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Translation of Timaeus first published 1965
Reissued with the addition of Critias and the Appendix on Atlantis 1971
Reprinted with revisions 1977
This revised translation and new introduction first published in Penguin Classics 2008
Copyright © The Estate of H. D. P. Lee, 1965, 1971, 1977
Introduction, Further Reading and revisions to the translation and Notes copyright © T. K. Johansen, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translators and editors has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-92049-8
List of Figures
Introduction
TIMAEUS
CRITIAS
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
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CLASSICSPLATO (c. 427–347 BC) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He came from a family that had long played a prominent part in Athenian politics, and it would have been natural for him to follow the same course. He declined to do so, however, disgusted by the violence and corruption of Athenian political life, and sickened especially by the execution in 399 of his friend and teacher, Socrates. Inspired by Socrates’ inquiries into the nature of ethical standards, Plato sought a cure for the ills of society, not in practical politics but in philosophy, and arrived at his fundamental and lasting conviction that those ills would never cease until philosophers became rulers or rulers philosophers. At an uncertain date in the early fourth century BC he founded in Athens the Academy, the first permanent institution devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the prototype of all Western universities. He travelled extensively, notably to Sicily as political adviser to Dionysius II, ruler of Syracuse.
Plato wrote over twenty philosophical dialogues, and there are also extant under his name thirteen letters, whose genuineness is keenly disputed. His literary activity extended over perhaps half a century. Few other writers have exploited so effectively the grace and precision, the flexibility and power, of Greek prose.
SIR DESMOND LEE was born in 1908 and was a scholar at both Repton School and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he gained a ‘double first’ in classics. He was a fellow and tutor at Corpus Christi and a university lecturer there from 1937 to 1948. His lifelong association with the college continued after he became headmaster of Clifton College in 1948, when he was also made a life Fellow of Corpus Christi. In 1954 he left Clifton College to take up the position of headmaster of Winchester College, where he remained until 1968. In 1959, 1960 and again in 1967 he was chairman of the Headmasters’ Conference. Returning to Cambridge in 1968 he became Senior Research Fellow at University (now Wolfson) College, and then from 1973 until 1978 President of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. Desmond Lee died in December 1993.
He also translated Plato’s The Republic for Penguin Classics.
THOMAS KJELLER JOHANSEN studied philosophy and classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is now University Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at Oxford University and Tutorial Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. His publications include Plato’s Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias (Cambridge, 2004).
1 and 2 The two basic triangles
3 Constituent triangles
4 Solids
5 and 6 The fish-trap and human body
7 The armillary sphere
8 Mirror image
9 The city and the buildings
10 The canal pattern