Plato's Atlantic War
“Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
-- George Santayana
The Egyptian Priest Speaks
“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 hoary with age…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…[which] performed the noblest deeds and…[had] the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven.”
Solon marveled at his words, and earnestly requested the priest to inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens. “You are welcome to hear about them, Solon,” said the priest, “For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia…[and that] subjected the parts of Libya within the straits 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 Pillars of Hercules.”
These are the words of the Egyptian priest Sonchis of Sais in the Nile Delta, speaking to Plato’s distant relative, the former and respected Elder Statesman and Archon of Athens Solon. The statesman lay astounded by the priest’s account and upon hearing of former unknown ancient predecessors at the Athenian Acropolis, still more fascinated by the cities’ previous actions in some bygone age long forgotten by the young Athenian “children” that he suddenly realized he was one.
Can there be any truth in such tales? Despite the span of over a century of investigations by both academics and laymen alike, the mystery of Atlantis continues to remain elusive and complex.
Atlantis Theories
One of the most widely sought solutions to Plato’s mythical city of Atlantis is the Minoan hypothesis. Unwilling to accept the extreme antiquity of the philosopher’s tale, academics in the 1970’s updated the story to the relatively more recent volcanic destruction of the island of Thera c. 1450 BC in the Aegean. These theories entirely relied on superficial cosmetic correlates, and a single disaster event, which in no way accounts for the “vast” war that Plato describes in the narrative. The Minoans universally are recognized by scholars to have been a remarkably peaceful people, with almost no weapons.
Furthermore, the Thera hypothesis originally formulated within the early days of archaeology, a time many archaeologists remained unaware of other certain realities now more recently coming to light. Scientists did not yet know of Aegean Paleolithic seafarers or the sheer magnitude of the Greek coastal submergence due to postglacial melting or the extent of the spread of mid-to-late ninth millennium arrowheads in Europe and the Near East. Or in addition, the date Jericho’s massive late ninth millennium fortification walls rose up, or indeed the depth and complexity of Europe’s artistic Magdalenian culture, whose location and period of influence closely parallel the character and boundaries of Plato’s far and wide Atlantic empire.
That Plato would jeopardize the reputation of himself and his academy by indulging in an exercise of pure fancy seems highly unlikely. Socrates, that renowned pillar of Greek wisdom and logic of Athens’ Golden Age even attested to the reality of Plato’s Atlantic story, a philosopher present at the telling of the tale saying that the story indeed is, “not fiction but true history.”
Millions of Atlantis quest seekers inspired by the American congressman Ignatius Donnelly’s imaginative 19th century book, “Atlantis: the Antedeluvian World”, further pushed Plato’s Timaeus account onto the fringes of respectable prehistory by reinventing the Philosopher’s original vision, injecting the narrative with new outlandish high-tech elements. Thus, the renowned philosopher’s story quickly descended into relative obscurity, and the experts prescribed a new now loaded term called the “lunatic fringe” to dismiss all other proposals by sincere Atlantis seekers to the negligible peripheries of “crazy history” existing on a level beneath that of tenants and “keepers” of the valid unquestionable “truth”.
And yet the pursuit of Atlantis was not always seen in such a negative light. The advent of the post-modern industrial boom of the 1950’s and 60’s fostered a rather fascistic political environment, including the infamous soviet Red scare, and a markedly elitest and “clubish” attitude among the West’s upper institutions, the pursuit of Atlantis and the forbidden “A” word thus being assigned out to the uncultured and lowly.
