soul he deposited in sluggish body.” Plato likewise, bears testimony tu the Oracles, when he calls the Demiurgus father, and represents him yvenerating souls, and sending them into the generation of men according to the first life.

Since however, us we have said, both soul and intellect give completion to one animal, Plato appears tome to use very appropriately the words to constitute and co-fabricate, through the common preposition σὺν in both, * For Aawy in this place, 1 read Aueor.

soon kl TIMEUS OF PLATO.

In an admirable manner Plato likewise, does not -peak of the deity of the world in the same way as concerning intellect and soul, viz.

For as intellect indeed, it derives its subsistence from the total fabrication, but as a divine intellect, from deity.’ Plato therefore, does not make a division into deity and intellect, in consequence of constituting the intellect of the world from the father.

‘Thus therefore, it is necessary to say, according to assimilative reasoning, that this world was gencrated an animal, possessing in trath for reality) soul and intellect through the providence of God.” As the world itself is mingled, being composed of images and divine essences, of physical and supernatural things, thus also Plato calls the discussion of it assimilative, and again truth.

Hence Plato, when about to speak concerning the world adds the word assiuilative, or probable, but the word truth, when about to speak concerning the providence of divinity, Farther still, you may perceive both assimilation and trathin the speaker himself; not only dividing these conformably to the nature of things.

For as Plato calls the rational soul an aninal!

ΤΙΜ δ OF PLATO, 347 perly denominates every thing animated an animal, but not vice versa.

All these however, Plato comprehends unitedly in the words, “ through the providence of God.” For from thence the universe is rendered an animal, anda blessed God,‘ becoming perfect through the providence of divinity.

According to both plilosophers therefore, the world is an animal animated and endued with intellect ; except indeed, that according to Aristotle, it is animated, as having an inseparable lite; for he does not admit that 1 has an intellectual soul, bat that it has an intellect above soul, and which is essentially suspended from another intelli gible animal For what) Plato calls animal itself, he calls eternal animal, as an his Metaphysics, when he says, “ We say that God ts an eternal animal.” And in short, since there are in the world things that are moved, and things that are immoveable, things which are always one or the other of these, and things which are sometimes in motion, and sometimes are tmmoveable, itis necessary that the ' Ttis necessary here, to supply ra Oynra.

‘TIMEUS OF PLATO.

Soul therefore is the cause of motion; on which eccount also Plato in the Laws admitting [for the sake ot arument] the universe to be immoveable, gives motion to it by the introduction of soul, Andinthe Phaedrus taking away soul, he makes all things to stand still.

Plato however, establishing prior to the whole world three causes, goodness, intelligible animal, and the demiurgic intellect, imparts from these to the world in the first place, a perfect intellect always fixed in energy, exempt from matter, and full of undefiled intellections.

Since however, as we have before observed, it is necessary to survey the procressions and the conversions of wholes, both these are accomplished by Plato.

So that according to Plato, providence is nothing else than an energy conformable to good, For in our concerns also, we say that to provide for some one, is to be the cause of good to the object of our pros idential care.

It is requisite likewise to remember what the Cheronean (Plutarch) says about the name of providence, as that which Plato exhorts us to conceive of as something divine.

Hence also, according to Plato, the latter may be said to be orice," as having one energy directed to himself: bat the former Gece, dogethor with ΠΝ energy ΘΟ ΟΝ ing also w power fabricative of the universe, and not: only lovinhatively regulating: things, posterior to himself, but also abiding in his own accustomed manner, as Plato says shortly after.

BOOK 11.} TIMZUS OF PLATO.

according to the similitude of what animal, the constituting artificer constituted the world.” Plato clearly exhibits to us through what is here said the connexion of the problems, and the suspension of secondary from primary natures.

That Plato also?

Hence, Plato says, that the discussion of the similitude of the world to intelligible animal, is consequent to the problem concerning the composition of it.

For there is a multitude of intelligible animals, which Plato also indicating, inquires to what animal the Demiurgus constituted the world similar.

Vor Plato says this in the latter part of this Dialogue.

nook We] TIMEUS OF PLATO, 353 indeed, but as in intelligibles and intellectuals ; and) in another intellectually alone.

Very properly therefore, does Plato investigate what kind of animal is the paradigm of the universe, whether it is super-mundane, or intellectual only, or intelligible, and at the same time intellectual, or intelligible only.

But Plato admits that the differences always subsist in the first animal itself: according to union, and gives a progression to them according to appropriate numbers.

however, some one may say, does Plato call the intelligible paradigm animal?

For every thing which lives, is according to Plato, an animal.‘ For because it has life, says Timeus, it may be justly called ananimal.” Hence also, Plato calls plants and seeds animals, characterizing the ' For ἢ τὸν vow gums here, it is necessary to read ἡ τὸν ὥνου peas.

For it does not exist out of intelligibles; since Plato on this' account alone calls the paradigm intelligible, though he knew the super-mundane demiurgic intellect.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

possesses energy essentially, For Plato does not call him in one way, and the effective energy proceeding from him in another, but he calls both by one name.

For that which is similar to an impertect thing, can never at any time become beautiful.” As there are many intelligible animals, some of which are more total, but others more partial,’ some of which are united, but others disided, and some are detined according to bound, but others according to infinity; Plato inquiring what the all-perfect paradigm of the universe is, and from what intelligible animal the world is suspended, thinks that no partial animal ought to be placed in this order.

