Critias

106a Timaeus: How glad I am, Socrates, to have won through at last and escaped the long journey of the argument, as a man rests gladly at the end of a road. And to the god who of old was real in deed and has only now come to be in words I offer my prayer: that, of what has been said, where it was said in due measure, he may grant us 106b safe deliverance; and if against our will we spoke any note out of tune about these things, that he impose the fitting penalty—for the right penalty is to bring the offender back into tune. So that from now on we may speak correctly about the coming-to-be of the gods, we pray that he give us the most perfect remedy, the best of remedies, knowledge; and having prayed, we hand over the next account to Critias, according to our agreement.

Critias: I accept it, Timaeus; and the same plea that you yourself made at the 106c outset, asking indulgence because you were about to speak of great matters—that same request I too now put forward,

107a and I ask to win it in even greater measure for what I am about to say.

Critias: And yet I know full well that the excuse I am about to offer is one of high ambition and rather boorish in view of what the occasion demands; still, it must be made. For that what you have said was not well said—who in his right mind would attempt to maintain? But that what is about to be said stands in greater need of indulgence, being the harder task—this I must try to make clear in some way. For when a man speaks of the gods to human beings, it is easier for him to seem to speak adequately 107b than when he speaks of mortal things to us. The inexperience and deep ignorance of the hearers about matters of which they know nothing give a great abundance of material to anyone who is to say anything about them; whereas the gods—we know how things stand with them. To make my meaning clearer, follow me along this line. What has been said by all of us must be some sort of imitation and representation; let us consider the image-making of painters, in what they do with divine and human bodies, 107c as regards the ease and the difficulty of appearing to spectators to have been adequately imitated; and we shall see that in the case of earth and mountains and rivers and forests and the whole heaven and the things that are and move within it, in the first place we would be glad if anyone could imitate even a small part of it in some likeness; and besides, since we know nothing precise about such things, we neither examine nor test what is painted, 107d but make use of an unclear and deceptive shadow-painting in our dealings with them. But when anyone tries to represent our own bodies, we quickly perceive what has been left out, because of the understanding that is always at our side, and we become harsh judges of the man who does not render every single likeness in full. The same thing, then, one must see happening with accounts as well: heaven and the divine we accept gladly even when they are said to be only slightly probable, whereas mortal and human things we examine with precision. Given, then, what is now being said on the spur of the moment, 107e if we cannot render what is fitting in every respect, indulgence is owed; for we must conceive that mortal things are not easy but hard to represent to the satisfaction of opinion.

108a Critias: It was to remind you of all this, and to ask for indulgence not less but greater for what is about to be said, that I have said all this, Socrates. If then I seem to be asking for this gift justly, grant it of your own accord.

Socrates: Why, of course we shall grant it, Critias. And let this same gift be given a third time to Hermocrates on our behalf as well. For plainly a little later, when he too must speak, 108b he will make the same plea as you; so that he may devise some other opening and not be forced to repeat the same one, let him speak now on the understanding that indulgence is already his until that time. Let me warn you in advance, dear Critias, what this audience is thinking: the poet who spoke before you has won astonishing approval here, so you will need a very great deal of indulgence if you are to be capable of taking over the theme.

Hermocrates: The same charge, Socrates, you lay upon me as 108c upon him. But men of faint heart have never yet raised a trophy, Critias; so you must advance upon the account with courage, and calling upon Paean and the Muses, set forth and sing the praise of the ancient citizens, who were good men.

Critias: My dear Hermocrates, you are posted last in the order and have another man in front of you, and yet you are still bold. What that boldness is worth will perhaps become clear to you; but since you both comfort and 108d hearten me, I must obey you, and besides the gods you named I must call upon the others, and above all upon Mnemosyne. For the greater part of our account lies altogether with this goddess: if we can remember adequately and report what was told long ago by the priests and brought here by Solon, I am well assured that we shall seem to this audience to have accomplished what is fitting in reasonable measure. This, then, is what we must now do, with no more delay.

