Plato’s Epinomis Lexicon

Introduction

The Epinomis asks what a mortal must learn to become wise. Its answer is an astronomy understood through number, the priority of soul, the ordered movement of living gods, and a demanding mathematical education. It ends by assigning the greatest offices to those who have completed that education and by summoning the nocturnal council to its wisdom. The argument is therefore simultaneously educational, theological, and political. Its confident claims are accompanied by qualifications that matter: only a few achieve complete happiness; the stars may be immortal or extraordinarily long-lived; they may be gods themselves or god-made images; the mathematical descriptions require interpretation; and the concluding hope about a life beyond death is not an unqualified report of knowledge.

This lexicon accompanies the supplied Diotimos Editions Epinomis of 2026, whose Greek follows John Burnet's 1907 text in a later Oxford impression and whose English translation, introduction, glossary, and notes belong to the supplied edition. It is designed for sustained reading of that particular Greek and English work. It does not replace the dialogue with a summary or treat each occurrence of a word as having a single fixed philosophical sense. Its purpose is to show how words acquire their argumentative work, what examples establish or fail to establish, and where the edition's textual decisions determine the English a reader encounters.

Full articles examine lexical families, persons, examples, and problems in connected prose. The defined vocabulary register gives shorter explanations of actual contextual uses, distinguishing an organizing headword from the inflected form printed in the Greek. Contextual phrase glosses preserve constructions and qualifications that can disappear in word-by-word lookup. The lexical, passage, and thematic indexes provide three different routes through the same material. Index references are navigational aids, not additional definitions.

Title authorship and dramatic situation

The title Ἐπινομίς is conventionally understood as an addition or appendix to the Laws. The three persons are the same as in that work: Clinias of Crete, an unnamed Athenian stranger, and Megillus of Sparta. Clinias addresses the Athenian; Megillus is present but never speaks. The Epinomis supplies no new narrated setting or date. The road from Cnossus to the cave and shrine of Zeus belongs to the opening of the Laws (1.625a–b), as the supplied edition explains; its geographical setting should not be silently imported as a newly stated fact in the Epinomis.

Clinias recalls a shared undertaking. The laws have been considered, but the greatest question remains: what learning makes a mortal wise? His opening charge of incompleteness gives the work its practical occasion. The Athenian is not merely appending a list of school subjects. He argues that without the proper account of intelligence, soul, and divinity, the work of legislation cannot reach its intended end. The extensive monologue grows from that request. Clinias' short responses encourage, assent, or invite the Athenian to pray; their brevity does not turn every subsequent inference into a jointly demonstrated result.

The supplied introduction reports both the ancient placement of the dialogue among Plato's works and the disputed attribution to Philip of Opus. Diogenes Laertius records the report about Philip at 3.37 and the ancient arrangements at 3.60–62. Ancient inclusion, the historical report, and modern arguments about authorship are different kinds of evidence. This lexicon does not decide the authorship question. It normally speaks of the dialogue, the Athenian, or the argument, rather than attributing every claim directly to Plato. Nor is the speaker automatically a historical witness to the opinions of either Plato or Philip.

The relation to the Laws and other dialogues

The Laws is a necessary reference point because the Epinomis explicitly recalls its earlier argument against impiety and explicitly returns to its nocturnal council. The recalled theology concerns the gods' existence, their care, and their resistance to being won over by gifts, with the priority of soul to body central to the first question (Laws 10.885b–907b). The Epinomis presupposes that prior proof and makes it the starting point for its own account of divine and mortal living beings. It does not reproduce the full proof afresh.

At the other end, the council's knowledge and education have already been discussed in Laws 12.951d and 966d–968e. The closing summons at 992e makes the present curriculum a proposed completion of that problem. Whether it is an adequate completion is an interpretive question; the verbal connection does not itself prove that everything is continuous or that all differences are trivial.

Comparison with the Timaeus is especially tempting and especially liable to erase distinctions. This dialogue names five bodies, including ether, and correlates kinds of living beings with them. The Timaeus passages cited by the edition distinguish the four elemental solids from the fifth figure and describe ether as a kind of air. The present fivefold scheme must be read on its own terms. Likewise, comparison of the musical means with Timaeus 35c–36b helps to explain the arithmetic; it does not authorize importing that dialogue's whole construction of soul into a few compressed lines here. The references to the Theaetetus, Gorgias, Statesman, and Symposium are similarly aids to a particular word or problem, not licenses to amalgamate the works into a uniform doctrine.

