Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  Plato’s Academy, Athens (ca. 360 BC)

  If Christos Doumas was correct, the Atlantis tale was solely a literary invention, like the Cave of the Ideas, created to illustrate the political model Plato placed at the center of what is probably the most influential work in the history of philosophy, the Republic. Near the start of the Timaeus, Socrates reminds his friends that “the chief theme of my yesterday’s discourse was the state—how constituted and of what citizens composed it would seem likely to be most perfect.” He then expresses a desire to see his ideas brought to life, in a story about how Athens “when at war showed by the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities a result worthy of her training and education.” This is Critias’s cue to start telling the story he heard of the war between Athens and Atlantis.

  But what was Plato’s ideal state? Strange though it may seem today, one of the Cradle of Democracy’s greatest citizens was no populist. His noble lineage predisposed him to negative feelings toward democracy, which he wrote “distributes a sort of equality to both equals and unequals alike.” Average citizens were easily swayed by rhetoric; a majority had repeatedly voted in support of the disastrous military campaigns of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, which ended with the defeat of Athens in 404 BC, including a reckless invasion of Syracuse that ended with the loss of thousands of Athenian soldiers and two fleets of warships. Following the war Athens was briefly ruled by a brutal oligarchy installed by the Spartans. When democracy was restored, Socrates, who was himself no populist, was prosecuted for the crimes of “refusing to recognize the gods of the state” and “corrupting the youth of Athens.” Socrates was found guilty by a majority vote and sentenced to death. He chose to die by drinking hemlock rather than escape into exile. In Plato’s beautiful dialogue the Phaedo, one of the witnesses to Socrates’s death presumably speaks for the author when he says, “My own tears came in floods against my will.”

  Following the death of Socrates in 399 BC, Plato escaped Athens to travel widely for a decade, stopping in Libya, Italy, and Egypt, all three of which, of course, later appeared in his Atlantis tale. In 390 BC, he began a long stay in southern Italy and Sicily, a period during which he encountered two men who would greatly influence the path of his life and thinking. In the city of Taras (now Taranto), he met Archytas, a statesman who led his city according to the principles of Pythagoreanism. This school of philosophy, founded by the Greek expatriate Pythagoras around 530 BC, held that mathematics provided a key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Plato’s conversations with Archytas seem to have left him a convert to the Pythagorean veneration of numbers.

  In Sicily, Plato met the dictator Dionysius I, a very different type of ruler. Dionysius controlled the powerful city of Syracuse absolutely. Plato liked dictatorships even less than he did democracies, an opinion he shared freely with Dionysius. The king responded by having Plato arrested and (according to one version of the story) sold into slavery. By luck, a friend of Plato’s was at the auction and purchased his freedom.

  Having completed one of history’s most fruitful study-abroad trips, Plato returned to Athens in 387 BC and founded the Academy on a plot of land about a mile from central Athens. He was already predisposed toward authoritarianism by his aristocratic roots, but the execution of Socrates by referendum seems to have cemented the military oligarchy of Sparta in Plato’s mind as the least-worst model for a society. Plato provides a framework for such a society in the Republic.

  In the Republic, the character Socrates compares running a large state to steering a large ship. To do so by majority rule invites calamity. “The true pilot must give his attention to the time of year, the seasons, the sky, the winds, the stars, and all that pertains to his art if he is to be a true ruler of a ship,” Plato writes. And just as trained navigators are the only ones suited to captain ships, only rulers trained in philosophy are capable of governing. The very best ruler would be both a philosopher and a king, or what Plato calls a philosopher-king.

  Socrates also describes one of Plato’s most important philosophical concepts, the Theory of Forms, by which the world is divided into two regions—that which we can intuit through our senses and a higher, abstract perfection (the forms) that exists outside of space and time. This latter idea is where we get the Platonic ideal, the unattainable model.10 We see a spindly legged animal with a long face and mane and we think “horse,” but that animal is merely a flawed example of the form of a horse.

