Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles: English Text

by Plato

Publisher:

Harvard University Press

, 1929

Overview

This volume contains R. G. Bury’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, and Epistles.

Contents

Top Highlights

“But it is clear to everyone that his gaze was on the Eternal; for the Cosmos is the fairest of all that has come into existence, and He the best of all the Causes. So having in this wise come into existence, it has been constructed after the pattern of that which is apprehensible by reason and thought and is self-identical.” (Page 53)

“For simultaneously with the construction of the Heaven He contrived the production of days and nights and months and years, which existed not before the Heaven came into being.” (Page 77)

“For God desired that, so far as possible, all things should be good and nothing evil” (Page 55)

“He was good, and in him that is good no envy ariseth ever concerning anything” (Page 55)

“Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings” (Page 41)

Product Details

• Title: Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles: English Text
• Author: Plato
• Series: The Loeb Classical Library: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Print Publication Date: 1929
• Logos Release Date: 2014
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subject: Plato › Translations into English
• ISBNs: 0674992571, 9780674992573
• Resource ID: LLS:WRKSPLT10
• Resource Type: text.monograph.ancient-manuscript.translation
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T21:10:47Z

About Plato

Plato (427–347 BC) was born in Athens to an aristocratic family. A student of Socrates until the latter’s death, he also studied the works of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans. Following the death of Socrates, Plato spent a number of years traveling around the Mediterranean. He eventually returned to Athens and founded a school of philosophy called the Academy (named for the field in which it was located), where he later taught Aristotle.

Plato wrote works on ethics, politics, morality, epistemology, and metaphysics. He is best known for his theory of forms, the theory that the qualities that define a thing’s existence (redness, beauty) exist in an abstract realm of forms, separate from matter. Plato believed that what was true, and therefore real, must be unchanging. Because the material world is in a constant state of change it is not true reality but a mere illusion. Plato taught that love is the longing for the Beautiful in its purest, most abstract, form. Consequently, love is what motivates all the highest human achievements.