Customer Reviews

Timaeus

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Reading Zeyl's translation of Timaeus is like taking a college-level seminar on this classic text. His introduction is longer than the text and gives background and insight to the translation. That coupled with the many footnotes throughout the text, explain Zeyl's translation of the Greek, offer alternative translations for certain key words or concepts, and make Zeyl's case for why he made some of the translation choices he did.

The text itself is one of the classics of western thought, offering among other things Plato's theory on creation, how and why the world and its parts was formed. While less well read than Plato's other works such as the Republic, the ideas in this book influenced writers for centuries to come including St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Be forewarned, however, this is not light reading. Plato's ideas are quite intricate and are frequently explained using geometric models. You may want to brush up on your high school geometry before tackling this treatise.

Amazon seems to have linked together all the comments on the Timaeus (no matter the translator). It is very possible that you are reading this under a different translation, not the Jowett translation as the commenter suggests. In any case, I recommend the Donald Zeyl translation. It DOES have Stephanus numbering -- very appropriate for class discussions and scholarly work. In my opinion, it is the best English translation available -- and I've spent years working through the text in Greek. Another translation that is nice to have around for alternative readings of key passages (all translation involves interpretation) is Peter Kalkavage's.

Zeyl's translation is easy to read; for a translation that follows the Greek a little more closely (and therefore is arguably less readable) see Peter Kalkavage's translation. The two translations and their notes are complementary.

"This world of ours is beautiful and its craftsman good" (29a). I shall summarise some highlights.

Why there are four elements. "Nothing could ever become visible apart from fire, nor tangible without something solid, nor solid without earth. That is why ... the god came to make [the universe] out of fire and earth. But it isn't possible to combine two things well all by themselves ... Now the best bond is one that really and truly makes a unity of itself together with the things bonded by it, and this is in the nature if things is best accomplished by proportion" (31b-31c), namely a mean proportional. "So if the body of the universe were to have come to be as a two-dimensional plane, a single middle term would have sufficed" (32a-b), i.e., the mean proportional of p^2 and q^2 is pq, while a three dimensional universe requires two mean proportionals, pq^2 and p^2q, between p^3 and q^3. "Hence the god set water and air between fire and earth" (32b).

Polyhedral theory of the elements. "Let us now assign to fire, earth, water, and air the [regular polyhedra]. To earth let us give the cube, because of the four kinds of bodies earth is the most immobile and the most pliable ... And of the solid figures that are left, we shall next assign the least mobile of them to water, to fire the most mobile, and to air the one in between" (55d-56a). The dodecahedron "still remained, and this one the god used for the whole universe" (55c).

Applications of the polyhedral theory ("a moderate and sensible diversion," 59d). Water=icosahedron has 20 equilateral triangles as its sides, while fire=tetrahedron has 4 and air=octahedron 8, so "when water is broken up into parts by fire or even by air, it could happen that the parts recombine to form one corpuscle of fire and two of air" (56d), i.e., steam is two parts air and one part fire. A second example may illustrate how the relative sizes of the polyhedra matter (61a). Fire is of course the smallest, followed by air. Thus, for example, water can normally be dissolved by air (evaporation) by air octahedra slipping in between the water icosahedra. But since the fire tetrahedra are smaller they dissolve water much more efficiently. And if the water is sufficiently packed (ice) then air cannot dissolve it at all since only fire can get through the cracks.

Experiments denounced. Timaeus' "well-reasoned account of colors" (67d) includes principles like "red mixed with black and white is of course purple" (68c). "But if anyone who in considering these matters were to put them to an actual test, he would demonstrate his ignorance of the difference of the human and the divine. It is god who possesses both the knowledge and power required to mix a plurality into a unity and, conversely, to dissolve a unity into plurality, while no human being could possess either of these, whether at the present time or at any time in the future." (68d).

Human anatomy is an appendix to the soul. "The entire body" was created "as its vehicle" (69c), and its properties were designed to serve the soul, e.g., "They wound the intestines round in coils to prevent the nourishment from passing through so quickly that the body would of necessity require fresh nourishment just as quickly, there by rendering it insatiable. Such gluttony would make our whole race incapable of philosophy and the arts, and incapable of heeding the most divine part within us." (73a). Even eyesight was created not for worldly purposes but primarily to give us the mind the idea of number and time:

Origins of human understanding. "Our ability to see the periods of day-and-night, of months and of years, of equinoxes and solstices, has led to the invention of number and has given us the idea of time and opened the path to inquiry into the nature of the universe. These pursuits have given us philosophy, a gift from the gods to the mortal race whose value neither has been nor ever will be surpassed. I'm quite prepared to declare this to be the supreme good our eyesight offers us." (47a-b).

Generation of animals. "[Birds] descended from ... simpleminded men, men who studied the heavenly bodies but in their naiveté believed that the most reliable proofs concerning them could be based upon visual observation. Land animals ... came from men who had no tincture of philosophy and who made no study if the heavens whatsoever ... As a consequence ... they carried their forelimbs and their heads dragging toward the ground." (91d-92a).

This copy doesn't include the Stephanus numbers required for a decent in-depth discussion. Although Jowett has a great reputation for being good at literal translation, the lack of numbers makes this copy undesirable if one is going to discuss the book as part of a class or reading group.