For as in the Banquet, Plato calls that which is not primarily beautiful, but participates of beauty, indigent of beauty, thus also he calls that an imperfect animal which is not the first animal, nor animal itself, but is such by participation, and subsists according to a progression from that which is first.

Very properly therefore, does Plato when investizating the paradigmatic principle of the world, recur to all-perfect animal, What then, some one may say, are not the sun and moon and each of the stars beautiful?

BOOK I] TIMMUS OF PLATO.

For that each of these is perfect, Plato manifests farther on, when he says, “ that the world was generated perfect from things perfect, anda whole framwholes.” Uence the perfection of the whole is one thing, and ofthe part another.

een] TIMEUS OF PLATO.

Others again, as Amelius, say that Plato by these words, distinguishes that which is particular from things that are more common.

Βοοκ 1] TIM-EUS OF PLATO.

of aram, a bull, a serpent, and a fierce lion." He also proceeds from the primogenial egg, in which the animal exists spermatically ; and Plato knowing this calls this mighty God animal itself.

If therefore that which first consists of bound and infinity is that which is primarily being, the being of Plato will be the same with the Orphtc egg.

For if Phanes first proceeds from the egg, which is manifestly with Orpheus the first intelligible intellect, but that which first and alone proceeds from an egg, is necessarily nothing else than an animal, it is evident that the most mighty Phanes is nothing else than the first animal; and, as Plato would say, animal ttself.

Vor as the egg’ antecedcntly comprehends the spermatic * The word used by Plato here for animals.

πον τ TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Farther still, this also may be considered as admirable in the doctrine of Plato, that at the same time that he preserves the union ofintelligibles unshaken, he imparts to them an unmingled purity.

The first triad of the intellicible order, which is called by Plato in the Parmenides το ¢r 11, the one being, or being characterised by, and absorbed as it were in lhc one.

DOOK 11.} TIMUS OF PLATO.

In short, as comprehension is twofold, the one being such as that of parts in their wholeness, but the other, as that of effects in their causes, Plato now assumes the former of these, and says, that the genera and species ofanimals, are comprehended as parts in their whole, i.

in what an admirable manner Plato, at one time ina way known to us, passes from images to paradizms, and at another time, from paradigms to images; at one and the same time indicating the connexion of things, and their progressions and conversions.

These things therefore, are beautifally asserted (by Orpheus and Plato.

That however, which is most synopucal' in the words of Plato, is this, that he says animal itselfis the most beautiful, not of all intellgibles simply, but of mtelhgible animals.

Tt as necessary however, that there should) be a thing of this Kind, because bemy itself, and beauty itself are more simple than the nature of animal, on which account also they are participated by things which are not animals, Moreover, the interpreters say, that the word asysinilation is appropriately assumed by Plato.

Dividing however, they say, that of physical forms indeed, the sensible world participates as of impressions in wax, but that it receives the representations of psychical, and the sunilitudes of intelligible forms.* So that since Plato is speaking concerning intelligible paradigms, he very properly, as they say, assumes similitude, Parther still, the world is an animal, as the image 1 Por συνεκτικωτατον here, Tread σννοπτιλωτατων.ς * Concerning the mod > in which forms themselves are participated by sensibles, see the Notes to my translation of the Parmenides of Plato.

But Plato adds, “as are allied to its nature,” because intelligibles are paradigms to the world of things which are according to nature, and not as some Platonists are accustomed to say, of things preternatural, Torin short, mundane things being divided into such as are according to nature, and such as are preternatural, into universals and particulars, and into essences and accidents, we always admit that there are formal causes of the more, hut by no means of the less excellent.

Plato likewise appears in this place to have given a definition uf the world, viz.

Let us however proceed to the words of Plato.

TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

For to some of them it appears that two things are now distinguished by Plato, the one, and all multitude.

And the patrons of this interpretation are Porphyry and Jamblichus, who speak conformably both to the things themselves, and to the doctrine of Plato.

Plato omitting to ‘say this through conciseness.

there will be but one world,] if it be admitted that it is fabricated according to the paradigm.” Again Plato in concord with himself, announces the whole of the conclusion prior to the demonstrations, previously to beltef, dissolving the doubt.

The whole sentence, therefore, is of the following kind, If the world was generated according to a paradigm, and the paradigm is one, then the world is one." Bat the antecedent is true, and) therefore the consequent also is true, That the world, however, was generated according to a paradigm, was asserted before, and was mentioned both by Plato and ous.

But that the paradigm is one and monadic, Plato asserts as he proceeds, ‘The assumption therefore being true, it remains to see how that which follows from it is true.

TIMAEUS OF PLATO 373 arity of intelligibles, but not the essential?

wooK 1] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

For of fabrication the first is total, one, and impartible; the second is partial and multiplied, and proceeds according to a distribution into parts; and the third is not only partible like that which precedes it, but comes into contact with generated natures, and with the forms they contain, Vou have also these three fabrications in Plato, viz.

If therefore Plato had now spoken concerning cyery fabrication, it would have been requisite to annex the extensions of forms into multitude, and their divisions.