108e

First of all, then, let us recall that the sum total was nine thousand years since the war was revealed as having taken place between those who dwelt beyond the Pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt this side of them—the war which we must now carry to its completion. Of the two sides, this city of ours was said to have led the way and to have fought the whole war through; of the other, the kings of the island of Atlantis, which we said was once an island larger than Libya and Asia, but which has now sunk beneath earthquakes and left impassable mud for those who sail out from here

109a over the whole open sea, so that no one can make the crossing any longer—that was the obstacle it put in their way.

Critias: The many peoples who were barbarians, and whatever Greek tribes existed at the time, the course of the account will reveal one by one as it unrolls, taking up whatever it meets along the way; but the Athenians of that day and the opponents they fought, it is necessary to go through first at the outset—the power of each side and their forms of government. And of these, we must give first place to telling of what happened here in earlier times. 109b

For the gods once portioned out the whole earth by regions—not through strife, for it would not be right to suppose that the gods do not know what belongs fittingly to each of them, nor again that, knowing what better suits others, they would strive to win it for themselves through conflict—so by just allotments, each receiving the portion it held dear, they settled the regions; and having settled them, like herdsmen with the flocks of a pasture, they reared us as their own possession and their own nurslings, not by 109c compelling bodies with bodies, as shepherds drive their beasts with blows, but turning the creature from the stern, where it is most easily guided, and laying hold of its soul with persuasion as with a tiller, in accordance with their own design—so they steered and guided the whole mortal race. Others, then, taking their lots in other regions, set those lands in order; but Hephaestus and Athena, having a common nature—brother and sister of the same father, and alike come together in their love of wisdom and love of craft upon the same pursuits—these two received this land as a single allotment, as their own, by nature fitted for 109d excellence and good sense; and implanting good men, children of the soil, they set in order the structure of the constitution. Of these men the names have survived, but the deeds have vanished, through the destructions that came upon those who inherited them and through the length of time. For the stock that was always left over, as was said before, remained mountain-dwelling and without letters, having heard only the names of the rulers of the land, and of their deeds only a little. The names, then, they bestowed on their descendants 109e gladly, but the achievements and the laws of their predecessors they did not know—save for some dim reports about each—and for many generations they and their children, being in want of the necessities of life,

110a with their minds fixed on what they lacked and their talk all about these things, they paid no heed to what had happened in earlier ages and long ago.

Critias: For storytelling and the inquiry into things of old come to cities together with leisure, when they see that the necessities of life have already been provided; before that, they do not come. This, then, is how the names of the men of old have come down to us without their deeds. I infer it from this: the names of Cecrops, Erechtheus, Erichthonius, and Erysichthon, 110b of most of the others, and of Theseus as well, are remembered one by one from the earlier account; and Solon said that the priests, in relating the war of those days, applied these names to most of the men of that time, and the women's names likewise. And indeed the very figure and image of the goddess make the point: since in those days the pursuits of war were common to women and to men alike, the goddess was dedicated in armor by the men of that time according to that custom, as a demonstration that of all 110c creatures that live in company, both the female and the male, every kind is by nature capable of cultivating in common the excellence that belongs to it.

In this land, then, in those days, the other classes of the citizens lived by the crafts and by the food the earth provides; but the warrior class, set apart at the beginning by men of divine nature, dwelt apart, with everything it needed provided for its sustenance and training, each of them possessing nothing of his own, 110d but holding everything to belong to all in common, and deeming it right to receive nothing from the other citizens beyond adequate sustenance; and they practiced all the pursuits described yesterday, everything that was said about the Guardians who were put forward. And indeed what was said about our country was plausible and true: first, that its boundaries in those days were fixed toward the Isthmus and along the rest of the mainland as far as the heights of 110e Cithaeron and Parnes; and that the boundaries came down, with Oropia on the right, and on the left, toward the sea, bounded by the Asopus; and that it surpassed all the surrounding land in excellence, which is why the country was able at that time to support a great host, kept free from the work of the land.

