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Critias and Atheism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Dana Sutton
Dana Sutton
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Extract

One of the best-known fragments of a lost Greek drama is Critias' fr. 43F19 Snell, an extended rhesis from the play Sisyphus in which the protagonist narrates how once upon a time human life was squalid, brutal, and anarchistic; as a remedy men devised Law and Justice; this expedient served to check open wrongdoing but did not hinder secret crimes; then some very clever man hit upon the idea of inventing gods and the notion of divine retribution; thus secret criminality was stopped by fear of the gods.

The prevalent understanding of Critias' motives is largely determined by the commonest interpretation of this fragment. Some authorities think the notion of divine justice as merely a human device designed to serve a socially utilitarian purpose is Critias' own invention; others regard this passage as wholly or in part a réchauffé of the ideas of others, such as Protagoras, Democritus, or Diagoras of Rhodes. With few exceptions, it has until recently been thought that Critias was, if not a sophist himself, at least a cynical disciple of Machtpolitik who differed from similar thinkers such as Thrasymachus and Callicles only in that he translated ideas similar to those these figures are made to express in the pages of Plato into brutal political action.

A handful of authorities have dissented from this view on the grounds that it is dangerous to attribute to a playwright sentiments placed in the mouths of his stage-characters (although to be sure, as we shall see, the theory that the views expressed in the fragment were the poet's own has ostensible ancient authority in the doxographic tradition). Recently the prevalent interpretation of fr. 19 Sn. has been subjected to additional criticism in two articles by German writers that may well be harbingers of a major reappraisal – long overdue, in the present writer's opinion – of Critias' beliefs.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , May 1981 , pp. 33 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1981

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References

1 Critias' dramatic fragments are quoted and cited from Snell, TrGF 1; his other fragments from Diels–Kranz, Vors.

2 Sisyphus is identified as the speaker by those ancient writers who attribute this fragment to Euripides (see below).

3 Some of the more notable discussions of this fragment are Nestle, W., ‘Kritias’, NJBB 1903, 99–104Google Scholar (cf. also Nestle, 's Von Mythos zum Logos, Stuttgart, 1940, 467Google Scholar and his note at Zeller, , Die Philosophie der Griechen 4.–7Google Scholar. Aufl., Leipzig, 1923, i. 1408 n. 0Google Scholar); Drachmann, A., Atheism in Pagan Antiquity (London, 1922), 44–50Google Scholar; Stephans, Dorothy, ‘Critias' Life and Literary Remains’ (diss. Cincinnati, 1939), 76–8Google Scholar; Schmid-Stählin, , GGL i. 3. 176–81Google Scholar; Jaeger, Werner, The Theology of the Early Greeks (Oxford, 1947), 186–8Google Scholar; Untersteiner, Mario, The Sophists (New York, 1954), 333–5Google Scholar; Guthrie, W. K. C., A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, U.K., 1969), iii. 243 fGoogle Scholar. cf. the further sources cited by Patzer, loc. cit. infra, 3 n. 1.

4 cf. the speculations of Nestle, Drachmann.

5 Drachmann, loc. cit. and Wilamowitz, , Aristoteles und Athen (Berlin, 1893), i. 175 n. 178Google Scholar. Miss Stephans, loc. cit., suggests Critias may have believed in the abstract theism enunciated in fr. 4 Sn. but not in the traditional gods. One fails to see how the fragment permits any such distinction and, as we shall see, the authorship of fr. 4 (from Peirithous) is in any event problematic.

6 Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Critias are taken quite closely together by Untersteiner and by Guthrie.

7 ‘Das Satyrspiel “Sisyphus”’, Hermes 105 (1977), 28–42Google Scholar.

8 Euripides' atheism has most memorably been asserted by Nestle, W., Euripides (Stuttgart, 1901)Google Scholar; cf. however Drachmann's severe critique, op. cit. 51–6.

9 Euripides' Sisyphus was of course produced with the Trojan trilogy of 415 b.c. Although it is doubtful that his satyr plays marched alongside his tragedies in the matter of iambic resolution, it is difficult to imagine any kind of late Euripidean play displaying the timid resolutions exhibited by fr. 19 Sn.: five in 42 lines, resolutions in first and third foot only, no more than one resolution per line. Note also the following rather unfortunate word-repetitions: 4κόλασμα ~ 6 κολαστάς, 5 κἄπειτα ~ 9 ἔπειτ', 10 πρ⋯σσειν ~ 11 ἔπρασσον ~ 15 πράσσωσιν, 11 ~ 14 λάθρᾳ, 16 ~ 25 εỉσηγήσατο, 29 ~ 35 ὅθεν.

10 ‘Der Tyrann Kritias und die Sophistik’, in Studia Platonica [Festschr. Hermann Gundert] (Amsterdam, 1974), 3–20Google Scholar. This article contains interesting observations, but too much of the argumentation uncritically accepts the Critian authorship of Peirithous, Rhadamanthus, and Tennes. Remarkably, there is no mention made of the testimony of Xenophon, Mem. 1. 2. 30–1 that as a member of the Thirty Critias engineered passage of a law forbidding the teaching of λόγων τ⋯χνη. Xenophon's anecdote appears doubtful or at least over-compressed. He deduced this action from a quarrel with Socrates, but inasmuch as Socrates himself was hardly a rhetoric-teacher, evidently the reader is left to surmise that this hostility somehow evolved into a dislike of sophistry (possibly Critias acquired the equation Socraticism = sophistry from Aristophanes' Clouds). In any event, the theory of Lesky, A., GGL (Eng. tr.), 498Google Scholar that this law was an attempt to muzzle Socrates' criticism of the Thirty seems unwarranted. If the bare fact of the law forbidding rhetoric-teaching is true, as may well be the case, Xenophon's testimony has a clear bearing on the question of Critias' attitude towards sophistry.

