Who are the gods? One obvious way for a Greek intellectual to address this question is to tell a story of origins, to locate the very beginning of all gods and then gradually reveal how one generation of gods followed another. Plato’s Timaeus is no exception to this standard when it offers to examine the nature of gods within the framework of theogony. What usually defines the traditional gods in the theogonic accounts is the succession of gods itself – their identities and roles emerge from the intergenerational relationships, conflicts and successive attempts to secure their own importance in the world. To know these things is to have a relatively privileged type of knowledge, which may be acquired from some sort of religious experience, such as divine inspiration. It is well known that Plato is no less averse to the dubious ways in which poetic and religious figures gain their insights than to the content of their beliefs and stories.Footnote ¹ It is a mark of ontological and moral deficiency to postulate that there are constant changes among the traditional gods in their aims and undertakings or to speak of a heated rivalry between them and attempts of gods to dominate their peers. However, the Timaeus assures its readers that it can provide a more secure alternative method, a cosmological investigation, with better philosophical evidence for the nature of gods. Theogony based on these premises is designed to demonstrate that the universe has mathematical structures, which emerge from an intelligent, perfect, benevolent and goal-directed first principle, and that the ensuing astronomical order signals the divinity of the stars and planets. But now the status of the traditional gods becomes problematic. Can cosmology give us any knowledge concerning the traditional gods? Does it support the more conventional religious beliefs about their characters and interrelations? And is there any hierarchy between the traditional and cosmic gods? Are they subordinated to each other or do they stand at the same theological level? This chapter explores the place of the traditional gods in the cosmology and cosmogony of the Timaeus. It shall take up one of the key questions in the Greek religious narratives – how the gods came to be – and position it within Plato’s broader reflections on the nature of the universe and the value of religious beliefs in a cosmological discourse. The overall objective of this chapter is to determine the relation between different kinds of gods and the specific theological status of the traditional gods.

1.1 The Two Theogonies of the Timaeus

Traditional gods make a curious entrance in Plato’s Timaeus. The scene is set with an entity that is genealogically older than and metaphysically prior to the divinities of Greek religion. It is not the Olympian gods or the Titans who brought forth the cosmic order but the mysterious figure of the Demiurge. He is presented as the first principle and the supreme cause of the universe, who, among other things, initiated time, designed the structure of the physical elements and created the cosmic gods, such as the planets and the stars. After discussing how the latter came to be, Timaeus reluctantly proceeds:

T1 is the main source of information on the traditional gods in the Timaeus. Although the second part of the passage ends with some positive conclusions, the way to it is riddled with a series of cautionary remarks. The very first statements disclaim any personal responsibility on Timaeus’ part and make clear that only the ‘figures of the past’ are accountable for what is about to be said. The highly nuanced rhetoric that follows is a confusing mixture of assertive eloquence and unconvincing reassurance. Timaeus praises the ‘children of the gods’ and their knowledge; he repeatedly employs prescriptive terms, urging the audience to believe in these figures (πειστέον, 40d7; πιστευτέον, 40e3); and yet he sincerely admits that he cannot offer an adequate foundation for the knowledge of traditional gods. Timaeus accepts the credibility of these accounts by referring to the discourse of those who claim to belong to the divine family.Footnote ² He envisages these theogonic narratives as a tradition based on customary belief among certain anonymous people, who are familiar (οἰκεῖα, 40e2) with these matters because of their family ties to the gods (ἐκγόνοις … θεῶν οὖσιν, 40d8), as if they are presenting their own family stories. The tone of the passage inevitably leaves us with a sceptical impression.

Timaeus’ acceptance of the authority of these ‘children’ is at odds with his broader concern in the passage that the traditional accounts do not meet the argumentative requirements of his cosmology. In the preceding part of the dialogue, the account of the origins of the cosmic gods was described as an eikōs muthos, a likely story (29d2), which is a type of discourse that explores how the supreme god would likely create a world and its beings. Following Myles Burnyeat’s interpretation, I take the adjective eikōs in this context to express both probability and reasonability.Footnote ³ On the one hand, the eikōs muthos derives its contingency from the fact that such an account focuses mainly on matters of which it is impossible to have a comprehensive and firm knowledge – for instance, what the motivations and reasoning of the creator god were. But in so far as an eikōs discourse invites the readers to consider the intellectually comprehensible patterns behind cosmogony, rationality also becomes a criterion according to which the reasonability and likelihood of Timaeus’ own muthos can be judged.Footnote ⁴ There is also the anankaios type of argumentation, which examines a subject matter that is stable and unchanging, like the Forms or mathematical truths, and by means of which the necessary truths can be deduced. Cosmological theogony combines both types of argumentations, because some aspects of the universe, such as the world-soul, have mathematical structure. On an even lower epistemic level, we find traditional theogony, which completely evades the eikōs–anankaios distinction. Timaeus’ acknowledgement that the customary stories fall short of the eikōs standard complicates the status of the passage. It detaches the traditional gods from the eikōs muthos because their problematic status and peculiar nature set certain limits on the epistemological status of human discourse about them.

A further discontinuity between these discourses can be observed in relation to their explanatory models. The preferred framework for cosmological theogony (29d–40d) is technological. It starts with an assumption that the primordial situation had three major constituents – the supreme divinity called the Demiurge, the chaotic materials with their inherent properties and the eternal paradigms or forms – and describes a process whereby the prime god created the world in the manner of a craftsman, who assembled, shaped and developed the material he had.Footnote ⁵ The primary task of the Demiurge, therefore, is not so much to start from the absolute beginning but to reorganise the primordial state by endowing it with an order.Footnote ⁶ The task was to arrange the materials the Demiurge had in line with the eternal paradigms, or the ‘Platonic’ Forms, in the best possible way.Footnote ⁷ The goodness of the Demiurge was the cause of the universe and its most authoritative principle (ἀρχὴ κυριωτάτη, 29e4–30a1).Footnote ⁸ The objective was to find a way to accommodate the good within the primordial chaos, the realm of becoming. What is clear from the technological framework is that the world itself and its living beings offers a practical solution to the most fundamental cosmological question: how the things of becoming participate in the things of being and how created things participate in the good. As a result, the cosmic totality and its particular parts such as the planets and the stars are dependent on the creative work of the Demiurge and the principles that guide his actions. Contrary to, for example, the Atomist cosmological theory, where the world emerges from the mechanical collision of the primary elements, Timaeus’ discourse makes a goal-directed, intentional agent the key factor responsible for the world.Footnote ⁹

In the traditional theogony of T1, on the other hand, we cannot immediately find such explanatory principles as the paradigms, the demiurgic goodness or teleology. The generation of the traditional gods seem to rely on the creative force of biological reproduction and therefore their existence is based on the previous generations of gods. Although this is a typical procedure in Greek theogonic narratives which otherwise seems to be intuitively acceptable to any religiously minded reader, its explanatory value in Platonic cosmological discourse is ambiguous.Footnote ¹⁰ The problem is that this process does not derive from the same creative force that was hitherto used in creating the world and the cosmic gods, namely the cosmic craftsmanship of the Demiurge. It is worthwhile to note, however, the Demiurge is introduced as a father as well (πατήρ, 28c3), and this role is amplified in the later parts of cosmogony (47e–48a, 50c–e), but the biological model is not applied to the origins of the cosmic gods. Two explanatory frameworks, therefore, are employed for the origins of different gods: one, for the generation of the cosmic beings, is technological, while the other, for the generation of traditional gods, is biological. The first is the general explanatory framework used in the eikōs muthos, whereas the biological framework appears to distance the traditional gods from the demiurgic theogony to some extent by raising questions concerning the status of this framework, its value and relation with the first explanatory scheme.

The final challenge to accepting the traditional theogonies dates back to Socrates’ discussion of the traditional gods in the Republic. The main problem with the epic theogonies is the dangerously impious language that depicts the successive theogonic phases as involving struggles between the gods for power and domination (R. 2.377e–378a). Consequently, one may see the gods who established their position in Olympus as occasionally malevolent, contentious and unpredictable. Socrates’ solution was to avoid such mischaracterisations and instead set the theological regulations that would require us to speak of the gods as the causes of what is good (2.380c) and stable beings who do not mislead into falsehoods (2.383a). As we saw a moment ago, this is precisely what is endorsed by the dialogue. Cosmogony is devoid of the struggle and conflict that are so typical of the divine matters in the epic narratives. The Demiurge does not fight for his authority with other primordial forces and he does not aim at establishing his reign in the universe.Footnote ¹¹ Along with the cosmic gods, the Demiurge is described as a good and benevolent being. But does Timaeus adopt this kind of religious language for the traditional gods as well? T1 neither mentions the struggles of the traditional gods nor gives support to the conventional mischaracterisations of them. When they come into being, the power structure is already fixed by the Demiurge, and the traditional gods must conform to it. Thus, it seems that T1 avoids describing the traditional gods in a theologically and morally unsound manner.

