Emeritus Professor Harold Tarrant

Proclus' Commentary on Plato's dialogue Timaeus is arguably the most important commentary on a text of Plato, offering unparalleled insights into eight centuries of Platonic interpretation. This edition offers the first new English translation of the work for nearly two centuries, building on significant recent advances in scholarship on Neoplatonic commentators. It provides an invaluable record of early interpretations of Plato's dialogue, while also presenting Proclus' own views on the meaning and significance of Platonic philosophy. The present volume, the first in the edition, deals with what may be seen as the prefatory material of the Timaeus. In it Socrates gives a summary of the political arrangements favoured in the Republic, and Critias tells the story of how news of the defeat of Atlantis by ancient Athens had been brought back to Greece from Egypt by the poet and politician Solon.

The principal figures here, in rough chronological order, were Eudorus, Thrasyllus, anon.Commentary on the Theaetetus, Plutarch of Chaeronea, Theon, Taurus, Albinus, Nicostratus, Atticus, Severus, Harpocration, and Alcinous. All are normally treated as Platonists today; antiquity treated most of them as ¿Platonics¿. There were a number of centres around the Mediterranean at which a ¿Platonic¿ might reside and operate. During the Hellenistic period there had been no need for such a term at all, since one¿s philosophical background had usually been indicated with reference to the philosophical group or school with which one had studied (usually at Athens), and to which one continued to feel some allegiance. Up to Cicero¿s generation it was normal for those with serious educational ambitions to study in Athens, and not unusual to seek tuition from more than one school. Those men of letters who felt the need to communicate in a philosophical vein did not normally have to adopt any title that indicated their favourite philosophy, while those who claimed to officially represent a school, and to teach its doctrines or methods, adopted such titles to legitimize their role.

This paper takes issue with the thesis of Rashed and Auffret that the Critias that has come down to us is not a genuine dialogue of Plato. Authors do not consider the style of the Critias, which should be a factor in any complete study of authorship. It observes the widespread consensus that the style of the Timaeus and Critias are virtually inseparable. It surveys a wide range of stylistic studies that have tended to confirm this, before answering a possible objection that cites the similarity of style between the genuine Laws and Philip of Opus' Epinomis. Since the main argument used by Rashed and Auffret relies on an inconsistency between Timaeus and Critias consideration is given to the types of inconsistency found within Platonic dialogues and sequences of dialogues, particularly the hiatus-avoiding dialogues including Timaeus itself and Laws. Finally, alternative explanations of the alleged inconsistency are offered.

At Alcibiades I, 133b-c, the reader expects, but does not according to the MSS find, the return of the mirror-motif that had supposedly explained the true meaning of the Delphic injunction. Hence it remains unclear why anything viewed within the soul should act in any way that resembles a mirror. I argue that the substitution of a single letter in one word, about which the manuscripts and modern scholars in any case disagree, can restore the necessary reference to a reflective surface, though not specifically to a mirror, since the term for a mirror could only be applied to sight. A failure to understand the underlying intertextual allusion to Cratylus 408c had resulted in a safe but unsatisfactory substitution by Late Antiquity, and other modifications followed thereafter in an effort to give meaning to the text.