That because Aristotle said the earth was flat, it must be. To presume that because Plato told the story it must be based on fact is more naive than the medieval presumption The language of myth came naturally to Plato, but he had no interest in the sort of hardheaded history his elder contemporary Thucydides practiced. The chariot of the soul in the ''Phaedrus.'' There is truth of a sort in all these myths, often laced with irony, but they would lead no one seriously to search for a race of fossilized Siamese twins or to do CAT scansįor chariot-shaped patterns in the brain. For example: in the ''Symposium,'' the Siamese twins who were the original form of human beings, or

Had they instead read more Plato, they would have learned that Atlantisīelongs to the category of Platonic myth - tales the philosopher told to convey truths his logic could not contain. On the ruins of such Platonic castles in the air, the modern Atlanteans have sited their imaginary city and then proceeded to search for it in geological and archeological records. In the ''Iliad'' or, more recently, oral poems on Crete that distort a 1944 commando raid by British forces into the glorious exploit of a local bandit.

If Solon did hear and write down the story, it would still derive from oral tradition, a notoriously fickle medium - as witness the exaggeration of the real Troy's splendors

The reach of even the ancient and reliable Egyptian records. The ascription of the Atlantis story to Solon, and beyond Solon to the Egyptians, is a typical Platonic ploy of burying a truth within a set of narrative Chinese boxes and then having it dispensed by unimpeachable guardians. They became ugly, which in Greek is to say ''base,'' and Zeus decided to- presumably to destroy them, but here the dialogue breaks off. Alas, the portion of divinity in the Atlanteans grew faint through breeding Athens was the ideal agricultural state, and far more fertile than in later reality.Ītlantis flourished particularly in mining and complex town and palace planning - described at the loving length Hitler might have expended on his opera houses. Text survives and that he himself possesses it: both states were founded by gods and settled by their descendants, who lived in a kind of Golden Age. The fragmentary dialogue ''Critias'' was designed as a sequel to Plato's utopian ''Republic'' and consequently examines the politically opposite states of Athens and Atlantis. Later, earthquake and flood destroyed Atlantis in a day and a night, and it vanished under the sea. When its mighty kings attempted to extend their empire over the whole Mediterranean, the city of Athens led the opposition that defeated The priests said that 9,000 years before (although their records go back only 8,000 years), an island calledĪtlantis, larger than Libya and Asia put together, lay outside the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar). His written version of it perished, but the story was passed down by oral tradition. On his travels from some Egyptian priests.

In ''Timaeus,'' Critias tells Socrates a story he ascribes to Solon, the Athenian wise man and a relative of his great-grandfather Solon heard it in which the character Critias describes the lost world. Ramage, who contributed his effort to their number - all got the bee in their bonnet from a single source, a pair of Platonic dialogues from the early fourthĬentury B.C. The Atlantis story partakes of at least three generic myths: the Golden Age, an idealized time and place where mankind lived in harmony and ease a decline from the Golden Age into corruption and strife (theĪncient world cottoning more to the notion of degeneration than improvement) and cataclysm by fire or flood, the Weather Channel gone haywire.Īs Ellis points out, the 2,000 or so books written about Atlantis - by the estimate of one E. In ''Imagining Atlantis'' Richard Ellis has written an entertaining, thorough yet readable account of the geological and archeological evidence that may have contributed to this peculiar myth, and of the lunatic fringe that has made He last time I was in Atlantis, the waiter sneered at my choice of wine, a cheap local vintage from the barrel, far tastier than the pricey bottles he had to offer.Īctually, it was the bar of the Hotel Atlantis on Santorini, almost 30 years ago, and the rush to capitalize on the popular identification of the legendary lost continent with this Greek island -what remained of it after a great volcanicĮruption three and a half thousand years ago - had just begun. Invented by Plato to further an argument, the story of Atlantis has attracted true believers down the ages.

Elysian exploit source