So far I have identified two major problems concerning passage 40d–41a: (1) its thesis is based on unsatisfactory epistemic grounds; (2) it uses an explanatory framework that is in tension with the primary explanatory scheme. The cumulative force of these observations should compel us to reject the passage as irrelevant to cosmology as many scholars have done before. But even if we are not meant to integrate T1 into the general philosophical architecture, the puzzle remains as to why Timaeus dwelt upon the traditional gods precisely at this point. We may wonder whether he merely wanted to show that the poetic accounts, though limited, have a place in the novel cosmology. Perhaps he might have played safe and avoided the charge of impiety. Or perhaps the classic commentaries were right when they considered the passage as ‘purely, though politely, ironical’?Footnote ¹² The epistemic, explanatory and descriptive challenges of T1 that we have explored might only strengthen this impression. But it is important to emphasise that the apparent irony of Timaeus is also less than straightforward. It can be interpreted in two ways: he is mocking either the authority of the unnamed poets or the theogonic content composed by them.Footnote ¹³ Generally, I shall avoid the second reading as it precludes a serious assessment of the relation between religion and cosmology. But the results of my discussion may support the first interpretation, for my aim is to show that the theogony of T1 is formulated in a deliberately vague way and thus unrelated to any specific Greek theogonic narratives. It means that Timaeus is not actually relying on any unnamed earlier poetic figure, even if he playfully pretends to accept their authority.

The solution of the Timaeus is not to follow the Phaedrus and cosmologise all Olympian gods (see Introduction). Instead, it is to find some common ground between the two theogonies and the key lies, I believe, at the very beginning of each theogony, where we find the same pair of gods, Ouranos and Gaia. The reason that these gods can appear not only in the traditional theogony of T1, but also in the cosmological theogony is that Timaeus uses the cosmological discourse to revise the nature of those astral beings who have theological significance. And this includes some traditional gods, such as Ouranos (the heavenly god), Gaia (the mother earth), Selene (the moon-goddess) and Helios (the sun-god), that had already functioned as the world-structuring gods in the religious tradition. That Timaeus makes Ouranos the main ‘hero’ of his cosmological narrative is mostly overlooked in current scholarship because of the emphasis on the world-soul, the psychic cornerstone of the universe, which is among the main themes in the first part of cosmology after the introductory remarks (the prooimion). Although the world-soul expresses the cognitive aspect of the world and gives structure to the individual cosmic gods, it is, nonetheless, only one of the components that constitutes the universe. For it is precisely Ouranos, as I shall argue, that unites the totality of cosmic functions and merges all of the contexts in question into a continuous composition. We find Ouranos frequently featured in the dialogue, where he assumes a diverse set of roles such as the name of the first created cosmic being, a senior traditional god and an ethical ideal for humans. With respect to the dramatic composition, Ouranos reappears in such varying segments of the dialogue as the methodological prooimion to Timaeus’ speech, the cosmological discussion and the appropriation of the traditional theogony in the passage at 40d3–41a6 (= T1). I intend to explain how Ouranos is turned into the point of intersection of these dramatic and theoretical contexts. I shall argue that the Timaeus is primarily a theological project, which involves a re-characterisation of Greek gods, in particular the old heavenly god Ouranos, and reclaiming the ouranos and the kosmos from the cosmologists as a properly divine being. So, my first objective is to show that the dialogue is, among other things, a theogony of Ouranos, which considers him as the first and the most significant created cosmic god (Sections 1.2–1.4).

Using this approach, we will also discover the discursive strategy employed for relating philosophical theology to religious tradition: although traditional theogony lacks any proper philosophical arguments for the existence of traditional gods, by claiming that these gods stem from the Ouranian god, Timaeus finds an incisive way to integrate the otherwise-awkward traditional theogony into cosmology. The results of this analysis will open the path to examine how the key themes of T1 correspond to the broader patterns of Timaeus’ narrative and, in particular, whether the biological explanatory framework is ever used in the cosmological discourse (Section 1.5). I shall also explore whether we can extract anything positive from T1, especially in relation to its theogonical arrangement, and how this information can qualify the epistemic status of the passage and its moral message (Section 1.6). This approach also leads me to my second claim: despite the fact that the dialogue rejects many traditional characteristics of Ouranos and gives a thorough cosmological reassessment of this divinity, he is considered as both a cosmic and a traditional god. This will make it necessary for us to return to the method of the so-called double identification (Section 1.7; see also Introduction). Our findings will confirm that the difference between the Phaedrus and the Timaeus is that the latter gives a cosmological update to only those few traditional gods that inherited a structural role in the world-order. In addition, I shall argue that the Timaeus and the Laws postulate some relation between two more pairs of traditional gods and astral beings, namely Hermes–planet and Apollo–sun (Helios), but this is neither an identificatory relation nor a procedure that is meant to be applied to the rest of the traditional gods.

1.2 Introducing the Ouranian God

Timaeus was given the task of explaining the origins of the universe by Critias (27a–b), who distributed philosophical topics among the interlocutors after Socrates asked for a story about the ideal city in political action. At that point, Critias did not present any clear theoretical requirements, objectives or a specific framework for Timaeus’ account, apart from a request to terminate his cosmology with the generation of human beings. From the very beginning, it is clear that Timaeus has to explain his theoretical agenda, and it is small wonder that he delivers a short prologue to the whole cosmological discourse in order to define the subject which was left open by both Critias and Socrates.Footnote ¹⁴ The prooimion, or introduction, (27c–29d) presents a number of philosophical themes: the origins of the universe as the central cosmological question; a methodological clarification of the eikōs as a standard for considering cosmological problems; the distinction between being and becoming; and the causal roles of the supreme creator god and the paradigms in his narrative. This is also the place where we encounter the ouranos for the first time:

Cosmology begins with a question regarding the origins of the ouranos. Whose origins does it have in mind?

As a common noun, ouranos refers to the sky, a physical location of gods. Taken in isolation, the term ouranos could mean the celestial realm proper, in which case the objective would be to explain just the generation of the astral bodies, but it can also mean the whole universe, which is precisely Timaeus’ topic.Footnote ¹⁵ The latter sense is reinforced here by placing ouranos in conjunction with kosmos, thus indicating an expanded meaning – the entire world, including the earth. Both ancient and modern authors debate as to when exactly kosmos was conflated with ouranos and began to mean the ‘world’, with possible options ranging from Pythagoras and Heraclitus to Plato.Footnote ¹⁶ Diogenes Laertius (8.1.48), for example, would like us to think that such a use originated in the works of Pythagoras, Parmenides or Hesiod, but these candidates are highly contested mainly because there is no primary textual evidence to support such a claim and one has to rely on the late doxographers.Footnote ¹⁷ A less disputed alternative is Heraclitus (DK22 B30).Footnote ¹⁸ However one would wish to settle this debate, the Presocratics clearly used kosmos for the ‘world’ one generation later, which, as Socrates’ students remarked, was characteristic of the intellectuals (Xenophon, Mem. 1.1.11; Plato, Grg. 507e–508a).Footnote ¹⁹ And by Plato’s time the philosophical tradition has settled on a synonymous use of kosmos and ouranos to designate ‘world’. Generally, Timaeus follows the rule set out in T2 by interchangeably referring to the universe as ouranos (31a2), kosmos (29a2, 30b7) and to pan (29d7).Footnote ²⁰ In other words, the origins of the world are regarded as the origins of the ouranos-kosmos.

