Critias

"Critias" names a charged ambiguity in the corpus. The speaker of Plato's Critias — the narrator of the Atlantis tale and of primeval Athens as the enacted ideal city — is, on Cooper's account, either Plato's mother's cousin, Critias the oligarch of the Thirty Tyrants (who also appears as a character in the Charmides and the Protagoras), or that cousin's grandfather. The identification is genuinely unresolved, and the difference matters: it is one thing for the Atlantis myth to be voiced by a pious antiquarian, another for it to be voiced by the most notorious anti-democratic strongman in Plato's own family. A page on "Critias" must hold the two apart and not silently collapse the dialogue-narrator into the historical tyrant.

Key Points

• Two candidates, one name. Cooper leaves open whether the Critias/Timaeus narrator is the oligarch Critias (Plato's relative, of the Charmides and Protagoras) or that man's homonymous grandfather — the difference of a generation that the dramatic chronology does not fix.
• The tyrant. The Critias who appears as a character in Plato is a kinsman of Plato, later one of the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens by terror after its defeat (404/3) and was killed in the democratic restoration — a charged historical figure the dialogues never moralize about directly.
• As a character in the Charmides: Charmides' guardian and a forceful interlocutor, who proposes that sōphrosynē is "knowledge of itself" — i.e. a form of self-knowledge — a definition pressed to aporia there but flatly affirmed in the (disputed) Alcibiades I.
• As the Critias-narrator: the bearer of the transmitted Atlantis memory (the Solon → Egyptian-priests → grandfather → family-manuscripts chain) and the voice that stages Socrates' Republic-city "in action" as ancient Athens.

What's Not Obvious

• The disambiguation is load-bearing, not pedantic. Whether the Atlantis-narrator is the oligarch or his grandfather bears on the Critias' dramatic date and on whether the tale of a virtuous, war-winning, well-governed ancient Athens carries any ironic charge given its possible teller's own anti-democratic history.
• The figure linked to the Thirty Tyrants is also the one who voices "temperance is self-knowledge" (Charmides 164d–165a). It is a character's proposal, refuted in the Charmides — so the link to self-knowledge is dramatic, not an endorsement; but it is a striking placement.

Connections

• is the narrator of plato-critias — the Atlantis tale and the enacted Republic (speaker-identity disputed).
• is an interlocutor in plato-charmides and plato-protagoras — (on one identification) Charmides' guardian; proposes sōphrosynē as self-knowledge. See self-knowledge, temperance-sophrosyne.
• is distinguished from his grandfather — the two homonymous Critiases Cooper leaves unresolved; do not conflate the dialogue-narrator with the historical tyrant by default.

Open Questions

• Which Critias narrates the Critias — the oligarch (Plato's cousin) or his grandfather? Cooper presents both, resolves neither.
• If the narrator is the tyrant, does Plato intend the disjunction between the speaker's praise of a just ancient Athens and his own historical role, or is the resonance ours and not his?

Sources

• plato-critias — Critias as narrator of the Atlantis tale and the transmission chain (106b–121c); the disambiguation in the editor's note.
• plato-charmides — Critias as Charmides' guardian and proposer of sōphrosynē as self-knowledge (164d–169c).
• plato-protagoras — Critias among the speakers at Callias' house.