  Plato’s ideal city-state in the Republic more closely resembles Sparta than Athens. All classes were expected to live austerely. Children were to be raised communally; no child would know the identity of his parents and vice versa. Men and women who possessed desirable characteristics would be encouraged to breed. Rigid state control of education would be essential. Children’s exposure to literature would be limited—Homer in particular was to be banned—so as not to expose them to tales that featured poorly behaved gods or soldiers who showed doubt or remorse.

  Stories, Plato knew, were much more than entertainment. Used properly, they could be powerful tools.

  • • •

  If classics scholars are correct in estimating that Plato wrote the Timaeus and Critias around 360 BC, his writing would have been colored by a disastrous real-world attempt to create a model society like that of the Republic. One might think that after being sold into slavery at the end of his first extended visit to Syracuse (just imagine the nasty TripAdvisor review he could leave today), Plato would have sworn off the place. But when Dionysius I died in 367 BC, his brother convinced Plato to return to Syracuse to train the new ruler, Dionysius II. Under Plato’s tutelage the young dictator might develop into a philosopher-king.

  If Plato was hoping to use the Republic as a training manual, his expectations were wildly unrealistic. In book VII of the Republic, Socrates explains that good philosopher-kings will require, in addition to extensive work in mathematics, five years of study in dialectic and fifteen years of practical training in governing. A true philosopher-king should be prepared to rule by age fifty—not exactly the sort of advice a young dictator is eager to hear. Whatever soured Plato’s second extended visit to Syracuse, he ended it under house arrest. When Plato’s old Pythagorean friend Archytas, the widely respected leader of nearby Taras, received word that Plato was being held captive, he dispatched a rescue ship.

  Archytas was himself a mathematician, famous for devising a nifty formula to double the size of a cube. (He seems to have been a most extraordinary man; among his achievements he is also credited with inventing a toy bird that could fly—possibly history’s first robot.) Some scholars believe he was the model for the philosopher-king in the Republic. It seems quite likely that his ideas were on Plato’s mind during the composition of the Timaeus, Plato’s attempt to impose order on a chaotic world. The Pythagorean basis of the Timaeus would have been obvious to anyone studying at the Academy. The school’s curriculum was based on the four disciplines of the Pythagorean quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics. Aristotle even wrote a book, since lost, about the relationship between Archytas’s works and the Timaeus.

  One thing I had noticed about the Atlantologists I’d met was that while almost all of them took Plato’s numbers quite seriously, none had much considered the possible influence of his Pythagorean thinking. Perhaps this is because the Pythagoreans themselves were such an odd bunch.

  Though we can’t be completely certain that the historical figure Pythagoras even existed—some historians think that he was invented, and there is a general consensus that all mathematical discoveries made by Pythagoreans were routinely attributed to their founder—classical sources paint him as a brilliant, charismatic philosopher from the Greek island of Samos. He may have traveled to Egypt, where he could have picked up some basic geometry, and eventually settled in Crotona, on the front part of the Italian boot’s instep. It was here that t
he Pythagorean Order was founded, a religious community (cult might be a more accurate description) based on his teachings. The Pythagoreans were secretive and wrote nothing down, but there is no doubt that their core beliefs blended two basic ingredients that do not mix well today—mathematics and mysticism.

  Pythagoras is famously credited with saying, “All things are numbers,” an idea that fascinated not only Plato but also Aristotle. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote of the Pythagoreans that “in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist . . . fire, earth, and water,” but also justice, soul, reason, opportunity, “and similarly almost all other things.” The discovery of mathematical formulas such as the Pythagorean theorem about 3-4-5 right triangles or that the sum of sequential odd integers starting with the number 1 always adds up to a square (i.e., 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16 = 4 squared) must have felt like divine revelations. It was as if bit by bit they were unraveling the binary code behind reality.

