[kragen]

platon didn't speak english, because english wouldn't exist for fifteen more centuries, so he didn't write the republic at any english reading level. the various english translations of it vary greatly in their clarity and readability

i agree that the timaios is platon's most esoteric surviving work, and it's full of enormous amounts of nonsense, but i think it's still reasonably clearly written. sadly, it is a foundational text in not only western philosophy but eastern philosophy as well, and it took twenty centuries for most thinkers to reject most of its erroneous dogmas