Ατλαντις
In two of his Dialogues Plato tells that Solon, in the course of his travels in Egypt, questioned the priests and that one of them, who lived at Saïs in the Nile delta, told him of very ancient traditions which related to a war waged in the distant past by Athens against the people of Atlantis. This story which starts in the Timaeus is resumed and elaborated in the fragment we possess of the Critias. The people of Atlantis, according to the priest, used to live on an island which lay beyond the pillars of Heracles, where the Mediterranean ended and Ocean began. When the gods were sharing out the earth, Athens fell to Athena and Hephaestus, but Atlantis became the kingdom of Poseidon. In Atlantis lived Clito, a girl who had lost both her parents, Evenor and Leucippe. Poseidon fell in love with her. Clito lived on a mountain in the middle of the island and around her dwelling Poseidon raised a barrier consisting of walls and moats full of water, and there he lived with her for a long time. They had five pairs of twin sons, the eldest son of all being called Atlas, to whom Poseidon gave supremacy. He divided the whole island into ten areas. Atlas reigned on the mountain in the centre and it was from there that we weilded his power.
The island of Atlantis was extremely rich both in vegetaion and mineral wealth. There were not only many deposits of gold, copper, iron and other metals but also orichalc, a metal which blazed like fire. The kings of Atlantis built magnificent cities with great numbers of vaults, bridges, canals and tortuous passages, for ease of both defence and trade. In each of the ten districts there reigned the descendants of the ten original kings, the sons of Poseidon and Clito, all ruled over by the descendant of Atlas. Each year they all met in the capital for a special ceremony, during which they gave themselves over to a ritual bull-hunt and joined together in drinking the blood of the bull which they had slaughtered. Then they all passed judgement on each other, clad in flowering gowns of dark blue in the middle of the night seated among the enbers still hot from the sacrifice, after which all the lamps were put out. At this point the Dialogue ends.
These men of Atlantis had tried to conquer the world, but they were defeated by the Athenians nine thousand years before the time of Plato. According to a considerably different tradition, recorded by Diodorus Siculus, the men of Atlantis were neighbours of the Libyans and had been attacked by the Amazons (see Myrina), but in Plato's belief, the men of Atlantis and their island had disappeared for ever, submerged by a disastrous flood.
{E2 DICTIONARY OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY}
Table of Sources:
- Plato, Timaeus 21a ff.; Critias 108e ff.
- Proclus, Comm. in Tim. 21a ff.
- Strabo 2, 3, 6, p. 102
- Hdt. 4, 184
- Diod. Sic. 3, 54ff.