Plato, Timaeus 20e · 20e
Solon, Dropides and old Critias
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Critias — Σόλων ποτʼ ἔφη. ἦν μὲν οὖν οἰκεῖος καὶ σφόδρα φίλος ἡμῖν Δρωπίδου τοῦ προπάππου, καθάπερ λέγει πολλαχοῦ καὶ αὐτὸς ἐν τῇ ποιήσει· πρὸς δὲ Κριτίαν τὸν ἡμέτερον πάππον εἶπεν, ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευεν αὖ πρὸς ἡμᾶς ὁ γέρων, ὅτι μεγάλα καὶ θαυμαστὰ τῆσδʼ εἴη παλαιὰ ἔργα τῆς πόλεως ὑπὸ χρόνου καὶ φθορᾶς ἀνθρώπων ἠφανισμένα, πάντων δὲ ἓν μέγιστον,
Solon once said so. Now Solon was a kinsman and a very close friend of our great-grandfather Dropides, as he says himself in many places in his poetry. And he told our grandfather Critias, as the old man in turn used to recall to us, that great and wonderful ancient deeds of this city had been wiped out by time and by the destruction of men, and of them all one was greatest,
Word by word
The setting
Critias gives the chain by which the story reached him: Solon was a close friend of his great-grandfather Dropides, and his grandfather Critias used to repeat what he had been told.
A note on this passage
The sentence about Solon sets out the first links of a chain. Solon was oikeios kai sphodra philos, a relative and a very close friend, of Dropides, the propappos, great-grandfather, of the speaker, and Critias adds that Solon says so himself pollachou, in many places, in his poiēsis, his poetry. The words hēmin and hēmeteron both mean "our" here, so the speaker is Critias the younger, speaking of his own family.
The next link is pros Kritian ton hēmeteron pappon, "to Critias our grandfather," and the verb apemnēmoneuen tells how the old man kept recounting it. It is an imperfect, a repeated telling, and apomnēmoneuō is the verb for recalling something from memory. What was recounted is that great and marvellous ancient deeds of the city had been ēphanismena, made invisible, by chronos and phthora anthrōpōn, time and the destruction of men.
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