Time,— Whence, too, the meteor's glowing mass doth speed And liquid rain descends upon the earth. Such were the fears wherewith he hedged men round, And so to God he gave a fitting home, By this his speech, and in a fitting place, And thus extinguished lawlessness by laws. And, after proceeding a little further, he adds— Thus first did some man, as I deem, persuade Men to suppose the race of Gods exists.. Authorship The authorship of the fragment, which survives in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, is vigorously debated. Modern classical scholarship accepted the attribution to Critias on the basis of a hypothesis first advanced by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in 1875, and thereafter Hermann Diels, Johann August Nauck, and Bruno Snell, endorsed this ascription for which there is but one source in antiquity. In 1977, Albrecht Dihle in a major paper challenged this ascription and assigned the work to Euripides, arguing that the fragment comes from the latter's satyr play of this name, produced in 415 BCE. Since Dihle published his article, the authorship of the fragment has divided modern scholars. Scholars that advocate Euripidean authorship include Charles H. Kahn, Ruth Scodel, Martin Ostwald, Jan Bremmer and Harvey Yunis. However, Critias authorship was argued by Walter Burkert, and other scholars that advocate for the same authorship include Dana Sutton, Marek Winiarczyk, Malcolm Davies, Dirk Obbink, Tim Whitmarsh and Martin Cropp. One source in antiquity ascribed the passage to Critias, one of the thirty oligarchs who ruled Athens in the immediate aftermath of the city-state's defeat in the Peloponesian War: two attribute it, or lines in it, to Euripides. Sextus Empiricus assigned these verses to Critias without however indicating which of his works. Both the Stoic logician Chrysippus and the doxographer Aëtius cited Euripides as the author, specifying that it was taken from that author's lost play Sisyphus. In modern times, Wilamowitz came down strongly for the view that it was written by Critias, a disciple of Socrates, and dated it, as forming the coda of a tetralogy, following three tragedies by Critias -Peirithous, Rhadumunthus and Tennes -, which he argued was written sometime after his return from exile in 411. The view that it was written by Euripides frequently identifies it as belonging to the Sisyphus, the satyr play capping his 415 trilogy: Alexandros, Palamedes and The Trojan Women, though Jan N. Bremmer suggests another lost play by