Plato with a piece of red jasper in the Attic hills, an imagined scene inspired by a historical engraving.

What a fragment of jasper tells us about the earth

Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BCE) was a Greek philosopher from Athens. In the Phaedo he has Socrates tell a story on the last day of his life. His listener Simmias is asked to imagine looking down upon the earth from above. Things that seemed familiar at ground level take on quite different colours from this height.[1]

An earth the colours of a ball

Socrates compares the earth to a ball sewn from twelve coloured pieces of leather. Purple, gold and a white brighter than snow lie side by side. Even painters’ colours look like small samples of its surface. As the story moves from great patches of colour to individual things, precious stones come into view.[1]

And what grows in this fair earth—its trees and flowers and fruit—is more beautiful than what grows with us in the same proportion: and so likewise are the hills and the stones in their smoothness and transparency and colour: the pebbles which we prize in this world, our cornelians, and jaspers, and emeralds, and the like, are but fragments of them: but there all the stones are as our precious stones, and even more beautiful still.[1]

A fragment changes the measure

Socrates chooses stones that Simmias can admire in his own world. His imaginary journey begins with a comparison the listener could make with a tangible fragment in his hand. Within one sentence the scale reverses. Here a rare jasper stands out among ordinary stones. There its brilliance would be an everyday sight. Socrates gives Simmias a way of picturing something he cannot show him.[1]