Critias: And there is a great proof of its excellence; for what remains of it today can compete with any land in bearing everything and yielding rich crops

111a and good pasture for every kind of creature. But in those days, in addition to its beauty, it produced these things in abundance. How, then, is this credible, and in what sense can it rightly be called a remnant of the land of that time? The whole of it lies like a headland stretched far out from the rest of the mainland into the open sea; and the basin of sea around it happens to be deep right up to the shore. Many great floods, then, having occurred within the nine thousand years—for that is the number of years that has passed from that time to the present 111b—the soil, in these times and these experiences, washing down from the heights, deposits no silt worth mentioning, as it does in other places, but keeps flowing off around it and disappearing into the deep; what is left, compared with what was there then, is like the bones of a body that has wasted away, all the rich, soft earth having washed away, and only the thin body of the land surviving. In those days, being still unimpaired, 111c it had high hills of earth, and the plains now called stony ground were full of deep soil; and it held much forest on the mountains, of which clear evidence is still visible: for some of the mountains now sustain bees alone, and yet it is not so very long ago that trees were felled there for the roofs of the largest buildings, and the roofing is still sound. There were also many other tall cultivated trees, and the land bore pasture for flocks beyond reckoning. And indeed 111d it made its yearly crop of the water from Zeus; not as now, when the water is lost, flowing off the bare earth into the sea, but holding much and drawing it into itself, storing it up in the earth that roofed it like tiling, and letting the water absorbed from the heights down into the hollows, it furnished in every region abundant streams of springs and rivers, of which even now, at the springs that existed then, shrines are still left behind as signs that what is now said about this land is true. 111e

Such, then, was the nature of the rest of the country, and it was ordered as one would expect by farmers who were true tillers of the soil and made that their whole business, men who loved beauty and were of good natural parts, possessing excellent soil and most abundant water, and seasons tempered most moderately over the land; and the city was settled in the following fashion in those days.

Critias: First of all, the acropolis was

112a at that time not as it is now. For now, after one night of exceptionally heavy rain stripped it bare of earth, it has been left so—by earthquakes, and before that by the destruction in the time of Deucalion, when the extraordinary flood came third of such disasters; but in an earlier age its size was such that it reached down to the Eridanus and the Ilissus, and enclosed within it the Pnyx, with Lycabettus as its boundary on the side facing the Pnyx; and it was all of earth, and level on top except for a little. 112b The lower outer parts, along its very flanks, were inhabited by the craftsmen and by the farmers who tilled the fields close by; but the heights were inhabited by the warrior class alone, keeping to itself, around the temple of Athena and Hephaestus, as if they had enclosed the garden of a single house within one surrounding wall. For on the northern side of it they lived, having built common dwellings and winter mess halls, together with everything that was fitting for the common 112c life to have in the way of buildings, for themselves and for their temples, without gold or silver—for these they made use of nowhere at all, but pursuing the mean between arrogance and meanness they built themselves orderly houses, in which they grew old, they and their children's children after them, always handing them on to others like themselves; while on the southern side they laid out gardens and gymnasia and summer mess halls, and used them for these purposes. There was a single spring on the site of the present acropolis, and when it was 112d choked by the earthquakes only small streams were left around it, but in those days it furnished an abundant flow, being tempered to suit winter and summer alike. In this fashion they dwelt—guardians of their own citizens and leaders of the rest of the Greeks who followed of their own will—keeping their numbers as nearly constant as they could from generation to generation, of men and women fit for war, both those already of age and those yet to come, about two 112e myriads in all. Such were these men, and since they always governed their own land and Hellas in the same spirit and with justice, they were renowned throughout all Europe and Asia for the beauty of their bodies and for every kind of excellence of their souls, and were the most celebrated of all the people of those days; and how their opponents fared, and how the whole story came about from the beginning, we shall now set before you, our friends, to share in common, if only we are not robbed of the memory of what we heard when we were still children.

113a Critias: One thing more I must make clear before the account, so that you are not surprised at hearing Greek names many times over for men who were foreigners; for you shall learn the reason. Solon, intending to make use of the story for his own poetry, and inquiring into the force of the names, found that the Egyptians had first recorded them by rendering them into their own language, while he in turn, taking up the meaning of each name 113b and bringing it into our language, wrote it down. And these writings were with my grandfather, and are still with me now, and I studied them when I was a boy. So if you hear names such as the ones used here, let it cause you no wonder; for you have the reason for them. The beginning of that long story, then, was something like this.

