Critias: Leader of the Thirty Athenian Tyrants– Putting the Terror into Tyranny (436–403 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week: Critias the Athenian tyrant!

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Let it not be in the power of Critias to strike off either me, or any one of you whom he will. But in my case, in what may be your case, if we are tried, let our trial be in accordance with the law they have made concerning those on the list… [Y]ou must see that the name of every one of you is as easily erased as mine.

 — Athenian politician Theramenes, quoted in Xenophon’s Hellenica 

Playwright, poet, scholar, great-uncle of the famous Athenian philosopher Plato (and contemporary of Plato’s even more famous teacher Socrates), Critias was renowned for much of his life as a writer whose work was in demand. He was even featured as the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Critias. 

Too bad he ended his life as a blood-soaked traitor to everything his city had once stood for, a classic example of conservative overreaction resulting in the loss of much life and property. 

By 404 B.C., Athens had lost its decades-long war with Sparta. As a result of the humiliating peace treaty, the Athenian city walls were leveled, its navy dismantled, and a collection of thirty oligarchs who favored Sparta were placed in charge of the government. Critias, a follower of fellow Athenian bastard Alcibiades during the war, was named one of these oligarchs (known afterward as “The Thirty Tyrants”). 

Critias, a strong personality with lots of scores to settle and bitterness eating away at his very soul, soon embarked on a vendetta against anyone who had ever wronged him. What followed was a bloodbath, one of the first recorded political purges in history.  

“Day after day,” writes Xenophon, “the list of persons put to death for no just reason grew longer.” For every person he denounced and had put to death, Critias received his confiscated property as a reward. When the Athenian statesman Theramenes protested that The Thirty ought to be careful about killing people so indiscriminately, noting that today’s butcher is tomorrow’s butchered, Critias famously responded with a statement that would be echoed for years afterward by politicians conducting similar purges: “If any member of this council, here seated, imagines that an undue amount of blood has been shed, let me remind him that with changes of constitution such things cannot be avoided.” One of the first times a politician used some variation of the notion, “You can’t make any omelet without breaking a few eggs!” 

Critias went on to denounce his former friend Theramenes, calling him a traitor and enemy of both The Thirty and the Spartan troops who had placed them in power. After heated debate, Theramenes was dragged from the meeting and executed on the spot. 

Emboldened by this silencing of their most vocal critic, The Thirty went on to denounce and execute thousands of Athenian citizens, seizing their property as they went. Within a year, the oligarchs had become such an object of fear and hatred that the people rose against them. Critias was killed in the fighting that followed, and his memory was justly damned in the minds of his countrymen for decades afterwards.

See you in two weeks!