Part 2 / Book 10 — INTRODUCTION TO THE CRITIAS.

This Dialogue may be considered as an appendix to that preceding, and the fulfilment of a promise which Critias had made in the opening of the Timæus, to give some account of the primæval history of the Athenians, whose early manners he supposed to correspond with those of the citizens in Socrates’s ideal republic. The Athenians were a people so boastful of their antiquity, as to arrogate to themselves the name of αὐτόχθονες; and therefore any narrative or legend was likely to be agreeable to their feelings, which assigned to them even a higher antiquity than they really possessed. This may probably have been a leading motive with Plato for constructing this amusing dialogue; more than half of which, however, is taken up with the description of the Atlantic islands, its kings and its inhabitants, who all existed in the time of the primitive Athenians, though in Plato’s time they were extinct, and their islands submerged in the sea. Many curious speculations have been put forth respecting the geography of the Atlantic isles, and some have gone so far as to conjecture them to have been a portion of the modern America. The whole story, however, has so much the appearance of a myth, that it seems useless to apply to it any of the laws of historical or geographical criticism. The Dialogue, moreover, is so short as scarcely to require any abbreviated account of its contents.

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