Just as was said before about the allotment of the gods—how they portioned out the whole earth, here 113c in larger lots and there in smaller, establishing temples and sacrifices for themselves—so in the same way Poseidon, receiving the island of Atlantis as his lot, settled it with his own descendants, whom he begot of a mortal woman in a certain place on the island, of this sort. There was a plain by the sea, in the middle of the whole island, which is said to have been the fairest of all plains and richly fertile; and near the plain again, at its center, about fifty stades away, there stood a mountain, low on every side. On this there dwelt one of the men who in the beginning had been born of the 113d earth there, Evenor by name, with his wife Leucippe; and they had one only daughter, Cleito. When the girl reached the bloom of womanhood, her mother and her father died; and Poseidon, desiring her, lay with her; and the hill on which she dwelt he made secure, breaking rings around it, alternately of sea and of land, lesser and greater, one about another—two of land and three of sea—turning them as on a lathe out of the middle of the island, 113e all at equal distances from one another, so that the place was impassable for men; for as yet there were no ships and no seafaring. And the island in the middle he ordered with ease, as befits a god, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one hot and the other cold, and making the earth yield food of every kind in abundance.

Critias: And he reared five generations of twin-born sons; and dividing the whole island of Atlantis into ten portions, to the elder of the eldest pair

114a To the firstborn he allotted the dwelling of the mother and the lands that lay round about it, which were the largest and the best, and he made him king over the rest, and the rest he made chiefs, giving to each rule over a host of people and a broad stretch of country. And he gave names to them all. To the eldest, who was king, he gave the name from which the whole island and the ocean too took theirs, both called Atlantic, because Atlas was the name of the first who was king 114b in those days. The twin born after him, whose allotment had fallen at the far end of the island toward the Pillars of Heracles, at the spot now called after that region the Gadeiran country, he named in Greek Eumelus, and in the speech of the land Gadeirus—which must be what gave that land its name. Of the second pair of twins, one he called Ampheres and the other Evaemon; of the third, Mneseus the elder 114c and Autochthon the one born after him; of the fourth, Elasippus the elder and Mestor the younger; and for the fifth pair, the name Azaes was set for the elder and Diaprepes for the younger. All these, they themselves and their descendants after them, dwelt there through many generations, chiefs of many other islands scattered over the ocean, and rulers besides, as was said before, of all the peoples this side of it, as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia. 114d From Atlas, then, besides these, there sprang another line, numerous and held in honor; and they kept the kingship safe through many generations, the eldest king always handing it on to the eldest of his offspring. Their wealth was of such magnitude as had never yet come to any royal house before, nor would it be easy to come again afterward; and everything had been furnished for them that in a city, or in the country at large, it was a task to furnish. For much came in to them from abroad 114e through the reach of their empire, and the island itself supplied most of what was needed for living: first, all that is dug out of the mines, the solid metals, and all that can be smelted; and that substance which today keeps only its name—orichalcum, dug from the earth in those days in many places of the island and then more than a name, the most precious of all things then in being after gold—and all the timber that the work of their builders required, all this the island bore in abundance, while it fed a plentiful stock of animals, tame and wild alike.

Critias: And there was in it, too, the greatest plenty of elephants; for pasture was at hand in abundance for all the other creatures—those that haunt the marshes and lakes and rivers, those

115a that graze upon the mountains, and those that feed on the plains—as well as for this animal, the largest by nature and the most ravenous of eaters. And besides these, whatever fragrant things the earth rears even now—roots, or herbage, or wood, or the distilled juices of gums and flowers and fruits—it bore all these and nourished them well; and further, the cultivated crop: both the dry kind that is our food, and the kinds we use to season our food—for we call all its parts 115b pulses—and the crop of trees, yielding drink and food and unguents, and the fruit of orchards, hard to store, which came into being for our sport and pleasure; and all those after-dinner comforts of repletion which we set out for the guest grown weary, so welcome to him in his weariness—all this the sacred island, then [once] lying beneath the sun, bore in beauty and wonder and in quantities past counting. Receiving all these things from the earth, they furnished out their temples 115c and the dwellings of the kings and the harbors and the docks and the whole of the rest of the country, ordering it in the manner that follows.

