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The word of the Muses (Plato, Rep. 8.546)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Edit Ehrhardt
Edit Ehrhardt
Affiliation:
Heywood, Lancashire
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Extract

Ever since Proclus wrote his commentary on Plato's Republic, repeated attempts have been made to find a hidden number of cosmic significance in Rep. 8.546. For the Neo-Platonist it was natural to look for esoteric secrets in ancient works; among the men of the New Learning at the end of the Middle Ages there were enough astrologers and necromancers to ensure respect for the proposition; we are now again enamoured of irrationality. But the scholars who attempted such calculations around 1900 must have considered Plato himself a mystery-monger.

In this article I propose: (i) to show why such attempts are mistaken, (ii) to discuss what early writers who mention the passage say about its meaning, (iii) to provide a mathematician's translation that fits the context, and to comment on it; for the currently accepted explanation is unsatisfactory.

‘There is fairly widespread agreement that the geometrical number is 12,960,000 = 3,6002 = 4,800 × 2,700, but on the method by which this number is reached the widest divergence exists’ or, from an earlier, different guess: ‘…one can, so to speak, state a priori that Plato's number is a multiple of 19 ten thousands’, i.e. the text is approached with a ready-made answer in mind. There are three further objections to the conventional view, (a) It takes the text out of its context as if it had strayed from the Timaeus.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , December 1986 , pp. 407 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1986

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References

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