Epinomis

Outline

The divisions follow the argument. References are to Stephanus pages and sections, which stand in the margins of both pages of the text.

I. The question (973a–974d)

973a–b Clinias: the three have come “to look into the matter of intelligence”; the Laws has gone through “everything that concerned the setting down of laws”, but not “by learning what a mortal human being would be wise”.

973b–d The Athenian’s “strange account”: “it is not possible for human beings to become blessed and happy, except for a few — so long as we live”; but “there is a fine hope” for one who has died.

973d–974a Coming into being is hard for every living being; the time of life “would be short, in the reckoning”, and old age would make anyone unwilling to live again.

974b–d Wisdom “runs away in flight” when sought among the crafts; the soul divines that it has “this power by some nature, but what it is, and when, and how, it is not at all able to discover”. Clinias concurs, in the hope “of forming about them, hereafter, the truest opinion”.

II. The kinds of knowledge that do not make wise (974d–976c)

974d–975c The necessities: “the making, at any rate, of barley-meal and wheat-flour, and with it nourishment, is fine and good, but it will never be willing to produce a man completely wise”; nor farming, building, the crafts of equipment, hunting; nor prophecy and interpretation, for “it knows only what is said, but whether it is true it has not learned”.

975d The imitative arts: “a kind of play, imitative for the most part but in no way serious”.

975e–976b The helpers: the general’s craft, medicine, the pilot’s art, the pleading of lawsuits; “none of these is esteemed for the truest wisdom; for they are carried along without measure, guessed at by opinions”.

976b–c Quickness of learning and memory: “none of the intelligent will ever be willing to call anyone really wise for any of these”.

III. Number, the gift of Heaven (976c–979b)

976c–e The knowledge sought is the one which, if it departed, “would render the human living being the most senseless and most unintelligent”: “the one that has given number to the whole mortal race”.

977a–b Its giver is “Heaven, very nearly”, whom “it is also most just … to honor and to pray to above all”.

977c–978b “If we were to take number out of human nature, we would never become intelligent in anything”; number is “the cause of all good things”, and “everything that has shared in anything bad, has been left without any number”.

978b–979a “How we learned to count”: from heaven, which “never ceases teaching men one and two”, and from the moon, by which the god “composed months in relation to the year”.

979a–b Fruits and nourishment come from these things; if anything turns out poorly, “one must blame not the divine but the human nature”.

IV. Which wisdom? (979b–980b)

979b–d The rest of virtue is easy to agree on, “but which wisdom … no one of the many any longer agrees with anyone at all”.

979d–980a Clinias: “how reasonably you said that you are attempting to declare great things about great things!” The Athenian will say “what it is that we think wisdom is”, or “which they are, and how many”.

980a–b The lawgiver may speak, “likening the gods more finely and better than what was said of them before”; Clinias’ wish, that the Athenian should “meet with the end that is at once the best and the finest”.

V. The new beginning (980b–981a)

980b–c The Athenian proposes a prayer: “Does it seem good that we honor the gods greatly by hymning them, praying that the finest and best things to say about them may come to us?” Clinias: “trusting in the gods, pray, and speak the account of fine things about the gods and the goddesses that comes to you”.

980c–981a “The generation of gods, then, and of living beings, since those before us likened it badly, I must first, it seems, liken it better”, taking up the account against the impious: “that all soul is older than all body”.

VI. The five bodies and the living beings (981a–982a)

981a–c A living being: “one combination of soul and body, coming together, brings forth one shape”; soul molds and crafts, body is molded; the bodies are five, “fire and water, and third air, fourth earth, and fifth ether”.

981d–982a The earthly kind, “the most of it is of earth and of the solid nature”; the fiery kind, “the divine kind of the stars”, either immortal or of “a life of long ages”.

VII. The stars are intelligent and divine (982a–984b)

982a–c “What moves in disorder we must hold to be unintelligent”; the stars’ order is “great evidence of its being intelligent”; “the three Fates hold fast and keep complete what each of the gods has deliberated”.

982c–e The many took sameness for soullessness, “so far did the multitude follow the unintelligent”; the stars, “dancing a procession and dance the finest and most magnificent of all dances, … accomplish for all living things what is needed”.

983a–c Their size: “the sun as a whole is larger than the earth as a whole”; “A god, I say, will be the cause”; “a thing could never become ensouled in any other way than through a god”.

983c–984b Soul and body are two, “the one as the cause of all things, the other as the cause of no affection at all”; so “either we must hymn them, most rightly, as gods themselves, or take them to have come into being as images of gods, like statues”.

VIII. The middle kinds (984b–985c)

984b–d Ether, air and water: soul “filled the whole heaven with living beings”, and the second to the fifth, “beginning their coming into being from the manifest gods, end in us human beings”.

