OBSERVATIONS ON THE POLITICUS MYTH

I

The

I cannot do better at the outset than refer the reader for the general characteristics of the Politicus Myth to Jowett's Introduction to the Statesman (Dialogues of Plato), where his admirable remarks, indeed, leave little to be added. philosophical import of the Myth, it will be gathered from Jowett's remarks, consists in its presentation of the "distinctions between God causing and permitting evil, and between his more or less immediate government of the world." Interesting observations will also be found on the art with which Plato gives verisimilitude to his own Myth "by adopting received traditions (as the tradition about the sun having originally risen in the West and that about the yŋyeveîs)— traditions of which he pretends to find an explanation in his own larger conceptions." We have had instances of this art in the Platonic Myths already examined, which we have found securing credit to themselves by explaining not only old traditional Myths, but the facts and doctrines of "modern science"; and we have found the same art employed by Dante.

Having referred to Jowett's Introduction1 for a general view of this Myth, I will now add some observations on special points.

The doctrine of periodical terrestrial "catastrophes," universal or local, leaving on each occasion a few scattered survivors to build up society afresh, mythologically explained in the Politicus, was part of the "science" of Plato's day,2 and was afterwards a prominent tenet of the Peripatetics.3

It was also "scientific" in Plato's day to explain at least the general course of terrestrial phenomena as caused by the motion of the Heavens. It is thus that the phenomena of

1 I would also refer to Grote's Plato, ii. 480, note s-a long and instructive note; and to Stallbaum's Prolegomena' to the Politicus.

2 Laws, iii. 676 ff.

3 See Newman's notes on Arist. Pol. ii. 5. 1269 a 5 and 6.

γένεσις καὶ φθορά in this sublunary region are accounted for by Aristotle.1

Putting together the occurrence of terrestrial catastrophes (cf. Tim. 22 ff.) and the influence of the motion of the Heavens, both vouched for by "science," Plato imagines the catastrophes as shocks produced by sudden changes in the direction of the motion. The western rising of the sun in the Atreus Myth may have suggested this explanation to him; or he may have known the Egyptian tradition recorded. by Herodotus (ii. 142), that during eleven thousand three hundred and forty years of Egyptian history the sun on four occasions altered his course, "twice rising where he now sets and twice setting where he now rises." Although another rationale of the Egyptian tradition (or of Herodotus's version of it) has been given,2 I venture to suggest that whereas East is left and West is right as one faces the mid-day sun in the northern hemisphere, while East is right and West is left to the spectator in the southern hemisphere, the "Egyptian tradition" was awkwardly built upon the tale of some traveller coming from south of the equator, who said truly that he had seen the sun rise on his right hand and set on his left.

II

Zeller (Plato, Eng. Transl. p. 383, n. 44) says, " Of course (cf. Tim. 36 E, and elsewhere) Plato is not in earnest in supposing that God from time to time withdraws from the government of the world."

Since the supposition of God's intermittent agency is made in a Myth, Plato is certainly not "in earnest" with it, in the sense of laying it down dogmatically as a scientific axiom. But is he more "in earnest" with the supposition of the continuous agency of God in the Timaeus? That supposition is equally part of a Myth; Timaeus ipse totus mythicus est.3 The truth is that, however Plato represents God-and he

1 De Gen. et Corr. ii. 10, 336 a 26, and cf. Zeller's Aristotle, Eng. Transl. i. 580 ff.

2 See Rawlinson's note ad loc.

3 Couturat, de Platonis Mythis, p. 32.

sometimes represents him in immense cosmic outlines, sometimes on a smaller scale and more anthropomorphically-the representation is always for the imagination, mythical. And it ought not to be forgotten that the supposition of God's intermittent agency is advanced in the Politicus in order to explain (mythologically, of course) the fact which Plato does not shut his eyes to even in the Timaeus, where he supposes (still in Myth) the continuity of God's government—the fact of the existence of evil, both physical and moral, in a world supposed to be governed by God. In maintaining the exist ence of evil Plato is certainly "in earnest.”

It is worth noting that the representation given by the Politicus Myth of the opposition between God and Mattergood and evil-as an opposition of motions is common to the Myth with the astronomy of Plato's day; but whereas the Politicus Myth makes motion in God's direction alternate with motion in the world's direction, astronomical theory makes the two motions go on for ever simultaneously, i.e. the eternal motion of the whole Cosmos from East to West carries round the inner spheres, whose own motions take place from West to East.

