Critias c. 460 BC – 403 BC

Critias was an Athenian aristocrat, sophist, tragedian, and statesman of the late fifth century BC and the most prominent of the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens after the city's defeat in the Peloponnesian War. A pupil of Socrates, an uncle of Plato, and a relative of Solon, he wrote tragedies, elegies, and prose works of which only fragments survive. His Sisyphus fragment, presenting religion as a human invention designed to deter wrongdoing, is one of the earliest surviving statements of the political theory of religion. He died in the civil war that ended the rule of the Thirty in 403 BC.