Plato's Text
Great lexical and syntactical differences are easily noted between the many translations of the Republic. Below is a typical text from a relatively recent translation of Republic 546b–c:
"Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number, and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained to three distances and four limits of the assimilating and the dissimilating, the waxing and the waning, render all things conversable and commensurable with one another, whereof a basal four-thirds wedded to the pempad yields two harmonies at the third augmentation, the one the product of equal factors taken one hundred times, the other of equal length one way but oblong,-one dimension of a hundred numbers determined by the rational diameters of the pempad lacking one in each case, or of the irrational lacking two; the other dimension of a hundred cubes of the triad. And this entire geometrical number is determinative of this thing, of better and inferior births."
The 'entire geometrical number', mentioned shortly before the end of this text, is understood to be Plato's number. The introductory words mention (a period comprehended by) 'a perfect number' which is taken to be a reference to Plato's perfect year mentioned in his Timaeus (39d). The words are presented as uttered by the muses, so the whole passage is sometimes called the 'speech of the muses' or something similar. Indeed Philip Melanchthon compared it to the proverbial obscurity of the Sibyls. Cicero famously described it as 'obscure' but others have seen some playfulness in its tone.
Read more about this topic: Plato's Number
Famous quotes containing the words plato and/or text:
“Through Plato Aristotle came to believe in God, but Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so. Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate Him. Plato never defined Him, but Aristotle thought God through logically and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He was the Unmoved Mover.”
—Edith Hamilton (1867–1963)
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)