timaeus · plato

Plato's Timaeus, a late dialogue, gives a 'likely story' of the making of the cosmos by a divine craftsman who shapes matter after eternal forms, and of the world soul, time, the elements and the human body. It was the most read Platonic dialogue for a thousand years and the source of the idea that the universe is ordered by mind.

Plato, Timaeus, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing, 1997). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors.