Critias

Critias led the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and was the most violent of them. Born around 460 BC into one of the oldest and richest Athenian families, he was a cousin of Plato's mother and appears as a character in Plato's dialogues, including the one that bears his name and contains the Atlantis story. He was an associate of Socrates and a pupil of the sophists, and wrote tragedies, elegies and prose works of which fragments survive. One fragment, from a satyr play, argues that a clever man invented the gods to frighten people into behaving when no one was watching — among the earliest surviving statements of religion as a political instrument. He was implicated in the mutilation of the Herms in 415 BC and imprisoned, and he proposed the recall of Alcibiades. He was later exiled to Thessaly, where he is said to have stirred up revolutionary agitation. When Athens surrendered in 404 BC, Lysander installed a commission of thirty to revise the constitution, and Critias emerged as its leader. Backed by a Spartan garrison on the Acropolis and a body of three hundred whip-bearers, the Thirty executed an estimated fifteen hundred people in eight months — political opponents, democrats, and wealthy metics whose property was confiscated to fund the regime. He had his moderate colleague Theramenes condemned and dragged from the altar to drink hemlock. He also forbade the teaching of the art of speech, which was aimed at Socrates. He was killed in battle at Munychia against the returning democrats under Thrasybulus in 403 BC.

• Lived: 460 BCE – 403 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: politician, oligarch, writer