A Likely Story, and Why Plato Says So

The dialogue is careful about its own status. Before the cosmology begins, Timaeus warns that an account of the changing world cannot have the certainty of an account of what always is, and offers what he calls a likely story. Everything that follows is presented under that qualification: the craftsman god, the world soul, the proportions, the triangles from which the elements are built. Readers who take the cosmology as doctrine are reading past a caution the text puts at the front. How to take it has been argued since antiquity.

Some ancient Platonists read the making of the world as an event, others as a way of describing an eternal dependence that never began, and the disagreement is not a modern invention but a division inside the school within a generation or two. The text supports both readings, which is presumably deliberate. The apparatus itself is mathematical rather than mythological, whatever the narrative frame suggests. The world soul is divided according to a series of musical intervals, the four elements are given geometrical solids built from two kinds of triangle, and the whole is a body fitted together by ratio rather than assembled from stuff. That is what allowed later readers to treat the dialogue as a bridge between philosophy, music and geometry, and why it was read in company with mathematical works rather than with the myths.