Table of Contents
Plato wrote Timaeus and Critias in the fourth century BCE. Critias tells the story of Athens and the island of Atlantis. This book page gives Benjamin Jowett’s English of that story.
The Timaeus chapter is the Atlantis portion only. It starts when Critias says he will tell the tale, and it stops after he has repeated Solon’s account, at the shoal of mud. It does not include the cosmology that follows. The Critias chapter is the whole surviving dialogue. It breaks off as Zeus is about to speak. A separate page, Critias, the story of Atlantis, keeps a literal translation that I am not replacing in this pass.
My commentary stays on Timaeus and Critias: Plato’s Island of Atlantis. The extracts there from R. G. Bury (1929) and from Bernadotte Perrin stay on that page.
The text below is the transcription at the Internet Classics Archive (classics.mit.edu). Jowett’s English is the nineteenth-century translation. It is in the public domain. I do not treat the archive’s own note, or its 1994-2009 footer, as Plato’s words.
Contents
Credits and public domain
Translator: Benjamin Jowett. Source: Internet Classics Archive transcription of Jowett’s English, Timaeus and Critias. The usual identification of this English is Jowett’s third edition (Oxford, 1892), which is in the public domain. I did not collate the archive text line by line against the 1892 book.