Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization

18 Plato, the Truth

How Does the Credibility of the Best-Known Chronicler of Atlantis Stand Up?

Frank Joseph

The Egyptian legend of Atlantis also current in folk-tale along the Atlantic seaboard from Gibraltar to the Hebrides and among the Yorubas in West Africa is not to be dismissed as pure fancy.

ROBERT GRAVES, THE GREEK MYTHS

As the only surviving report from antiquity describing Atlantis, Plato’s account is the single most important source of its kind at the disposal of investigators pursuing the lost civilization. His version continues to attract the attention of both skeptics seeking to debunk Atlantis, and true believers who contend that every word is quite literally factual. However, an impartial reading of Plato’s account as it is matter-of-factly presented in his dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, leaves most readers impressed that the events described so plainly might just as well be found in the more easily verified writings of Herodotus or Thucydides.

To be sure, gods, goddesses, and Titans are employed, as one may expect, to stand for the powers of nature, fate, and the remote past, just as they were called upon to do in virtually every other Greek history. As such, the myths were metaphors more than actual religious personages. But this is largely the story of men and events well within the realm of Mediterranean experience, and does not overly tax our imagination.

The story as it stands seems far less fabulous than factual, if only for its straightforward, unadorned rendering. As William Blackett wrote in his book Lost History of the World in 1881, “The case is put very differently by Plato. Divested of the simplicity of story-telling, and free from the concealment of mysticism and fancy, his account of the occurrence takes the form of a great historical event.”

The most common argument against the validity of the existence of Atlantis as presented in the Timaeus and the Critias is that Plato meant them to be understood merely as fictional recapitulations of his ideal state. While he obviously admires its high culture, Atlantis was not a mirror image of the society described in The Republic. There are very significant, nay, fundamental, differences between the two. His authoritarian ideal of a regime ruled by philosopher-kings was a single, race-conscious state, not a far-flung confederation of various peoples under the old system of monarchs constrained from wielding absolute power by a counsel of royal equals.

Even if Atlantis had been tailored after his work The Republic (which it was not), the addition of unnecessary, unphilosophic material (lengthy descriptions of architecture, racetracks, etc.) could not have illustrated any ideas that were not already thoroughly covered in The Republic, and would have therefore been so much superfluous repetition, something unparalleled in any of the man’s writings.

Moreover, Atlantis grows corrupt, the reason for its punishment by the gods, hardly the fate of a society Plato hoped to immortalize as his ideal. His story achieves a more proper perspective when we understand that it was not intended to stand alone as some kind of an anomaly among his other philosophic works, but was rather the first part of an unfinished anthology concerning the major events that most shaped the history of the world until his time. It would have been, by its very nature, an interpretive history, another work on philosophy.

The Timaeus deals with the creation of the world, the nature of man, and the first civilized societies. The Critias, which survives only in draft form, was to be a full account of the Atlanto-Athenian war and its aftermath; its final section was to describe the critical events of the recent past, up to the fourth century B.C.E. So, the Atlantis story was intended as part of a far greater project, but essentially no different in character from the rest of Plato’s writings. More significant, if his account was pure invention, it would not correspond as well as it does with accessible history, nor go on to logically fill so many gaps in our knowledge of pre-Classical antiquity by bridging such a great deal of otherwise disconnected, isolated information.

But Plato’s accuracy as historian could not be verified until our own century. His description of a holy spring that ran through the Acropolis was deemed entirely mythical until the discovery of Mycenaean potsherds from the thirteenth century B.C.E. showing a fountain in the midst of the Acropolis led some researchers to reconsider his account. Then, in 1938, renewed excavations revealed that earthquake activity had closed an underground spring beneath the Acropolis precisely where Plato said it had been. During the 1950s, joint teams of Greek, German, and American archeologists found their reconstruction of fifth-century-B.C.E. Athens matched Plato’s description of the city with unexpected exactitude. We have, therefore, every reason to assume his description of Atlantis is just as accurate. Both his identification of the fountain at the Acropolis and his precise knowledge of Athens reflect favorably on his historical reliability.

There is also some evidence that Plato’s account was not altogether unknown to the Greeks in Classical times before he set it to paper. At the Panathenaea Festival, held every year in Athens, women wore a peplum, a kind of skirt, embroidered with symbolic designs commemorating the goddess of their city. Some of the peplum depictions represented Athena’s victory over the forces of Atlantis, not a particularly remarkable fact in itself, except that the Panathenaea was founded 125 years before Plato’s birth.

