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1 results

  • 3 - The Atlantis story: the Republic and the Timaeus

  • Edited by Mark L. McPherran, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
  • Book:
    Plato's 'Republic'
    Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    25 November 2010, pp 52-64

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the Atlantis story and its links to the main argument of the Republic and the cosmology of the Timaeus. The Atlantis story is fiction invented by Plato, which is intended to carry an ethical message. The story insists on its own truth, something which is a familiar feature of fiction. The Republic argues for the value and benefit of virtue in a person's life even in the worst conditions of the actual world. In the Timaeus Plato creates a cosmology in which the goodness of the gods, insisted on in the Republic, is seen in the good ordering and construction of the whole cosmos, in which virtue and vice get the appropriate reward despite appearances. In the Timaeus the story is presented as a narrative which supports philosophical ideas. But what has actually appealed about the story is the fantastic and exotic aspect of Atlantis.