For a full discussion of the astronomy of the Politicus Myth I would refer the reader to Mr. Adam's Republic, vol. ii. 295 ff. Mr. Adam's view is that the two cycles (the motion in God's direction, and that in the opposite direction) are of equal length, and that each of them represents a Great Year -the Great Year being 36,000 years.

"

III

Τὸ γήϊνον ἤδη πᾶν ἀνήλωτο γένος (Politicus, 272 D). The Resurrection" of the Politicus Myth and "Metempsychosis" may be regarded as parallel products of imagination. Metempsychosis assumes a fixed number of souls created once for all and continuing always in existence. New souls are not created; the souls which animate the bodies of men in each successive generation are always souls which had been incarnate in former generations. In Rep. 611 A, Plato ex

pressly lays it down that the number of souls in existence is always the same without augmentation or diminution.' This tenet involved in Metempsychosis Plato shares with the aborigines of Australia. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen say: 2

The idea is firmly held that the child is not the direct result of intercourse—that it may come without this, which merely, as it were, prepares the mother for the reception and birth of an already formed spirit child who inhabits one of the local totem centres. . . . In the native mind the value of the Churinga (stone or wooden objects lodged in a cave or other storehouse, near which women do not pass) lies in the fact that each one of them is intimately associated with, and is indeed the representative of, one of the Alcheringa ancestors, with the attributes of which it is endowed. When the spirit part has gone into a woman, and a child has, as a result, been born, then that living child is the re-incarnation of that particular spirit individual.*

As Metempsychosis makes the same soul, so Resurrection makes the same body, serve more than one life. There is a store of old bodies, as there is of souls, upon which a new generation draws. The store of souls assumed by Metempsychosis is never exhausted, being recruited as fast as it is drawn upon; but the store of adult bodies in the "Resurrection" of the Politicus Myth is at last exhausted, for each adult body, when in its turn it rises from the dead, grows smaller and smaller till it becomes the body of an infant and vanishes

away.

One might develop Plato's myth, and say that it is these vanished infants which reappear after the manner of ordinary

1 Cf. Rohde, Psyche, ii. 279.

2 The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 265.

3 Cf. Myer and Nutt's Voyage of Bran, ii. 82, on the widespread idea of conception, without male intervention, through swallowing a worm in a drink, or through some other means.

Spencer and Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 138. Before going to press I have not had an opportunity of seeing Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's new book, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, but I transcribe the following sentences from a notice of it in the Athenaeum (July 9, 1904):"These tribes believe that in every child the soul of a mythical Alcheringa ancestor of a given totem is re-incarnated. These totem souls haunt the places, marked by a tree or rock, where the ancestors went into the ground.' There the dying ancestors left stone amulets of a type familiar in Europe and America, styled churinga. When a child is born his ancestral churinga is sought, and often is found near the place where the totem spirit entered his mother.' Are the "articles belonging to the deceased," referred to p. 450 infra, parallel to these Australian amulets?

birth, and grow back into adult size, when the revolution of the Cosmos is reversed. This would be in accordance with the belief, by no means confined to such primitive minds as those of the Australian aborigines, observed by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, that intercourse is after all not the real cause of the birth of a child: that the child-hardly distinguished as "soul" and "body"-is one who returns from the world of the departed and enters into the mother. The relationship between such a view of the nature of procreation and the custom of counting kinship through the mother, not through the father, is of course obvious.

That the notion of Resurrection, then, recommends itself to the imagination in much the same way as the notion of Metempsychosis is what I wish to suggest to the student of the Politicus Myth. The two notions are closely allied and, indeed, tend to coalesce. The distinction between soul and body is a hard one for the imagination to maintain; thus it is very imperfectly maintained in the following instance: "The Jesuits relate that among the Hurons there were special ceremonies for little children who died at less than two months old; their bodies were not put in coffins in the cemeteries, but buried upon the pathway in order that they might enter into the body of some passing woman and so be born again ;" and it is practically given up in the Christian Eschatology which insists on the ultimate union of the soul with its risen body.

IV

My remarks in this section will serve as introduction to the "Creation Myths," which we shall examine next.

The Politicus Myth may be distinguished as Aetiological from the Eschatological Myths which we have examined in the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic. The Eschatological Myths are concerned immediately with the Ideas of Reason. They set forth the Idea of Soul as subject of God's govern

1 J. E. King on "Infant Burial," in Classical Review, Feb. 1903, p. 83. The souls of infants seem always to have caused difficulty; see Rohde, Psyche, ii. 411-413, on awpoi, and Adam's note on Rep. 615 c, Tŵv dè evlùs yevoμévwv kal ὀλίγον χρόνον βιούντων πέρι ἄλλα ἔλεγεν οὐκ ἄξια μνήμης.