Plato’s Critias: The Legend of Atlantis and Faded Memory of Immortality

Having just completed four sessions on Plato’s Timaeus, Plato’s Pod podcast revisits the Critias, a short 13-page dialogue that picks up where the Timaeus ends.

At the beginning of the Timaeus, the character Critias relates the story of the lost city of Atlantis, to which he returns in the Critias with further details on the constitution and history of the ancient city of fabulous wealth and technology that Zeus brought to an end.

The Critias is the last of a trilogy that began with Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates and others idealized a city declared to be a failure, at the outset of the Timaeus, because of a political and economic structure that would lead to instability over time. As Critias states, “You must realize that human life is no easy subject for representation, but is rather one of great difficulty, if we are to satisfy people’s opinions.”

In Critias’ telling of the history of Atlantis that existed 9,000 years earlier, it too was a failed city that fell into disharmony with a constitution that was inflexibly based on faded and imperfect memories of its founding by the god Poseidon and his children from a mortal mother. Like the failed city of the Republic, Atlantis was protected by a guardian class of soldiers, but its people became “filled with an unjust lust for possessions and power” and fell into an “abject state.”

In his recounting of Atlantean history, Critias touches on themes that are central to many of Plato’s dialogues, including: memory, the origin of names, geometry and numbers (in the description of the city’s design), justice, and harmony. Time, in Critias’ telling, is not linear when memories grow faint, and his story of the fate of Atlantis may be taken as a warning to his fellow Athenians that a city’s glory does not last forever.

We’ll focus our discussion on the following two questions.

1. Are there any lessons to be drawn from the Critias about the nature of present-day political and economic constitutions?
2. Although some say that Plato left the Critias incomplete, for what reasons might Plato have deliberately ended with the following two sentences: “To this end [Zeus] called all the gods to their most honored abode, which stands at the middle of the universe and looks down upon all that has a share in generation. And when he had gathered them together, he said …”?

All are welcome to participate in the discussion, although please relate your comments to Plato’s text, which will be reviewed at the outset of the meeting. To get the most from the session, participants should read the dialogue in advance, a free version of which is available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0180%3Atext%3DCriti.

You can listen to and the entire library of the podcast, now in its 4th season, at https://rss.com/podcasts/platospod/ or on your favourite podcasting platform. The recording of our previous meeting will be posted a few days in advance of this session.

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BEFORE THE MEETUP: Please visit https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqvPwkIofv4UaFldrPpbva3VSXI?e=3Y7PjP for selections from the text that will be reviewed at the outset of the discussion, as well as questions that we will aim to address in our discussion. You can also find there as questions and themes that we explored in our previous meetups on many of Plato’s other dialogues. Before each meeting we will update this link with some questions and material for discussion. Our meetings will generally be scheduled every two weeks on Sunday at 4 p.m. eastern. During our dialogue on the dialogue, participants are encouraged to relate their comments to Plato's text, making reference to the Stephanus marginal number for the passage so the rest can follow in the reading.

There are many translations of Plato’s works available, and your public library should have multiple editions in print or e-book format. Participants with a particular interest in Plato might be interested in purchasing Plato: Complete Works in e-book or print (https://www.amazon.ca/Plato-Complete-Works/dp/0872203492/), which is the source we quote in the podcast series.
Whether new to or experienced with Plato, all are welcome to the dialogue and to sharing in the discovery and learning.
This Meetup will take place on Zoom. Please RSVP to access the Zoom link at your Meetup Account.