Note 147 — KRITIAS.

Socher (Ueber Platon’s Schriften, pp. 370-371) declares the fragment of the Kritias now existing to be spurious and altogether unworthy of Plato. His opinion appears to me unfounded, and has not obtained assent; but his arguments are as good as those upon which other critics reject so many other dialogues. He thinks the Kritias an inferior production: therefore it cannot have been composed by Plato. Socher also thinks that the whole allusion, made by Plato in this dialogue to Solon, is a fiction by Plato himself. That the intended epic about Atlantis would have been Plato’s own fiction, I do not doubt, but it appears to me that Solon’s poems (as they then existed, though fragmentary) must have contained allusions to Egyptian priests with whom he had conversed in Egypt, and to their abundance of historical anecdote (Plutarch, Solon, c. 26-31). It is not improbable that Solon did leave an unfinished Egyptian poem.