Is Critias a Sophist?

Abstract

The coherence and indeed the reality of the sophists as a philosophical school or movement has been contested and debated in modern scholarship, with inconclusive results. While their collective identity, not to mention their exemplarity, is subject to probing scrutiny, we usually have a fairly good idea of which historical figures we mean when we speak of the sophists. However, the case of Critias, the most infamous of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, is particularly challenging since he does not seem to fit the professional profile of the other figures who are generally recognized as sophists and with whom his fragments have been edited and collected. This essay will briefly reconsider Critias’ candidacy as one of the ancient Greek sophists, not on the basis of what might be conjecturally reconstituted as his own philosophy, but rather on the basis of his association with the notion of the Greek or Sophistic Enlightenment. This notion and the periodization that it implies will be the focus of attention.

Keywords

• Critias
• Euripides
• Pierre Bayle
• Enlightenment
• Sisyphus
• atheism