The Voyage to Atlantis, rediscovered and tragically lost in modern times, was another earlier source, composed 150 years before Plato’s time by Dionysus of Miletus. A few other tantalizing fragments still exist, singed scraps from the incinerated Great Library of Alexandria, such as a fleeting reference to the second-century Roman writer Elianus, whose Historia Naturalis described how the rulers of Atlantis dressed to demonstrate their descent from Poseidon. The story was given special credence by another philosopher, Proklos, who told how Krantor, an early follower of Plato, seeking to validate the legend of Atlantis, in 260 B.C.E. personally journeyed to the Egyptian temple at Sais. There he discovered the original tablets, which confirmed the account. Translated, they paralleled Plato’s narrative detail for detail.

Krantor was a prominent scholar at the Great Library of Alexandria, the center of Classical learning, where the story of Atlantis was generally regarded as a credible episode in history by the leading minds of the age, including the chief chronicler of the Roman Empire, Strabo. Long before its destruction, the Great Library apparently contained a good deal of supportive materials that almost universally convinced its researchers that Plato had described an actual city in the “outer ocean.”

It was only after the success of the Christian revolution that the facts concerning Atlantis, like most of “pagan” civilization, were lost. The story was condemned as heresy because it was not found in the Bible and because it supposedly predated God’s creation of the world in 5508 B.C.E., a date arrived at by the curious chronology of Christian theologians.

The subject remained closed until the discovery of America, when so many mysterious parallels between the New World and the Old reminded scholars of Plato’s Atlantic empire. Among the first was a sixteenth-century explorer and cartographer, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, who was struck by descriptions of an “opposite continent” (America) in the Timaeus. But the Alexandria of Classical antiquity was, after all, only seventy-five miles from Sais, and any investigator who wished to verify the details of Plato’s account did not have to travel far to read the tablets at the Temple of Neith.

According to the Roman historian Marcelinus (330–395 C.E.), scholars at the Great Library knew of a geologic convulsion that “suddenly, by a violent motion, opened up huge mouths and so swallowed up portions of the Earth, as in the Atlantic sea, on the coast of Europe, a large island was swallowed up.” The historiographer Theopompus believed Plato’s story, as did the famous naturalist Pliny the Elder. The original source materials they once possessed, lost since the collapse of Classical civilization, and the fragmentary evidence remaining to us argue consistently on behalf of Plato’s credibility.

As Zadenk Kukal, a modern critic of the dialogues, has written, “It is probable that even if Plato had not written a single line about Atlantis, all the archeological, ethnographic, and linguistic mysteries that could not be explained would lead to some primeval civilization located somewhere between the cultures of the Old and New Worlds.”

R. Catesby Taliaferro writes in the foreword to the Thomas Taylor translation of the Timaeus and the Critias, “It appears to me to be at least as well attested as any other narration in any ancient historian. Indeed, he [Plato], who proclaims that ‘truth is the source of every good both to gods and men,’ and the whole of whose works consist in detecting error and exploring certainty, can never be supposed to have willfully deceived mankind by publishing an extravagant romance as matter of fact, with all the precision of historical detail.” Plutarch, the great Greek biographer of the first century C.E., wrote in his Life of Solon that the Greek legislator cited in Plato’s story “had undertaken to put into verse this great history of Atlantis, which had been told to him by the wise men of Sais.”

The city itself played an important role in the Atlantis epic. It was one of the oldest major settlements in Egypt and served as the first capital of the Lower Nile after the unification, which was around 3100 B.C.E.—in other words, at very start of dynastic, historic Egypt. As an indication of its and the Atlantean tablets’ antiquity, the Temple of Neith—where they were enshrined, was established by Pharaoh Hor-aha, the first dynastic king of a united Egypt.

Even Sonchis, the obscure character who told the story to Solon, was a historical figure whose very name contributes to the authenticity of the legend. Sonchis is a Greek derivation of the Egyptian god Suchos, known in his Nile homeland as Sebek. Sebek was a water deity who, appropriately enough, worshiped at Sais—where the Atlantis report was recorded—with his mother, Neith. It was in her temple, Plato wrote, that the tablets were preserved.

Neith was one of the very oldest of predynastic figures, the personification of the Waters of Chaos from which the Primal Mound, the First Land, arose. She was known as the keeper of the most ancient histories of both gods and men. The Minoan Mother Earth goddess and the Greek Athena are later manifestations of Neith. She fell into almost complete neglect after the passing of the Old Kingdom. But the First Birth-Giver experienced a popular revival during the Saite Period of the twenty-sixth dynasty, when her temple and its oldest records were restored—precisely the time Plato said Solon visited Egypt. Herodotus wrote that Pharaoh Ahmose had just finished refurbishing the Temple of Neith when Solon arrived in Sais.

