It is evident that the Atlantis tale must be treated either as mainly historical, with presumably some distortions and exaggerations, or as fiction necessarily based in some measure (like all else of its kind) on living or antiquated facts. Certainly no one will go the length of accepting it as wholly true as it stands. But, even eliminating all reference to the god Poseidon and his plentiful demigod progeny, we are left with divers essential features which credulity can hardly swallow. Atlantis is too obviously an earlier and equally colossal Persia, western instead of eastern, overrunning the Mediterranean until checked by the intrepid stand of the great Athenian republic. The supreme authentic glory of Athens was the overthrow of Xerxes and his generals. Had this been otherwise we must believe that we should not have heard of the baffled invasion by Atlantis. Again, we are asked to accept Athens, contrary to all other information, as a dominant military state more than 9,500 years before Christ, when presumably its people, if existent, were exceedingly primitive and unformidable. Moreover, the sudden submergence of so vast a region as the imagined Atlantis would be an event without parallel in human annals, besides being pretty certain to leave marks on the rest of the world which could be recognized even now.
The hypothesis of fiction seems reasonably well established. We must remember that Plato did not habitually confine himself to bare facts. His favorite method of exposition was by reporting alleged dialogues between Socrates and various persons—dialogues which no one could have remembered accurately in their entirety. It is recognized that in arrangement, characters, and utterance he has contrived to convey his own theories and conceptions as well as those of his revered teacher and leader, so that it is often impossible to say whether we should credit certain views or statements mainly to Plato or to Socrates. Possessed by his meditations, he would even present as an instructive example and incitement a fancied picture of an elaborate system of social and political organization, chiefly the product of his own brain. He did this in the “Republic” and apparently had planned a larger partly parallel work of the kind in the triology of which the “Timaeus” and the fragmentary “Critias” are the first part and the unfinished second. A writer (Lewis Campbell) in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, article “Plato,” states the case very clearly.
What should have followed this [the Timaeus], but is only commenced in the fragment of the Critias, would have been the story, not of a fall, but of the triumph of reason in humanity.... Not only the Timaeus, but the unfinished whole of which it forms the introduction, is professedly an imaginative creation. For the legend of prehistoric Athens and of Atlantis, whereof Critias was to relate what belonged to internal policy and Hermocrates the conduct of the war, would have been no other than a prose poem, a “mythological lie,” composed in the spirit of the Republic, and in the form of a fictitious narrative.[13]
Jowett takes substantially the same view in his introduction to the “Critias,” indicating surprise at the innocent, literal, matter-of-fact way in which the former existence and destruction of great Atlantis have generally been accepted as sober declarations of fact and accounted for in divers fashions accordingly. Nor is this estimate of the Atlantis tale as primarily a romance of enlightenment and uplifting a merely modern theory. Plutarch, in a passage quoted by Schuller, lays more stress on Plato’s tendency to adorn the subject, treating Atlantis as a delightful spot in some fair field unoccupied, than on ennobling imagination, and avers the described magnificence to be “such as no other story, fable, or poem ever had.”[14] But this, whether wholly adequate or no, surely emphasizes the recognition of romance. Plutarch adds a word of regret that Plato began the “delightful” story late in life and died before the work was completed. The precise motive of the fiction is only of minor importance to our present inquiry. It seems hardly possible that the development of the composition in the remaining two parts of the trilogy could have given it a more authentic historical cast. As the matter stands Atlantis is rather succinctly reported in the “Timaeus,” more fully and with mythological and architectural adornments in the later “Critias” till it breaks off in the middle of a sentence; but the two accounts are consistent. It seems a clear case of evolution suddenly arrested but allowing us fairly to infer the character of the whole from the parts that remain.
If there were any corroboration of the tale, it would count on the historical side; but it seems to be agreed that Greek literature and art before Plato do not supply this in any unequivocal and reliable form. Certain hints or contributory items will be dealt with below, but they do not affect the character of the story as a whole nor tend to establish the reality of its main features.
We do not need to ascribe to Plato all the fancy and invention in the story. The romancing may have been done in part by the priests of Sais or by Solon or by Dropides or by Critias; or possibly all these may have contributed successive strata of fancy, crowned by Plato. Practically we have to treat the tale as beginning with him. Its circumstantiality and air of realism have sometimes been taken as credentials of accuracy; but they are not beyond the ordinary skill of a man of letters, and Plato was much more than equal to the task.
Significant Passages from the Tale
The Atlantis narrative has been so often translated and copied, at least as to its more significant parts, that one hesitates to quote again; but there are certain items to which attention should be drawn, and brief extracts are the best means of effecting this. The following passages are from the Smithsonian translation of Termier’s remarkable paper on Atlantis reproduced by that institution. It differs verbally from the translation by Dr. Jowett but not in the broader features. Of the two quotations the first is from the “Critias.” It is briefer than the other, though forming part of a more elaborate and extended account of the island. Taking his appointed part in the dialogue, Critias says:
According to the Egyptian tradition a common war arose 9,000 years ago between the nations on this side of the Pillars of Hercules and the nations coming from beyond. On one side it was Athens; on the other the Kings of Atlantis. We have already said that this island was larger than Asia and Africa, but that it became submerged following an earthquake and that its place is no longer met with except as a sand bar which stops navigators and renders the sea impassable.[15]
Termier quotes also from the “Timaeus” dialogue (Critias is repeating the statement of the Egyptian priests):