THE STRUCTURE OF BOOK 4

Book 4 of Proclus’ Timaeus Commentary continues the structure introduced at the opening of Book 3. Proclus takes Plato's dialogue to provide an account of ten gifts bestowed on the visible cosmos by its creator, the Demiurge. Each of these gifts makes a progressively greater contribution to the goodness of the Demiurge's creation, rendering it ever more perfect and its life ever more divine and blessed. Book 2 (Volumes III and IV in this series) deals with the first seven gifts of the Demiurge:

• 1. Being perceptible due to the presence of the elements (Tim. 31b).

• 2. Having its elements bound together through proportion or analogia (31c).

• 3. Being a whole constituted of wholes (32c).

• 4. Being spherical in shape so that it is most similar to itself and similar to the paradigm upon which it is modelled (33b).

• 5. Being self-sufficient or autarchˆes (33c).

• 6. Rotating upon its axis makes it similar to the motion of Intellect (Tim. 34a, cf. Laws 10. 898a).

• 7. Being animated by a divine World Soul (Tim. 34b).

Book 4 (the present volume) provides the last three Demiurgic gifts to the cosmos:

• 8. Time, in virtue of which it is a moving image of eternity had by its intelligible paradigm, the Living Being Itself (Tim. 36e–37a).

• 9. The heavenly bodies in it, which Plato describes as the ‘instruments of time’ and Proclus as ‘sanctuaries of the gods’ (Tim. 39d; in Tim. ii 5.28).

• 10. All the living things within the visible cosmos make it an even more perfect or complete imitation of its paradigm since the Living Being Itself contains four genera of living things: celestial, aerial, aquatic and terrestrial living things (39e–40a).

Proclus’ commentary in Book 4 does not exhaust the tenth and final gift of the Demiurge. The present volume contains his account of the celestial genus of living things. The final section of the present work begins his discussion of the sub-lunary gods, a topic that continues in Book 5.The nature of the breaks between the books, however, finds some rationale in Plato's text. At 40d4–5 Timaeus says that he is finished discussing the visible and created gods. He next turns to a genealogy of the ‘traditional gods’ such as Ouranos,Okeanys and Tethys, referring to them initially as ‘daemons’.