Critias

There's even less to say about Critias than Timaeus, not least because Plato left the dialog unfinished after about 10 pages.  It was meant to be a sequel that continues the story which framed Timaeus' speech (which I did not discuss last time).  Timaeus opens with Socrates recounting the basic design of the Republic, as if Timaeus and Critias had been present for 'yesterday's' discussion of the just city (neither character is mentioned in the Republic, which was written years earlier).  Critias then proposes to tell a story which will dramatize the true Republic in action.  Before he does this however, Timaeus tells the story about the origins of the universe that we recounted last time.  Critias attempts to complete the earlier discussion and paint a picture of how the just city Socrates described actually behaves in practice.

As you might imagine, this is set to degenerate into a superhero movie about how amazing the one true Republic is.  Pow!  Look at that philosopher king go!  Mercifully, all Plato managed to write was the introduction.  The only aspect of the story at all notable is its semi-mythological setting.  Critias says that his grandfather heard from Solon that the Egyptians knew about a time long ago when Athens itself was governed by the structure laid out in the Republic.  So we don't have to invent a story about what the Republic might actually be like, we just have to re-tell the tale of the glory of ancient Athens.  It turns out that this tale was lost when all the Athenian warriors were killed in a fierce war with Atlantis.  Yep, that Atlantis.  While the Athenians triumphed and Atlantis sunk into the sea, no one was left to tell the tale.   The Egyptians only remember this stuff because they never suffered a dark age as the Greeks did. 

I did not know this, but it turns out that Plato is the original source of the myth of Atlantis.  In fact, the preliminary piece of the story we get in Critias, the one whose point will be how great ancient Athens was, spends more time describing Atlantis than anything else.  It's a pretty boring description, so it's beyond me how it managed to spark 2,500 years of 'lost continent' mania.  But, like so many other aspects of Western culture, this is where it all started.

THE END