Timaeus’ discourse is theogony as much as cosmogony: for the universe is not only a physical entity or a spatial term, but also a god.Footnote ²¹ T2 makes a pious and typically Greek gesture of leaving it for the emerging god to decide which name is acceptable to it, either ouranos or kosmos.Footnote ²² I retained the nice ambiguity in Zeyl’s translation by leaving the neutral ‘it’ rather than substituting the pronoun with the more loaded masculine ‘he’, but this does not change the fact that T2 makes a personal address to the god. As the third person verb indicates (δέχοιτο, 28b4), the god is given a choice to decide on how it is to be called and what name is appropriate to it.Footnote ²³

In the opening part of the cosmogony (27c–40d), we find a comparable number of the two terms, fifteen for ouranos and ten for kosmos.Footnote ²⁴ Sometimes the more fitting name for the cosmic god appears to be ouranos:

We can notice here the personal aspects of the ouranos emphasised by such attributes as knowledge, friendship and happiness. Now let us compare T3 with the concluding passage of the whole dialogue:

In T4, Timaeus returns to his religious hesitations and uses all three main terms – ouranos, kosmos and to pan – to complete the discussion of the origins of the cosmic god.

It is a dangerous theological move to use the term ouranos as the name for the cosmic god, since it alludes to the old heavenly god Ouranos. In archaic poetry, Ouranos is one of the primordial gods, literally the broad and starry sky that encloses the earth and provides a physical residence for the gods. It is safe to say that he was not the most revered Greek divinity. Ouranos is characterised as a malicious being, who takes pleasure in evil actions: he has unceasing lust for his wife Gaia and hatred for his children, which makes him to hide the new-borns in Gaia herself. These wrongdoings lead his son Kronos to castrate and depose the heavenly god.Footnote ²⁵ Hesiod’s Theogony left such a powerful account of Ouranos’ viciousness and downfall that the later tradition could only conclude that ‘the one [Ouranos] who was formerly great … will now not even be spoken of as existing in the past’ (Aeschylus, Ag. 167–170, trans. A. H. Sommerstein). Given this deplorable religious legacy, one would expect any discourse to distance the new cosmic god from the old Ouranos. Instead, we find an open proposal for the god to take this name. So the crucial question is why Timaeus wants to associate the universe with both ouranos and kosmos. What is the upshot of this religious juxtaposition?

A short detour to Xenophanes provides background and useful points of comparison for understanding Timaeus’ theological project. Xenophanes postulated a single, eternal, omnipotent and omniscient God as the primary principle shaking the universe by the power of mind (DK21 B23–26). This bold and novel characterisation of the divine may have been partly formulated as a critique of Homer’s and Hesiod’s theological narratives, which attached flawed human moral qualities to the Olympian gods (DK21 B11–12).Footnote ²⁶ In addition, Xenophanes identifies the God with the universe. In a striking testimony at Metaph. 986b24–5 (= DK 21 A30), Aristotle claims that Xenophanes ‘asserted that the One is the God by looking towards the whole ouranos’ (εἰς τὸν ὅλον οὐρανὸν ἀποβλέψας τὸ ἓν εἶναί φησι τὸν θεόν).Footnote ²⁷ The testimony presupposes an expanded meaning of the term ouranos, namely the whole world. According to Palmer, the passage exposes more than the location of the God, for it seems to indicate the coextensiveness, if not consubstantiality, of the divinity with the universe.Footnote ²⁸ What is significant is Aristotle’s emphasis on the term itself: he suggests that Xenophanes chose a familiar and poetically loaded term ouranos for the supreme God. This is not an innocent move, since it brings us back to Xenophanes’ clash with the poets. Palmer argues that Xenophanes’ theology challenges the poetic theogonies, which portray an overthrowal of Ouranos and the rise of Kronos and Zeus: ‘if it is an attribute of a god to be most powerful and if it is impious to suppose that one god can be subject to the mastery of another, then there will be neither a simultaneous hierarchy of divinities nor any hierarchy of succession. What remains is a single god that preserves aspects both of the Homeric/Hesiodic heavenly rulers and of the physical οὐρανός itself.’Footnote ²⁹ Thus, Xenophanes’ philosophy both continues and reacts to the discourse of archaic poetry. This cosmic God may not be the same old Ouranos, but it is a reformation of this religious being.

We can now see that Timaeus places the discourse at the crossroads of traditional theogony and the Presocratic cosmogony.Footnote ³⁰ He is reacting to the poetic images and re-characterising Ouranos with the vocabulary provided by his predecessors. First, Timaeus is concerned with the physical extension of ouranos. Just like Xenophanes and later philosophers, Timaeus wants to show that ouranos is not just a partial constituent aspect of the universe, the sky, but everything that exists within the world. Second, ouranos conflated with kosmos enables the latter’s rich connotations of harmony, orderliness and systematicity to be employed for the depiction of the world, whilst also ensuring that there is no misunderstanding as to what the relation between the two terms is – they are equated.Footnote ³¹ This association, therefore, has a rhetorical function, and it will later help to introduce some of the key Platonic terms, such as beauty and goodness.Footnote ³² And finally, the use of the divine name Ouranos prepares the audience for the idea that an enquiry into the origins of the world is simultaneously an enquiry into the origins of a cosmic god. By using the old heavenly god as the philosophical point of departure, Timaeus distances himself from the new circles of the atheistic intellectuals as well as the materialist cosmologists, who questioned the divinity of astral entities, and settles the philosophical debates in the religious tradition. It is also a clear departure from the Phaedrus, where the ouranos usually means a celestial region (e.g. 247a5, 249a7) and an epistemic boundary between the world of the sensibles and the intelligibles (247b1, 247b7–c3), but never a divinity. T2 raises a fundamentally theological question: how did the Ouranian god come to be? An investigation into the nature of Ouranos, therefore, decisively associates the Timaeus with the theogonic tradition.Footnote ³³ Let us now take a closer look at the new conception of the kosmos-ouranos and explore how it reorganises the religious perception of what is Ouranos.

1.3 Ouranos and the Origins of the Cosmic Gods

We have already discussed some religious aspects, which radically reconsider the principles of the poetic theogonies. In terms of dramatic composition, the story begins with something more fundamental than the heterogeneous list of Greek divinities. At the primordial phase, there is a single transcendent first principle, the Demiurge, who is responsible for all creation. The creative process, moreover, lacks the typical divine battles and family dramas of the Homeric and Hesiodic gods. If the gods fought each other, they could not be considered as harmonious, and the creative process would be destabilised and therefore deficient. In other words, the cosmogony lacks politics as understood by the poets. In general, there are no conventional political undertones in what the Demiurge does: he does not try to conquer and vanquish some primordial or divine forces, and he does not have an objective to establish his power. The actions of the Demiurge are not described in military vocabulary, and he is not titled a king or a ruler of the universe. Rather, his objective is practical or even technical, that is, to find a way to anchor the world in goodness. This objective is explicated in a language of cosmic craftsmanship. The cosmogony that follows, as we quickly learn, is theogonic, since the generated universe is actually a god, whose name is Ouranos. Just as in the poetic theogonies, Timaeus introduces Ouranos as one of the first generated beings. But in contrast to them, he aims to demonstrate what makes Ouranos superior to the other created gods.

The reason is that Ouranos is generated as a living world and an exceptionally intelligent divinity with a cosmic body constituted of all material elements (the world-body) and a soul that is capable of cognition and movement (the world-soul). The striking feature that the Ouranian god is generated as a bodily, ensouled animal is not accidental, for this is the best model to reflect the good intentions of the Demiurge:

The premise of this passage is the Platonic axiom that intelligence has intrinsic and supreme value. Accordingly, if the world is to be truly good, it must acquire reason. The crucial link here is the soul, which is the source of cognition and life. The Demiurge makes a mathematically precise and proportionate arrangement of the soul-stuff composed of sameness, difference and being (35a), and then weaves it throughout the whole ouranos (ἐκ μέσου πρὸς τὸν ἔσχατον οὐρανὸν, 36e2), which empowers the universe with reasoning. The Demiurge assimilates the created god to himself (cf. μάλιστα ἐβουλήθη γενέσθαι παραπλήσια ἑαυτῷ, 29e3) by making Ouranos intelligent.

The soul of Ouranos guarantees the perpetual order and divinity of the universe. Through the world-soul, it receives a function to contemplate the eternal beings like the eternal paradigms, and all the created things that are within this cosmic totality (37a–b). The visible expression of this thought-process is the heavenly motions – constant, regular and harmonious revolutions that take place because of equally constant, regular and harmonious cosmic cognition (36d). Thus, the Ouranian god lives a stable life and its motions make the other astral beings follow the same course. Unlike the old Ouranos, it cannot initiate something that changes itself or others towards something worse and evil (Hesiod, Th. 154–160). For this reason, Ouranos cannot feel hatred or take joy in wrongful deeds anymore (cf. σφετέρῳ δ᾽ ἤχθοντο τοκῆι, Th. 155; κακῷ δ᾽ ἐπετέρπετο ἔργῳ, Th. 158). Instead, it serenely contemplates the beings inside it and thus experiences blessedness and happiness (Ti. 34b, 37a–c). The result is that the Demiurge has actually managed to reshape the realm of becoming with a view to the realm of changeless things and to make the world good by endowing it with the rational soul. The latter feature is of a crucial importance, because the created things and beings will be in need of a safeguard to maintain the cosmic organisation once the Demiurge retires from the creation. The world-soul is precisely such a guarantor.

