(14) Thus it comes about that this kosmos, lit with many lights, gleaming in its souls, receives still further graces, gifts from here and from there, from the gods of the Supreme, and from those other Intellectual-Principles whose nature it is to ensoul. This is probably the secret of the myth in which, after Prometheus had moulded woman, the other gods heaped gifts upon her, Hephaistos "blending the clay with moisture and bestowing the human voice and the form of a goddess"; Aphrodite bringing her gifts, and the Graces theirs, and other gods other gifts, and finally calling her by the name which tells of gift and of all giving- for all have added something to this formation brought to being by a Promethean, a fore-thinking power. As for the rejection of Prometheus' gift by after-thought, Epimetheus, what can this signify but that the wiser choice is to remain in the Intellectual realm? Pandora's creator is fettered, to signify that he is in some sense held by his own creation; such a fettering is external and the release by Hercules tells that there is power in Prometheus, so that he need not remain in bonds.

Take the myth as we may, it is certainly such an account of the bestowal of gifts upon the kosmos as harmonizes with our explanation of the universal system.

(74) Timaeus: mixed it in therewith, and thus molded flesh full of sap and soft. And the substance of the sinews He compounded of a mixture of bone and unfermented flesh, forming a single substance blended of both and intermediate in quality, and he used yellow also for its coloring. Hence it is that the sinews have acquired a quality that is firmer and more rigid than flesh, but softer and more elastic than bone. With these, then, God enclosed the bones and marrow, first binding them one to another with the sinews, and then shrouding them all over with flesh.

(74) Timaeus: And inasmuch as He deemed that the texture of the bony substance was too hard and inflexible, and that if it were fired and cooled again it would decay and speedily destroy the seed within it, for these reasons He contrived the species known as sinew and flesh. He designed to bind all the limbs together by means of the former, which tightens and relaxes itself around the pivots, and thus cause the body to bend and stretch itself. And the flesh He designed to be a shield against the heat and a shelter against the cold; and, moreover, that in case of falls it should yield to the body softly and gently, like padded garments ;

(74) Timaeus: All the bones, then, that possessed most soul He enclosed in least flesh, but the bones which contained least soul with most and most dense flesh; moreover, at the junctions of the bones, except where reason revealed some necessity for its existence, He made but little flesh to grow, lest by hindering the flexions it should make the bodies unwieldy, because stiff in movement, or else through its size and density, when thickly massed together, it should produce insensitiveness, owing to its rigidity, and thereby cause the intellectual parts to be more forgetful and more obtuse. Wherefore

(73) Timaeus: and the mortal kind, while still incomplete, come straightway to a complete end,—foreseeing this, the Gods set the “abdomen,” as it is called, to serve as a receptacle for the holding of the superfluous meat and drink; and round about therein they coiled the structure of the entrails, to prevent the food from passing through quickly and thereby compelling the body to require more food quickly, and causing insatiate appetite, whereby the whole kind by reason of its gluttony would be rendered devoid of philosophy and of culture, and disobedient to the most divine part we possess. As regards the bones and the flesh and all such substances

(8) But what are we to understand by this Zeus with the garden into which, we are told, Poros or Wealth entered? And what is the garden?

We have seen that the Aphrodite of the Myth is the Soul and that Poros, Wealth, is the Reason-Principle of the Universe: we have still to explain Zeus and his garden.

We cannot take Zeus to be the Soul, which we have agreed is represented by Aphrodite.

Plato, who must be our guide in this question, speaks in the Phaedrus of this God, Zeus, as the Great Leader- though elsewhere he seems to rank him as one of three- but in the Philebus he speaks more plainly when he says that there is in Zeus not only a royal Soul, but also a royal Intellect.

As a mighty Intellect and Soul, he must be a principle of Cause; he must be the highest for several reasons but especially because to be King and Leader is to be the chief cause: Zeus then is the Intellectual Principle. Aphrodite, his daughter, issue of him, dwelling with him, will be Soul, her very name Aphrodite indicating the beauty and gleam and innocence and delicate grace of the Soul.

And if we take the male gods to represent the Intellectual Powers and the female gods to be their souls- to every Intellectual Principle its companion Soul- we are forced, thus also, to make Aphrodite the Soul of Zeus; and the identification is confirmed by Priests and Theologians who consider Aphrodite and Hera one and the same and call Aphrodite's star the star of Hera.

(378) Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods. I entirely agree with you, he said; in my opinion those stories are quite unfit to be repeated. Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling among themselves as of all things the basest, should any word be said to them of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, for they are not true. No, we shall never mention the battles of the giants, or let them be embroidered on garments; and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relatives. If they would only believe us we would tell them that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin by telling children; and when they grow up, the poets also should be told to compose for them in a similar spirit 9 . But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer— these tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and

(10) "He bound eighteen-hundred rulers in every æon, and set three-hundred-and-sixty over them, and he set five other great rulers as lords over the three-hundred-and-sixty and over all the bound rulers, who in the whole world of mankind are called with these names: the first is called Kronos, the second Arēs, the third Hermēs, the fourth Aphroditē, the fifth Zeus."

