Source edition
Platonis Opera Tomus IV: Tetralogia VIII. Burnet, John, editor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905.
Source data
Perseus Digital Library · CC BY-SA (per Perseus's terms)
Cloned and adapted by Humanitext, with ongoing edits.
Summary
This work is a philosophical and cosmological dialogue that depicts the origin of the cosmos and the nature of humanity on a grand scale, through a conversation between the philosopher Socrates and his intellectually distinguished guests: Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates. The dialogue begins with a retrospective of an ideal state and the famous historical legend of the ancient war between Athens and the lost empire of Atlantis. Timaeus then takes center stage to deliver a comprehensive discourse, explaining how the divine craftsman, the Demiurge, brought order to chaos and fashioned the cosmos as a living, intelligent being endowed with a soul and body. He mathematically accounts for the four elements using geometric polyhedra and proceeds to detail the anatomical structure of the human body, the mechanisms of perception and respiration, as well as the causes of physical and mental illnesses. Finally, the discourse concludes by describing the process of reincarnation into various animal forms based on the state of the soul, completing the portrait of the cosmos as a visible, perfect divinity.