Greek forms renderings and evidence

A Greek headword normally gives a recognizable lexical form. A register record separately supplies a form actually present in the dialogue and a Stephanus location. The distinction prevents a dictionary nominative or infinitive from being mistaken for the precise form in the text. Several related words may share an article; one word may receive more than one contextual explanation. The short attestations are evidence for the discussed usage, not an exhaustive concordance of every repeated function word or inflection.

The lexicon's breadth is defined by the reading task: the argument, its examples and transitions, the vocabulary carrying them, the significant constructions, and the edition's consequential textual choices. It does not claim to be a new critical edition or a complete morphological index. A word appearing only in Burnet's apparatus is not thereby spoken by the Athenian. Deletions and conjectures are identified as such; the title and speaker labels are likewise distinct from the dialogue's spoken text.

The supplied English deliberately keeps wisdom, intelligence, sense, and knowledge apart. Those English words represent σοφία, φρόνησις, νοῦς, and ἐπιστήμη and their families; they should not be casually interchanged in a paraphrase. Conversely, λόγος requires different English expressions in different constructions: account, reason, and the ability to give an account belong together lexically without meaning exactly the same thing on each occasion. The same care applies to form and shape, visible and manifest, divine and daimonic, kind and generation, number and reckoning, and contemplation and ordinary seeing.

An entry's general explanation of a word's range is distinct from its account of the local use. An English gloss such as “land-measuring” explains the name geometry; it does not settle what the Athenian means by the course of study. The mathematical articles mark reconstruction as reconstruction. The numerical examples explain the ratios without presenting every explanatory numeral as a quotation from the Greek.

References and navigation

Stephanus references identify the ancient text. Thus 981b–c refers to sections b and c of traditional page 981, not pages of this lexicon. A range may span the end of one section and the start of the next; the endpoints are meaningful. Burnet's printed pages are another system, and the supplied edition reproduces twenty-five of them. References to other works name the work so that their numbers cannot be confused with those of the Epinomis.

The three indexes are complementary. The lexical index searches by an English headword and its Greek; the passage index moves continuously through the dialogue; the thematic index gathers articles that need to be read together even when their headwords differ.

Argument map

973a to 974d The unfinished question

Clinias recalls their agreement and asks what a mortal must learn to be wise. The Athenian introduces a disturbing claim about the scarcity of happiness, limits it to the living, and offers a fine hope concerning death. The burdens of generation, nourishment, education, and age make ordinary life an inadequate measure of the highest good. Wisdom seems naturally promised to the soul yet escapes when sought among the familiar crafts. Clinias agrees in the hope of arriving at the truest opinion, not by claiming already to possess knowledge.

974d to 976c The inventory of insufficient expertise

The Athenian separates useful accomplishments from what makes their possessor truly wise. Food production, agriculture, building, equipment, hunting, prophecy, interpretation, imitation, war, medicine, navigation, and forensic speech each receive a reason for exclusion. Their differences matter. Some serve bodily necessity; some imitate; some work through opinion, luck, or unmasterable circumstances; interpretation can report an utterance without knowing its truth. Quick learning and memory do not by themselves cure the deficiency. The inventory is not a claim that civilization can dispense with the crafts.

976c to 979b Number and the education supplied by heaven

The sought knowledge is introduced by asking what loss would make human beings most unintelligent. Number is indispensable even to the crafts just set aside. Heaven gives it through the repeated alternation of day and night, lunar appearances, months, and the year. Number makes reasoned accounts possible and is associated with order and goodness. The argument nevertheless expressly allows courage and temperance without full rational achievement; complete virtue and happiness are the stronger requirements. The practical gifts of seasons and nourishment belong to the same heavenly beneficence.

979b to 980c Disagreement about wisdom and a prayerful restart

Agreement is easier about other virtues than about which wisdom is necessary. The Athenian admits the scale of his undertaking; Clinias encourages him to continue. Legislation and the honoring of gods provide the transition. The possibility of representing the gods better than predecessors did requires both a new account and a prayer for good speech. “Play” in this transition already complicates the earlier dismissal of imitative amusement.

