Abstract

This work depicts a journey through intellectual history: the merging, over a period of some eight hundred years, of the Stoic and Platonist interpretations of Plato's Timaeus and its cosmology. As such it deals with a wide range of philosophical texts, in both Greek and Latin, and from very diverse cultural backgrounds . ;One can approach intellectual history from mainly three angles. Of these, the so-called doxographical approach which studies the direct influences of texts upon each other, is the most technical one. I am using the results of research done in this domain, but I am not focusing on it. I concentrate instead on the philosophical arguments themselves, a second possible angle, but within their literary and rhetorical context, the third approach, which yields a discourse of assimilation. ;Thus it is important, in each case, not only what an author or a group of authors thought about a given theme, but also how they viewed their own doctrine or how it was being viewed by others in relation to Plato's Timaeus,--which became very influential--, and in relation to other interpretations of this text of Plato. ;The themes which I explore are the principles which a thinker uses to explain the overall structure of our universe and reality, the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm, the parallels between the human and the divine, the image of the cosmic state and the interaction between Providence, necessity, fate and nature. ;Grafted upon these themes of the Timaeus all possible relationships between Plato and his Stoic and later Platonist readers do occur: an open antagonism of the Early Stoics against Plato's authority, a reconciliatory attitude of the Stoic Posidonius and of sources belonging to the Platonist tradition, or an 'eclectic' attitude by Platonists who attack the Stoics, but nevertheless incorporate many features of the Stoic philosophical system within their own