Timaeus and Critias (Oxford World's Classics) by Robin Waterfield & Andrew Gregory

Author:Robin Waterfield & Andrew Gregory [Waterfield, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2008-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

CRITIAS

TIMAEUS : How pleased I am to have come to the end of my

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account, Socrates! I feel as relieved as someone resting after a long journey, now that I’ve finished with it. And my prayer to the god who has just been created in my speech (though of course he was created long ago, in fact) is that for our sakes he may keep safe everything that was well said, and that if we

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inadvertently struck a false note he will impose the appropriate penalty—and the right penalty when someone is out of tune is to make him harmonious. I pray, then, for the gift of knowledge, the most perfect and most effective medicine,* so that in the future any account we give of the creation of gods may be accurate. And with this prayer I make way for Critias, as we agreed: it’s his turn to speak now.

CRITIAS : Well, Timaeus, I’m ready, but first I have a request to make—the same one that you relied on at the beginning

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of your speech, when you asked for leniency given the immensity of the topics you were going to address. In fact, I think I have even more of a right to leniency, and to more

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of it, for what I’m about to say. And despite being pretty sure that, in making the request, I’ll seem more than a little self-important and unduly rude, I still have to make it. I’m not suggesting that anything in your speech was less than excellent—how could anyone in their right mind presume to do so?—but I do want to try to show that what remains to be said is actually more difficult, and therefore calls for more leniency. You see, Timaeus, it’s easier for someone to give an impression of competence in speaking to us humans about gods than it is when the subject of his speech is mortal

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men. When the audience’s situation is one of inexperience and downright ignorance of a topic, that makes it rather easy for someone to address it—and, of course, we know how we’re placed when the topic is the gods.

I can make my meaning clearer if you’ll just bear with me for a while. Our words are never going to be more than images and representations of things, I’d say, so let’s look at how painters go about creating images of divine and human figures, in terms of how easy or difficult they find it to get

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the viewers to think that they’ve produced an adequate representation. Take things like the landscape, or mountains, rivers, and woodland, or the sky as a whole, as well as the bodies that exist and move in it. We shall find, first, that we’re satisfied if an artist is capable of representing any of these things in a way that even vaguely resembles them, and also that, since our knowledge of such things is inexact, we don’t criticize or challenge the painted images, but in these

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cases are content with an imprecise and deceptive outline.* When

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