Note 261 — Chapter I
Reading edition
Plato, Phaedo, 109. Schaefer is in error when he asserts (Entwicklung der Ansichten der Alten ueber Gestalt and Grösse der Erde, 16) that Plato in the Timaeus (55, 56) assigns a cubical form to the earth. The question there is not of the shape of the earth, the planet, but of the form of the constituent atoms of the element earth.