CRITIAS OF ATHENS Christopher Moore, Christopher C. Raymond INTRODUCTION Critias of Athens (c. 460–404/3 BCE), a relative of Plato’s and scion of an elite family that counted Solon among its kin, is now best remembered for three things: an intellectual association with Socrates that ended unhappily; authorship of the so-called “Sisyphus” fragment, among the earliest extant presentations of atheism, and thus a leading instance of the naturalizing explanations typical of the Sophistic movement; and leadership in the so-called Thirty Tyrants, the murderous oligarchy that eliminated the democracy, perhaps with the aim to Spartanize the Athenian polis, in the year following the Peloponnesian War. The last seems to have overshadowed his many other intellectual and cultural accomplishments, as Aristotle and Philostratus suggest. Critias wrote works of almost unequalled generic variety: elegiac poetry, lectures, tragedies (perhaps), analyses of political constitutions (maybe in both poetry and prose), and even proto-dialogues (conceivably). He had a complex and enduring friendship with Alcibiades, a nexus of Athenian political, civic, and military life. Plato treats Critias as a central interlocutor in several dialogues—perhaps more frequently than anyone else besides Socrates. He made statements in natural philosophy, on the nature of soul and the relationship between cognition and perception. The extensive scholarship on Critias deals, in the majority case, with late-5th-century Athenian politics and Euripides’ fragmentary plays, to which ancient authors attributed the dramatic fragments thought to be his. He is less frequently discussed in studies of the Sophists, Presocratics, Socrates, or Plato—according to some scholars, rightly so. But he is not absent from those sub-disciplines, if in a scattered way, and synthetic studies of Critias,