Epinomis

Introduction

The dialogue

The Epinomis is a conversation of the three old men of the Laws: an Athenian stranger, whom neither work names, Clinias of Crete, and Megillus of Sparta. Megillus is present and does not speak. Clinias opens it by recalling an agreement: they have come together, “in keeping with our agreement”, because the Laws has gone through “everything that concerned the setting down of laws” but has not found “by learning what a mortal human being would be wise” (973a–b). There is no narrator and no setting. A reader of the Laws will remember that its conversation was held on the road from Cnossus to the cave and shrine of Zeus (1.625a–b), but the Epinomis does not say where the three are. After the opening exchange the Athenian speaks almost without interruption; Clinias answers briefly at 974c, at 979d–981b, where he asks the Athenian to pray and to speak, and at 986a.

It is short: twenty pages of Stephanus’ edition (973a–992e), twenty-five of Burnet’s. Its name means “appendix to the laws”. The ancient arrangement of Plato’s works by Thrasyllus, which Diogenes Laertius preserves (3.60), puts it third in the ninth and last tetralogy, after the Minos and the Laws and before the Letters, with the subtitle “or The Nocturnal Council, or The Philosopher”, and classes it as “political”; Aristophanes of Byzantium, Diogenes adds, joined the Laws, the Minos and the Epinomis in one of his trilogies (3.61–62). Diogenes also reports that “some say that Philip of Opus transcribed his Laws, which were on wax”, and that “they say the Epinomis too is his” (3.37). Many modern scholars have followed that report and taken the dialogue for Philip’s work, written after Plato’s death; others have defended it as Plato’s own. This edition does not argue the question.

The dialogue presupposes the Laws throughout. The Athenian takes up “the account given before … against the impious” (980c–d), the argument of Laws 10 that the gods exist, care for men and cannot be bought, with its proof “that all soul is older than all body” (980d); and the dialogue ends with the “nocturnal council” of Laws 12 (992e). There the Athenian had said that what the members of that council must learn “is neither easy to discover nor to learn from another who has discovered it”, that it would be idle to set down in writing when each thing is to be taken up, and that none of it, said beforehand, would make anything clear (12.968d–e). The Epinomis sets it down.

The question and the answers

The question is Clinias’: what must a mortal learn to be wise (973b)? The Athenian begins with “a strange account, and yet in a way, again, not a strange one”: “it is not possible for human beings to become blessed and happy, except for a few — so long as we live”, though “there is a fine hope” for one who has died (973b–c). Life is short and full of labors (973d–974a); wisdom, which the soul divines that it has “by some nature”, runs away from those who look for it among the crafts (974b–c).

He then sets aside the kinds of knowledge that “do not make wise the one who takes them up and has them” (974d): those that supply the necessities of life, the making of food, farming, building and the crafts of equipment (975a–c); hunting, prophecy and the art of interpretation (975c); the imitative arts, “a kind of play, imitative for the most part but in no way serious” (975d); and the helpers, the general’s craft, medicine, the pilot’s art and the pleading of lawsuits (975e–976b). A quick learner with a good memory is called wise by some, “but none of the intelligent will ever be willing to call anyone really wise for any of these” (976c).

The first knowledge he names is the one whose loss would leave man “the most senseless and most unintelligent” (976d): the one “that has given number to the whole mortal race” (976e), and its giver is a god: “Heaven, very nearly” (977a). Without number “we would never become intelligent in anything” (977c); everything that has shared in anything bad “has been left without any number” (978a–b). The Athenian tells how we learned to count: heaven “does not cease rolling round” the days and nights until “even the slowest learner has learned to count well enough”, and the moon, waxing and waning, gives the month (978b–979a). But the rest of virtue is easy to agree on, and “which wisdom” no one agrees about (979b–d). Clinias remarks how reasonably the Athenian said that he was attempting “to declare great things about great things” (979d), and asks him not to grow weary of saying what he says (979e).

The argument’s main stretch

The Athenian begins again. The lawgiver may speak of the gods, “likening the gods more finely and better than what was said of them before” (980a); Clinias bids him “pray, and speak the account of fine things about the gods and the goddesses that comes to you” (980c); and the Athenian undertakes “the generation of gods, then, and of living beings, since those before us likened it badly” (980c), on the ground laid in the Laws: “that soul is older than body” (980e).

