ABSTRACT
FOR a long time now most Platonic scholars have agreed that the Timaeus and its sequel, the unfinished Critias, belong to the last group of Plato's writings, that except for the Laws and possibly the Philebus they are in fact the latest of his works. Some three years ago, however, an English scholar, Mr. G. E. L. Owen, published an article in which he professed to undermine this currently prevailing opinion and to prove that the Timaeus and Critias were designed by Plato as ‘the crowning work of the Republic group’ and were composed before the group of so-called ‘critical dialogues’, the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Politicus, before the Cratylus (which he thinks also belongs to this group), long before the Philebus (on the relative lateness of which he holds to the current orthodoxy), and even before the Phaedrus (which he would place somewhere between the Timaeus and ‘the critical group’). 2 There is little or nothing under the sun that is entirely new in Platonic scholarship. The opinion that the Timaeus is one of Plato's latest works is much older than the arguments that established the modern orthodoxy in this matter—it is in fact at least as old as Plutarch; 1 and Mr. Owen's arguments against it also are not so novel as he appears to have believed. 2 Whereas such arguments had hitherto attracted little attention, however, there are clear indications that now, especially in England and among younger scholars, the case as presented by Mr. Owen is coming to be more and more widely accepted as established. 3 This would be reason enough, it seems to me, to subject it as soon as possible to the test of an exhaustive and critical examination.