BOUK 11.) TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

"This likewise appears to be the cause of the perpetuity of the things which he produces, that each receives the whole form of the paradigimatic cause, Ilence every thing which proceeds from the whole Demiurgus has a nature of this hind, It, therefore, he gives subsistence to the world, the world is one; both on account of the demiurgic monad, and the onlyness of the paradigm; which Plato, as it appears to me, knowing, says, “if it be admitted that itis fabricated according to the paradigm.” For by not saying if it was generated, but Wit was fabricated, according to the paradigm, he indicates the onlyness both of the paradigmatic and the demiurgic cause.

See the 5th and 6th Books of my Translation of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, for an account of the deities called fountains and principles.

nook 11.] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Why, however, does Plato say, the second with another thing?

Book 11} TIMUs OF PLATO, 381 allness of himself; in imitation of whom, Jupiter likewise, produces twofold orders, the super-celestial and the mundane.

“Tn order, therefore, that the world from its onlyness or being alone, might be similar to all-perfect animal, on this account the artificer neither made infinite, nor two worlds.” Again, Plato reminds us of the Demiurgic cause, in order that we may understand also from this, that every thing which is generated by the whole fabrication, 15 monadic, perpetual, and intellectual; and that the Demiurgus is the cause of all things, in consequence of producing the monnds of them; but that he delivered the multitndinous and partial fabrication to the yunior Gods.

BOOK 11 TIM.ZEUS OF PLATO.

TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Plato however, has chosen the most principal and proper cause of their being but one world, viz.

For Plato alone or especially employed, says Theophrastus, the cause which is derived from prooidential inspection ; beautifully testifying this of Plato.

But it is possible, says Porphyry, to use the demonstration of Plato in all other principles.

380 PROCLUS ON THE TIMZEUS OF PLATO.

On this account therefore, Plato delivers to us an all-various generation of body, producing it wholly from causes different from itself; but he produces soul both trom itself, and from the total fabrication and vivitication.

Plato therefore, delivers the first: hypostasis of the universe from fabrication, viz.

As we have said therefore, fabrication being triple, the first, according to wholeness, the second, according to a division into wholes, and the third, according to a division into parts,’ Plato now intends to deliver to us the middle or second fabrication ; having indeed a transition of this kind consentaneous from.

“Since, however, it is necessary that what is generated of a corporeal nature should be visible and tangible ; but without fire nothing can become visible, neither can any thing be tangible without a certain solid, nor solid without earth ;—hence divinity beginning to fabricate, constituted the body of the universe from fire and earth.” Plato having a little before given the definition of that which is generated, calling it that which is becoming to be, and which is perishable, he defined it to be that which is the object of opinion in conjunction with sense.

If however, some one should say that according to Plato material forms and qualities themselves are apprehended by sense, and yet are incorporeal, and at the same time have generation, let him know, says the divine Tamblichus, that these likewise contribute to the hypostasis of bodies, and are surveyed in conjunction with them.

psychical and intellectual; and further still, since the world also has the unbegotten and the generated, but the whole of every thing which consists of the unbeyotten and the generated, is generated, Plato very properly calls the whole world something generated and corporeal.

Plato beginning therefore from body, in the first place gives it to be sensible according to the extreme senses.

βοοκ 111.] TIM.LUS OF PLATO.

Hence also Plato opposes the visible to the tangible.

What Plato therefore here says, is not as Theophrastus thought, imperfect : for he doubts as follows: Why does Plato say that the peculiarity of five is visibility, and of earth tanzibility, but does not at all mention the peculiarities of the other elements?

The most proper solution however of the doubt, is that which says, that Plato assumes the extreme elements prior to the others, because the latter subsist for the sake of the former.

ποὺ κ 211.} TIMAUS OF PLATO.

Plato however, does not say that fire alone is vistble: for this is false in a twofold respect.

But Plato knew the mixture of things, and separately delivered the nature of each, fashioning the elements from figures, Perhaps however, the wonderful Aristotle will object to what is said, not admitting that every thing visible is such through the participation of fire; because the choir of the stars, and the great sun itself, though they do not consist of fire, yet at the same time are visible.

Hence Plato, as he proceeds, calls matter the receptacle of the universe.

Hence, it must be said, that Plato does not characterize fire by heat, nor by being, moved upward ; for these things are the peculiarities of the fire which is here, and which is not in its proper place; but that he characterizes it by visibility.

If therefore, as we have said, fire is requisite in order that the world may be visible, but earth, that itimay be tangible, divinity beginning from fire and earth, made the universe, Not that he first made these ; for we have already reyected the generation which is according to time; but since every physiology commences from contraries, on this account Plato says that the composition of the universe orianated from fire and earth, in order that it might become visible through fire, and tangible through the solidity of earth, which with great accuracy he calls ὦ certain solid.

BOOK 111.} ΤΙΝ ῦ5 OF PLATO.

We shall omit however to notice those who say that Plato here calls the three elements after fire, earth, For if this were admitted, it would not be possible to assign what is the medium of earth and fire.

Beginning therefore from the duad, as allied to generation, progression and difference, Plato introduces union to the participants of it, and an harmonious communion through a bond, imparting to the world this as the second gift from the Demiurgus.

We shall however here avoid the introduction of such doubts as are adduced by those who do not rightly understand what is said by Plato.

For Plato does not absolutely say, that there is something between all things, in whatever manner they may exist, which gives perfection to the hypostasis of one composite.

ΑἸ these theretore, wander trom the conception of Plato.

