Hermocrates (dialogue)
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Hermocrates is a hypothetic dialogue, assumed to be the third part of Plato's late trilogy along with Timaeus and Critias. Since Plato never completed the Critias for an unknown reason, it is quite certain that he never began writing the Hermocrates. In any case, the persons that would have appeared are very likely be the same as in Timaeus and Critias, though the unnamed stranger mentioned at the beginning of the Timaeus might have unveiled his identity.
Hermocrates, the name giver of this dialogue, had only a small share of the conversation in the previous dialogues. Since Critias recounted the story of the ideal state in ancient Athens of nine thousand years ago — and why it was able to repel the invasion from the imperialist naval power Atlantis — by referring on prehistoric accounts via Solon and the Egyptians, it might have been Hermocrates' task to tell how the imperialist naval power that Athens of Plato's lifetime had turned into had suffer a bitter defeat in the Sicilian expedition against Syracuse and eventually in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta — since he was a Syracusan strategos during the time of the Sicilian expedition.
[edit] Trivia
- In the 1992 LucasArts video game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis one has to find the Hermocrates in order to find out more details about Atlantis.
[edit] References
- Eberz, J. (1910). "Die Bestimmung der von Platon entworfenen Trilogie Timaios, Kritias, Hermokrates". Philologus 69: 40-50.
- Forsyth, Phyllis Young (1980). Atlantis. The making of myth. Montréal: McGill-Queens Univ. Press. ISBN 0-7099-1000-2.
