[617a]
took its color from the seventh,
which shone upon it. The colors of the second and fifth were like one
another and more yellow than the two former. The third had the whitest
color, and the fourth was of a slightly ruddy hue; the sixth was second in
whiteness. The staff turned as a whole in a circle with the same movement,
but within the whole as it revolved the seven inner circles revolved gently
in the opposite direction to the whole,1 and of
these seven the eighth moved most swiftly,
1 Burnet, op. cit. p. 123, says; “This view that the planets had an orbital motion from west to east is attributed by Aetios ii. 16. 3 to Alkmaion (96), which certainly implies that Pythagoras did not hold it. As we shall see (152) it is far from clear that any of the Pythagoreans did. It seems rather to be Plato's discovery.” Cf. ibid. p. 352.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.