ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION THE Timaeus belongs to the latest group of Plato's works: Sophist and Statesman, Timaeus and Critias, Philebus, Laws. The whole group must fall within the last twenty years of his life, which ended in 347 B.C. at the age of eighty or eighty-one. The Laws is the only dialogue that is certainly later than the Timaeus and Critias. It is probable, then, that Plato was nearer seventy than sixty when he projected the trilogy, Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates -the most ambitious design he had ever conceived. Too ambitious, it would seem; for he abandoned it when he was less than halfway through. The Critias breaks off in an unfinished sentence; the Hermocrates was never written. Only the Timaeus is complete; but its introductory part affords some ground for a conjectural reconstruction of the whole plan.
