Κριτίας, Ίππαρχος, Αντερασταί

The third of Plato's trilogy, pairing with Timaeus and left tragically unfinished, Critias contains the only surviving ancient account of Atlantis. Here, the philosopher paints a portrait of ancient Athens in its prime, a society of martial virtue, democratic governance, and spiritual nobility, before it succumbed to the corruption that would eventually destroy it. The narrative then turns to the island empire of Poseidon's offspring: a civilization of staggering wealth and power, whose rulers began as wise guardians but degenerated into tyranny and hubris, inviting divine punishment. This fragment breaks off mid-sentence, leaving one of literature's most tantalizing gaps. The volume also includes Hipparchus, a brief Socratic exploration of the love of profit, and Anterastae, a dialogue examining the nature of true and false friendship. Together, these works reveal Plato using myth not as ornament but as philosophical instrument, testing the boundaries between ideal and real, between the Athens that was and the Athens that might have been.