At a glance
- Also called
- timaeus critias atlantis, plato atlantis dialogues, critias dialogue, plato timaeus atlantis
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Atlantis, Pseudoarchaeology, Lemuria, Neoplatonism
The Timaeus and the Critias are two linked dialogues written by Plato about 360 BCE. Between them they contain everything the ancient world recorded of Atlantis.
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What do the Timaeus and Critias say about Atlantis?
The Timaeus opens with a short account of Atlantis and then turns to its main subject, the ordering of the world by a divine craftsman. The Critias takes the story up again, describing the island's rings of land and water, its temple of Poseidon, its ten kings and their laws, and stops before the war begins.
Both are set as sequels to a talk about the ideal city: Socrates has described such a city and asks to see it in action. The Atlantis tale is the answer, with ancient Athens as the good city and Atlantis as the rich power it defeats. The speakers present it as a true story handed down from Solon.
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What sets Timaeus and Critias apart
The pair are unusual in Plato's work for presenting a long tale as inherited fact, with a chain of tellers: an Egyptian priest, Solon, an elder Critias, and the Critias who speaks. Readers have long noticed that such a chain lends authority while keeping the tale out of reach of checking. The second of the two is also the only dialogue of Plato that simply stops, in the middle of a sentence, with Zeus about to speak.
- Author and date: Plato, late in his life, about 360 BCE
- Main subject of the Timaeus: the ordering of the world by a divine craftsman
- Where Atlantis stands: a short passage early in the Timaeus, and most of the Critias
- Planned third part: the Hermocrates, never written
- Medieval fame: the Timaeus in the Latin of Calcidius, about the fourth century CE
Often mistaken for something else: The Republic describes the ideal city at rest; the Atlantis tale in these two dialogues was meant to show that city in a war.
The story behind Timaeus and Critias
Plato wrote the pair late in life, about 360 BCE, and seems to have planned a third dialogue, the Hermocrates, that was never written. The Timaeus was the one work of Plato widely read in the Latin Middle Ages, through a partial translation by Calcidius, and it shaped medieval ideas of the cosmos. The Atlantis pages drew little notice until the Renaissance, and their modern fame dates from the nineteenth century.
Why Timaeus and Critias matters
Every claim about Atlantis goes back to these pages or adds to them, so knowing the text lets a reader tell the source from the additions.
How to read Timaeus and Critias
Readers go to the dialogues to check a claim: the date, the size of the island and its fate are all stated there, and most later details are absent.
Timaeus and Critias in practice: an example
Someone curious about Atlantis can read the relevant pages of both dialogues in under an hour and know all that Plato says.
Where readings of Timaeus and Critias go wrong
The speakers call the tale true, but that is a device Plato uses elsewhere too; a dialogue is not a chronicle.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- timaeus critias atlantis, plato atlantis dialogues, critias dialogue, plato timaeus atlantis
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What do the Timaeus and Critias say about Atlantis?
That an island power beyond the Pillars of Heracles attacked the Mediterranean nine thousand years before Solon, was defeated by Athens, and sank in a single day and night. The Critias adds a long description of the island and its kings.
Why is the Critias unfinished?
Nobody knows. The text stops as Zeus is about to address the gods on the punishment of Atlantis. Plato may have abandoned it, or the ending may have been lost, though no ancient writer reports a fuller version.
Is the Timaeus mainly about Atlantis?
No. Atlantis takes up a few pages near the beginning. The rest is an account of how a divine craftsman ordered the world, the elements and the human body, and it was studied for that for two thousand years.