As a created animal, it also has a body. The possibility that Ouranos might be akin to any known species of animals is rejected: there is nothing outside the universe in which it could move or observe, so it has no need of eyes, legs or similar bodily parts. And if it did, that would presuppose that the universe is not constituted by the whole of matter and that there is some kind of disorderly outer material layer, which can interact and collide with the created universe, causing changes and reorganisation of it from the outside (33a). So, if the universe is to be complete, it has to be a self-sufficient and singular entity (μονογενὴς οὐρανὸς, 31b3), without anything material beyond it. Hence, the Demiurge gave Ouranos a spherical shape composed of all the matter that existed. The body of Ouranos is crafted as visible and tangible entity (οὐρανὸν ὁρατὸν καὶ ἁπτόν, 32b7–8) proportionally constituted by the four primary elements (32b–32c).Footnote ³⁴ The cosmic body encompasses within itself all the living beings, including the younger gods (31a–b with 39e–40a). In other words, Ouranos lends them part of its body, since the living beings are composed of the body of the universe. The singularity and completeness of Ouranos ensures that there is no other body for living beings to partake in, and therefore all the bodies in the current universe are derived from the body of the Ouranian god (33b).Footnote ³⁵ Among other things, this characterisation stands in sharp contrast to Hesiod’s depiction of Ouranos who did not share the world with his children and returned them to Gaia. The reformed Ouranos, on the other hand, could do no such thing as it is inseparable from them. It also implies Gaia is no longer the ‘ever immovable seat of all the immortal [gods]’ (πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ ἀθανάτων, Th. 117–118). This function is reassigned to Ouranos. Another contrast with Hesiod’s narrative is that Gaia’s organising role is significantly diminished. It is not Gaia, who generates Ouranos to enclose the earth from above (Th. 126–127), but instead Gaia qua the earth is generated within Ouranos to give a fixed centre to its world-body (Ti. 38d, 39b). In addition, Gaia no longer has the power or any personal intention to drive forward generational change among the gods. There is no place for such a change in cosmological discourse, because the cosmic gods are all made after the permanent image of Ouranos.

The generation of cosmic gods, the planets and the stars, is an integral part of the generation of the great cosmic god. They are designed in such a way as to make sure that their functions would be meaningful within the overall cosmic structure and that their existence would provide no conflicts with the senior cosmic god. More specifically, the origin of the cosmic gods is associated with the question of time. The beginning of the world indicates a change from primordial chaos to the ordered condition. This transition opens up a space for a consideration of temporal differences resulting from something that was before and comes after. So, the cosmological conditions for the possibility of time need to be clarified. For this purpose, Timaeus offers a preliminary definition of chronos as a measure of change and movement (38a1–5) and tells how the Demiurge created the cosmic gods:

The main function of the celestial bodies is to make the cosmic motions visible. The cosmic gods in T6 are organised in seven circles with the earth at the centre of the universe (38c–d), the circles in which they are carried by the motions of sameness and difference, while the rest of the stars are distributed in various positions between the Equator and the poles (40a).Footnote ³⁶ The relative differences in particular orbits, rotations and speeds lay the basis for the understanding of time. Thanks to the orderly revolutions of the cosmic gods induced by the world-soul, they provide stable measuring units of time – the numbers or general divisions, such as day, lunar month, annual circuit of the sun etc. Hence, time is dependent on the heavenly motions. From the cosmological perspective, the collective role of cosmic gods is to become a kind of cosmic clock (χρόνον ὄντα τὰς τούτων πλάνας, 39d1).Footnote ³⁷ This function of cosmic gods demonstrates that they contribute towards the order of the universe.

We must distinguish three motions which the cosmic gods make: the axial rotation that is caused by the self-motion of their own souls; the cosmic revolutions that are caused by the world-soul’s motion of sameness; and the observable irregularities in movements, such as retrogradation, caused by the world-soul’s motion of difference.Footnote ³⁸ In other words, the world-soul is responsible for all observable motions of astral entities: the usual circling of planets and stars around the earth is caused by the second motion, while the occasional backward motion of the planets that looks like a loop is caused by the third motion. The first type of motion, on the other hand, cannot be observed by human eyes. Some scholars doubt whether the cosmic gods have the self-motion and axial rotation altogether. D. R. Dicks limits individual (axial) movements only to the stars, while Gregory Vlastos goes even further by claiming that no cosmic being has any kind of individual motion apart from those motions inflicted by the world-soul.Footnote ³⁹ I find their interpretations implausible for several reasons. First, Timaeus explicitly says that the stable and uniform axial rotation comes from a different kinetic source than the stable and uniform motion of sameness (cf. κινήσεις δὲ δύο προσῆψεν ἑκάστῳ, τὴν μὲν ἐν ταὐτῷ κατὰ ταὐτά, περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν ἀεὶ τὰ αὐτὰ ἑαυτῷ διανοουμένῳ τὴν δὲ εἰς τὸ πρόσθεν, ὑπὸ τῆς ταὐτοῦ καὶ ὁμοίου περιφορᾶς κρατουμένῳ, 40a7–b2). We also have to discard the motion of difference as the alternative option, since it produces retrogradations. And so the self-motion of the stars is the only plausible candidate for being the cause of axial rotations. Second, Vlastos’ reading implies that none of the cosmic gods can have souls, as they have no individual motions. Without souls they would become inanimate objects, mere stones or rather globs of fire. It would deny their divine status, but in fact the astral entities are repeatedly called the gods (e.g. 39e10, 40b5, 40c3, 40c6). It is true that the dialogue is rather enigmatic about the psychic nature of the planets. But it occasionally refers to the souls of cosmic beings (38e, 41d–e, 42d–e; cf. Lg. 10.898e–899a).

And there is one final reason for considering the cosmic gods as ensouled beings. The cosmic gods are images of the parts of the paradigm of ‘Animal’ after which the ouranos was created. Timaeus claims that it includes four kinds of living things: ‘first, the heavenly race of gods; next, the kind that has wings and travels through the air; third, the kind that lives in water; and fourth, the kind that has feet and lives on land’ (μία μὲν οὐράνιον θεῶν γένος, ἄλλη δὲ πτηνὸν καὶ ἀεροπόρον, τρίτη δὲ ἔνυδρον εἶδος, πεζὸν δὲ καὶ χερσαῖον τέταρτον, 39e10–40a2).Footnote ⁴⁰ Each of these kinds must have an individual soul, a particular predominant element, a specific type of shape, motion and cognition. Otherwise, they could not be living beings. For instance, the cosmic gods are built primarily out of fire, which is the source of their supreme intelligence, in perfect spherical shapes, and move in circles. So, the creation of four natural kinds is a necessary cosmological step in order to bring about the world as an ‘Animal’ with all of its variations. For this reason, the very existence of cosmic gods contributes towards the completeness of the universe, and eventually assists in achieving what is good.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, the cosmic gods have a comparable theological-cosmological characterisation to Ouranos. The planets and stars are the cosmological miniatures of the universe – they have bodies, souls, their own (axial) motions – with the difference being that the cosmic gods also partake of the additional motions (of sameness and difference) imposed by the world-soul.

The prooimion and cosmogonic discourse is used to thoroughly revise the poetic features of the Ouranian god. Even though it is still primarily a heavenly being, Ouranos is no longer a mutilated lonely deity cast off to the margins of Greek religion: Timaeus turns the castrated god into an intelligent spherical universe, which all living beings must inhabit so that it would become perfect (41b6–c2). After such a re-characterisation, the new Ouranos may appear to share little with its predecessors, except for the name. But we can observe a continuity between the two gods with respect to the reformed theological aspects: the old Ouranos serves as the point of departure to think about what needs to be changed in order to transform him into the cosmic god. They share the same area of influence, but the extent and the activity are amplified and enhanced in the reformed version of the god. The cosmological discourse achieves the goal set in T2 – it demonstrates that the Ouranian god is ouranos, kosmos and to pan. It is no accident then to find in the final lines of the dialogue a statement that the cosmogenesis has produced ‘a single ouranos, one of its kind’ (εἷς οὐρανὸς μονογενής, 97c7–8).

