 The question of the place of the Timaeus relative to the other dialogues has given rise to an acrimonious but nevertheless fruitful debate, with far-ranging implications for our assessment of Plato’s philosophy. In 1953, G. E. L. Owen published a provocative article that challenged the orthodox view of the Timaeus as a work written during Plato’s so called “late” period, and argued that it should be regarded as a middle dialogue instead, composed prior to the Theaetetus and the Parmenides. Owen claimed to see in the Timaeus a reassertion of several metaphysical views familiar from the Republic but (on the reading proposed by Owen) subsequently exposed for refutation in these two dialogues, both of which on the orthodox view precede the Timaeus. The orthodox view was based on long-standing tradition, but had been confirmed by the stylometric studies of Plato’s writings undertaken by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philologists. Owen called into question the assumptions and the results of these studies. Four years later Owen’s criticism of stylometry, as well as his interpretation of the relevant arguments in the Theaetetus and the Parmenides, were in turn vigorously if not rancorously disputed by H. F. Cherniss in defense of the traditional view (Cherniss 1965, 1977). This debate between these two scholars of renown whose approaches to the study of Plato’s dialogues were so markedly different did much to bring a new level of acuity to the analysis of Platonic texts. Over time the orthodox view appears to have held its own. Both a more nuanced examination of the texts and more recent computer-assisted stylometric studies have done much to reinforce  it.[7]