Plato, Timaeus 22d · 22d
The truth behind Phaethon
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Critias — ἀληθές ἐστι τῶν περὶ γῆν κατʼ οὐρανὸν ἰόντων παράλλαξις καὶ διὰ μακρῶν χρόνων γιγνομένη τῶν ἐπὶ γῆς πυρὶ πολλῷ φθορά. τότε οὖν ὅσοι κατʼ ὄρη καὶ ἐν ὑψηλοῖς τόποις καὶ ἐν ξηροῖς οἰκοῦσιν μᾶλλον διόλλυνται τῶν ποταμοῖς καὶ θαλάττῃ προσοικούντων· ἡμῖν δὲ ὁ Νεῖλος εἴς τε τἆλλα σωτὴρ καὶ τότε ἐκ ταύτης τῆς ἀπορίας σῴζει λυόμενος. ὅταν δʼ αὖ θεοὶ τὴν γῆν ὕδασιν καθαίροντες κατακλύζωσιν, οἱ μὲν ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν διασῴζονται βουκόλοι νομῆς τε, οἱ δʼ ἐν ταῖς
Critias: But the truth is a deviation of the bodies that move around the earth across the heaven, which happens after long periods of time and destroys the things on earth with a great fire. Then, all who live on the mountains and in high and dry places are destroyed more than those who live beside rivers and the sea. For us, the Nile is a saviour in other ways, and it saves us then too from this difficulty, when it is released. But whenever the gods cleanse the earth by flooding it with waters, the cowherds and herdsmen in the mountains are saved, but those in the
Word by word
The setting
The priest gives the plain account behind the myth, a shift of the heavenly bodies, and explains who survives a fire or a flood and why the Nile saves Egypt.
A note on this passage
The key word is parallaxis, "deviation," a shift or swerve in the paths of the bodies kat' ouranon iontōn, "moving across the sky." The priest sets to alēthes, "the true thing," against the mythos of 22c: the Greek tale of a boy who loses control of the sun's chariot is, he says, a picture of a real change in the heavens that burns up the earth at long intervals. The phrase is the priest's, as Critias reports it, and Plato does not say which bodies are meant.
The rest of the section explains who lives through each kind of destruction. In a fire, people of the mountains and dry places perish more than those by rivers and the sea. Egypt is spared because the Nile, sōtēr "saviour," saves it lyomenos, literally "being loosed": the river spreads over the fields, and 22e explains that in Egypt the water rises from below. When the gods wash the earth with water, it is the boukoloi and nomēs, cowherds and herdsmen, in the hills who survive, and the sentence breaks off at en tais, "in the," to be finished in 22e.
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