1.4 The Cosmic Cult-Image

Timaeus concludes the origins of the Ouranian god by comparing the created universe to a peculiar religious object:

I take agalma in its stronger sense (‘a cult statue’) rather than in a more deflationary way – a ‘delight’ or simply an ‘image’ – because of the religiously charged context of this passage, which we will discuss in a moment.Footnote ⁴² However, the connections between the ‘cult-statue’, ‘image’, ‘delight’ should be retained. At this point the ouranos is both a created god and a copy of the model, hence a ‘cult-image’. And this entity stimulates a positive experience in the Demiurge, hence a ‘delight’. An even stronger reading (‘a shrine for the everlasting gods’) found in Cornford’s translation gives the interesting idea that the Ouranian god is a religious figure not only for humans, but also for the other gods.Footnote ⁴³ Yet it loses the crucial reference to the ontological status of Ouranos, namely the suggestion that the universe is modelled after the paradigm of Animal, so we must retain the association with the image.

The second question is: who are these ‘eternal gods’ (τῶν ἀιδίων θεῶν, 37c6) whose agalma is Ouranos? Are they the created gods of which Ouranos is a container, or rather those gods of which Ouranos is a visible representation? In other words, if ouranos is a cult-image, are we worshiping the planets and stars inside the universe, or the paradigms of which the universe is a copy? The identity of the gods partly depends on the attribute ‘eternal’, and who can meet this requirement in the cosmological system. If one takes a non-creationist perspective, then the planets and stars are indeed eternal and so the universe could become a temple for the cosmic gods. Otherwise, none of the younger gods in the universe are eternal. The primary reason is that both the traditional and cosmic gods have a temporal beginning and they are potentially destructible (41a–b).Footnote ⁴⁴ The only properly eternal entities are the Demiurge, the paradigm of Animal and the beings inside the paradigm. So is it the case that our reading of T7 depends on one’s prior commitment to a broader interpretative strategy? Fortunately, there is a way to bypass this assumption, and it takes us to the relationship between Ouranos and these theoi. From what we discussed above, it is clear that whichever interpretative strategy one adopts, the cosmic gods are still the functional parts of Ouranos and so integral to it. It would be quite odd to take Ouranos as an image of the cosmic gods, because their derivative status and cosmological dependence on Ouranos qualifies them as an image of Ouranos much more than the other way round. Ouranos, therefore, does not represent them. They represent it. We are left then with the second option, which is also reinforces the creationist approach: in so far as Ouranos is the created image of the paradigm of Animal, we should say that Ouranos is the agalma of the eternal divine being, namely the paradigm and the beings it includes (cf. 37d1, 37e5).Footnote ⁴⁵

The final question concerns the religious significance of T7 and the role of the cult statues in Greek culture. The statues of gods were among the key objects of worship, because the Greeks believed that the cult statues point towards the invisible divinity present in the agalma. Verity Platt notes that originally the term referred to the votive dedications and cult images, which

From the fifth century bc onwards, she observes, the meaning of agalma was increasingly restricted to the cult statues, but they inherited qualities associated with the votive dedications (divine presence, aesthetic appeal, skilful depiction and material value). The classical period produced perhaps the most famous religious sculptures, such as Pheidias’ Zeus at Olympia and Athena at Parthenon, remarkable for their highly technical and naturalistic embodiment of the gods, which expresses the manner in which the divine would likely appear in reality. But the god could also dwell in a more modest form of wooden sculpture (χόανον) or even aniconic object, such as a stone or an ash altar.Footnote ⁴⁷ The variety of these religious items shows that there is no single way to capture the divine nature – the gods are present in the material representations and yet they transcend every visual discourse.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is important to add that the presence of the divine in sculpture meant that an encounter with it could also be regarded as a form of epiphany. Worshippers may consciously pursue this experience through ritual actions that were supposed to reanimate the statues in the festival environment, which would reveal the gods celebrating with the worshippers and overwhelm them with joy and wonder.Footnote ⁴⁹

The network of these cultural notions is present in T7. Timaeus’ strategy is to establish a conceptual link between the cosmos and a religious agalma. The universe is like an agalma, because it has a creator, almost a sculptor, who shaped the primordial matter into a harmonious composition. It can also be regarded as an agalma, because the universe not only inhabits the Ouranian god, but also indicates the divinity, which is beyond the material image and serves as its model. The paradigms of animality and goodness, the so-called eternal gods, are fully accessible only to the Demiurge, but he opened the possibility of partially comprehending them to every rational being through a created medium, which is the cosmic agalma. The third sense in which the universe is an agalma is the idea that the Demiurge produced a naturalistic representation of the eternal gods. Unlike any mortal artisan, he managed to create an image, which is actually a living, moving entity and thus always being present to the mortals in an unceasing epiphany. Finally, it is an agalma, because it is a source of wonder and delight, the kind of human reaction that one would expect from an encounter with the gods. The passage, therefore, captures a deeply religious idea. The immediate force of the comparison with a cult-statue is that the cosmic god is depicted as an object of worship, which affirms that Ouranos is a religious figure.Footnote ⁵⁰ It simply suggests that human beings should recognise the divine status of the ouranos just as they recognise the traditional gods in temples. But the deeper significance of this comparison is that it encourages those capable of understanding the identity of the invisible eternal gods to pursue cosmological studies and thus to honour the paradigm and its transcendent gods.

1.5 The Traditional Gods and the Biological Framework

After the considerations above, one might be tempted to conclude that Timaeus’ theoretical commitments lie in the cosmological theogony and its products only. However, in the next couple of sections, I shall argue that there is a way to bridge the gap between the two theogonies, at least to a certain extent. Here again Ouranos will play a prominent role. But first I shall consider the explanatory and descriptive challenges that we first identified at the beginning of this chapter. We will see that the biological framework is not only compatible with cosmology, but also a significant part of it (Section 1.5). What is more, I shall argue that there is nothing in the narrative that demonstrates Timaeus’ commitment to poetic mischaracterisations of the traditional gods. The latter argument will prepare the way for my next claim. We will see that Timaeus’ version of traditional theogony does not depend on any particular poetic or religious source. Instead, he formulates it in such a way as to make it consistent with the cosmological theogony, for the starting point of the traditional theogony is Ouranos, the very god who was created as the most senior cosmic god by the Demiurge (Section 1.6). Thus, Ouranos appears as a god with a double-layered identity, and this feature of Ouranos is precisely what allows us to partially circumvent the epistemic challenge. That being said, the cosmological description of Ouranos retains its priority, for it grants a higher level of epistemic certainty. Towards the end of this chapter, I shall argue that Ouranos is joined by Gaia in being characterised as both a cosmic and a traditional god (Section 1.7).

Let us revisit the part of T1 where Timaeus introduces the family of traditional gods:

The identities of traditional gods in T1 are anything but those of the cosmic gods, who form a characterless group of cosmic beings tranquilly circulating in the heavenly region. The passage might strike us as endorsing a more traditional manner of speaking about the family of Ouranos, but the specific features of these gods are extremely limited, only amounting to personal names and chronological arrangement. The passage is so sparing in terms of its theological content that it is probably better to approach it by asking which traditional characteristics are absent in the discourse. Under this approach, T1 could be interpreted along the lines of the Republic as avoiding all poetic misconceptions.Footnote ⁵¹ So just as we would expect from a Platonic discourse on the traditional gods, T1 lacks both terror-inducing language (cf. R. 3.387b) and jokes about the gods (cf. 3.388e–389a). The gods, moreover, do not commit evil deeds (cf. 2.377e–378a, 3.391c–e), hence the absence of Gaia’s plot against Ouranos, Ouranos’ castration, Kronos’ dethronement, or Zeus’s accession to power – the episodes which usually mark the transitions from one divine generation to another. And precisely because these episodes are removed, all the old gods have a rightful place in the good kosmos the Demiurge builds, where they peacefully live together. The important result is that, contrary to the Hesiodic theogony, the story in T1 is not about a struggle for power and domination. Timaeus narrates a story in which the first political plot against Ouranos never happened.