Book 411] TIM ALUS OF PLATO, 399 proceeds from the cause of the animal, and employs the nerves, and all the inaterial organic bonds tor the colligation of the animal.

You must not therefore, understand the bond which is now mentioned by Plato, according to the first mode; for this is not attended with cause ; but cause is entirely exempt from the things which proceed from it, so far as itis cause.

But Plato says, that the bond isin the middle of the things that are bound.

Plato however adds, that the bond of which he is sneaking, makes both itself and the things which are bound to be one.

For analogy inserts connexion, causing the natures which are bound by it, as Plato says, to be indissoluble by every thing except by him who binds them.

And Plato indeed adduces an universal assertion by saying, “a certam or some third thing.” But if you add the words, “ which are entirely contrary,” (immediately after the words, * or two things alone”) you will render whatis said mcontrovertble, and more acknowledged.

nook 11} TIM.EUS OF PLATO, 401 For it is impossible for two things which are most contrary to concur into one composition with each other, without the intervention of a third.

Hence it is rightly said, that a bond imparts beauty, and an harmonious communion and union, But what this bond is, and how it is inherent in the things that are bound, Plato shows through the following words.

chus, Moderatus, &c.,’ we shall confine ourselves to the three media from which Plato constitutes the soul, arithmetically, geometrically, and harmonically.

Hence Plato appropriately adds the words, ‘naturally adapted,” beewuse the analogies and all the tiddles have the spontaneous, Por they neither introduce an artificial, nor an adscititious bond, but present themselves to the view in) the essences and powers themselves of things.

ROOK 411} TIMEUS OF PLATO.

There are therefore some who think that Plato in these words detines the geometric middle, and among other things which they assert, they say that the geometrie middle is properly exclusive of all the others analogy ; but that the others may be justly ealled middles.

10) geometric proportion is properly analogy ; but it is requisite to call the ethers middle, as Plato also says further on inthe gencration of the soul, But the others are improperly" called analozics.

Vo others, however, these appear not to have apprehended the meaning of Plato properly.

For by that part of the triad by which the triad is exceeded by the tetrad, by the same part of the hexad is the tetrad sarpassed by the hexad, Sach, therefore, is their opinion, though Plato clearly assumes the geometric iniddle.

As, however, there are three middles, the arithmetic, the geometric, and the harmonic, and these being such as we have shown them to be, Plato very properly assumes these * For καταχρώμενοι here, 1 read καταχρήστικωε.

And hence Plato uses these three, viz.

TIMASUS OF PLATO.

As Plato therefore says, It subsists in nambers, masses, and powers.

TIM.£Us OF PLATO.

Hence, too, Plato appears to me to say very cautiously, not that there is entirely one medium in similar planes, but that it is possible for one to be suflicient.

Hence between similar solids, two media are sufficient; just as Plato says, that two media adapt solids to each other, but never one medium.

Plato, however, does not say that one medium only falls between any casual planes, nor again two media between casual solids, but between those that are similar, and in an eflable ratio, and which have their sides arranged according to numbers.

the things generated by the demiurgic God, are effable with reference to each other, and are variegated by demiurgic numbers, as Plato says in another part of this dialogue.

We shall show therefore at the end of these Commentaries, how itis possible, two right lines being civen, to find two analogous media, selecting for this purpose the demonstration of Archytas, rather than that of Menwchmus, because he uses conical lines, and in like manner rather than that of Eratosthenes, because he employs the apposition of a rule." With respect however to the things investigated, it must now be said that Plato appears to have perfect contidence in arithmetical demonstrations, since it is also possible to find in geometrical figures of two solids an analogous medium.

Hence it seems that Plato employing numbers, shows that solids are never co-adapted by one mean, but always by two media.

But Plato * From the most unfortunate loss of the latter part of these commentaries of Proclus, this method likewise of his fiuding two analogous media between two given lives, is lost.

poor 11 TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Hence, as there is the same ratio in the sides of the cubes, and in the media, Plato says that there is necessarily two media, and this in amanner more consonant to the proposed physiology.

What Plato says, therefore, is true according to the before-mentioned method.

We however, conformably to physical principles, speak as follows, receiving auxiliaries from what Plato says as he proceeds.

TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

TIMA&US OF PLATO.

The physical dogmas therefore of Plato about the elements of the universe, accord with mathematical specalations, Hence these things being thus determined, let us physically adapt them to the words of Plato.

by the assertions of Aristotle, extend through the whole world one passive matter, not at all different from that of the heavens, and in consequence of embracing certain barbaric opinions, give to the world a fifth body, end refer the doctrine concerning it to Plato, For Aristotle, following these opinions, introduced a filth element.

But others assert, that the heavens are of a diflerent essence, as having a different form of life, a more simple motion, and a more perpetual nature ; but that Plato is now speaking about the sublunary elements, and adorns these by analogies.

These menindeed, speak rightly, both with respect to things, and the opinion of Plato, in asserting that the nature of the heavens is different from mutable, and in short, material things; but at the same time ' they neglect the Platonic words, in which the philosopher says, that “ ¢he Demiurgus bound together and constituted the heaven [or the universe} through the analogy of the four elements ;”?

Tf however, that element is different from the four, how does Plato say that the whole world consists of the four elements?

And how does Plato say that fire for the most part predominates there, if there is an equal domination?

υουκ I.) TIM AEUS OF PLATO.

