This chapter explores the role of traditional and cosmic gods in Plato’s narratives of human and social origins expounded in the Timaeus, the Critias and the Laws. It argues that Plato unifies the two divine families in terms of their common function to originate human beings, but differentiates the traditional gods from the cosmic gods in terms of their political role – Plato regards only the traditional gods as the makers of political communities, which indicates his mild support of the Greek foundation myths and civic stories. This may be the key to the puzzle of why the two families were kept apart in the first place: unlike the uniformity of the cosmic gods, the diversity of the traditional gods provides a good explanatory factor for such a complex, diverse and unpredictable phenomenon as politics. Consequently, Plato’s anthropogony and politogony should be viewed as discontinuous discourses.

This chapter discusses the place of the traditional and cosmic gods in the cosmological theogony of the Timaeus. It argues that Plato’s cosmology follows the Greek theogonic tradition to a certain degree and accommodates both the traditional and cosmic gods via a shared pair of the first gods, but adopts different explanatory frameworks for the two types of gods. It also proposes a new reading of the Timaeus as a theogony of Ouranos. For Plato, Ouranos is a traditional god and a cosmic being, and as such he is the most senior deity of both families. These new findings lead to a more detailed examination of the double identity of gods (cosmological and religious) in Plato’s later dialogues, which shows that there are at least three ways to understand the double identification of gods.

This chapter addresses the relationship between divinity, cosmology, morality and religion in the Timaeus and the Laws. It argues that the ideal of godlikeness becomes both the main ethical and the central religious principle in these dialogues. In particular, Plato finds in religion the institutional environment for achieving moral improvement as much as leading a good civic life, provided that the ordinary citizens will imitate the character traits of the traditional gods. However, the highest level of moral achievement lies in the assimilation to the cosmic gods via cosmological understanding, which can be achieved by the intellectual elite. Thus, this ideal has two sets of assimilative objects, two ways of imitating the gods, and it appeals to two different groups of people.