It appears as if the only distinctively conventional function that the traditional gods retain in T1 is of a generative kind. Although the passage does not consider the physical characteristics of Ouranos and the other gods apart from their sexual differentiation, the gods are put in male–female pairs and some of them, such as Ocean and Tethys, are explicitly called the children (παῖδες, Ti. 40e5) of the previous gods. T1 may be seen as implying that the gods have procreative powers. On this reading, Ouranos has to copulate with Gaia, a pattern repeated in the successive generations. In virtue of this, we would be encouraged no longer to think of these gods as the astral bodies, but as the senior traditional gods biologically capable of generating further divine generations. This idea falls under the biological explanatory framework of which we spoke before as contrasting with the creative power of the Demiurge. We noted then that these models differ in the ways in which they explain the generation of divine beings: traditional gods are products of procreation, whereas the cosmic gods result from the goodness of the Demiurge. But we can also add now that divine craftsmanship provides a fixed number of cosmic gods, which consistently follows the idea that the Demiurge only rearranges the primordial condition, hence the limited amount of matter in use.Footnote ⁵² The biological model of generation, on the other hand, can potentially result in an indeterminate number of gods if it is not qualified with clearer principles of generation, for the number of gods progressively multiplies in T1, finally terminating in an unspecified cluster of gods. In any case, the general picture of T1 resembles the divine genealogical trees of the poetic theogonies, which hardly finds philosophical support in Platonic cosmology. It also curiously contrasts with Timaeus’ later take on sexual differentiation. Towards the final eschatological scenes of the dialogue, we learn that sexuality did not come about as an essential feature of living beings, for the first-generation humans did not have a gender. On the contrary, the genders are derived from the providential cycle (90e–91d).Footnote ⁵³ Only in the second generation (ἐν τῇ δευτέρᾳ γενέσει, 90e8–91a1) did human beings receive genitals, sexuality and a desire for copulation.

On a closer inspection, however, we can see that the language of sexual reproduction of the traditional gods in T1 must be non-literal. The reason is that the sexual relationship is merely implied in the passage, but not explicitly stated. In the explanation of how Ouranos and Gaia created their children, there are no sexually connotated verbs apart from a middle passive aorist form of the verb γίγνεσθαι: ‘the children Ocean and Tethys came from Gaia and Ouranos’ (Γῆς τε καὶ Οὐρανοῦ παῖδες Ὠκεανός τε καὶ Τηθὺς ἐγενέσθην, 40e5–6). The formulation in T1 is carefully crafted. The children simply ‘came to be’ from the gods without further explanation of exactly what that process looked like. So what the use of the biological framework in T1 does is leave the traditional gods in a peculiar grey zone: it invokes associations with traditional theogonies without committing to them, whilst also remaining true to the cosmological discourse without, however, acquiring the same explanatory power. The reader is left with a sparse genealogy without any comment on how the traditional gods actually came to be. Even in this religiously loaded passage, Ouranos and Gaia are presented in such a way as not to create any incoherence with their cosmological characteristics. In Section 1.6 we will see that this particular phrasing is part of Timaeus’ broader strategy for dealing with the legacy of the poetic theogonies in T1.

It is important to note that T1 is not the only place where ‘parental’ language is employed to describe the origins of various entities. The Demiurge, for example, is repeatedly titled ‘the maker and the father’ of the universe (ποιητής καὶ πατήρ, 28c3) and later on he even assumes parenthood of all the gods in the universe, including the traditional gods (δημιουργὸς πατήρ, 41a7).Footnote ⁵⁴ The rhetorical figure works closely with the image of mother to account for the restructuring of the primordial state:

In this analogy, the characterless and constantly changing matter is compared to a mother. She is called the Receptacle, because she receives the ordering from the father understood here as the Animal model and provides space and material substrate for the universe to come to be. The Receptacle is analogous to a mother in virtue of her ability to carry and deliver a new-born, the universe.

The Receptacle should not be confused with Necessity, which is a causal factor and, interestingly, is featured as a mother-figure as well:

T9 explicitly speaks of Necessity and Intellect as the female and male agents, who generate the physical universe. This event is caused by the union or combination (σύστασις), which was formed when Intellect convinced Necessity of the goodness of their partnership. To explain this process Timaeus uses words with sexual connotations, such as πείθειν and μιγνύναι, which mark sexual seduction and intercourse. On the face of it, the union appears to result from a defeat of Necessity and its subjection to cosmic wisdom, but later on we learn that Necessity agreed to be persuaded (ἡ τῆς ἀνάγκης ἑκοῦσα πεισθεῖσά τε φύσις ὑπεῖκεν, 56c5–6).

The basic idea of T8 and T9 is a simple one: the rational ordering principle sets out to reorganise chaos into the ordered whole. ‘Intellect’ or ‘father’ here stands for what was called the Demiurge in the previous parts of the dialogue, while ‘Necessity’ or ‘mother’ stands for the chaotic aspect of the primordial nature. The father-mother-offspring model is a fractal structure captured at every level of the narrative: at the metaphysical level, we have the intelligible realm composed of the Demiurge, the paradigm of Animal and chōra producing the sensible realm; at the causal level, we have a distinction between Intellect and Necessity producing the world; at the cosmological level, we have the main cosmic entities, Ouranos and Gaia, producing perishable living beings. Thus, the difference between the previous parts of the dialogue and T8–T9 is the angle from which we have to reiterate the steps of the world-building. In T8–T9 the perspective shifts from divine theogony to physical cosmogony, where the latter sometimes assumes the shape of matrimony and biological reproduction instead of craftsmanship. What this model indicates are the requirements for transforming the primordial condition.Footnote ⁵⁵ The biological and matrimonial images describe how those principles cooperate in establishing the world-order.

Contrary to what was assumed at the beginning of this chapter, we can see that the technological and biological frameworks do not offer conflicting explanations. They apply similar principles: in both accounts, the process is oriented towards the good and guided by practical reasoning. Surely, not every biological model necessarily involves the direction of practical reasoning, but this aspect is emphasised for a good reason: it explains how the cooperation of two distinct ontological principles is possible. The biological framework places a stronger emphasis on the idea that Intellect cannot bring about the world on his own. Otherwise, there would be no need to persuade Necessity of the goodness of his plan – Intellect could do as it pleases without restrictions. As Sergio Zedda has rightly noted, the world-building is a mutual, voluntary endeavour of the two main primordial principles.Footnote ⁵⁶ So it is not the case that Timaeus finds a convenient analogy between human biological reproduction and the world-building, since he does not use something like the Aristotelian sexual dichotomy of passive femininity and active masculinity.Footnote ⁵⁷ Such beliefs concerning human generation are not applied to explain the basics of ontology. In fact, T8 and T9 lack explicitly sexual language: the meaning is merely implied in the subtext. It is important to emphasise that in none of these passages is erōs presented as a causal factor, the principle of generation, like in the early Greek theogonies.Footnote ⁵⁸ Instead, the images in these passages serve to show on what grounds completely different principles of the primordial phase can nonetheless join in a productive way. These images do not imply a metaphysics which would seriously presume the fundamental ontological principles to be sexually differentiated. These passages explain cosmogony by playing with the erotic vocabulary of courting, seducing and copulating.

The biological model is used as an explanatory framework, just like the technological.Footnote ⁵⁹ Both models give colourful metaphors, which may not be literally true, but still have an exceptional discursive power to illuminate the cosmological processes and structural relations between the ontological principles. Without these familiar analogies the world-building would become far less comprehensible to the audience. The explanatory value of the technological account lies in its capacity to explain how practical reasoning implements teleology, while the value of biological explanation lies in its ability to show how Intellect uses its practical reasoning in cooperation with something entirely different from itself, namely Necessity. Therefore, the biological framework makes intelligible some new areas of cosmology and so it expands on the technological framework without conflicting with it. The additional input of the biological model to the whole cosmological architecture of the discourse is twofold: first, it shows that ontology is pluralistic rather than monistic; second, it explains how Intellect overcomes the potential threats to the production of a good universe by using ‘erotic’ persuasion. It is only appropriate to sum up the outcome of our discussion with one more metaphor, which is the planned parenthood. The world is a child of Intellect and Necessity deliberately planned to be conceived rather than an accidental outcome of the interaction between them. So when Timaeus uses sexually connotated concepts, he does not commit himself to a robust ontological position. This is just a convenient way of describing some of the more problematic areas of theogony. In the light of these findings, T1 might look less challenging to the basic structure of cosmology – it is in tune with the general method used in T8–T9, though it does not obtain the same force of explanation, since the biological framework is not intended to clarify the role of first principles in the origins of the traditional gods.

