Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato Translated with a Running Commentary

Plato's Cosmology, The Timaeus of Plato Translated with a Running Commentary, by Francis Macdonald Cornford, published by Kegan Paul in 1937, is a classical scholar's translation of Plato's Timaeus paired with detailed philosophical commentary explaining the dialogue's account of the cosmos's creation by a divine craftsman, the demiurge, and its underlying mathematical structure. Cornford was among the twentieth century's most influential translators and interpreters of Plato, and this edition remains cited generations later as a standard English point of entry into a genuinely difficult text. Its strength is pairing an accurate translation with commentary that untangles the dialogue's dense technical cosmology for readers without specialist training in ancient Greek philosophy. Its limit is that Cornford's commentary reflects his own interpretive choices on famously disputed points, including whether Plato meant the creation account literally or as a didactic myth, so a claim resting on one specific reading of that dispute should note it as Cornford's position, not Plato's settled meaning.