BOOK 11|.} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

What we now say, however, is conformable to the history delivered by many [of the Pythagoric doctrines], For that this mode of distribution is not Platonic, we may learn from this that Plato arranges the sun immediately above the moon, afterwards Venus, and then Mercury.

TIM.GUS OF PLATO.

That Plato however, affords us these auxiliaries, he clearly shows shortly after, whenhe says, “ that hewho constituted the world composed itfromall fire water, airand earth, leaving nopartnor power ofany oncof them externally.” For he does not sa y from “ae appears.that the words τῆς ἕε deurepas τον υποσεληνὴῆν τόπον, are wanting in this place, in the orginal.

As we have said therefore, the Oracles also bear witness to what is asserted by Plato, since they too generate the world from the four elements.

And thus much concerning the concord of philosophers about this particular: for we shall see in what follows, if there is any difference respecting it in the doctrine of Plato, It is manifest however, that the elements are every where bound to each other by analogy." For analogy, as we lave said, imitates divine union, and is a demiurgic bond.

Again therefore, the order of the elements becomes apparent, and we see that Plato very properly procures from the mathematics belief in.

Plato therefore knowing these things, adds, * as much as possible,” in order that you may not entirely require in’ physical reasons a mathematical accuracy.

noow it] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

Farther stall, we ought also to understand the manner in which Plato constitutes the analogy.

In addition to these things also, it must be observed that Plato assumes here, as we have said, the geometric mean, and indicates that this is analogy, For it is the peculiarity of this middle to have the same ratio, Tlence some persons properly call.

For the world being adorned by the tetrad, which proceeds fromthe monad and triad, is terminated by the decad, as being comprehensive of all things, That the world likewise is one through analogy, subsisting from these elements, and from such like things according to powers, and from so many according to quantity, Plato clearly manifests by saying, that not the sublunary region, but the body of the universe, Was venerated from the four elements.

BOOK 111.} TIM.LUS OF PLATO.

As corruption therefore, is produced in a sixfold manner, Plato subverts all the modes of it.

Why then does Plato add, that it cannot be corrupted, except by him by whom it was bound?

πθοκ 111] TIM/EUS OF PLATO.

133 Plato knew, as we have before observed, that there are many differences of fire, of water, and of each ofthe other elements; from all which, he says, the worid derives its completion; and he confers this as the thira demiurgic gift on the world.

May we not say, that though those firmaments should not consist of the four elements, again it is true, that no part of the four, is external to the universe, or rather, as Plato says, is erternally.

Unless it be requisite to say this, that Plato produces soul analogous to the etheral worlds, but intellect, to the empyrean world.

These things therefore must hereafter be considered : for itis very dubious how they accord with the dogmas of Plato.

See the 4th Book of wy translation of Proclus on the Theology of Plato.

Book 111} TIMJEUS OF PLATO.

430 Plato assigns three causes, that I may speak summarily, through which no element is left externally to the universe, viz.

For if there is nothing external to the universe, and if it comprehends all appropriate parts, it is one, perfect, and perpetual, Some one however may doubt, how Plato arguing from perpetuity, says that nothing is left external to the universe, For there are other perpetual natures, such as the celestial bodies, and yet something is external to them.

Hence also Plato calls the periods of our souls, disorderly and confused ; not only on account of the psychical motions, but hkewise on account of the motions of our vehicles, in consequence of such ἃ conglutination taking place from these sublunary bodies.

These therefore, that I may speak summarily, are the particulars which are discussed by Plato.

Perhaps, too, Plato adds this, on account of the celestial bodies, and in short, on account of monadic natures.

of each of these [eelestial bodies}, From = the elevated conceptions therefore of Plato, it follows, that then alone a thing is corrupted by the natures that surround it, When it Consists of the same things as those by which itis surrounded ; so that there are as many diflerenees of fire, and of each of the elements, as there are monadie natures from whieh) the universe consists 3 and: the Dc miurgcus coustttuted asimany ideas of simple bodies, as of the composite natures, whieh he in tended to produce, Hence, all of them give completion to oue certain thing, and nothing else is generated from: them, Bat the words, πω" obuovious to old age, nor disease, Wave ἃ manifest Cause.

For disease arises from the want of symmetry inthe things that enter into the body, some of the parts nus being augmented by others, and dissoleing the analogy with the remaining parts of which we consist, through which a superabundance and deficiency of the humours are secretly introduced, and old age accedes, nature becoming imbecile, as Plato says further on, through contending against many things that externally attack it, and enduring a numerous succession of labours.

in what Plato now says] the providence of divinity about the universe, in order that it may be free from disease, concurs with the composition of the universe.

Uence, as Plato says, the universe is from intellect: and necessity, intellect’ persuading necessity; but necessity being converted to intellect, in order that it may lead all things to that which is best.

But Plato assumes heat and cold as things ofan eflicacions nature, and as possessing strong and vigorous powers; the former producing corruption through section, but the latter through violent congelation, But the word unscasonably manifests the privation of symmetry, and the ‘inaptitude arising from the want of symmetry, and besides these, the incursions * For τὸν τὸν here, read τὸν you.

Plato, however, in saying that heat and cold by surrounding and falling on the world, would introduce disease and corruption, may seem to grant that the world is in short both hot and cold.

