Plato's Statesman Myth: The Cosmos That Spun Backward

Plato's myth of a cosmos steered by a god, then let go, so that the world spun backward and people grew younger.

In Plato's Statesman, a visitor from Elea tells a myth in which a god steers the universe, then lets go, and the cosmos turns the other way, bringing destruction and a new age.

In the middle of the Statesman, a dialogue about the art of ruling, Plato's main speaker, a visitor from Elea, tells a strange cosmic myth. The universe, he says, does not always turn in the same direction. For one long era a god guides its motion directly. Then the god lets go of the controls, withdraws to his lookout, and the cosmos begins to turn the opposite way by its own momentum.

The reversal is catastrophic. Great destructions of animals and people follow, and in the age of Cronus, when the god was steering, everything ran the other way: people were born from the earth as old men and grew younger until they vanished. They needed no farming, clothes or government, because divine shepherds cared for every group of living things.

In our age, the one after the hand-off, humans must fend for themselves. Plato's speaker says the gods gave them fire through Prometheus, crafts through Hephaestus and Athena, and seeds and plants, so they could survive. Over time the world, left alone, drifts into disorder, until the god takes the helm again to save it.

Scholars read the myth as a philosophical device: it separates ideal divine rule from the human politics that Plato actually wants to analyze, and it plays with older stories like Hesiod's golden age and the legend of the sun reversing its course. Readers of ancient visitor ideas see something else in it: an age when someone was literally at the controls of the world, and a departure that left humanity with a starter kit of technology.