  The Pythagoreans were equally well-known for their esoteric dogmas. Chief among these was a belief in the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. Austerity was prized. Property was held in common. Women were considered equal to men. Pythagoreans were vegetarians—the term Pythagorean diet was commonly used to describe abstinence from meat until the nineteenth century—possibly because of their belief in transmigrating souls. Their list of dos and don’ts was long and strange. Never touch a white rooster. Always remove the right shoe first but wash the left foot first. Do not leave the impression of one’s body in the bedclothes upon rising. And never eat—nor even touch—beans.

  As often occurs with charismatic religious leaders, Pythagoras himself became the subject of various astounding stories, many of them involving animals. He was said to have once persuaded a bear to give up eating meat. On another occasion he heard a dog yelping as it was being beaten and intervened, insisting that he recognized the animal’s bark as the voice of a reincarnated friend. Aristotle noted that Pythagoras was believed to have a golden thigh, had traveled to the underworld, and was reported to have been seen in two different cities at one time.

  If all things were numbers to the Pythagoreans, those same numbers were also, to a certain extent, living things. They had personalities and meanings beyond representing amounts. The number 1, for instance, represented reason and indivisibility. The number 2 represented opinion and imperfection, 3 represented harmony, and so on. Odd numbers were male, even numbers female. Numbers were represented by groups of monads, or dots, which is why 9 is still called a “square” number—it would probably have been depicted as three identical rows of three pebbles. The most perfect number of all was 10, which was the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 and would have been represented like this:

  This figure was called the sacred tetractys, and it would have been packed with meaning for a Pythagorean. Not only does this equilateral triangle have three equal sides, but also the four rows correspond to four of the fundamental concepts of geometry: a point (zero dimensions), a line (a one-dimensional segment between two points), a plane (a two-dimensional shape, in this instance a triangle), and a polyhedron (a 3-D solid that occupies space, in this instance a pyramid). The Pythagoreans believed that numbers gave off vibrations, an idea that is still popular with numerologists, who proudly cite Pythagoras as their founder. It should come as no surprise that the Pythagoreans were really into pentagrams, which they apparently used as symbols of health.

  But what might strike us as a particularly modern goofball idea—is there any term more self-evidently flaky than good vibrations?—seems to have instead emerged from one of the greatest mathematical discoveries ever made. Historians agree that this discovery had a major influence on Plato, and on the Timaeus. Which means that it might help explain Atlantis, too.

  • • •

  According to Pythagorean lore, one day Pythagoras was walking past a metalworker’s workshop. From within he heard the surprisingly harmonious sounds of hammers beating iron on anvils. The philosopher entered the shop to discover the source of this concordance. Within he learned that when two hammers, one twice the weight of the other—a six-pounder and a twelve-pounder—struck metal simultaneously, they were in perfect harmony. The key was the ratio of their weights, 1:2. Pythagoras later re-created the same effect by plucking two strings, one twice the length of the other. (Musically inclined blacksmiths should not attempt to replicate these results at home. Subsequent tests have shown that the hammer demonstration doesn’t actually work, but the string does.)

  What Pythagoras had found was the octave. Because there are seven notes to the CDEFGAB musical scale, two notes eight places apart will have the same pitch, like the first and last do in the sequence do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. The higher note has twice the frequency of the other. Pythagoras also noted that the twelve-pound hammer and the eight-pound hammer (a 3:2 ratio) produced the sweet harmony of what musicians call a perfect fifth. The twelve-pounder paired with a nine-pounder (a 4:3 ratio) created what’s now known as a perfect fourth. As if these discoveries weren’t enough proof of having tapped into the supernatural world, the ratios 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4 would likely have been represented like this:

  Pythagoras had uncovered a mathematical foundation for the most ephemeral of human pleasures, music. No wonder he thought all things were numbers.

