LP0069 - Timaeus & Atlantis - The Forgotten Enemy, from Plato's Timaeus

Legendary Passages #0069 - Timaeus & Atlantis -
The Forgotten Enemy, from Plato's Timaeus.

The next six episodes focus on Atlantis. This passage is an
overview of the story, focusing on the forgotten history of Athens and
their triumph over the Atlanteans.

This story was told by an Egyptian priest to Solon, who told
Critias, who told his grandson (also named Critias), who told Socrates
and was recorded by Plato.

Solon tries to impress the Egyptian priest by recounting their
oldest stories of the flood of Deucalion and their earliest genealogies.
The priest dismisses them as children's tales, for there have been many
floods and disasters, and the written word and the greek histories lost
several times over.

Ancient Athens was founded nine thousand years before. Their
greatest act was the defeat of Atlantis, which had conquered Europe and
Africa from beyond the Mediterranean. Athens led the Greeks and their
allies in losing war against Atlantis. Yet she prevailed, and liberated
the enslaved and the subjugated. But then disaster struck and the brave
men of Athens perished, and the island of Atlantis sank beneath the
waves.

http://sacred-texts.com/cla/plato/timaeus.htm

Timaeus & Atlantis,
a Legendary Passage,
from Plato's Timaeus,
trans. by Benjamin Jowett.

Crit. Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange,
is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest
of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my
great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of
his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfather, who
remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great
and marvellous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into
oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one
in particular, greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse.
It will be a fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of
praise true and worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival.

Soc. Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of the
Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon, to be
not a mere legend, but an actual fact?

Crit. I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an
aged man; for Critias, at the time of telling it, was as he said,
nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten. Now the day was that
day of the Apaturia which is called the Registration of Youth, at
which, according to custom, our parents gave prizes for recitations,
and the poems of several poets were recited by us boys, and many of us
sang the poems of Solon, which at that time had not gone out of
fashion. One of our tribe, either because he thought so or to please
Critias, said that in his judgment Solon was not only the wisest of
men, but also the noblest of poets. The old man, as I very well
remember, brightened up at hearing this and said, smiling: Yes,
Amynander, if Solon had only, like other poets, made poetry the
business of his life, and had completed the tale which he brought with
him from Egypt, and had not been compelled, by reason of the
factions and troubles which he found stirring in his own country
when he came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he
would have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet.

And what was the tale about, Critias? said Amynander.

About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and
which ought to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of
time and the destruction of the actors, it has not come down to us.

Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from
whom Solon heard this veritable tradition.

He replied:-In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the
river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the
district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called
Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have
a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith,
and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene;
they are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some
way related to them. To this city came Solon, and was received there
with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in
such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither
he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the
times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of
antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our
part of the world- about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man,"
and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion
and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and
reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events
of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who
was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are
never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.
Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied,
that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down
among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with
age.

And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again,
many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest
have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other
lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which
even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of
Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he
was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all
that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt.
Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of
the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great
conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long
intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in
dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who
dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile,
who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When,
on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water,
the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell
on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are
carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then
nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the
fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which
reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient.

The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of
summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater,
sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened either in your
country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed-if
there were any actions noble or great or in any other way
remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old, and are
preserved in our temples. Whereas just when you and other nations
are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites
of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven,
like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you
who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin
all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in
ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those
genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they
are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you
remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in
the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land
the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and
your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them
which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many
generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no
written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge
of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in
every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed
the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of
which tradition tells, under the face of heaven.

Solon marvelled at his words, and earnestly requested the
priests to inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens.
You are welcome to hear about them, Solon, said the priest, both for
your own sake and for that of your city, and above all, for the sake of
the goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator of both
our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before ours,
receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and
afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded
in our sacred registers to be eight thousand years old. As touching
your citizens of nine thousand years ago, I will briefly inform you of
their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of
the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred
registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you
will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they
were in the olden time. In the first place, there is the caste of
priests, which is separated from all the others; next, there are the
artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not
intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of hunters,
as well as that of husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the
warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other classes, and are
commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to military pursuits;
moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style
of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in
your part of the world first to you. Then as to wisdom, do you observe
how our law from the very first made a study of the whole order of
things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which gives health,
out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for human life,
and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this
order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when
establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you
were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons
in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess,
who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all
settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest
herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still
better ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the
children and disciples of the gods.

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in
our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and
valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked
made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to
which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the
Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and
there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by
you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya
and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from
these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which
surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of
Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other
is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a
boundless continent.

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful
empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over
parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had
subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as
Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into
one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and
the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country
shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind.
She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of
the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to
stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she
defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those
who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us
who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent
earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all
your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis
in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the
sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal
of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

http://sacred-texts.com/cla/plato/timaeus.htm