(9) But Zeus- ordering all, governor, guardian and disposer, possessor for ever of the kingly soul and the kingly intellect, bringing all into being by his providence, and presiding over all things as they come, administering all under plan and system, unfolding the periods of the kosmos, many of which stand already accomplished- would it not seem inevitable that, in this multiplicity of concern, Zeus should have memory of all the periods, their number and their differing qualities? Contriving the future, co-ordinating, calculating for what is to be, must he not surely be the chief of all in remembering, as he is chief in producing?

Even this matter of Zeus' memory of the kosmic periods is difficult; it is a question of their being numbered, and of his knowledge of their number. A determined number would mean that the All had a beginning in time ; if the periods are unlimited, Zeus cannot know the number of his works.

The answer is that he will know all to be one thing existing in virtue of one life for ever: it is in this sense that the All is unlimited, and thus Zeus' knowledge of it will not be as of something seen from outside but as of something embraced in true knowledge, for this unlimited thing is an eternal indweller within himself- or, to be more accurate, eternally follows upon him- and is seen by an indwelling knowledge; Zeus knows his own unlimited life, and, in that knowledge knows the activity that flows from him to the kosmos; but he knows it in its unity not in its process.

(75) Timaeus: the thighs and the shins and the region of the loins and the bones of the upper and lower arm, and all our other parts which are jointless, and all those bones which are void of intelligence within, owing to the small quantity of soul in the marrow—all these are abundantly supplied with flesh; but those parts which are intelligent are supplied less abundantly—except possibly where He so fashioned the flesh that it can of itself convey sensations, as is the case with the tongue; but most of these parts He made in the way described above. For the substance which is generated by necessity and grows up with us

(379) Assuredly. Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him. That appears to me to be most true, he said. Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the folly of saying that two casks ‘Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots 10 ,’ and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two ‘Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;’ but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill, ‘Him wild hunger drives o’er the beauteous earth.’ And again— ‘Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.’ And if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which was really the work of Pandarus 11 , was brought about by Athene and Zeus, or that the strife and contention of the gods was instigated by Themis and Zeus 12 , he shall not have our approval; neither will we allow our young men to hear the words of Aeschylus, that

(377) for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them. Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater. Those, I said, which are narrated by Homer and Hesiod, and the rest of the poets, who have ever been the great story-tellers of mankind. But which stories do you mean, he said; and what fault do you find with them? A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie. But when is this fault committed? Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,—as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original. Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what are the stories which you mean? First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too,—I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him 8 . The doings of Cronus, and the sufferings which in turn his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought certainly not to be lightly told to young and thoughtless persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a chosen few might hear them in a mystery, and they should sacrifice not a common [Eleusinian] pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; and then the number of the hearers will be very few indeed. Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable.

(73) Timaeus: all of bone. And bone He compounded in this wise. Having sifted earth till it was pure and smooth, He kneaded it and moistened it with marrow; then He placed it in fire, and after that dipped it in water, and from this back to fire, and once again in water; and by thus transferring it many times from the one element to the other He made it so that it was soluble by neither. This, then, He used, and fashioned thereof, by turning, a bony sphere round about the brain; and therein he left a narrow opening; and around the marrow

(57) 3. Upon his exile from Athens, Phidias--the greatest of all the Greek sculptors--went to Olympia in the province of Elis and there designed his colossal statue of Zeus, chief of the gods of Greece. There is not even an accurate description of this masterpiece now in existence; only a few old coins give an inadequate idea of its general appearance. The body of the god was overlaid with ivory and the robes were of beaten gold. In one hand he is supposed to have held a globe supporting a figure of the Goddess of Victory, in the other a scepter surmounted by an eagle. The head of Zeus was archaic, heavily bearded, and crowned with an olive wreath. The statue was seated upon an elaborately decorated throne. As its name implies, the monument was dedicated to the spirit of the planet Jupiter,--one of the seven Logi who bow before the Lord of the Sun.

(383) Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own. You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in which we should write and speak about divine things. The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way. I grant that. Then, although we are admirers of Homer, we do not admire the lying dream which Zeus sends to Agamemnon; neither will we praise the verses of Aeschylus in which Thetis says that Apollo at her nuptials ‘Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and to know no sickness. And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul. And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of prophecy, would not fail. And now he himself who uttered the strain, he who was present at the banquet, and who said this—he it is who has slain my son 15 .’ These are the kind of sentiments about the gods which will arouse our anger; and he who utters them shall be refused a chorus; neither shall we allow teachers to make use of them in the instruction of the young, meaning, as we do, that our guardians, as far as men can be, should be true worshippers of the gods and like them. I entirely agree, he said, in these principles, and promise to make them my laws.

(73) Timaeus: and mixing them one with another in due proportion, He fashioned therefrom the marrow, devising it as a universal seed-stuff for every mortal kind. Next, He engendered therein the various kinds of Soul and bound them down; and He straightway divided the marrow itself, in His original division, into shapes corresponding in their number and their nature to the number and the nature of the shapes which should belong to the several kinds of Soul. And that portion of the marrow which was intended to receive within itself, as it were into a field, the divine seed He molded