ABSTRACT
THE Timaeus stands alone among the Platonic dialogues in being devoted to cosmology and natural science. Owing to the fact that the first two-thirds of it were continuously preserved through the “dark ages” in the Latin version and with the commentary of Chalcidius, it was the one Greek philosophical work of the best age with which the west of Europe was well acquainted before the recovery of Aristotle's metaphysical and physical writings in the thirteenth century; it thus furnished the earlier Middle Ages with their standing general scheme of the natural world. In the present volume it is impossible to deal with the contents of the dialogue in any detail; I have tried to perform the task in my Commentary on Plato's Timaeus (Oxford, 1928), with which the later commentary of Professor Cornford (Plato's Cosmology, London, 1937) should be compared.
