01.23
It is important to emphasise that Plato’s intentions, in recounting the Atlantis legend, were philosophical rather than historical. Many commentators fail to point out that in the Dialogues Plato is concerned with the wisdom, noble institutions and influence of Athens rather than Atlantis.
The doomed Atlanteans are a convenient contrast to the ancestors of Solon and Plato himself. These Athenians of old were the people whom Plato calls ‘the upright men’, who created something like the ideal state the philosopher projects in his Republic. The story of the corruption of Atlantis is a backcloth against which the virtues of this philosophical state stand out more clearly.
Some classical writers, however, did not take Plato’s parable very seriously. His pupil Aristotle held that it was no more than a poetic fiction, invented to enhance the narrative, and that Plato had created Atlantis simply in order to sink it conveniently at the end of the story. Many other writers adopted the same attitude.
But other scholars had doubts. Crantor, who lived some time around 300 BC and was the first commentator on Plato’s works, maintained that the account of Atlantis was accurate in every detail. It is believed that Crantor even went to Egypt to check Solon’s sources at first hand. A few centuries later the Stoic philosopher and scholar Posidonius (c. 135-50 BC) cited Plato’s belief that the story was not a pure invention.
Truth or fiction? It is an argument that has raged for some 23 centuries, that has stimulated the most extravagant fantasies and given birth to numerous and elaborate pseudo-sciences. Atlantis has become the happy hunting ground for the promoters of bogus religions, for occultists and black magicians, for spiritualists, clairvoyants and science-fiction writers. It has also engaged the attention of serious archaeologists.
What is the eternal fascination of Atlantis, the lost continent? It is the stuff of many myths: an idyllic land lying to the west, in the path of the setting sun … the Garden of the Hesperides where the apple trees bore golden fruit … the Elysian fields … the land of the Hyperboreans – all these were located in the vast Western Sea that was thought to have swallowed Atlantis.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the legendary Happy Islands, the Islands of the Blessed and St Brendan’s Island were similarly situated. When geography is a product of the imagination, the possibilities are boundless and the pre-modern mind filled the oceans with fabulous islands, lands of milk and honey where the living and the dead were reunited in eternal bliss.
History and legend contain many accounts of islands that were swallowed by the sea – King Arthur’s mysterious Isle of Avalon is an example. And the idea is not entirely fanciful. Volcanic islands which rise out of the sea and then disappear do genuinely occur in the Atlantic, particularly in the Azores and near Iceland.
Plato is clear that Atlantis was in the Atlantic, and a number of the more serious investigators have searched for it there, believing that there was once a vast continent in the middle of the ocean. According to this theory, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, the Canaries and Madeira were the mountain peaks of Atlantis and are all that remain visible of a lost continent.
Read about the obsession with Atlantis in modern times, and the birth of Atlantology »