980c to 982a Soul and the fivefold living world

The prior argument against impiety supplies the priority of soul. Soul is active in forming a body into a living being. The five bodies are fire, water, air, earth, and ether; the account of living kinds uses predominance rather than requiring a chemically pure body of one element. Mortal earthly life and the fiery stars provide the immediately visible contrast. The stellar race is described under an alternative: immortality or a life long enough to fulfill its divine function.

982a to 984b Why orderly stars should be honored

The Athenian reverses the popular inference from repeated motion to lack of life. Regularity is evidence of intelligence and of a soul's settled best deliberation. Necessity and the Fates express the firmness of that intelligent order. The stars' dance accomplishes what other life needs. Their immense size adds an argument that a divine cause must move them. The conclusion preserves an alternative: hymn them as gods themselves, or regard them as god-made images, deserving a higher honor than human-made images.

984b to 986a Middle kinds and the duties of worship

Ether, air, and water fill the intermediate region between fiery gods and earthly human beings. Their visibility, intelligence, receptivity to pain, and powers of communication distinguish them. Ethereal and aerial beings interpret between humans and the highest gods; the watery kind is likened to a demigod. The text's ordinal wording should not be forced into one regularized enumeration. Traditional divine names may be located as people choose; ancestral sacrifices are not to be recklessly disrupted. Yet the manifest heavenly gods are inadequately honored, and a lawgiver who recognized this but failed to speak would be culpable.

986a to 988b The heavenly powers and learning across peoples

Eight related powers are presented. The sun, moon, stellar power, and five other motions are not simply a modern list of planets in distance order. The Dawn-bringer and Evening Star are one; divine titles attach to the unnamed planetary motions. The eighth counter-circulation and the details of leadership depend in part on Burnet's textual choices. Egypt and Syria receive credit for sustained observation, followed by a claim about Greek improvement of what is learned from others. The argument then rejects the fear that studying divine things is forbidden: the god is neither unintelligent nor envious and has already taught mortals to count.

988b to 990b Cause goodness and the right students

The Athenian contrasts his account with bodily-first explanations. Soul causes movement; the best soul leads toward good, and the opposite corresponds to the contrary. The return to the question of wisdom makes piety central and identifies the naturally suitable learners. Courageous and temperate dispositions, ease of learning, memory, and love of learning are required together; divine leadership is also invoked. “Astronomy” names the goal, but seasonal lore after Hesiod's fashion does not satisfy it. The true astronomer studies seven circuits within the eightfold whole.

990b to 991b The mathematical preparation

The pupil must be prepared from childhood and youth. The course begins with numbers themselves, proceeds to geometry and solid measurement, and considers doubling, proportions, and means. The descriptions are compressed and sometimes textually difficult. On the interpretation supplied by the edition, the means between six and twelve disclose the ratios of the fifth and fourth. That explanation is not a substitute for the passage's own larger claim that related numerical structures inform nature, rhythm, and harmony.

991b to 992a Testing and seeing the bond

The difficult route reaches the most divine nature of visible things. It also requires bringing particulars under forms or kinds, asking questions, and rejecting what is not well said. Accurate time and the priority of soul support the saying that everything is full of gods. Diagrams, numerical systems, harmony, and the stars' revolutions are to be seen together through one natural bond. This is a program of integration and examination, not a list of unrelated school attainments.

992a to 992e The final hope and political completion

The way must be traveled whether difficult or easy. The most truly wise person has taken up the studies in the specified way; possession of disconnected information is insufficient. In play and earnest together, the Athenian describes becoming one from many and a blessed condition after death, retaining the conditional wording of the passage. The opening restriction to a few returns. Such people should receive the greatest offices in old age, while others follow them; the nocturnal council is finally called to this wisdom.

Questions the lexicon keeps open

The dialogue denies the title of wisdom to practical arts partly because they depend on opinion and uncertain conditions. How fully does its own astronomical theology meet that demanding test? Regularity may be evidence of an intelligence; does it by itself demonstrate the particular account of deliberating divine souls? The supplementary appeal to stellar size changes the grounds of the argument without removing that question.

Religious continuity is also a question to examine rather than resolve by a slogan. The lawgiver protects ancestral practices and leaves the placement of traditional divine names open, while demanding new recognition of visible gods. The argument neither simply abolishes traditional cult nor leaves it philosophically untouched. Its vocabulary of reverence, piety, honors, prayer, and interpretation distributes different tasks among inherited practice, knowledge, and legislation.

