Critias

He is known today for being a student of Socrates, a writer of some regard, and for becoming the leader of the Thirty Tyrants, who ruled Athens for several months after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War in 404/403.

[2] Both men were in their prime at the beginning of the 6th century BCE and Dropides served as archon eponymous shortly after Solon held that position in 594/3.

[8] Other works include Aphorisms, Lectures, On the Nature of Desires or of Virtues, and Proems(Prologues) for Public Speaking.

[13] In general he appears to have stayed in the background, or perhaps on the periphery of Athenian politics – dabbling rather than plunging headlong.

He questioned democracy, conventional morality and challenged the certainty with which many intellectuals propounded their thoughts endeared him to the rebellious adolescent minds of the younger generation.

In the spring of 415, the Athenians decided to send an armada to Sicily to counter a perceived threat from the city of Syracuse.

[16] The failure of the Sicilian expedition in 413, in which tens of thousands of Athenian soldiers were killed or captured, rocked the city's political and social stability.

[20] Arguing against that possibility is that in the days following their deposition he was recorded as proposing two decrees before the reconstituted Assembly: one to hold a post-mortem trial of one of the perpetrators of the coup, one Phrynichus,[21] the other to repatriate his friend Alcibiades,[22] who had been exiled at the start of the Sicilian expedition for mocking the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most sacred religious cult at Athens.

[23] The playboy-general was at that time assisting the Athenian fleet at Samos and attempting to ingratiate himself with those who had banished him a few years earlier.

[24] These two actions, while not clearly exonerating Critias, show that he was politically adept enough to shed the stigma of participating in the takeover, if he indeed had.

The Spartans demanded that the city take down its walls, recall its exiles (oligarchic sympathizers all), and restore the ancient government – i.e., dismantle its democracy.

[32] A third body was designated: the Three Thousand – those of the cavalry (hippeis) and infantry (hoplite) classes, who were allowed to keep their armor and weapons after the rest of the citizens had been forcibly disarmed.

At one point, the Thirty compelled the Three Thousand to begin arresting metics so they could be stripped of their property and executed – this so the citizens would become complicit in the slaughter.

[34] He was later recorded as offering this not-so-oblique criticism of Critias: It seems enough to me that a herdsman who lets his cattle decrease and go to the bad should not admit that he is a poor cowherd; but stranger still that a statesman, when he causes the citizens to decrease and go to the bad, should feel no shame nor think himself a poor statesman.

It was a calculated insult to Socrates, whom he saw no means of attacking except by imputing to him the practice constantly attributed to philosophers,[37] and so making him unpopular.

[38]When Critias and Charicles confronted Socrates with the new law, the latter did what he had done so many times before and began to probe its actual meaning.

In the spring of 403, they returned under the leadership of Thrasyboulus and eventually commandeered the fortress called Munichia in Peiraieus, Athens' port city.

He also collaborated with the Spartans in absurd resolution in order that Attica, emptied of its flock of men, might become a grazing-ground for sheep.

Hence it seems to me that he is the worst of all the men who have gained a reputation for wickedness… It appears to some that he became a good man toward the end of his life, inasmuch as he employed tyranny as his winding-sheet [burial shroud].

The feelings I then experienced, owing to my youth,[43] were in no way surprising: for I imagined that they would administer the State by leading it out of an unjust way of life into a just way, and consequently I gave my mind to them very diligently, to see what they would do.

By the late 4th century, Aristotle could write: The many do not demand a statement of the case if you wish to extol Achilles, for all know his deeds; yet it is necessary to make use of them.

[46]As for Critias' efforts as a poet and essayist, his works survived for several centuries, as the above citations attest, but his repute as a writer eventually faded.

Philostratus, writing in the 3rd century CE, said of Critias: He wrote tragedies, elegies, and prose works, of which not enough has survived for any sure estimate to be made of his talent.

Among his extensive comments on Herodes, Philostratus inserted this: For while he devoted himself to the study of all the older writers, from Critias he was inseparable, and he made the Greeks better acquainted with him, since he had hitherto been neglected and overlooked.[48]Our[who?]

For discussions of Critias and translations of his fragments into English, see the works by Kathleen Freeman and Rosamund Kent Sprague listed in the references.