BOOK IIL.) TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

That Plato however, in an admirable manner informs us, that nothing is left external to the universe, from which any thing else of the like kind could be generated, and that each of the things that are monadic alone consists of the simple | natures of which it is composed, and there are not other?

Let us, however, proceed to what ux next said by Plato.

TIM.ZUS OF PLATO.

of my translation of Proclus on the Theology of Plato.

For as Plato says in the Laws, intellect possesses intelligence similar to the motion of a sphere fashioned by a wheel; being extended according to the same things, after the same manner, in the same, and about the same.

noox it] TIMEZUS OF PLATO.

For Plato likewise says that this figure is adapted to that which is to comprehend in itself all figures.

Such therefore is the meaning of what is here said by Plato.

| BOOK 111.} TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

TIM EUS OF PLATO, 449 this be the care, the heavens are spherical.

At the same time, however, thus much must be related, that they demonstrate the superficies of the sphere to be more capacious than that of all other solid bodies of equal ambits, and they particularly demonstrate that it is more capacious than the bodies which are called by Plato, equilateral and equiangular polyedra; partly employing the propositions of Euclid, and partly those of Archimedes.

Tet us therefore return to the words of Plato, and survey after what manner each of them is delivered.

then, figure is after whole, and that Plato having demonstrated the universe to be a whole, very properly in what follows teaches us concerning the figure of it, we have before observed.

BOOK 111.]} TIALEUS OF PLATO.

And in another sens:bly, accompanied with separation and interval, And _ this last, indeed, is not simply called by Plato spherical (σφαιρικοην), but spheriform (σφαιροειδές), as being an imitation of the intellectual or intelligible sphere.

Plato likewise uses the expression lo fashion as with a wheel, because bodies with us are rendered more accurately round throngh a wheel which cuts off the inequalities of the bodies.

After this, he adds, which is evident, “ that the similar ts better than the dissimilar.” For similitude is of an uniting, but dissimilitude of a * Which the Coryphean philosopher mentioned by Plato in the Thextetus, is said to do.

Whenee also some one may wonder at those Platonists, who admit that difference is better than) sameness, though Plato says that the similar is infinitely more beautiful than the dissimilar, At the same time, also, dissimilitade is ima certain respect secretly introduced into beings from matter, but similitade accedes from forms alone, and intellizible causes.

Hence Plato also endeavours to show what the figure of the world is, from similitude, and the Py thagoric Timeus himself, assigns this as the first cause of its fisure, in conjunction with making a physical mention of it.

BOOKIII.] TIM £US OF PLATO.

Plato says, for the sake of many things.

You may say therefore, that Plato reminds os of this catoptnc apparatus, ino what he now says of the sniouthness of the external superiicies of the world, Hence the corporeal * fom, Odyss.

Nor was hearing necessary : for there was nothing externally audible, Nor was itinvested with surrounding air, that it might be in want of respiration,” Through these things, Plato appears to do nothing clse, than to take away a partible life from the universe, and the partible organs, which are suspended from us, when we descend intu generation, For while we abide on high, we are not at ail in want of these multiform lives, and partible organs.

Por wholes are more divine than parts, and comprehending than comprehended natures, And thas much as to the cotmmon conception of the things proposed, Since, however, in whatis now said, and in what follows, Plato takes away

TIM-EUS OF PLATO.

And why do I speak of theologists, when Plato himself says that the universe is an animal, and that animal is characterized by sense?

BOOK 111.] TIMAUS OF PLATO.

For its compo-sing artificer thought that it would be much more excellent, if sufficient to itself, than if in want of other things.” Through what is here said, Plato takes away two other senses from the universe, the smell and the taste.

BOOK 111.] TIM.£US OF PLATO.

Let us however, discuss the particulars of what is here said by Plato.

For as Plato has not yet delivered to us the generation of the heavens and stars, how could he speak about the nutriment of them?

braced by Aristotle, who subverts the existence of a vacuum in energy, and preserves the world only-begotten, But that nothing departs froin, or accedes to the universe, Plato infers, the latter indeed, becanse there is nothing external to it, and the former, from the universe making the consumption of itself, its proper nutriment.

And that Plato intended the latter should be inferred as well as the tormer, I think he clearly manifests by saying, that “ the universe suffers and acts all things tn itself, and from its own peculiar operations.” But if all that is gencrated, is the consequence of the universe acting on and suffering from itself, it must not be said, that either consumptions or corruptions are simply evils.

And this indeed, is a divine corollary, which is to be assumed from what Plato says.

Hence the Oracles call the Demiurgus of the universe ove who produces works by art; which expression Plato divides, at one time calling the things contained in the world, the works of the Demiurgus, [as when he represents the maker of the world saying] “ ofwhom Iam the Demiurgus and father of works ;° just as the Oracles also when they say; for understanding the works of the paternal self-begotten intellect ; but at another denominating the energy of the Demiurgus art, which in the end becomes the cause of the sufficiency of the universe to itsclf, For the Demiurgus being good, raade all things simitar to himself; i.

BOOK I11.] TIM-EUS OF PLATO.

For that which is violent ts not perpetual.’ But Plato guarding against the oversights of both these, assigns to the world a proper and spontaneous motion, and shows that the Demiurgus is the cause of this motion.

Nor does Plato stop here, but having mentioned the peculiarity of the circular motion, he shows its admirable transcendency above the other notions, For he denominates it to be that which subsists about intellect and wisdom, and this not simply, but he also adds especially.