First they bridged the rings of sea that lay about the ancient metropolis, making a road outward and toward the palace. The palace itself they built on this site, the dwelling-place of the god and of their fathers, from the very beginning, each king receiving it from the one before him and, adorning what he received, 115d always surpassing his predecessor as far as he was able, until they had made the residence a thing to astonish the eye in the size and the beauty of its works. For, beginning at the sea, they cut a canal through to the outermost ring, three plethra in breadth, a hundred feet in depth, and fifty stades in length, and they made it the passage for ships from the sea into that ring, as into a harbor, opening a mouth wide enough for the largest vessels to sail in. And they cut through the rings of land as well, those that divided the rings 115e of sea, at the bridges, leaving a passage from one to another just wide enough for a single trireme, and roofed them over above, so that the passage beneath was covered; for the lips of the rings of land had depth enough to stand well above the sea. Now the largest of the rings, into which the sea had been cut, was three stades across, and the ring of land next to it was equal to that; of the second pair, the water ring was two stades across, and the dry ring once more equal to the water ring before it; while the

116a ring that ran about the central island itself was a single stade across.

Critias: The island on which the palace stood was five stades in diameter. Around it, together with the rings and the bridge—which was a plethrum in width on either side—they threw a wall of stone, setting towers and gates upon the bridges wherever the crossings of the sea came. The stone they quarried from beneath the circle of the central island and from beneath the rings, from outside and from within: one kind white, another black, 116b a third red; and as they cut it, they hollowed out at the same time ship-sheds, hollow and double within, roofed by the native rock itself. And of their buildings some were simple, while in others they blended the stones and wove them into varied patterns for the sake of delight, giving them a pleasure native to their substance. The wall about the outermost ring they sheathed with bronze all round its circuit, as one might apply an ointment; the wall inside that they overlaid with tin, melted on, 116c and the wall about the acropolis itself with orichalcum, which flashed like fire.

Inside the acropolis the palace was furnished as follows. In the middle they set apart a holy precinct, inviolate, of Cleito and Poseidon, girdled about with a fence of gold; this was the very spot where in the beginning they sowed and begot the race of the ten kings, and here, too, year by year, from every one of the ten allotments, they carried to this place the offerings of the season, making sacrifice there to each of them. There was also a temple of Poseidon himself, 116d a stade in length, three plethra in breadth, and in height proportionate to these to look upon, though of a somewhat barbaric aspect. The outside of the temple they overlaid all about with silver, except the ornaments at its crowning points, which were of gold; within, the ceiling was of ivory throughout, inlaid with gold and silver and orichalcum, while all the rest—the walls and the pillars and the floor—they covered with orichalcum. And they set up statues of gold: the god himself standing in a chariot, the charioteer of six winged 116e horses, of such a size that his head touched the ridge of the roof; and Nereids mounted upon dolphins, a hundred of them all around—for that was the number they believed these to be in those days—and within were many other statues, the private offerings of individuals. About the temple outside stood figures of gold of all the wives, and of the kings themselves, all the ten of them, and many other great dedications, from kings and private men alike, both from the city itself and from all the peoples they ruled beyond it.

