There is a similarity between the Timaeus and the fragments of
Philolaus, which by some has been thought to be so great as to
create a suspicion that they are derived from it. Philolaus is
known to us from the Phaedo of Plato as a Pythagorean philosopher
residing at Thebes in the latter half of the fifth century B.C.,
after the dispersion of the original Pythagorean society. He was
the teacher of Simmias and Cebes, who became disciples of
Socrates. We have hardly any other information about him. The
story that Plato had purchased three books of his writings from a
relation is not worth repeating; it is only a fanciful way in
which an ancient biographer dresses up the fact that there was
supposed to be a resemblance between the two writers. Similar
gossiping stories are told about the sources of the Republic and
the Phaedo. That there really existed in antiquity a work passing
under the name of Philolaus there can be no doubt. Fragments of
this work are preserved to us, chiefly in Stobaeus, a few in
Boethius and other writers. They remind us of the Timaeus, as
well as of the Phaedrus and Philebus. When the writer says (Stob.
Eclog.) that all things are either finite (definite) or infinite
(indefinite), or a union of the two, and that this antithesis and
synthesis pervades all art and nature, we are reminded of the
Philebus. When he calls the centre of the world (Greek), we have
a parallel to the Phaedrus. His distinction between the world of
order, to which the sun and moon and the stars belong, and the
world of disorder, which lies in the region between the moon and
the earth, approximates to Plato’s sphere of the Same and of the
Other. Like Plato (Tim.), he denied the above and below in space,
and said that all things were the same in relation to a centre.
He speaks also of the world as one and indestructible: ‘for
neither from within nor from without does it admit of
destruction’ (Tim). He mentions ten heavenly bodies, including
the sun and moon, the earth and the counter-earth (Greek), and in
the midst of them all he places the central fire, around which
they are moving—this is hidden from the earth by the
counter-earth. Of neither is there any trace in Plato, who makes
the earth the centre of his system. Philolaus magnifies the
virtues of particular numbers, especially of the number 10 (Stob.
Eclog.), and descants upon odd and even numbers, after the manner
of the later Pythagoreans. It is worthy of remark that these
mystical fancies are nowhere to be found in the writings of
Plato, although the importance of number as a form and also an
instrument of thought is ever present to his mind. Both Philolaus
and Plato agree in making the world move in certain numerical