It is difficult to believe that Plato went to such lengths of mythic and historic detail to create a mere fable. It is no less unlikely that he suspected any connections among the priest Sonchis; the god Sebek; his mother, the goddess Neith; and their intimate relation to the story of Atlantis recorded so appropriately and unearthed in so timely a fashion at Sais.

Another point worth noting: Krantor said the story was inscribed on tablets mounted on a pillar in the Temple of Neith, while the Critias tells that the royal proclamations in Atlantis were inscribed on tablets posted to a column in the Temple of Poseidon: The one seems to reflect and memorialize the other.

There are many unquestionably authentic touches throughout the narrative. For example, the Critias tells us that each of the wealthy leaders in Atlantean society was required to provide for the national armaments, including “four sailors to make up a compliment of twelve ships.” Although it fell out of use in Plato’s more “democratic” times, in Periclean days and for some centuries before, wealthy men known as Trierarchoi each had to undertake the funding of a warship, complete with crew and weapons.

Of course, many more of those fragments still existed, even in Classical times, when the story was generally accepted as a historical event. One of those believers was the geographer Poseidonous of Rhodes (130 to 50 B.C.E.), who conducted his studies at Cadiz—the Gades in the Critias—in the Atlantean kingdom of Gadeiros. Strabo wrote of him, “[H]e did well in citing the opinion of Plato that the tradition concerning the island of Atlantis might be received as something more than fiction.” Modern critics are less generous. They continue to demean the story as nothing more than a fabulous allegory intended to dramatize principles already laid out in The Republic, with no basis in actual history except perhaps for a sketchy reference to Minoan Crete.

In 1956, however, Albert Rivand, professor of classical history at the Sorbonne, declared that both the Timaeus and the Critias embodied ancient, historic traditions, and contained results of the latest contemporary research carried out in Plato’s day. As Ivan Lissner wrote, “That a distinguished French scholar who had spent decades studying the Platonic texts should reach this conclusion is most significant, because it invests the geographical and ontological allusions in the two books with greater weight.”

Standing alone, Plato’s account is simple enough. But background information on the principles in the narrative should raise it above the level of a dry report and lend the reader a feeling of living history.

More famous in his day than the author of the Timaeus and the Critias was their chief character, Solon, one of the Seven Sages, who “grew old ever learning new things” and whose name became synonymous for a wise lawgiver. Timaeus, born in Locris, in southern Italy, was an explorer and Pythagorean astronomer. Critias the Younger was an orator, statesman, poet, philosopher, and one of the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants. He was also a first cousin of Plato’s mother. A vigorous man, he died on the battlefield at Aegospotamis, in the Piraeus, in 403 B.C.E. as he approached his ninetieth birthday.

Solon’s unfinished manuscript was passed on to his brother Dropides, the great-grandfather of Critias, and through succeeding generations it became something of a family heirloom. Though these leading characters were real enough flesh-and-blood figures who related the tale with great accuracy (as mentioned above, Krantor verified Plato’s version by comparing it with the original Egyptian tablets), the Timaeus and the Critias are not stenographic records of word-for-word conversations, but rather speeches organized to illustrate ideas by ordering arguments into the most logically convincing presentation, a standard exercise in the Classical schools of high rhetoric. So when Critias says he hopes he has not forgotten all the details of the Atlantis story, the integrity of the whole narrative does not hang by the memory of an old man. Instead, Plato uses a standard rhetorical device to present his description.

More likely than not, he had Solon’s unfinished manuscript in front of him as he wrote out the speeches. He hints as much when he has Critias say, “My great-grandfather, Dropides, had the original writing, which is still in my possession.” It is even possible Plato saw the original tablets at the Temple of Neith, as many scholars are sure he traveled to Egypt himself on at least one occasion. His narrative gains additional credence in the high standing of the men involved. No fictional improvisations, their lives were linked to the preservation of the account.

The Critias also differs from the rest of Plato’s work, not only because of its incompleteness, but also, unlike in the other dialogues, Socrates does not interrupt the narrative with questions, a sign, judging from his behavior in The Republic, of agreement. Of course, he may have been saving his questions for later, but that would not have been like him. We, however, should continue to question the story for more answers.