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Critias

Critias

c. 460 BCE–c. 403 BCE · Athens

Critias was an Athenian aristocrat, writer, and politician of the late 5th century BCE, a relative of Plato and an associate of Socrates. He became the most notorious leader of the oligarchic regime known as the Thirty Tyrants imposed on Athens in 404 BCE, and he was killed in the fighting that overthrew it; he was also a poet and prose author whose works survive only in fragments. Some ancient verses on religion as a human invention are attributed to him.

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AthensAttica (Greece)

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About Athens

Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

In Athens at the same time

Aeschylus, Themistocles, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Sophocles, Gorgias of Leontini

Across the traditions, in Athens at the same time

See other sages who lived in Athens→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Critias’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Critias’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(1)