Nonfiction · about 360 BC
Critias
Plato · translated by Benjamin Jowett
The dialogue that follows the Timaeus, and the only sustained account of Atlantis in ancient literature. Critias picks up a story he says came down from Solon by way of an Egyptian priest: nine thousand years ago there was an island empire beyond the Pillars of Heracles, laid out in concentric rings of land and water, rich in a metal called orichalcum, ruled by the ten kings descended from Poseidon under a law inscribed on a pillar of that metal — and there was an older Athens, which alone resisted it. The description of the island is elaborate and unfinished: the dialogue breaks off in mid-sentence, at the moment Zeus rises to address the gods.
Plato wrote the Critias in his later years as the second part of a projected trilogy that was never completed. This edition is Benjamin Jowett's English translation, with his introduction.
This Bibliomancer edition presents Jowett's introduction and the complete dialogue as it survives.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
-428–-348 · Ancient
Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was an Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, and the founder of the Academy, the school that gave the word its meaning. His dialogues — among them the Apology, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Timaeus and Laws — are the foundation of Western philosophy, and they have survived complete, which is true of almost no other ancient writer. The English here is Benjamin Jowett’s: the Master of Balliol whose translation of the Dialogues (1871) carried Plato to English readers for a century, and whose introductions are printed with it.
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