Timaeus
one of the Dialogues of Plato
(actually, this is only an excerpt which pertains to Atlantis)
Critias. 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 hace 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.
Socrates. 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 wre 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 anyting worth mentioning about 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 descendents, 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
Phaëthon, 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 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 sunner sun 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, and 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 8000 years old. As touching your citizens of 9000 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 themsleves. 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 like 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 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, endeavored 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.
I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some
mysterious coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak. And so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well provided.
That about wraps it up for the mentioning of
Atlantis and
the Flood and all that, so I will stop here.
Go see
Critias, which is the following dialogue of
Plato, for the rest of the Atlantis narrative.