11 To be sure, Patzer notes the broad resemblance of this rhesis to the culture-mythos Protagoras is made to deliver in Plato's Protagoras. The ‘sophistic’ interpretation of the Cyclops originated in Schmid, Wilhelm, ‘Kritisches und Exegetisches zu Euripides’ Kyklops', Philologus 55 (1898), 57Google Scholar. But this interpretation cannot in fact withstand the devastating criticism of Marquardt, R., ‘Die Datierung des euripideischen Kyklops’ (diss. Leipzig, 1909), 48Google Scholar.

12 op. cit. 16 f.

13 Doxographi Graeci (repr. Berlin, 1958), 59Google Scholar.

14 Analecta Euripidea (Berlin, 1875), 166–72Google Scholar; cf. the other references given by Untersteiner, op. cit. 320 n. 59.

15 ‘De Pirithoo Fabula Euripidea’, Mnemosyne 35 (1907), 354–85Google Scholar; cf. also SirPage, Denys, Loeb Select Papyri (Cambridge, Mass.-London, 1950), iii. 120–3Google Scholar.

16 ‘Critias’, fr. 1, 9 Sn. is identical to the first line of Euripides' Melanippe the Wise. Similarly, if the attribution of P. Flor. Inv. 3021 to Peirithous is correct, the echo of Eur. H. 990 in vv. 6 f. might be relevant (cf. Kramer, B., Kölner Papyri, Cologne, 1976, i. 18Google Scholar). For a notable feature of Euripidean style is the repetition of phraseology from one play to another: this phenomenon has been observed by Schroeder, F., ‘De Iteratis apud Tragicos Graecos’ (diss. Strassburg, 1882)Google Scholar, Cook, A. B., ‘Unconscious Iterations’, CQ 16 (1902), 151–4Google Scholar, and Parry, Milman, ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Versemaking’, HSCP 12 (1930), 97–114Google Scholar.

17 An example of the wavering one encounters is that the play is included in Steffen, Wiktor, Satyrographorum Graecorum Reliquae (Poznan, 1936)Google Scholar but not in the same author's Satyrographorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Poznan, 1952)Google Scholar.

18 As pointed out at Sutton, D. F., ‘The Nature of Critias' Sisyphyus’, RSC 22 (1974), 3–7Google Scholar.

19 The only certain example of a diminutive in tragedy is pointed out by Stevens, P. T., Colloquial Expressions in Euripides (Wiesbaden, 1976), 5Google Scholar, χλανίδιον at Eur. Or. 42, Su. 110, Chaeremon fr. 14, 9 and fr. tr. adesp. 7. Normally when a diminutive is found in a fragment — e.g. Soph. fr. 768, 1 Radt αὐλίσκοις — we may conclude the fragment to have been satyric.

20 On the other hand, the fragment is not without felicities such as the description of heavenly portents commencing at line 31.

21 Page, op. cit. 121, remarks that there is no reason for thinking that the myth of the eidolon was presented in any kind of ‘rationalized’ manner.

22 Both the setting and the chorus of the play are thought to be somehow imitated or parodied in Aristophanes' Frogs: cf. Wilamowitz, , Analecta 171Google Scholar and Stephans, op. cit. 74 f.

23 To be sure, the above suggestion that Plutarch identified Critias as an atheist on the basis of nothing more than familiarity with fr. 19 Sn. is a hypothesis. It might not be inconceivable that he had at his disposal extra information unknown to us. But this is a small point when cast in the balance against the fact that no contemporary styles Critias an atheist.

24 The probable cause of his exile was the fall of Alcibiades according to Wilamowitz, , Platon 2 (Berlin, 1920), ii. 119Google Scholar and de Sanctis, G., Storia dei Greci dalle Origini alla Fine del Secola V (Florence, 1939) ii. 463Google Scholar. Nothing supports the idea of a second exile, proposed by Freeman, K., The Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Oxford, 1946), 406Google Scholar.

25 So Stephans, op. cit. 29–31.

26 So Stephans, ibid. 38 (about his conduct during his exile).

27 ‘MOIXOΣ ΛAΓNOΣ KAI YBPIΣ⋯HΣ: Critias and his Judgement of Archilochus’, Gräzer Beiträge 3 (1975), 323–34Google Scholar.

28 The question will occur to the reader, why cannot the anecdote about ‘Euripides’ merely be shifted to Critias, so that Critias placed this speech in the mouth of a notorious rascal in order to escape prosecution for impiety? That is to say, why could there not be a kind of irony so that ostensibly Critias was placing this atheistic speech in Sisyphus' mouth but at the same time was addressing cognoscenti in a more serious way? The answer is simply that this possibility could not be excluded — if there was the slightest confirmation in Critias' preserved writings or in the facts of his life that he himself might have entertained any such thoughts. But there is not.

29 Plausible but not demonstrable: the passage at Cicero, de Natura Deorum I. 42. 118 stating that some say religion was an invention made for reasons of state is no more than an allusion to Critias' fr. 19 Sn. Diels, loc. cit. shows this passage depends on the same selection of atheistic sentiments used by Sextus and Theophilus.

30 cf. Sutton, D. F., The Greek Satyr Play (Meisenheim am Glan, 1979)Google Scholar, index s.v. ‘tricksters and trickery’.

* In the same way, I would suppose that the allusion to those previous writers who have maligned Busiris (5) is primarily a reference to Euripides' satyr play Busiris.