<<What is "outstanding" on the story of Atlantis is for people to stop
treating this fairy story as if it preserved a genuine tradition. Plato
creates myths more readily than Hans Christian Anderson.>>
Paul, you must be a classicist. They all think this of the Atlantis
story, probably incited by Plato himself, who says in the previous
dialogue, _Republic_, that noble lies should be told to the citizens
of the ideal city, and invents the story of the Cave to illustrate his
ontology.
A mathematician, however, might well conclude that, as in division by
zero, if you believe that you'll believe anything, including that
Socrates never said anything like the _Apology_ at his trial, or indeed
that there was never a Socrates at all, much less a Plato, and that
platonic idealism is a fairy tale or an imposture. This carries
socratic irony and platonic playfulness too far for my taste.
A historian should weigh the evidence and come to a more mixed and more
tentative conclusion. Unlike the Cave, the story of Atlantis is put in
the mouth of Critias, whom the historical Plato knew as a friend, and
is presented as coming from a chain of older relatives (whom Critias
names) and a manuscript by Solon (which Critias asserts as having
existed), which Solon wrote after he had heard the story from a priest
in Egypt. Though Plato’s dialogue gives the story several moral points,
a great many of its details (including a bull sacrifice) have nothing to
do with those points. The idea of the archaeologist Marinatos that the
story is a nine-century old Egyptian memory of Minoan civilization and
the quadramillennial catastrophe of Thera's eruption, distorted by
transmission and translation, is hardly implausible, and certainly worth
investigating.
Works for me.
-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn