Book 12
25
What epithet ought one to apply to Timaeus, and what word will properly characterise him? A man of his kind appears to me to deserve the very bitterest of the terms which he has applied to others. It has already been sufficiently proved that he is a carping, false and impudent writer; and from what remains to be said he will be shown to be unphilosophical, and, in short, utterly uninstructed. For towards the end of his twenty-first book, in the course of his harangue of Timoleon, he remarks that the whole sublunary world being divided into three parts —Asia, Libya, and Europe. . . .See 3, 37. The point seems to be that the remark was too commonplace to put into the mouth of a hero. One could scarcely believe such a remark to have come, I don’t say from Timaeus, but even from the proverbial Margites. . . .