1.6 Timaeus, the Poets and the Orphics

We began with an observation that T1 suffers not only from the explanatory ambiguities, but also from the unreliable authority of the poets and their failure to provide proper epistemic grounds for the knowledge of the traditional gods. Timaeus does not take responsibility for what is assumed in the theogony of T1. The passage belongs to the discourse of the ‘children of gods’. One could think that it is referring to the poets – Homer, Hesiod and the like – since the passage speaks about religious ways of knowing the gods, legendary cultural figures and myths. But the explicit reference to the poets is conspicuously absent in T1. The reason is that Homer and Hesiod never said that they are the sons of the Olympians, let alone based their knowledge of the divine genealogy on this relationship. The ‘children of gods’ appear a few dozen times in Plato’s corpus, but the title is generally reserved for someone who has a direct lineage to the deities, for example the heroes or the younger gods born from the senior gods.Footnote ⁶⁰ When the poets are mentioned in the dialogues, they are usually called the ‘children of Muses’.Footnote ⁶¹ The most prominent exception to this rule is located in the Republic. Its passage is pertinent to our discussion, since Socrates refers to the children of gods who produce genealogies of gods (τῶν γενεαλογησάντων ποιητῶν, R. 2.365e3), just like Timaeus’ characters (Ti. 40e4):

In this part of the Republic, Adeimantus challenges Socrates by claiming that injustice pays off and one needs only to pretend to be just, since gods usually grant a happy life to bad people. He cites the poetry of Hesiod, Homer, Musaeus and Orpheus to support this idea (R. 2.364c–e), arguing that they believe that one can avoid divine wrath by placating gods with sacrifices and rites. However, the reference of T10 is not so broad as to include all four poetic figures. By the time we come to T10, Adeimantus has in mind only Orpheus and Musaeus, for the mystery rites in question are surely Orphic, and Orpheus and Musaeus are called the sons of the goddesses, the Moon and the Muses, a page before (2.364e3–4).Footnote ⁶²

Is it possible that Timaeus refers to Orpheus and Musaeus as well? There are some obstacles to accepting such a reading. First, there is a mismatch between the Orphic theogonies and Timaeus’ genealogical tree. The divine succession in T1 has the following structure (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Children of gods on the divine succession

There is no way to prove that this line of succession does not correspond to any Orphic theogony, since it is highly probable that Orphic theogonies existed in many varied versions.Footnote ⁶³ But the surviving Orphic theogonies do not match the structure in Figure 1.1: the Derveni papyrus has Night and Aether as its starting point, while the Rhapsodies, which is, admittedly, a late source, places the origins with Chronos, who produces Aether and Chasma or Chaos.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Proclean transmission makes Phanes the first ruling god, who was succeeded by Night and then by Ouranos, Kronos, Zeus and Dionysus (In Ti. III 168.15–26).Footnote ⁶⁵ So the main problem is that we cannot find any of the specific features of the Orphic theogony in Figure 1.1: the Orphics begin with a blend of traditional and philosophical elements (a primordial Greek deity plus a first principle) that is absent in our passage.Footnote ⁶⁶ Alternatively, Adeimantus’ reference might be to the Orphics in general as opposed to Orpheus and Musaeus in particular. This solution might be attractive, since we find the Orphics self-proclaiming their divine kinship in the Gold Tablets, similarly to the ‘figures of the past’ of T1. These Orphics explicitly drew their lineage from the Ouranian kind (γένος οὐράνιον).Footnote ⁶⁷ The problem with either reading is that ‘the children of the gods’ in T1 produce conventional stories: Timaeus is relying on the so-called customary practice of belief (τῷ νόμῳ πιστευτέον, 40e3) at the time when Orphism was far from being generally accepted.Footnote ⁶⁸

In fact, the genealogy of Timaeus does not correspond exactly to what we find in archaic poetry either, even if it looks somewhat familiar. The Homeric theogony, for instance, starts with Ocean and Tethys, who are placed in the second divine generation in Timaeus’ account (Il. 14.201, 14.246).Footnote ⁶⁹ The Hesiodic tradition, on the other hand, begins with Chaos and Gaia, the latter being the mother and wife of Ouranos.Footnote ⁷⁰ In Timaeus’ account Ouranos exists independently of Gaia, and Chaos is removed altogether.Footnote ⁷¹ Timaeus’ family tree also deviates from the Hesiodic theogony by making Ocean and Tethys the parents of Kronos, Rhea and Phorcys.Footnote ⁷² Admittedly, these objections against the poetic and Orphic sources are not conclusive. Instead, I would like to suggest that Timaeus’ move is deliberate, intended to clothe the reference to the traditional gods with poetic and mythical contexts, whilst also ensuring that there is some conceptual independence from them. The anonymity of the ‘children of gods’ frees him from the typical Platonic debates on the value of theogonic stories and invokes a broad cultural horizon without committing to any specific poetic or religious tradition. The only truly standard aspect of Timaeus’ theogonic tree is that it is as creatively composed as any other theogonic tree.

We finally arrive at the main reason why we should avoid the ironic reading of the content of Timaeus’ tree.Footnote ⁷³ The distinctiveness of T1 with respect to the poetic tradition, I want to claim, is that neither the theogonies of Homer or Hesiod, nor the creation myths of Orpheus or Musaeus have both Ouranos and Gaia as the original primordial gods who generate the succeeding gods. This move might appear to be insignificant in the general context of the fluid and unfixed Greek religion. After all, the ancient Greeks were quite open to negotiating the particular divine identities and adapting them according to the local customs and wider Pan-Hellenic conventions.Footnote ⁷⁴ But the particular arrangement of the divine successions is peculiarly convenient to Timaeus. If the divine genealogy had started with Ocean, or Chaos, or any other Greek god, Timaeus would be unable to position the traditional narrative within his cosmology, because the origins of Ouranos and Gaia would depend on some traditional Greek gods and, as a consequence, it would contradict the previous claim that the cosmic gods were in fact created by the Demiurge.Footnote ⁷⁵ In that case, the traditional and cosmological theogonies would conflict in terms of their accounts of origins. But now the two types of theogonies share some common grounds. Since T1 argues that there is nothing prior to Ouranos and Gaia as far as the traditional theogony goes, the passage is not at odds with the previous parts of the dialogue, which has shown that in so far as we speculate along the lines of the eikōs muthos, there is in fact something older than Ouranos and Gaia, namely the Demiurge. Thus, the traditional theogony is partly absorbed into Timaeus’ cosmological theogony.Footnote ⁷⁶ And this explains why Timaeus accepts the children’s stories (who are not, I must emphasise again, specific figures) in the first place: the children of gods derive the origins of all traditional gods from Ouranos and Gaia, and these are also the most senior cosmic gods created by the Demiurge.

This conclusion may strike as implying that religious beliefs of T1 can contain a rudimentary form of cosmological knowledge and thus their epistemic status appears to approximate to something like the Aristotelian endoxa, the credible opinions accepted by the people or the wise.Footnote ⁷⁷ It would mean that the religious beliefs about the traditional theogonies have some measure of likelihood, which would make them an eikōs type of discourse. But T1 firmly rejects such a possibility – the children of gods are unambiguously denied any likelihood. The opinions of the children of gods or any poet for that matter are not credible. Nonetheless, Timaeus may have two independent reasons for including the traditional gods in his cosmological story. On the one hand, the explanatory scheme of their origins is consistent with the cosmological discourse. On the other hand, the starting point for traditional theogony are the two gods, whose existence is assured by the eikōs muthos. Timaeus seems to accept the likelihood of these two aspects of the origins of the traditional gods without, however, subscribing to the idea that the theogonic tree of T1 or any other poetic or religious theogony is correct as a whole. Only these two beliefs may find some cosmological support, while the rest of it is neither the endoxa, nor the eikōs type of discourse.