Critias: An altar

117a accompanied it too, matching it in size and in the artistry of its making; and the palaces in their turn were worthy of the greatness of their empire and worthy of the ornament that belonged to the temples. And the springs, the one of cold water and the one of warm, whose supply was without stint, and whose waters were a marvel both in sweetness and in fitness for either use, they made much of, surrounding them with buildings and with plantings of trees suited 117b to the waters, and setting reservoirs about them, some in the open air, others roofed over for the warm baths in winter: the royal baths apart, the private apart, others again for women, and yet others for horses and the other beasts of burden, giving to each the adornment that befitted it. The overflow they led to the grove of Poseidon, where trees of every kind, of beauty and a wondrous height, grew by the excellence of the soil; and they carried it on to the outer rings through channels cut at the bridges. 117c There many temples of many gods, many gardens, and many gymnasia had been built, some for men and some apart for horses, in each of the two rings of land; and in particular, in the middle of the larger of the islands, a racecourse had been marked out for them, a stade in breadth, while its length ran the whole way round the ring, left open for the contest of horses. About it on either side were quarters for the guard, 117d for the host of the bodyguard; the more trusted of them were stationed in the smaller ring, nearer the acropolis, and those who surpassed all the rest in fidelity had dwellings given them within the acropolis itself, about the persons of the kings. The shipyards were full of triremes, and of all the equipment that belongs to triremes, everything amply fitted out. Such, then, was what stood about the dwelling of the kings. But once past the harbors, which were three, facing outward, there ran from 117e the sea a wall in a circle, keeping everywhere a distance of fifty stades from the largest ring and the harbor, and closing upon itself at the mouth of the canal where it faced the sea. All this was densely covered with many dwellings, and the ship-channel and the great harbor were thick with ships and merchants arriving from every quarter, whose multitude raised by day and by night a clamor of voices, a tumult of every kind, and a din of sound.

Critias: So much, then, for the capital and what lay about the ancient dwelling-place, kept in memory now very nearly as it was told then; but of the rest of the land

118a and of its natural character and the manner of its ordering I must now try to preserve the memory. First, then, the whole region was said to rise very high and sheer above the sea, while all about the city lay a plain, encircling that place and itself encircled in a ring by mountains that sank down toward the sea; level and even throughout, elongated as a whole, three thousand stades in one direction and two thousand, at the middle, up from the sea. 118b This district lay turned toward the south of the whole island, sheltered from the north winds. The mountains about it were in those days celebrated as surpassing in multitude and size and beauty all the mountains now in being, holding within them many villages, rich and full of inhabitants, and rivers and lakes and meadows giving food in plenty to all creatures, tame and wild, and timber abundant both in quantity and in variety of kind, ample for every sort of work and for each particular need. Such, then, was the plain by nature, 118c and many kings, over a long stretch of time, labored upon it further. It was for the most part four-square and elongated, with straight sides, and where it fell short of that they made it true by digging a ditch round it in a circle. Of the depth and breadth and length of it, the account is past belief, being, as a work of human hands, greater than the other labors besides; yet we must say what we heard: it was dug to a depth of a plethrum, its breadth was everywhere a stade, 118d and dug as it was about the whole plain, its length came to ten thousand stades. Receiving the streams that came down from the mountains and running round the plain in a circle, it came to the city on this side and on that, and there let itself off to flow toward the sea. From it, running inland, straight canals of about a hundred feet in breadth were cut across the plain, let out again into the ditch that faced the sea, and these lay a hundred stades apart from one another; and by them 118e they brought down the timber from the mountains to the city, and the rest of the season's produce was carried by boat, cutting passages from the canals into the cross-channels and to the city. And twice in the year they gathered in the earth's fruit, in winter using the waters of Zeus, in summer watering what the earth bears with streams led in from the canals.

Critias: As for numbers: of the men in the plain fit for war, it was appointed that each

119a lot furnish a commander. The measure of a lot was ten stades each way, ten times ten, and of all the lots together there were six myriads; of the men from the mountains and the rest of the country the number was said to be past counting, and all of them, by districts and villages, were apportioned to these lots and to their leaders. Each leader was then required to furnish for the war a sixth portion of a war-chariot's unit, to the amount of ten thousand chariots; two horses 119b and their riders; and further a light two-horse car without a box, carrying a small-shielded fighter who could dismount, and the driver of the pair of horses with a man mounted behind them; two hoplites; archers and slingers, two of each; light-armed stone-throwers and javelin men, three of each; and four sailors, toward the manning of twelve hundred ships. Such, then, was the war equipment appointed for the royal city; for the other nine it was appointed otherwise, and it would take a long time to tell. 119c

