Plato's Critias, or Atlantis (Live Reading)

Critias or Atlantis : a lost continent and Plato's philosophy of History

Critias belongs to the last period of Plato's writings and it is amongst the shortest. It is the only one that is unfinished, which lends weight to the hypothesis that it could have been Plato's last dialogue.

It forms the second part of an unfinished trilogy, the first - and only finished- part being Timaeus, to which it forms a companion piece. The dialogue furnishes a pseudo-historiographical account of the earliest times of Athens, which is about the thinly disguised discourse on the rise and fall of Empires, the interaction of natural and built environment, and the part played by mores in history.

It endows the political reflections expounded in the Republic and Laws with a narrative and symbolic form. Its importance in the history of Western culture can hardly be exaggerated. Critias provides, alongside the first part of Timaeus, the first principal account of the Atlantis myth. Almost certainly a philosophical fable concocted from a variety of sources including 5th c. historiography, Atlantis took on a life of its own and became embedded in popular culture. Furthermore, it inspired Renaissance Utopias such as the cities of Thomas More and Campanella.

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The reading is intended for well informed generalists even though specialists are obviously welcome. It is our aspiration to read the Platonic corpus over a long period of time. The host is Constantine Lerounis, a distinguished Greek philologist, author of Four Access Points to Shakespeare’s Works (in Greek) and Former Advisor to the President of the Hellenic Republic.

The text can be found here:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NXThQVWAWnpJqSYmkSBdqgnYyMZI3vej/view?usp=sharing](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.google.com%2Ffile%2Fd%2F1NXThQVWAWnpJqSYmkSBdqgnYyMZI3vej%2Fview%3Fusp%3Dsharing%26fbclid%3DIwAR1JcuYx7VSkm3DulfilrvwrnknypAOUhP1CQzAC4iSK-DF9d8GCNLC5Eoo&h=AT0txf0-H4p-ULI3F6RDQnh-tYx7Wi8x5VrDpXGo372NXM9Vw_1Xxo1G7TusFb27jh69JzZRBeVRDtqi5CeZP5LutB0pCsvXfTQS-zx0VLWqtsYrxqzWkfBJ4sj4cDR3HJs)