A living being is what comes about “when one combination of soul and body, coming together, brings forth one shape” (981a). There are five solid bodies, fire, water, air, earth and ether (981b–c), and living beings of each. Two kinds can be seen: the earthly, which “moves in disorder”, and the fiery, the stars, which move “in all order” (982a). What moves in order is intelligent: the stars’ regularity, which the many took as a sign that “they have no soul” (982d), is “great evidence” of their intelligence (982b), and the stars’ “dance” is “the finest and most magnificent of all dances” (982e). They are immense, and no nature but a god could carry such bulks round always in the same time (983a–b); so “we must hymn them, most rightly, as gods themselves”, or take them as “images of gods, like statues, the gods themselves having made them” (983e–984a). Between the gods of fire and the earthly race the Athenian sets three middle kinds, of ether, of air and of water (984b–c). After the stars come “the daimons, and the kind of air, holding the third and middle seat, the cause of interpretation” (984e); these beings of ether and of air, seen through and never plain to us, “interpret everyone and everything to one another and to the highest gods” (985b); and the kind of water one would liken to a demigod (985b). The traditional gods, “Zeus and Hera and all the others”, he leaves where anyone wishes to set them (984d).

The lawgiver, he says, will not innovate in the rites the ancestral law prescribes (985c–d); but “the gods who are really manifest to us”, the stars, are “without rites and do not receive the honors that belong to them” (985d), and one who saw this and did not declare it would justly be called bad (985e–986a). There are “eight powers of the things about the whole heaven” (986a): those of the sun, the moon and the stars, and five others (986b); two of the five keep pace with the sun, the Dawn-bringer and a third, which has no name of its own and is very nearly Hermes’ (986e, 987b); three are slower, the slowest of which some call by the title of Cronus, and the next two must be called Zeus’ and Ares’ (987c); and the eighth, which travels contrary to all the rest, “one might most of all name cosmos” (987b). They were first observed by barbarians in Egypt and Syria, where the summer sky is clear, and that, he says, is why they have no names of their own but have taken the titles of gods (986e–987b); but “whatever Greeks take over from barbarians, they carry it more finely to completion” (987d–e). No Greek need fear that mortals ought not to busy themselves with divine things: the divine is not envious, and knows that it teaches us number (988a–b). Soul, not body, is the cause of all motion, the best soul of the motion toward the good (988c–e).

The ending

At 988e the Athenian returns to the question. Nothing of virtue is greater for the mortal race than piety (989b); the best natures, good-natured, able to learn, of good memory and lovers of learning, must learn “these things”, though one would not even teach them unless a god led the way (989b–d). The wisdom sought has “a name that one would never expect, through inexperience of the matter: astronomy”; “the true astronomer must be the wisest”, not the one who “does astronomy after Hesiod’s fashion”, but the one who has looked into “the seven circuits of the eight circuits” (990a). Its preparation is a course of studies: numbers themselves (990c); geometry, “a very ridiculous name” (990d); stereometry (990d–e); the proportions of the double and the means that give music its fifth and fourth (990e–991b); then the heavens themselves (991b). To these one must add the bringing of “what is one by one to what is by forms”, “questioning and refuting what has not been said well” (991c); the precision of time must be grasped, so that one may think it “said altogether finely and well enough that all things are full of gods” (991d); and every diagram, system of number, combination of harmony and the agreement of the stars’ revolution must come to light as one, “for one bond of all these, by nature, will come to light to those who think about them” (991e–992a).

The one who has taken up all these things is “the most truly wisest” (992b). The Athenian affirms, “in play and in earnest at once”, that after death such a man “will no longer then share, as now, in many perceptions, but, having had a share in one portion only and having become one out of many, will be happy, and at once wisest and blessed” (992b). The opening account is “present now too as really true”: “it is not possible for human beings to become completely blessed and happy, except for a few” (992c). Those who have labored at these studies are to be given “the greatest offices” in old age, the others are to follow them, and “all of us, having come to know it well enough and having scrutinized it, must most rightly summon the nocturnal council to this wisdom” (992d–e).