Such was the ordering of command and honor as it was arranged from the beginning. Each one of the ten kings, in his own district and in his own city, ruled over the men and over most of the laws, chastising and putting to death whom he pleased; but their rule over one another and their common intercourse were governed by the injunctions of Poseidon, as the law handed them down, and by the record inscribed by their first kings on a pillar of orichalcum, 119d which stood in the middle of the island in the temple of Poseidon. To that place they assembled every fifth year, and in alternate years every sixth, giving equal honor to the even and to the odd; and when they were gathered they took counsel about their common affairs, and made inquiry whether anyone had transgressed in anything, and gave judgment. When they were about to judge, they first gave one another pledges after this manner: there were bulls at large in the temple of Poseidon, and the ten kings, being left alone, ten and no more, prayed to the god that they might capture a sacrifice pleasing 119e to him, and hunted the bulls without iron, with staves and nooses; and whichever bull they caught they led up to the pillar and slaughtered it over the top of the pillar, over the writing. On the pillar, besides the laws, there was an oath invoking mighty curses upon the disobedient.

Critias: So then, when according to their

120a own laws they had sacrificed and consecrated all the limbs of the bull, they mixed a bowl of wine and cast into it a clot of the blood, one for each, and carried the rest to the fire, having purified the pillar round about; and after this, ladling from the bowl with cups of gold and pouring the wine upon the fire, they swore to give judgment according to the laws written upon the pillar, and to punish anyone who had already transgressed in anything, and for the future to transgress none of the writings willingly, nor themselves to rule, nor to obey any ruler, 120b except according to the laws of their fathers. This prayer each of them made for himself and for his line after him; then he drank and dedicated his cup in the sanctuary of the god, and gave himself to dinner and the needs of the body; and when darkness came on, and the fire about the offerings had died down, all of them, clothed in their most beautiful dark-blue robes, sat down on the ground beside the embers of their oath, and by night, 120c putting out every fire in the precinct of the temple, they were judged and gave judgment, if anyone laid accusation against any among them of transgressing; and when they had judged, they wrote the verdicts upon a plate of gold, and when daylight came they set up the records, together with their robes, as memorials. There were many other special laws concerning the several prerogatives of each king, but the greatest were these: that they should never bear arms against one another, and that all should come to the aid of any one of them if anyone anywhere in a city should attempt to overthrow the royal house; and that in common 120d, as their fathers before them, they should take counsel over war and their other undertakings as seemed best, rendering the leadership to the house of Atlas. And no king was to have power over the death of any kinsman, unless more than half of the ten so judged.

Such a power, then, so great and of such a kind, as it was in those places at that time, the god gathered and brought against these same lands again, on a pretext of some such kind as this, as the story runs. 120e For many generations, so long as the divine nature in them sufficed, they were obedient to the laws and bore themselves kindly toward the divinity of their own kindred;

Critias: For they possessed thoughts that were true and great in every way, applying a gentleness joined with wisdom to the chances that befell them at all times and to one another; and so, because they looked down upon everything but virtue, they counted

121a the goods at hand of little account, and bore lightly, as though it were but a burden they carried, the mass of their gold and of all their other possessions; they were not drunk with luxury nor, for all their wealth, without command of themselves and so brought low, but sober they saw clearly that all such things grow out of the common friendship joined with virtue, and that in the eager pursuit and honor of the goods themselves, both the goods decay and that friendship perishes away with them. By such reasoning, then, and with the divine nature abiding in them, everything we have passed through before grew great among them. But when the divine portion in them grew faint, watered down with a great measure of the mortal and 121b blended again and again, until the human temper gained the mastery, then at last they could no longer carry their fortune, and fell into unseemly ways; and to those who could see they showed themselves base, squandering the most beautiful of their possessions, the most precious, while to those who could not see the life that truly leads to happiness they seemed at that moment most supremely beautiful and blessed, brimming over with unjust greed and power. And Zeus, the god who reigns among the gods by law, since he was able to see such things, when he marked a noble race sunk in wretchedness, and wished to lay upon them 121c punishment, that chastened they might grow more orderly, gathered all the gods into his own most honored abode, which, standing at the center of the whole world, looks out upon all that has a share in becoming; and gathering them he said—