The Timaeus of Plato

34 A] TIMA1O2. 103
there was nothing. For by design was it created to supply its
own sustenance by its own wasting, and to have all its action
and passion in itself and by itself : for its framer deemed that
were it self-sufficing it would be far better than if it required
aught else. And hands, wherewith it had no need to grasp
aught nor to defend itself against another, he thought not fit idly
to bestow upon it, nor yet feet, nor in a word anything to serve
as the means of movement. For he assigned
it that motion
which was proper to its bodily form, of all the seven that which
most belongs to reason and intelligence. Wherefore turning
it
about uniformly in the same spot on its own axis, he made it to
revolve round and round ;
but all the six motions he took away
from it and left it without part in their wanderings. And since
for this revolution there was no need of feet he made it
without
legs and without feet.
VIII. So the universal design of the ever-living God, that
Xois from a perpetually constant motion.
But in the Timaeus the movement of the
universe is changeless and everlastingly in
the same direction . Now the interpretation
of this difference is in my judgment
indubitably this. The passage in the
Politicus belongs to a different class of
myth to the allegory of the Timaeus.
Plato is not there expounding his metaphysical
theories under a similitude ;
he
is telling a tale with a moral to it. Therefore
it suited his convenience to adopt
the popular distinction between spirit
and matter; and since the /co