Let us however pass on to what is next said by Plato, “ Tence by a circumduction according to saineness, in the same, and in itself, he caused it to be moved convolving in a circle.

ROOK Ε1|,] TIM-LUS OF PLATO.

467 The universe indeed, Plato says, is moved according to sameness, and after a similar manner; and according to one reason and one order.

But such a eireulation as Severus speaks of, subverts the one order of motion, The mode, however, in Which such ἃ motion is fabulously introduced, is shown by our preceptor in his Commentaries on that dialogue, ' conformably to the meanine of Plato.

gr about the It is however worthy of admiration in Plato, that when discoursing essence of the universe, he assimilates it to itellizible animal; but that now teaching us concerning the motion of it, he refers the similitude of it to intellect; delivering to us from these things, the analogy which is in them, viz.

TIM.EZUS OF PLATO.

In what is here said, therefore, Plato makes a summary repetition of all such particulars as the universe derives from the intellectual Gods.

[tis necessary likewise to observe, that Plato by arranging the Demiurzus among eternal beings, gives to him an eternal order, so that he will not faccording to Plato} be soul.

Hat a τς ROOK Lh] TIM.EUS OF PLATO.

For since, as we have Letore observed, it las an eternal power of existing derived from a cause dierent trow itself, and the power which it possesses it possesses terminated, but by always receiving, it always is, having the power in that which is terminated numbered to infinity ;—this being the case, it is evident that it is once, from the once always acquiring existence, and always becoming to be, in consequence of that which gives it to exist, never ceasing.’ According to its own nature, however, it is once, and has a renovated immortality, as Plato says in the Politicus, possessing its being in advancing into existence, and on this account participating not at once wholly of the whole (of time} but once ; and this again and again, existing in generation, and not being without an extension [of existence].

Unless, therefore, the word once signifies with Plato the whole of time.

If yon are willing also to consider what is said after another manner, since Plato has hitherto fashioned a corporeal nature, bat has not in words constituted soul and intellect, he denominates the God that would exist, and who subsists in discourse according to a part, once.

It is also said to be in the And thus Plato beginning from singular number a body, as being only-begotten.

Book: The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato, Volume I, London, 1820, printed by A.

The description of the Central Part of the Atlantic Isle, by Plato, in Critias, compared with the modern account of Central America .

Besides that, when Strabo, a geographer of reliable character, is found stating that 6000 years before his time, there was an Arsenal at Cadiz and ships celebrated for voyages at sea : and when Plato, as will afterwards be seen, described great warlike eruptions from beyond the Pillars of Hercules, it becomes too plain for contradiction, that there must have been extensive intercourse between the two hemispheres in times of high antiquity.

The first extract will be taken from the writings of Plato, in his work, entitled Critias.

Plato was a celebrated Athenian philosopher, who died about 384 years before the Christian era.

Plato puts this great warlike eruption, at 9000 years before his time.

Again, Plato refers to this warlike attack on Europe as great.

There must have been big ships and national troops, for Plato speaks of the Kings of the Atlantic Isle.

Not only so : for the language employed by Plato, leads to the unavoidable conclusion, that the early history of Europe must have been affected by this hostile attack.

Plato says that the Atlantic Sea was navigable 9000 years before his time : so that there must have been navigation across the Atlantic Ocean, in the mythic ages.

They say that this island is situated beyond Mount Caf, in which it appears, that this ancient tradition of the Orientals, is taken from the Isle Atlantic of Plato, which is no other thing than the continent of America.

Plato puts the irruption of warlike races from the Atlantic Isle at 9000 years before his time.

He ran to the place and attacked Cacus, squeezed and strangled him in his arms, though vomiting fire and smoke." Cacus, in this myth, is put in Italy, and mention is made of Geryon, who belongs to Spain: so that the story must relate to the movements of the warlike races, that Plato brings into Europe, from beyond the pillars of Hercules.

If that latter event were put at 9,000 years before Plato, who will venture to assign a period for their erection, and the events that must have occurred in them?

CENTRAL PART OF THE ATLANTIC ISLE, BY PLATO, IN CRITIAS, COMPARED WITH THE MODERN ACCOUNT OF CENTRAL AMERICA.

In the fourth chapter of this work, as a part of the evidence that America was known to the Ancients, the writings of Plato, in Timseus, were transcribed.

Plato returns to the subject, in his writings entitled Critias, and he gives a much more extended account of the Island entering a little into its histories, and describing at great length the practices of the inhabitants, giving a particular account of the temple of Poseidon.

From the details of the statement, it can be safely judged, that Plato is really giving a description of what specially belongs to Central America.

PLATO ON THE CENTRE OF THE ATLANTIC ISLE.

The quotation from Plato is remarkable, as describing in ancient times, the identical palace and temple, or one similar to it, which is described by Mr.

PLATO ON THE CENTRE OF THE ATLANTIC ISLE.

211 by Plato, a temple of Poseidon, and it is especially referred to Atlas and his descendants.

This comparison between the writings of Plato and the modern description of Central America is singularly valuable in forming conclusions concerning the ruined cities, their probable history, and the manner of their abandonment.

Plato puts into the country, one Evenor, with his wife Leucippe and a family.

Then Plato goes on to say, that there were ten kings in the land, each of whom had despotic sway over his subjects.

