"Critias, Socrates’ student, was the Hitler of the ancient Greek world. He and his friends established a regime based on atheistic biologism so to speak; on “Sparta radicalized,” a eugenic antinomian dictatorship. He was maybe what Hitler’s most hysterical detractors claim of him today. Critias killed more Athenians in his short rule than died in the decades of the war with Sparta. He expelled almost everyone from the city, and burned the docks, which were the perceived source of democratic power. He wasted all the priests of Eleusis for being tedious religious moralists. He saw the purpose of the Spartan constitution as the creation of one “supreme biological specimen,” and Critias sought to found a state based on such ideas. He and his friends were overthrown quite quickly. Against this catastrophe, carried out in the name of philosophy and nature (of biology) there was a predictable reaction. Socrates’ other students, most of them at least, as well as Isocrates and others, went out of their way to distance themselves from Critias and what he was perceived to stand for: “We are not like that guy. We are good boys. Philosophy isn’t actually about that. We’re doing something different. We’re socially responsible good guys.” Does this sound familiar?