984d–985b “Zeus and Hera and all the others, let anyone set them down where he wishes”; the visible gods are “the nature of the stars”; then “the daimons, and the kind of air, holding the third and middle seat, the cause of interpretation”; the two middle kinds “interpret everyone and everything to one another and to the highest gods”.

985b–c The fifth, of water: “a demigod”, “sometimes seen, and at other times hidden away”.

IX. The lawgiver and the visible gods (985c–986a)

985c–d The lawgiver “will never dare, innovating, to turn his city to a reverence toward the gods that has nothing clear about it”, nor prevent what the ancestral law says about sacrifices.

985d–986a But the gods “who are really manifest to us” are “without rites and do not receive the honors that belong to them”; one who saw the sun or the moon and did not declare it would justly be called bad. Clinias: “Of course, stranger; the very worst, indeed.”

X. The eight powers (986a–987d)

986a–c “Eight powers of the things about the whole heaven, born sisters of one another”: “let us all speak and say that they are all brothers and in sister portions, and let us render them honors”.

986c–d “The happy man first wonders at it, and then he comes to have a love of learning thoroughly as much as is possible for mortal nature”; after death he “continues for the rest of time as a contemplator of the finest things”.

986d–987a The sun’s, the Dawn-bringer’s and a third’s, “which it is not possible to declare by a name, because it is not known”; the cause is “the first to observe these things, being a barbarian”, in lands of “the beauty of the summer season, which Egypt and Syria possess well enough”.

987a–d The planets have no names of their own, but “have taken the titles of gods”: the Dawn-bringer, “being the same as the Evening Star”, is Aphrodite’s, and the third is Hermes’; three slower, Cronus’, Zeus’ and Ares’; and the eighth, “which one might most of all name cosmos”.

XI. Greeks and barbarians; the divine is not envious (987d–988b)

987d–988a Greece lies “midway between winters and the summer nature”; “whatever Greeks take over from barbarians, they carry it more finely to completion”.

988a–b Let no Greek fear “that those who are mortal ought never to busy themselves with divine things”; the divine knows “that it teaches us this very thing, and that we learn number and counting”.

XII. Soul the cause of motion (988b–e)

988b–c The first accounts of the gods were “said not to the liking of the temperate”, and the second made the things of fire and water “oldest, and those of the wonderful soul later”.

988d–e Soul “the cause of the whole”: “the motion and movement toward the good belongs to the best soul, and the contrary to the contrary”, and “the good things must have conquered, and must conquer”.

XIII. The wisdom sought (988e–990b)

988e–989b “We must think the good man, at least, wise”; nothing of virtue is greater than “piety”, and it has not come about in the best natures “through the greatest stupidity”.

989b–d The best natures: “good-natured, admiring courage, and ready to be persuaded toward being temperate”, able to learn, “a lover of learning”; “one would not even teach it unless a god led the way”.

989e–990b Its name, “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”.

XIV. The subjects of learning (990b–991b)

990b–c The moon and the sun; “one must labor at it always, teaching him much beforehand and accustoming him while he is a boy and a young man”.

990c “The greatest and first is also that of numbers themselves, but not of numbers that have bodies”.

990d “What they call by a very ridiculous name, geometry”; “the numbers three times increased and like the solid nature”, by “stereometry”.

990e–991b “As the power, and the power opposite to it, turn always about the double, in each proportion the whole of nature stamps out form and kind”; the means between six and twelve, “the one-and-a-half and the one-and-a-third”, given “for the sake of the play of rhythm and harmony”.

XV. The goal (991b–992a)

991b “The divine coming into being and at once … the finest and most divine nature of visible things”.

991c “One must bring what is one by one to what is by forms”, “questioning and refuting what has not been said well”.

991c–d “The precision of time”: one who has trusted “that soul is at once older and more divine than body” will think it well said “that all things are full of gods”.

991d–992a “Every diagram, and system of number, and every combination of harmony, and the agreement of the revolution of the stars” must come to light as one: “for one bond of all these, by nature, will come to light to those who think about them”.

XVI. The wise man and the nocturnal council (992a–e)

992a “This is the way, this the nourishment, these the subjects of learning; whether hard or easy, one must travel this way.”

992b–c “The most truly wisest”, “in play and in earnest at once”: “having become one out of many, will be happy, and at once wisest and blessed”.

992c–d “It is not possible for human beings to become completely blessed and happy, except for a few”; to the divine and temperate who have taken up the blessed subject of learning “alone have all the things of the daimonic fallen as their lot”.

992d–e The greatest offices to them in old age; “all of us … must most rightly summon the nocturnal council to this wisdom”.