Ever since antiquity, scholars of Plato have been evenly divided between those who identify Plato’s supreme god with a form (usually, the form of the good) and those who identify Plato’s supreme god with a soul (usually, the soul of the cosmos). But Plato never aims to give us a science of god; he aims to show us how to become like god. I distinguish three Platonic ascents to the divine: a metaphysical ascent to the form of the good; a cosmological ascent to the cosmic soul; and a religious ascent to the proper civic cult. These three ascents form a nested hierarchy, such that the cosmological ascent presupposes the metaphysical ascent, while the religious ascent presupposes the cosmological ascent. The metaphysical and cosmological ascents culminate in the religious ascent because becoming like god for Plato is a civic project. A philosopher can save herself only by saving her city.

This chapter explores the role of traditional and cosmic gods in Plato’s narratives of human and social origins expounded in the Timaeus, the Critias and the Laws. It argues that Plato unifies the two divine families in terms of their common function to originate human beings, but differentiates the traditional gods from the cosmic gods in terms of their political role – Plato regards only the traditional gods as the makers of political communities, which indicates his mild support of the Greek foundation myths and civic stories. This may be the key to the puzzle of why the two families were kept apart in the first place: unlike the uniformity of the cosmic gods, the diversity of the traditional gods provides a good explanatory factor for such a complex, diverse and unpredictable phenomenon as politics. Consequently, Plato’s anthropogony and politogony should be viewed as discontinuous discourses.

This chapter discusses the place of the traditional and cosmic gods in the cosmological theogony of the Timaeus. It argues that Plato’s cosmology follows the Greek theogonic tradition to a certain degree and accommodates both the traditional and cosmic gods via a shared pair of the first gods, but adopts different explanatory frameworks for the two types of gods. It also proposes a new reading of the Timaeus as a theogony of Ouranos. For Plato, Ouranos is a traditional god and a cosmic being, and as such he is the most senior deity of both families. These new findings lead to a more detailed examination of the double identity of gods (cosmological and religious) in Plato’s later dialogues, which shows that there are at least three ways to understand the double identification of gods.