Critias facts for kids

Critias (/ˈkrɪtiəs/; Greek: Κριτίας, Kritias; c. 460 – 403 BC) was an ancient Athenian, known today for being a student of Socrates, a writer of some regard, and the leader of the Thirty Tyrants, who ruled Athens for several months after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War in 404/403.

Early life

Little is known of Critias’ early years.  Athenaeus reported that he was a trained aulos player.  He was best attested as a poet, with a variety of forms to his credit: hexameters, elegies and dramas.  Among the plays tentatively assigned to him are Tennis, Rhadamanthys, Pirithus, and the satyr play Sisyphus.  All of these, however, have been contested by both ancient and modern scholars, with Euripides proposed as the most likely alternate author.  (The “Sisyphus fragment” presumably comes from the satyr play – again, attributed to either Critias or Euripides.)

Critias also wrote prose. Among his most important works were a series of “Commonwealths” or treatises on the governments of various city-states. Athens, Lacedaemonia (Sparta), and Thessaly are specific mentions made in ancient sources.  Other works include Aphorisms, Lectures, On the Nature of Desires or of Virtues, and Proems(Prologues) for Public Speaking.

According to pseudo-Plutarch, he was among those who criticized the logographer Antiphon, though there is little evidence that he (or Antiphon) participated in Athenian politics during the years that the latter was active (430s and 420s).   What little there is was provided by Cicero, who names him as an orator, along with Lysias and Theramenes.In terms of style, he was described as “lofty of sentiment, also pride”, “stately, much like Antiphon, and sublime, verging on majesty, and says much in the negative, yet is rather pure in style”.

In general he appears to have stayed in the background, or perhaps on the periphery of Athenian politics – dabbling rather than plunging headlong.  All this began to change in 415.

Student of Socrates

The philosopher Socrates was well known for attracting the young men of Athens’ elite.  His questioning of conventional morality and challenges to the certainty with which many intellectuals propounded their thoughts endeared him to the rebellious adolescent minds of the younger generation. Critias was among those who gravitated to him, and the two formed a friendship that was to last many years, though eventually they drifted apart.  Plato, who cast Socrates as the protagonist of most of his dialogues, included Critias as an interlocutor in two of them.  Though these were written many years after both Socrates and Critias were dead, Plato made no mention in them of the activities that tarnished Critias’ reputation in his later years.

The Four Hundred

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.  In 411, as Athenian prosecution of the Peloponnesian War limped along, a junta of oligarchic sympathizers contrived to take over the government and end the war.  They succeeded in convincing the Athenian Assembly that governmental change was necessary and instituted in place of it the council of the Four Hundred. The coup was put down a few months later and democracy gradually restored.

Critias has been suspected by some modern scholars as being a member of the Four Hundred, but there is little evidence of this.  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, the other to repatriate his friend Alcibiades, who had been exiled at the start of the Sicilian expedition for mocking the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most sacred religious cult at Athens. ..... 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.

Exile

Alcibiades’ rapprochement with his fellow citizens was not to last. In 407, while commanding a fleet in the eastern Aegean, he temporarily handed over some of his ships to a subordinate, who proceeded to instigate and then lose an encounter with the Spartan fleet in the area.  Alcibiades was held responsible and banished once again. As his advocate, Critias was subsequently banished as well, and he spent the next few years in Thessaly.

While there, he was reported by Xenophon to be “setting up a democracy in Thessaly and was arming the serfs against their overlords”. Also, he “consorted with men subject to lawlessness rather than to a sense of justice”. Countering this, Philostratus said, “he rendered their oligarchies the more grievous by conversing with those in power there and by attacking all democracy. He slandered the Athenians, claiming that they, of all mankind, erred the most”.

Tyranny of the Thirty

After the battle of Aigospotami in 405, in which the Athenian fleet was destroyed, the city was besieged by the Spartans and eventually capitulated.  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.  At their “suggestion”, a ruling body of thirty governors was selected, mimicking Sparta’s own ruling board of thirty, the gerousia. Critias had returned from Thessaly as part of the recall of the exiles and now became one of the leaders of the “Thirty”.  One source said that they also appointed five men to supervise this group, called ephors after the similar body at Sparta. Critias was one of the five. 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.  This body would constitute the “citizenry” of the new Athens.  Socrates and Xenophon (our source for much of this history) were among this group.

During the next few months, as the Thirty consolidated their hold on the institutions of government, they arrested, confiscated the property of, and summarily executed a wider and wider swath of Athenian citizens and resident aliens (metics).  At every step, Critias was the leading advocate for more extreme levels of violence, to the point where he was getting resistance even from within the Thirty.  The leading “moderate” was Theramenes, and his continued cautioning against the continuing destruction ultimately got him arrested and executed at Critias’ direction.

Critias’ relationship with Socrates withered during these months. 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. With blood on their hands, they would be less likely to attempt an overthrow of the oligarchy. When Socrates was ordered to go with three others to arrest one Leon of Salamis, he ignored the order and simply “went home”. At another point, his critique became more personal.  Xenophon related that Socrates took his old friend to task for being overly enamored with a young man.Socrates reputation and general popularity protected him from the punishment meted out to Theramenes. 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.

Fall of the Thirty

Many Athenians had left the city when the attacks of the Thirty began.  In the spring of 403, they returned under the leadership of Thrasyboulus and eventually commandeered the fortress called Munichia in Peiraieus, Athens’ port city.  When the Thirty brought their forces to Peiraieus to root them out, the two armies fought in the streets.  During this confrontation Critias was killed, which left the oligarchs without their strongest leader.  This spelled doom for their reign, and they were soon deposed and democracy reestablished.

Legacy

Critias was in ancient times castigated for his activities under the Thirty.  Philostratus, in his Lives of the Sophists, had much to say about him. Xenophon lumped Critias in with his friend Alcibiades in his criticism:Plato, on the other hand, said nothing disparaging about Critias directly – either about his exile in Thessaly or his time in the Thirty.  Yet, the philosopher was loathe to join the oligarchy because of its violent means. For all the condemnation he received from his contemporaries, Critias was soon forgotten by most people. By the late 4th century, Aristotle could write: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. Herodes Atticus, a 2nd century CE Roman senator and rhetorician, attempted a revival of Critias’ works in the 2nd century CE. Our judgment today would not be much different than that of Philostratus, since Critias’ extant works have diminished still further.  What fragments survive were collected by the German historian Herman Diels and first published in his Die Fragmente der Vorsokratikerin 1903 – in Greek.  This seminal work was later revised several times, most recently by Walter Kranz in 1959. 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.

See also

In Spanish: Critias para niños

• List of speakers in Plato's dialogues