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[546b] the men you have bred to be your rulers will not for all their wisdom ascertain by reasoning combined with sensation,1 but they will escape them, and there will be a time when they will beget children out of season. Now for divine begettings there is a period comprehended by a perfect number,2 and for mortal by the first in which augmentations dominating and dominated when they have attained to three distances and four limits of the assimilating and the dissimilating, the waxing and the waning, render all things conversable3 and commensurable

1 Cf. Tim. 28 Aδόξῃ μετ᾽ αἰσθήσεως.

2 For its proverbial obscurity cf. Cic.Ad att. vii. 13 “est enim numero Platonis obscurius,” Censorinus, De die natali xi. See supra,Introd. p. xliv for literature on this “number.”

3 προσήγορα: Cf. Theaet. 146 A.

Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.

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