What is most exposed

A first-time reader is likely to be troubled at five points. The first is the dismissal of the crafts (974d–976c): generalship and medicine are denied the name of wisdom because they are “guessed at by opinions” (976a), a test that the dialogue does not put to its own astronomy, and the pilot’s art because no one could know the wind (976a–b). The second is the argument that order of motion proves intelligence (982a–e). It reverses what “the many” think, and it rests on the assumption that what always acts “in the same respects and in the same way and for the same reasons” (982e) must be intelligent; the argument from the stars’ size (983a–b) adds only that nothing but a god could move them. The third is the theology. The traditional gods are left to custom (984d–985d) while the stars are to be honored as “the visible gods” (984d), and the wisdom that makes men happy turns out to be an astronomy that is also piety (989b, 990a); the reader must decide whether this completes the Laws or replaces its gods. The fourth is the course of studies (990c–991b), which is compressed to the point of obscurity; the notes give the usual interpretation of the “making alike” of numbers by geometry and of the solid numbers, marked as interpretation, and work out the means between six and twelve. The fifth is the text. Burnet marks two places as corrupt (975b, 980e), prints his own corrections at 986e, 987b and 990c, and keeps at 988c words that make no clear sense; the notes say where these readings bear on the English.

The manner

The manner is solemn. The Athenian prays before he speaks of the gods (980b–c), and his periods are long, piled with clauses and qualifications, as when he describes the lawgiver who will not dare “to turn his city to a reverence toward the gods that has nothing clear about it” (985c–d), or the man who should see the sun and moon “coming into being and looking down on us all” and not declare it (985e). The English keeps these periods as they stand. Clinias’ replies are short and eager: “Wonderfully so, indeed” (980c); “Of course, stranger; the very worst, indeed” (986a). There is little of Socrates’ irony, but there is some wit. The Athenian reminds Clinias of the Laws, “if indeed you remember, Clinias; for you even took notes” (980d); he says of the eight powers that he has “accomplished nothing great, for it is easy for another too” (986a–b); he calls the planet of the morning and evening Aphrodite’s, “a thing quite fitting for a Syrian lawgiver” (987b); he calls the name others give geometry “a very ridiculous name” (990d); and he makes his last affirmation “in play and in earnest at once” (992b).

On reading this edition

Each left-hand page is one page of Burnet’s Greek, line for line, with his margin and apparatus; the right-hand page opposite translates it. The letters in the margins of both pages (a–e) mark the sections of Stephanus’ pages, by which Plato is cited; the numbers 973 to 992 mark where each of his pages begins. The speakers are named at the head of each speech, as Burnet names them. Words in square brackets [ ] are deleted by Burnet and are not translated (977c, 978d, 979c, 986b, 988e); a word in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ is added by him and is translated (987b); a dagger † marks words he judges corrupt (975b, 980e). The notes are numbered afresh on each page. At the back of the volume are an Outline of the argument, an Editorial Note on Burnet’s text, his apparatus and the translation, a Glossary of the key terms with the places where they occur, and a Note on how this edition was made.

A note on the persons

The three persons are those of the Laws. Clinias is a Cretan of Cnossus: in the Laws he says that the Cretans are founding a colony and have charged Cnossus with it, and Cnossus “me and nine others” (3.702c); the prophet Epimenides, he says, was his kinsman (1.642d). Megillus is a Spartan whose family is the proxenos of Athens at Sparta, its official friend and host (1.642b). The Athenian is not named in either work. At the end of the Laws Megillus and Clinias resolve that they must not let him go, but must make him a partner in founding their city (12.969c–d); the Epinomis opens with the three met again “in keeping with our agreement” (973a).

The other persons are named only in passing: Hesiod, whose Works and Days times the farmer’s year by the risings and settings of stars (990a); the gods Heaven, Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Hermes, Cronus and Ares, and the Fates (977a, 982c, 984d, 987b–c); and the Muses (991b). The notes say who Heaven, the Fates and Hesiod are, and which planets bear the gods’ names.