Critias was said by, Laetranic, which he had all his speeches to be a great orator. So he shows off incredible verbal skills in those word portraits. And I agree that Plato does really fall in love with this state he's created and his wonderful imaginative ability runs away. But before we even start the description of Atlantis, Plato's already sowed in our minds have thought, do you know what? Actually, there's a little implicit criticism of its love. Even before it degenerates, it's always in love with bling.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato's account of the once great island of Atlantis out to the west, beyond the world known to his fellow Athenians, and why it disappeared many thousands of years before his time. There are no sources for this story other than Plato, and he tells it across two of his works, the Timaeus and the Critias, tantalizing his readers with evidence that it is true and clues that it is a fantasy. Atlantis, for Plato, is a way to explore what an ideal republic really is, and whether Athens could be (or ever was) one; to European travellers in the Renaissance, though, his story reflected their own encounters with distant lands, previously unknown to them, spurring generations of explorers to scour the oceans and in the hope of finding a lost world.
The image above is from an engraving of the legendary island of Atlantis after a description by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680).
With
Edith Hall
Professor of Classics at Durham University
Christopher Gill
Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter
And
Angie Hobbs
Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield
Producer: Simon Tillotson