Three Links in a Golden Chain

One of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus (ca 370 BCE), describes an abstract numerical pattern that is said to have guided the creative work of an artisan, the Demiurge, who designed both the soul that animates the material world as a whole and the souls of each of the sentient beings that live within this world. Any artist or artisan who took this creation story seriously might reasonably be motivated to take guidance from this same numerical design in his or her own creative work, hoping thereby to mirror the macrocosm in the microcosm of a work of art. Have any artists in history tried to do that? Three likely candidates will be examined here. The first is Plato himself (in a short narrative of the generation of the pantheon of Greek gods, which he recounts in the Timaeus). The second is an unknown Medieval author of an epic poem about Charlemagne (The Song of Roland, ca. 1100 CE). The third is Iris Murdoch (in a novel, The Unicorn, 1963).