When the statement of Plato, that Zeus assembled the Gods into this particular spot, is compared with the tradition, that they were ultimately installed in the mountains of Quiche, the conclusion cannot be avoided, that the ruins were the cities of the Titan race, which, after a residence for ages, they were either compelled to leave, or which they voluntarily forsook.

The extract now transcribed from Plato's Critias differs in nothing, except the details, from the writings of Diodorus and Philo.

In the Chronicle of Eri, it is said, that "long before the Celts left Spain, the God Baal had sent the blessed stone, the Laic feal, to their ancestors." This last tradition shews what is meant by the saying "fallen from heaven." These stones, shields and images, must have been brought into Europe and Asia, from across the Atlantic Ocean, in those great migrations and warlike expeditions, of which Plato speaks in the Timseus.

The case is put very differently by Plato.

According both to the native traditions and the statement of Plato, there must have been a general gathering of the Gods in Quiche and Yucatan, and Jupiter himself was among them.

That grand and marvellous erection, therefore, attests the truthfulness of Plato, when he brings into Western Europe a great conquering people from beyond the pillars of Hercules.

The Inca and his institutions may have been unknown in Asia and Europe, from Plato to Columbus; but there is ocular demonstration, from the monuments of antiquity, that the Inca and his customs were known in ancient Ethiopia and Babylonia.

He gave laws to his subjects, which still remained in full force in the age of the philosophic Plato, about 1000 years after the death of the legislator.

There can be no doubt at all, that the figures now before the reader, represent the Oceanides mentioned by Plato, as making great warlike eruptions from beyond the Pillars of Hercules, 9,000 years before his time, on the fair plains of Western Europe.

Its general histories are given by Diodorus Siculus and Plato, which last celebrated author, instructed by an Egyptian priest from the famed repository of ancient knowledge, shews how the inhabitants of the Island, headed by kings, have migrated into Europe, and seizing the western countries have mingled their 2s

333 Charon myth, 233 Chichen Basso relievo, 206 Chickasaw customs, 189 China pedigrees, 272 Chippeway tradition, 83 Chiron myth, 198 Choctaw traditions, 186, 187 Chrysaor Hephaestus, 106 ; myth, 154; father of Echidna, 165 ; father of Medusa, 165 Circe, 35 Cnouphis soul of world, 77 Cocytus River, 56, 57 Con in Peru, 282 Constellations by Gods, 14; localizations, 18 Copan Stone, 220 Critias of Plato, 30, 208 Cronus in the Egg, 77 ; Ilus, 107 ;

I quote the following from Plato ("Dialogues," xi, 517, Timceiis) : "Thereupon, one of the priests, who was of very great age, said, 'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and there is never an old man who is an Hellene.' Solon, hearing this, said, 'What do you mean?' 'I mean to say,' he replied, ' that in mind you are all young ; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age.

369 country." On this land is "the palace of the sun, raised high on stately columns, bright with radiant gold, and carbuncle that rivals the flames ; polished ivory crests its highest top, and double folding doors shine with the brightness of silver." In other words, the legend refers to the island-home of a civilized race, over which was a palace which reminds one of the great temple of Poseidon in Plato's story.

383 And in Plato's description of Atlantis, as received by Solon from the Egyptian priests, we read : "There was an island " (Atlantis) " situated in front of the straits which you call the Columns of Hercules ; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the loay to other islands, and from the islands you might pass through the whole of the opposite continent,'''' (America,) " which surrounds the true ocean," Now this is not very clear, but it may signify that there was continuous land communication between Atlantis and the islands of the half-submerged ridge, and from the islands to the continent of America.

These were the "myriads of years " referred to b}^ Plato, during which mankind dwelt on the great plain of Atlantis.

In the Egyptian history, as preserved by Plato, the Deluge of Deucalion, which many things prove to have been identical with the Deluge of Noah, was the last of a series of great catastrophes.

"Whereby the xoorld that then was, being overflowed with water, perished." This seems to refer to the island Atlantis, " overflowed with water," and destroyed, as told by Plato ; thereby forming a very distinct connection between the Island of Poseidon and the Deluge of Noah.

He has now found that the signs on the Pyramid of Xochicalo are both Maya and Egyptian ; and a careful study of these decorative inscriptions has made it plain to him that the pyramid was a monumental structure erected to commemorate the submergence and destruction of the great Land of Mu (Plato's Atlantis), together with its population of 64,000,000 of human beings, about 1 1,500 years ago.

Plato is the first who gives an account of it, and he is said to have obtained his information from some Egyptian priests with whom he had come in contact.

Plato's account says: "Atlantis was a continent larger than Asia and Africa put together, and that at its western extremity were islands which afforded easy passage to a large continent lying still beyond — this last mentioned continent being now supposed to be South America." Nine thousand years be-

fore the time of Plato, according to the tradition, Atlantis was a powerful, thickly settled-country which extended its way over Africa and the major portion of what is now Europe, "even to as far as the Tyrrhenian Sea." Further progress of the invasion of the Atlantides was checked by the combined efforts of the Athenians and other Greeks.

Plato, for instance, condensed the whole history of the Continent of Atlantis, covering several millions of years into an event, he located upon the island of Poseidonis (about as large as Ireland) ; whereas, the priests spoke always of Atlantis as a continent as large as Europe and Africa put together.