Timaeus is the dialogue in which Plato has a Pythagorean astronomer describe how the visible world was made. A craftsman god, the demiurge, looks to an eternal model and shapes a world that is itself a living creature with a soul, its elements built from two kinds of triangle and its body divided according to musical ratios. It was the one Platonic dialogue the Latin West kept reading through the Middle Ages, and its demiurge passed into Gnostic and Hermetic thought.
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Text
Literary Form Scholarship
How Its Legacy Is ContestedIts craftsman god, the demiurge, was taken up by Gnostic and Hermetic writers and turned to purposes Plato's text does not support, in several systems becoming an ignorant or malevolent maker rather than a good one. 1 Critical EditionJohn Burnet's Oxford Classical Text edition of the Greek and Francis Cornford's English translation and commentary, Plato's Cosmology, remain widely used modern references for study of the dialogue. 1 Origins
Era of Composition Era of CompositionFourth century before the common era, among the late dialogues. 1 Attributed Author / Compiler Transmission
Manuscript TraditionThe one Platonic dialogue the Latin West went on reading through the Middle Ages, and it read it in Calcidius's partial Latin translation, which stops well before the end. Medieval Platonism is therefore built on a fragment of a single dialogue. 1 Structure
StructureAlmost the whole work is a single uninterrupted speech. Socrates, who leads every other dialogue, sits and listens while a Pythagorean astronomer from Locri describes how the visible world was made, which is why the cosmology can be set out as a continuous account rather than won by question and answer. 1 Disputed
Scholarly NoteAncient interpreters already disagreed over how literally to take the creation account: some Middle Platonists read the demiurge's act as a real event in time, while others, including later Neoplatonists, read the whole narrative as a pedagogical device describing an eternal, timeless order. Modern scholarship has not settled which reading Plato himself intended. 1 Learn More
A Likely Story, and Why Plato Says So
The dialogue is careful about its own status. Before the cosmology begins, Timaeus warns that an account of the changing world cannot have the certainty of an account of what always is, and offers what he calls a likely story. Everything that follows is presented under that qualification: the craftsman god, the world soul, the proportions, the triangles from which the elements are built. Readers who take the cosmology as doctrine are reading past a caution the text puts at the front. How to take it has been argued since antiquity.
Some ancient Platonists read the making of the world as an event, others as a way of describing an eternal dependence that never began, and the disagreement is not a modern invention but a division inside the school within a generation or two. The text supports both readings, which is presumably deliberate. The apparatus itself is mathematical rather than mythological, whatever the narrative frame suggests. The world soul is divided according to a series of musical intervals, the four elements are given geometrical solids built from two kinds of triangle, and the whole is a body fitted together by ratio rather than assembled from stuff. That is what allowed later readers to treat the dialogue as a bridge between philosophy, music and geometry, and why it was read in company with mathematical works rather than with the myths.
The One Dialogue the Latin West Kept
For most of the Middle Ages, Latin readers who knew Plato knew this text and little else. A partial translation with commentary was available where the rest of the dialogues were not, and the consequence was that a cosmological work stood in for the whole philosophy. Medieval Platonism is shaped by that accident: a school of thought known through its account of the making of the world reads differently from one known through its ethics or its epistemology.
The demiurge had a further career outside orthodoxy. Gnostic writings take the idea of a craftsman who shapes the world from a model and put it to a use Plato does not, making the maker of the material world a lesser and sometimes hostile power, and Hermetic and Neoplatonic literature works the figure over in its own ways. Reading any of those traditions without this dialogue behind them leaves the vocabulary unexplained. Its influence on esoteric thought runs mainly through that vocabulary. The world as a living creature with a soul, the correspondence between the order of the heavens and the order in a person, and the notion that number is what the cosmos is made of are all Timaean, and they arrive in later occult literature already several removes from the argument that produced them.
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