Reading room

Critias

Plato

An unfinished sequel to the Timaeus. Critias relates, following a tradition Solon supposedly heard from the Egyptian priests of Sais, how primeval Athens, governed like the ideal city, defeated nine thousand years earlier the mighty island of Atlantis beyond the Pillars of Heracles. The story breaks off as Zeus is about to punish the Atlanteans. It is the literary origin of the Atlantis myth.