Finally, the promised education is selective. It needs a favorable nature, preparation, arduous study, questioning, divine assistance, and a comprehensive vision of relations. The political ending raises the stakes of that selection: the completed students become rulers. The narrowness of the path and the persistence of hope belong to the conclusion just as much as its affirmative identification of astronomy with wisdom.

The supplied edition

The controlling source for this companion is Plato Epinomis, Diotimos Editions, 2026. It contains the complete Greek and English dialogue, 973a–992e, with introduction, key-word essays, notes, outline, glossary, editorial explanation, and a Note on this Edition. The lexicon is a separate work accompanying it; it does not silently amend its Greek, English, or notes.

The supplied edition identifies its Greek as John Burnet's text in the fifth volume of the Oxford edition of Plato, first published in 1907. It describes the particular later impression as issued between October 1936 and 1945 on the evidence of its bound publisher's list and publishing and printing names. That is a distinction between the date of the edited text and the date of the reproduced physical impression. It is not a claim that Burnet prepared a new text in 1936.

The English translation and explanatory matter belong to the supplied Diotimos edition. Short English quotations in the articles follow that text. Explanatory prose in this companion should not be mistaken for a new translation of the whole dialogue. Where the source itself marks an explanation as interpretation, the lexicon preserves that status, particularly in the mathematical curriculum, divine mediation, planetary ordering, and the conclusion.

Ancient references identified by the edition

The following references record the comparisons and contextual evidence used by the supplied edition. They are not a bibliography of every parallel in ancient philosophy. Unless stated otherwise, the lexicon's use is limited to the specific connection described here; it does not claim a new verification against manuscripts or a full survey of subsequent scholarship.

Diogenes Laertius and the attribution

Lives of Eminent Philosophers 3.37 reports the attribution of the Epinomis to Philip of Opus alongside the report concerning his work on the Laws. Sections 3.60–62 supply the ancient arrangements of the dialogues and their titles or classifications. These passages establish a transmitted report and a catalogue tradition, not an uncontested resolution of authorship.

The Laws

1.625a–b. The journey from Cnossus to the cave and shrine of Zeus belongs to the dramatic setting of the Laws 6.782b–d. The account of earlier nourishment and mutual eating supplies the comparison identified in the note on food production 6.752a and 7.812a. The Athenian can describe the city in words and related educational accounts in the language of story-telling, relevant to the Epinomis' self-description at 980a 10.885b–907b. The earlier argument against impiety concerns divine existence, care, and resistance to being bought off; soul's priority is developed especially at 891e–896c 10.899b. The saying that all things are full of gods provides an explicit parallel for Epinomis 991d 12.951d. The council's daily meeting is located before sunrise, relevant to its traditional designation as nocturnal 12.960c–d. The Fates and the language of an irreversible power illuminate the Epinomis' application to settled divine deliberation 12.966d–967e. Knowledge of soul's priority and of the ordering role of sense belongs to the council's education 12.968d–e. The difficulty of specifying the required studies provides an important background to the Epinomis' proposed curriculum

The Timaeus

28c. The language of maker and father is one possible comparison for the “father” at Epinomis 978c; the edition also allows an animal's own parent as the local reference 35c–36b. The musical ratios help explain the arithmetic and harmonic means discussed in the notes on Epinomis 991a–b 55c and 55d–56b. The fifth figure used for the whole and the four elemental solids provide a comparison, not an identity, with the five bodies of the Epinomis 58d. Ether is described there as the clearest kind of air, unlike its separate place in the fivefold list here

Other Platonic comparisons

Republic 7.527d. The practical usefulness of astronomical observation provides a comparison for the distinction between seasonal observation and the fuller education proposed here Theaetetus 147d–148b. The discussion of powers supplies a mathematical comparison for the usual interpretation of the geometry passage, without deciding every detail of its compressed language Gorgias 463b and 501a. Experience, routine, and memory in the discussion of cookery illuminate the vocabulary of expertise denied the rank of wisdom Statesman 290c. The description of prophecy-related interpretation between gods and humans clarifies the activity distinguished from knowledge of truth at Epinomis 975c Symposium 202e. Diotima's account of daimonic interpretation and conveyance is a useful comparison for the middle kinds at 984e–985b; it does not settle all the present dialogue's elemental distinctions Phaedo 97b–c. The supplied key-word essay recalls Anaxagoras and the ordering role of νοῦς while explaining the ordinary idiom “have sense”

Hesiod Aristotle and planetary nomenclature

The edition identifies the practical stellar timings of Hesiod's Works and Days at 383–387, 564–567, 597–598, and 609–617. Those are the background to doing astronomy “after Hesiod's fashion,” a form of useful seasonal orientation distinguished here from the fuller course. The possible association of the islands at 992b–c with the Islands of the Blessed is explicitly tentative; the edition cites Works and Days 167–173.

