Timaeus of Locri

In Plato's works, Timaeus appears as a wealthy aristocrat from the Greek colony of Lokroi Epizephyrioi (present-day Locri in Calabria) in Magna Graecia, who had served in high offices in his native town before coming to Athens, where the dialogue of Timaeus is set.

Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, suggests that the character of Timaeus was based on the Pythagorean Philolaus.

[5] Modern scholarship tends to dismiss Timaeus's historicity,[6] treating him as a literary figure constructed by Plato from features of the Pythagoreans known to him, such as Archytas.

[7][8] The main reason for assigning the status of a literary fiction to Timaeus is the lack of any information that does not stem ultimately from Plato's dialogues.

[13] On the World and the Soul was first mentioned in sources of the second century AD (Nicomachus and the commentary on Timaeus by Calvisius Taurus) and its authenticity was not doubted in antiquity.

R. Harder hypothesized that the composition of On the World and the Soul was a two-step process, whereby Pseudo-Timaeus, the author of the preserved version of the book, would have edited an earlier, Hellenistic variant of Timaeus.

The Greek text appeared as part of Aldo Manuzio's collected works of Plato, first published in 1513 and reprinted many times.

In the sixteenth century, it was considered a Vorlage of the Timaeus (so in Henri Estienne's edition) and often printed along with the works of Plato.