The Great Year: From the Platonic Ideal to Astronomical Reality

In the dialogues of his maturity, Plato ventures into the description of the physical world, a domain he had previously considered a mere faded copy of the intelligible world of the Ideas. The Timaeus, in particular, stands as his cosmological masterpiece, a work that, after a brief prologue, unfolds as a monumental doctrinaire discourse delivered by the figure of Timaeus of Locri. At the center of this narrative is the Demiurge, a divine artificer who does not create the universe ex nihilo, from nothing, but rather imposes an intelligent order on a chaotic and pre-existing matter.