I. The hand of the master is clearly visible in the myth. First in the connection with mythology;—he wins a kind of verisimilitude for this as for his other myths, by adopting received traditions, of which he pretends to find an explanation in his own larger conception (compare Introduction to “Critias”). The young Socrates has heard of the sun rising in the west and setting in the east, and of the earthborn men; but he has never heard the origin of these remarkable phenomena. Nor is Plato, here or elsewhere, wanting in denunciations of the incredulity of “this latter age,” on which the lovers of the marvellous have always delighted to enlarge. And he is not without express testimony to the truth of his narrative;—such testimony as, in the “Timaeus” (40 D), the first men gave of the names of the gods (“They must surely have known their own ancestors”). For the first generation of the new cycle, who lived near the time, are supposed to have preserved a recollection of a previous one. He also appeals to internal evidence, viz. the perfect coherence of the tale, though he is very well aware, as he says in the “Cratylus” (436 C, D), that there may be consistency in error as well as in truth. The gravity and minuteness with which some particulars are related also lend an artful aid. The profound interest and ready assent of the young Socrates, who is not too old to be amused “with a tale which a child would love to hear,” are a further assistance. To those who were naturally inclined to believe that the fortunes of mankind are influenced by the stars, or who maintained that some one principle, like the principle of the Same and the Other in the “Timaeus,” pervades all things in the world, the reversal of the motion of the heavens seemed necessarily to produce a reversal of the order of human life. The spheres of knowledge, which to us appear wide asunder as the poles, astronomy and medicine, were naturally connected in the minds of early thinkers, because there was little or nothing in the space between them. Thus there is a basis of philosophy, on which the improbabilities of the tale may be said to rest. These are some of the devices by which Plato, like a modern novelist, seeks to familiarize the marvellous.
The myth, like that of the “Timaeus” and “Critias,” is rather historical than poetical, in this respect corresponding to the general change in the later writings of Plato, when compared with the earlier ones. It is hardly a myth in the sense in which the term might be applied to the myth of the “Phaedrus,” the Republic, the “Phaedo,” or the “Gorgias,” but may be more aptly compared with the didactic tale in which Protagoras describes the fortunes of primitive man, or with the description of the gradual rise of a new society in the Third Book of the Laws. Some discrepancies may be observed between the mythology of the “Statesman” and the “Timaeus,” and between the “Timaeus” and the Republic. But there is no reason to expect that all Plato’s visions of a former, any more than of a future, state of existence, should conform exactly to the same pattern. We do not find perfect consistency in his philosophy; and still less have we any right to demand this of him in his use of mythology and figures of speech. And we observe that while employing all the resources of a writer of fiction to give credibility to his tales, he is not disposed to insist upon their literal truth. Rather, as in the “Phaedo” (114 D), he says, “Something of the kind is true”; or, as in the “Gorgias” (527 A), “This you will think to be an old wife’s tale, but you can think of nothing truer”; or, as in the “Statesman” (277 B), he describes his work as a “mass of mythology,” which was introduced in order to teach certain lessons; or, as in the “Phaedrus” (230 A), he secretly laughs at such stories while refusing to disturb the popular belief in them.
The greater interest of the myth consists in the philosophical lessons which Plato presents to us in this veiled form. Here, as in the tale of Er, the son of Armenius, he touches upon the question of freedom and necessity, both in relation to God and nature. For at first the universe is governed by the immediate providence of God—this is the golden age—but after a while the wheel is reversed, and man is left to himself. Like other theologians and philosophers, Plato relegates his explanation of the problem to a transcendental world; he speaks of what in modern language might be termed “impossibilities in the nature of things,” hindering God from continuing immanent in the world. But there is some inconsistency; for the “letting go” is spoken of as a divine act, and is at the same time attributed to the necessary imperfection of matter; there is also a numerical necessity for the successive births of souls. At first, man and the world retain their divine instincts, but gradually degenerate. As in the Book of Genesis, the first fall of man is succeeded by a second; the misery and wickedness of the world increase continually. The reason of this further decline is supposed to be the disorganisation of matter: the latent seeds of a former chaos are disengaged, and envelope all things. The condition of man becomes more and
