Akropolis 3 (2019) 129-149 Marina Marren* Seeing Ourselves in the Xenoi – Plato’s Warning to the Greeks Abstract: In this essay about the story of Atlantis in Plato’s Timaeus, we focus on the crucial political message that the Atlantis tale contains. More precisely, we seek to respond to a question that may evade a completely satisfactory answer. Te question is: Could Plato’s story of the rise and fall of Atlantis, in the Timaeus, be a warning tale to the Greeks of his own time? In order to root the inves- tigation prompted by this question in solid textual ground, we pay close attention to the framing of the Atlantis tale. In what follows, we analyze the series of substitutions (between mythical, ancient, and historical cities, i.e., Atlantis, Athens, and Sais) that Plato uses as he seeks to bring his readers to a point from which we can assess the politics of ancient Athens – a city that in Plato’s time stands on the brink of repeating the political blunders of the formerly glorious empire of the East. Introduction In the spirit of the tradition that takes Plato’s dialogues to be both works of literary genius and of philosophy, we pay careful attention to Plato’s narrative frames and to his choice of interlocutors in order to tease out the philosoph- ical and political recommendations that Plato has for his ancient readers and that his dialogues ofer to us. To that end, in Section II, we focus on providing philosophically pertinent details related to the identity and ambitions of Critias IV who, on our interpretation, is the narrator of the Atlantis story. Our view is contra Cornford, Burnet, and Sallis, but it is in agreement with Davies as well as with the commentaries of Proclus, according to which the narrator of the Atlan- tis tale is a member of the pro-Spartan tyranny of the Tirty. Te Tirty Tyrants terrorize Athens in the afermath of the Peloponnesian War. 1 Mindful of Critias’ * Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, USA (mmarren@uoregon.edu) 1 Davies, Athenian Properties Families , 322 – 29, esp. 326; Proclus, Te Commentaries , 59 – 71; Sallis, Chorol- ogy , 32; Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology , 1; Burnet, Greek Philosophy , 338; Nails remains undecided on the matter of whether it is the III or the IV Critias who is the interlocutor in the Timaeus and, hence, if we should trust the ancient or the modern commentators, calling it “an unsettled controversy” ( Te People of Plato, 106). Howland ofers a summary of the debate pertaining to Critias’ identity (“Partisanship and the Work of Philosophy”, 2, nt. 5).