  From here Pythagoras, according to tradition, looked into the night sky and speculated that the distances between the celestial bodies above (the visible planets, the moon, the sun, and the stars) might adhere to the same ratios. Aristotle reported in his Metaphysics that the Pythagoreans believed that the orbits of the heavenly bodies produced a sound. This cosmic harmony, which humans other than Pythagoras (allegedly) didn’t hear, became known as “the music of the spheres.” This idea would prove to be so enduring that it would serve as the inspiration for Johannes Kepler’s work on the third law of planetary motion more than two thousand years later.

  Perhaps the most important influence of Pythagorean celestial harmony was on Plato’s Timaeus, his own attempt to explain the cosmos. The very first words of the dialogue, spoken by Socrates, set the Pythagorean tone by echoing the sacred tetractys: “One, two, three . . . Where is number four, Timaeus?” In a surprisingly short amount of time, Plato moves through the first part of the Atlantis story to his description of the Divine Craftsman creating the universe from a set of blueprints. Plato proposes that this universe is both the sum total of all matter and a living being, animated by something he calls the World-Soul.

  By now you’re asking yourself, What the hell does all this have to do with Atlantis? Well, Plato shifts abruptly from extreme obscurity to odd precision by defining the exact proportions into which the Divine Craftsman divided this raw World-Soul material. The measurements are given as 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, and 27. The scholar Crantor—who studied at the Academy in Athens not long after Plato’s death, wrote history’s first known commentary on the Timaeus and believed that the Atlantis story was literal history—suggested that it might be helpful to arrange the numbers like this:

  A few things about this schema are notable. Let’s set aside the number 1 atop the pyramid because for the Pythagoreans 1 was the symbol of the universe and was a sort of super number from which all others derived. The remaining numbers to the left are evens; to the right are odds. The first number on each side is a prime, followed by its square, followed by its cube. Look closely and you’ll also see that the basic Pythagorean harmonic ratios are there—1:2, 2:3, 4:3, and 9:8. Plato goes on in the Timaeus to explain—somewhat—what he’s up to, using math to show that the Divine Craftsman was weaving Pythagoras’s invisible source code of the universe, the harmonic scale, into the very fabric of the cosmos. Somehow, the World-Soul is also simultaneously formed into a long band that the Craftsman cuts lengthwise into two strips, which he formed into two linked circles. One of these circles he subdivided into seven other circles. These were the orbits of the five visible planet
s, plus the moon and the sun. The choice of seven is not coincidental. There are seven notes in the CDEFGAB scale.

  There is a lot more of this type of stuff in the Timaeus, but that’s enough for now. All we need to keep in mind at this point is that Plato wrote the numbers-packed Timaeus and Critias after hanging around with Archytas, and that their message wasn’t aimed at twenty-first-century readers armed with world maps and satellite photos. Plato wrote the Timaeus and Critias as lectures to be delivered to his students at the Academy, who were studying a Pythagorean curriculum. It seems highly improbable that Plato would have written a dialogue named for the Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus, filled it with numbers and speculations about the geometric basis of the universe—and then sandwiched it between the two parts of the Atlantis story in which the numbers were intended to be taken literally.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Cradle of Atlantology

  Athens

  When Plato returned to his hometown of Athens for good, having failed to put his ideas into practice in Syracuse, it’s likely that he fine-tuned the ideas that formed the Timaeus and Critias by strolling the grounds of the Academy with a promising, if somewhat literal-minded, young student from Macedonia with a penchant for untangling complex ideas during ambulatory conversations. That pupil was Aristotle.

  Because they are the two most important thinkers in the Western canon, and because their general philosophies were so different—Plato the dreamer asking, “What if?” and Aristotle the realist asking, “What is?”—they are often portrayed in contrast to each other. Aristotle, the story goes, having been passed over to run the Academy upon Plato’s death, went home to Macedonia to tutor Alexander the Great and returned years later to open his own rival school, the Lyceum, which played Yale to the Academy’s Harvard. For Atlantology, one consequence of this insubordination, cited in almost every semiserious Atlantis book and documentary, is Aristotle’s quote “He who invented it also destroyed it.”