Aristotle, On the Soul 1.5, 411a7–8, attributes the saying about everything being full of gods to Thales. That external attribution should not be used to make Thales a named speaker or explicit citation within the Epinomis. Diodorus 2.30.3 is cited by the edition to explain the Sun-related title in the textual alternatives for the planet printed here as Cronus'.

Ancient quotations and the apparatus

The edition identifies quotations in Eusebius' Preparation for the Gospel at 13.18.2, 13.2.1, 13.18.3, 11.16.1, 10.4.21, and 10.4.22, corresponding to selected passages of the Epinomis. It also lists passages quoted by Theon of Smyrna in the Hiller edition of Mathematics Useful for Reading Plato, pages 2, 7–10, and 84. Ancient quotations can preserve wording, omissions, or paraphrases different from the direct manuscript tradition. Their presence in Burnet's apparatus does not make every reported form part of his printed text.

The supplied edition itself identifies limits in these references. It does not provide checked line numbers for Theon's quotations; it preserves Burnet's report of a Eusebian reading despite a recorded difference in Dindorf's text; and it relies on Burnet's report for Grou's conjecture. This companion does not claim to have removed those limits.

Lexical references

The identification of στερεμνίας as an inflected adjective belonging to στερέμνιος is checked against the Liddell Scott Jones entry for στερέμνιος. The register distinguishes that lexical identification from the word's particular use in the account of solid earthly composition at 981d. The aorist κατίδωμεν is grouped under καθορᾶν on the evidence of the Liddell Scott Jones entry for καθοράω, while the register preserves the contextual distinction between observing and seeing. These supplemental dictionary checks do not alter the supplied Greek.

Textual cautions that affect interpretation

The article on reading the text and apparatus gathers the chief interventions. They include the daggers at 975b and 980e; the indefinite expression rather than “prophet” at 978a; play rather than education at 980a; the deletion of “wandering” at 986b; Burnet's corrections and addition concerning the three equal-speed motions and the eighth motion at 986e–987b; the competing planetary title at 987c; the unclear wording at 988c; and the readings behind “always,” “three times,” and “stereometry” in the curriculum. The exact effects are different in each case. A corrupt word, a conjecture, a manuscript variant, and an uncertain construction should not all be filed under an undifferentiated label of “uncertain text.”

Two grammatical questions also remain visible in the supplied edition. At 979a the English keeps the god as the subject of seeing numbers together, while another construal takes “all things” as the subject. At 984b the English connects “most clearly” with the middle kinds' coming into being; another reading connects it with speaking. The lexicon explains the edition's choice and avoids building an unnecessary doctrinal certainty on either disputed construction.

Mathematical explanation and its limits

The mathematical course is exceptionally compressed. The interpretation of geometry as making numbers alike through areas whose sides may be incommensurable is an explanatory reconstruction identified as such by the edition. The same applies to understanding “three times increased” through three-dimensional products and cubes, and to the passage's relation between doubling, squares, and cubes. The articles separate the Greek terms from the modern explanatory language.

The arithmetic of the means is secure as arithmetic: between 6 and 12, the arithmetic mean is 9 and the harmonic mean is 8. The first is three units above and below the extremes; the second exceeds 6 by one third of 6 and falls short of 12 by one third of 12. The resulting fifth and fourth ratios are 3:2 and 4:3. These examples explain the edition's note; they should not be presented as if the Greek separately enumerated all four modern Arabic numerals. Nor do the calculations eliminate every interpretive question about the larger account of nature, form, and kind.

Scope of this companion

The lexicon is based on the complete supplied edition and keeps its Greek text, translation choices, and explanatory qualifications distinct. Full articles are accompanied by context-defined vocabulary, phrase explanations, and linked indexes.

This is not a manuscript collation, a replacement critical text, a comprehensive history of reception, or a verdict on authorship. References inherited from the supplied edition are identified as such rather than represented as newly researched findings. A close-reading companion can make uncertainty more intelligible without pretending that it has settled every question.