The Disordered Sky in the Sphere of the Universe, the Ugly Tartarus in the Dodecahedron of the Earth

On the Ancient Visual Philosopheme of Embracing Disorder with Order

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of a rare example of visual philosophizing in Antiquity, in which the axiologically perfect ordered limit of the Universe is conceived as embracing and locking within itself its less perfect, disordered and ugly internal parts. The article analyzes the testimony of Joannes Stobaeus from the 5th or 6th century AD (44 A16 DK), probably taken from an older and more voluminous compilation by Aëtius), in which he attributes to the Early Pythagoreans a worldview, according to which the Universe has a fiery center orbited by 10 celestial bodies including the Earth, the Moon and the Sun, all of which are embraced in a ”second”, greater fire. However, this picture is supplemented by the strange assertion that the Universe has a three-part vertical structure, consisting of Olympus, Cosmos and Heaven (the area under the Moon in which we live), in which perfection decreases from top to bottom. It is customary in scholarship to regard this compilation as logically impossible, and its second part as a forgery. We examine the origins and traces of the various anachronistic elements of this picture and find them in Plato, in the Timaeus (Ti. 55c: the dodecahedron serves as a model of the Universe, embracing its less perfect parts) and the Phaedo (Phaed. 108d--115a). The Phaedo presents a fantastic landscape in which (i) the inhabitants of the ”True Earth” live in beautiful ethereal landscapes full of smooth and transparent stones, while we and the inhabitants of the sea-bed live in increasingly lower depressions, filled respectively with air and water, in which the ”perfection” and beauty of things, as well as the level of knowledge of their inhabitants, progressively decrease; (ii) the rivers of the upper regions flow into disordered Tartarus, which lies deep in the center of the Earth. It is concluded that the compilation of Aëtius/Stobaeus is not just a falsification, but a valuable and, most likely, conscious last attempt to preserve the ancient early Pythagorean-Platonic scheme of embracing, by imposing on it the Neoplatonic idea of vertical axiology.