1.7 The Double Identity of Gods in Later Plato

Let us now take an overall look at the theological situation. The philosophical project of the Timaeus begins with a recognition of religious heritage by employing a divine name for the senior created god, as was familiar to the Greeks. But then it offers a reinterpretation of the poetic tradition by giving a new cosmological significance to the ouranos. This god becomes the universe itself and receives a soul capable of moving every astral entity. The god is placed at the origins of all gods, both the cosmic and the traditional, whilst altering the respective successions of traditional gods inherited from the poets. As a result, the familiar gods find new cosmological grounding for their existence in the reformed cosmic god. Timaeus attempts to build a bridge between the two discourses because of the versatile nature of Ouranos.Footnote ⁷⁸ I argued that the core affinity between the old Ouranos and the new Ouranos remains intact: they are very physical gods, who provide space for the divine beings and cause heavenly motions. The main difference lies in the theological priority of Ouranos over Gaia, the increased physical extension of Ouranos, which now encompasses the whole cosmos, and the soul of the reformed Ouranos, which elevates the core function to new cosmological dimensions. And for this reason, Ouranos can acquire an important role in the cosmological discourse of philosophers, while still preserving his religious significance to the ordinary believers. However, the new cosmic god does not exhaust the whole nature of Ouranos. For we have to remember that in the context of traditional theogony (T1), Ouranos recovers some of the more conventional aspects, which are not immediately derivable from the cosmological discourse. All in all, Timaeus deploys a curious theogonic strategy: he transforms the old heavenly god into a new cosmic god only to reinstate some aspects of the former once again, when it suits his explanation of the interrelation between philosophy and the religious tradition.

A conclusion to the effect that Ouranos has a double nature (cosmological and religious) might look paradoxical to the modern reader, but it conforms to Greek religious beliefs. One and the same Greek god had different ways of articulation depending on a particular place, festival, tradition and register. To quote Henk Versnel,

To these layers of identity we can add one more, which is cosmological.

For Timaeus, the double identification provides a way of positioning the traditional gods within the cosmological discourse. But it also creates a paradox by making one and the same god a traditional deity, whose function is to generate further gods, and a cosmic being, whose function is simply to move and contemplate various entities inside it. The dialogue never resolves this new complication. Analytic philosophers might conclude that the integrative project is fundamentally incoherent and therefore theologically flawed. They would probably expect Timaeus either to adopt a full cosmological approach to the traditional gods or to provide the eikōs type of arguments in favour of their existence. But a religious historian, to borrow Versnel’s phrase, might find here ‘luxurious multiplicity’, the peaceful coexistence of diverse aspects of the divine, each of which might come to the fore in different theological contexts. Some aspects of Ouranos were needed to correct the cosmogonies of the past, while the others were needed to reintegrate the religious tradition to philosophy. The present study is more sympathetic to the second approach not because it justifies a less rigorous conception of the divine, but because it gives a richer context to the religious notions in the dialogue without pushing Plato’s characters into solutions, which were not pursued by them.

Ouranos is not the only god to receive such a reinterpretation. There are at least three more gods with parallel identities: Gaia and Hermes in the Timaeus, and Apollo–Helios in Plato’s Laws. In what follows, I will show that the theories concerning these gods lacks systematicity and completeness. Although each of these gods may be considered as deities with a double identity (cosmological and religious), the problem is that the double identification means different things in each of these cases. Gaia is conceptualised in a similar way to Ouranos: she is a cosmic being, who also has a conventional religious role to generate the traditional gods. Hermes, on the other hand, has in his possession a cosmic entity, a planet, but he does not seem to be identical to it. The case of Apollo–Helios is even more complicated, for Helios is already a cosmic being in the religious tradition (the sun). Plato’s Laws revises some aspects of this god in the cosmological discourse and then connects him to Apollo in a religious-political discourse. So we have at least three ways of understanding the double identification: it can mean two aspects of the same god, two different beings under the same religious name and two gods worshipped as a single god. Moreover, there is no wholesale identification of the remaining traditional gods with the cosmic gods. It means that the traditional gods as a group were not replaced with the cosmic gods or merged with other kind of cosmological beings. Unlike the Phaedrus, Plato’s later dialogues do not offer a full cosmological reinterpretation of the traditional gods. Instead, it is safer to follow Glenn Morrow and say that ‘Plato hoped to enlarge and enrich current religion by directing attention to other manifestations of the divine than those usually recognized in worship.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Thus, Plato retains the distinction between the traditional and the cosmic gods. But it is clear that the framework for giving a preference to the cosmic beings and for identifying the traditional deities with the cosmic gods was already prepared by Plato, and, as we will see in the final chapter of this book, that he may have encouraged his students to continue this project.

1.8 Conclusions

The aim of this chapter was to explore the challenges for positioning the traditional gods and religious theogony within the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus and Laws. We have found that the dialogue attempts to address some of the worries that a philosophical reader might have about the poetic tradition. It describes the traditional gods in such a way as not to transgress the theological rules of speaking about the gods, it makes sure that the explanatory framework is consistent with the philosophical cosmogony and it shows that a few selected religious beliefs, however limited, may be translated into a cosmological discourse. In sum, we have discovered that Plato is quite serious about the traditional gods and that he provides a narrow space for the religious theogony in the philosophical cosmogony. The latter is achieved by reconceptualising the world-god Ouranos.

This chapter has approached the Timaeus as a theogony of Ouranos, which deliberately engages with poetic theogonies and philosophical cosmologies. On the one hand, the dialogue follows the Hesiodic tradition in so far as it makes the origins of the world coincide with the birth of Ouranos. However, the poetic theogonies are refashioned in such a way as not to include any subversive stories concerning the defeat of Ouranos, and as to conform with the theological rules of speaking about the gods. The theogony of the Timaeus is devoid of antagonistic political relations, such as the mutilation, imprisonment, or elimination of hostile gods. Plato preserves only a few elements of the conventional religious language, such as the plurality of gods, their particular names, their generative capacities and their birth from Ouranos and Gaia. On the other hand, the dialogue expands the imagery of Ouranos as the heavenly god by attaching to him novel cosmological concepts and explaining his place within the broader Platonic metaphysical framework. Plato presents Ouranos as primarily a cosmic being, remarkable for his orderly, all-embracing body and rational soul. His origins are now based on the creative work of the Demiurge and his nature is anchored in what is good. All in all, the double nature of Ouranos makes him the main cosmic and traditional god. With respect to the cosmic gods, Ouranos ensures cosmic stability and goodness, and provides a theological model to the nature of the younger gods. With respect to the traditional gods, Ouranos and Gaia remain the senior divine parents. My conclusion is that Ouranos, along with Gaia, becomes the centrepiece, which thematically and dramatically joins together the philosophical and traditional ideas in Plato’s cosmology. The point of this theology is to keep the two families of gods together without merging them with cosmologisation of religion or rationalisation of the traditional gods. The positive role of Ouranos is precisely to serve as the bridge between the old religious thought and the new cosmological science.

These findings, however, are not without some complications. First, Plato never explicitly addresses the paradoxical question of how a single god can be a cosmic totality and a parent of younger divinities at the same time. The precise meaning of double identification was not properly established. The dialogue encourages the reader to associate the two identities of Ouranos, but it never gives a philosophical anankaios or eikōs argument which would properly prove the double identification thesis. We saw the same ambiguity present in the Laws’ discussion of Apollo–Helios, Gaia and Hermes as well. Second, if it were carried even further in its natural direction, Plato’s strategy for integrating the traditional gods with the cosmological discourse would actually be in conflict with the religious beliefs of his day. The double identification thesis, the preference for the cosmic gods as opposed to the traditional gods, the interpretation of the biological origins of the traditional gods as an explanatory framework rather than a real event – all of this presses Plato to take up a fully cosmological reading of the traditional gods, according to which these gods would be fully merged with the cosmic gods or at least transformed into the bodiless souls of the Phaedrus. But later Plato abstains from completing this project and, instead, he leaves it to the next generation of Academics to reconsider the distinction between the two types of discourse.

Thus, the Timaeus leaves the traditional theogony and its gods in a peculiar middle position between integration and isolation, compatibility and conflict. On the one hand, cosmology has little to say about the basic nature of the traditional gods when compared to the cosmic gods, while on the other hand, it aims to re-establish a connection to the traditional gods via the theogony of Ouranos. Therefore, the relationship between religion and philosophy is extremely delicate in the Timaeus. We could say that the two discourses have a number of shared gods, common patterns of thinking about the theogonical issues and even a similar language to explain these matters. Nonetheless, Timaeus’ ultimate judgement on the children of gods is that the knowledge of them is beyond the anankaios and eikōs types of argumentations. Thus, the traditional gods have a limited place in the philosophical project of the Timaeus, but their unequal relation with the cosmic gods results in an unequal theological status.