Who's Who in Plato's "Timaeus-Critias and Why"

Abstract

One, two, three--but where's the When Socrates counts to open the paired dialogues Timaeus-Critias he points to the three who are present, but he points most emphatically to a fourth who is absent--sick, Timaeus reports. Who are one, two, and three? But especially who, is the fourth, that ostentatiously absent fourth? This paper will ascertain exactly who one, two, and three are through a detailed analysis of the historical information Plato provides in the two dialogues. The analysis strongly suggests just who the fourth was and why his absence mattered enough to make it the opening event of dialogues which set forth a whole cosmology and an elaborate tale of ancient Athenian greatness. Once all four characters are granted their proper weight, Timaeus-Critias as a whole must be measured anew. In the final part of this paper, then, we will begin the more difficult and contentious consideration of just how an appreciation of the characters provides a compelling perspective for interpreting the intention of both the cosmology and the patriotic tale set forth in these great dialogues.(1) Our assumption throughout is that it matters who the three are and who the absent fourth was to be or Plato would not have given the issue such prominence. An ancient report states that Plato was an assiduous polisher, that he combed and curled his dialogues, the openings in particular, constantly revising them.(2) It is a true report, judging from the remarkable openings of so many of Plato's dialogues. Why did combing and curling the opening of these two dialogues entail counting the three individuals who are present and pointing to an absent fourth? I The Setting. The speeches of Timaeus-Critias are all given at a certain Kritias's house,(3) and they have a predetermined theme because of what was said at Socrates' house the previous day. Yesterday, when Socrates was host, he entertained his four guests with a speech outlining a city. Today's summary of yesterday's speech makes yesterday's city sound like the city built in the speeches of Plato's Republic. Once that apparent connection is reflected upon, however, it becomes evident that Socrates' speech yesterday was an incomplete version of the city of the Republic. Moreover, it was incomplete in a telling way: Socrates' speech yesterday stopped at the precise point where the Republic took up today's theme, how the city makes war.(4) By stopping there yesterday, Socrates also omitted any mention of the theme taken up immediately after the city at war in the Republic: the philosopher ruler. This theme too, perhaps the most memorable novelty of the Republic, has direct relevance for the Timaeus-Critias because Socrates flatters today's interlocutors by calling them philosophers and statesmen, men fit to speak on the grave topics of the city at war and its encompassing cosmos.(5) Socrates had thus maneuvered, through his abridged account of the Republic, to induce the others to speak on topics on which he himself is wholly fit to speak and had in fact spoken in the Republic. Today he asserts his inability to continue, alleging his unfitness to speak about his city at war because he is unable to sufficiently magnify the citizens or city he had described yesterday.(6) Furthermore, he states that he is not alone: poets and Sophism are also unfit to praise their cities or citizens. Poets are unfit because they are imitators wholly tied to their own things, the things of the city in which they have been raised. Sophists--wanderers from place to place who/are neither wise nor politic--are unfit because their uprootedness makes them unable to represent men who are both philosophers and statesmen.(7) Socrates, poem, and Sophism are all unfit, but there are present here today, Socrates says, philosophers and statesmen fit to describe the city at war: Timaeus of Locri, Kritias of Athens, and Hermokrates of Syracuse. That is the task Socrates assigned them yesterday, having won the right to demand this effort by his own speech, that carefully truncated version of the Republic given yesterday and briefly recalled before today's speeches. …