NOT SO VERY LONG after the destruction of Nineveh and the burial of Gilgamesh, Greek philosopher Plato wrote down another story that is still very much alive, that of the fabled land of Atlantis. So much has been said about Atlantis since – and so much of it is dubious, if not crack-brained – that it is worth going back to the original text to see what Plato actually described. The sequence comes in two parts, in the introduction to the Timaeus and in the Critias. These two texts, the second fragmentary, are all that remain of a projected three dialogues; the third was apparently never written. In the introduction to the Timaeus Critias, a politician and Plato’s maternal great-grandfather, describes a tradition handed down to him by his grandfather, also Critias, who had it from the great law-giver Solon, who was in turn told the story in the sixth century BCE by Egyptian priests at Sais at the head of the Nile Delta. The younger Critias summarises the tradition and promises to tell the full story when it is his turn to speak at length the following day. This he begins to do, in the dialogue that bears his name, but the text breaks off in mid-sentence not far from its beginning. Paradoxically, then, the summary by Critias in the Timaeus is more complete than the fragment that comes later.
This is, in part, what the Egyptians told Solon:
Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Herakles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Herakles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Herakles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
When Socrates hears what Critias proposes to say, he is delighted. It is a great point in its favour, he says, that it is not a fiction but true history. Immediately modern readers are alerted: does this mean that Plato believed the story of Atlantis to be true? Or does it mean that he is among the first, perhaps the very first, to elaborate the trope of the fiction of non-fiction? In other words, should we see in Socrates’ words an exquisite irony or should we read them as plain speaking? And how did Plato’s audience read or hear them? Perhaps we should look in more detail at the fragmentary account Critias gives.
The origin and nature of Atlantis were thus: the gods divided the land so that each might own a portion; Poseidon, god of the sea, was given the island of Atlantis. It was large, 700 kilometres across, mountainous in the north, with a great rectangular plain to the south. Inland from the coast was a hill of no great size; there lived a mortal woman, Cleito, with whom Poseidon fell in love and upon whom he fathered five pairs of male twins. The land was further partitioned between these ten and the elder of the eldest pair, Atlas, the giant who would later carry the world upon his shoulders, was made king over his brothers, over the entire island of Atlantis and over the ocean, called Atlantic, in which it lay.
Poseidon fortified the hill where Cleito lived, enclosing it with concentric rings of sea and land and making a city there; he caused hot and cold springs to flow. Then the Atlanteans took over, building roads and bridges and digging a canal to the sea. They excavated tunnels in the rings of land that separated the moats, allowing ships to sail in and tie up at docks carved into the rocky walls. The roadways into the city were protected by gates and towers; and each of the city’s three rings was surrounded by a wall. These walls were constructed of white, black and yellow stone and were covered with bronze, tin and orichalcum, respectively. Orichalcum is a mystery – a metal, perhaps a copper-gold alloy, perhaps simply brass, that in Critias’ time was already only a name and remains uncertainly identified to this day. It was mined in Atlantis and the palace at the heart of the city was full of it; the interior walls, pillars and floors of the temple of Poseidon were sheeted in this fantastic metal, and the ivory roof too. And a pillar that stood in the temple, recording the genealogies of the princes of Atlantis and the laws by which they ruled, was made out of it; so that the entire citadel flashed with the red light of orichalcum.
West of Atlantis was a chain of fruit-bearing islands – an early mention of Las Islas Fortunatas, the Islands of the Blessed that were, in Classical and Celtic myth, a paradise for dead heroes and heroines – leading to the other continent, reminiscent of the Americas, against which, in their later days, the Atlanteans are said to have made war. On Atlantis itself the people built palaces, baths, racecourses and temples as well as the great harbour works. They lived on cereals and pulses, and every kind of animal, both wild and domesticated, flourished there, along with fruits and flowers and aromatic gums. There were even elephants in this earthly paradise: the first known mention of these animals in Greek writing. But the story of Atlantis is in fact a story of a paradise lost, of the descent of an ideal society into tyranny: when the divine element in them became weakened by frequent admixture with mortal stock, and their human traits became predominant they ceased to be able to carry their prosperity with moderation … The fragment ends, mid-sentence, not long after the account of degeneration begins so we don’t hear much more about it; but it’s clear that the Atlanteans have lost their greatness of mind … wisdom and forbearance and that the coming war with the Athenians will be a result of this decline.
According to Critias that war took place 9000 years before Solon’s time. It is, conventionally, a war between freedom and tyranny, good and evil: for what has been suppressed by almost all later commentators is that Atlantis, rather than a paradise or an ideal society, was by the time of the conflict precisely the opposite. Ancient Athens represents the ideal and Atlantis is its antipodes, the antithesis of the perfect society described in Plato’s Republic. It is a kind of dystopia, a monolithic state that oppresses its citizens and enslaves its enemies: an island carved out of stone, like some implacable adamant from which the orichalcum flashes the red light of tyranny.
IN THE TWO MILLENNIA plus since Plato wrote, many people, both scholars and laymen, have busied themselves seeking to find out where this fabulous place ‘really’ was. Various solutions have been proposed, from the Greek island of Santorini, where there was an enormous volcanic eruption around 1400 BCE which may have destroyed the Minoan civilisation on Crete; to a now submerged portion of the coast of West Africa (Robert Graves’ solution); to far more fanciful versions of an actual land, perhaps inhabited by extra-terrestrials, lost beneath the Atlantic waves. The Santorini thes
is rests in part upon an alleged calendrical misunderstanding: the 9000 years ago of Solon is really, in the Egyptian lunar calendar, 9000 months, which gives a date not so very far removed from the eruption of Santorini; while the accounts that allege alien invasions seem to rest upon nothing more substantial than the predilections of their partisans.
What is curious is that both scientists and fantasists follow the same kind of reasoning. Because Socrates said the story was true, therefore let us search for the facts upon which it is based. An assumption of this method is that all stories are ‘really’ about something else; that is, they can be displaced from the realm of the imaginative and relocated in the world of fact. But Plato was a philosopher as well as a story teller and was particularly skilled at reasoning by analogy; when he illustrates an argument with reference to a tale, the truth or falsity of that tale is always subordinate to the point he is making. His Atlantis is better understood as a parable, a tale of two cities, a clash of civilisations with no more – and no less – factual basis than one of Christ’s parables. Whatever dim legends might swirl in the antique darkness behind the story of Atlantis as Plato tells it, it remains a category mistake to ask: but is it true?
Yet Socrates’ comment remains to tantalise us. A man who wrote nothing, who was skeptical of the advantages of literacy – he thought, or Plato said he thought, that inflexibility of thought, decline of memory skills, and loss of control over language would follow the shift from oral to written tradition – nevertheless attests to the truth of a story written down by the Egyptians, transmitted to the Greeks and then written down again by Plato. Atlantis as Plato described it is both a counter-exemplary no place and an instructive other place, a heterotopia. Its lesson, like that of Gilgamesh, is a kind of warning, in this case against political and personal corruption that results from a mingling of divine with earthly essences. And it has a seductive geographical undersong in its evocation of the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean …
THESE TENDENCIES, or preoccupations, return in the tale of Panchaea, the mythical island located by its inventor in the South Seas – a term used by the Egyptians for what we now call the Indian Ocean. Panchaea appears in the Sacred History (Hiera Anagraphê) of Euhemerus, a Greek mythographer of the fourth century BCE who lived and wrote at the Macedonian court in the generation after Alexander the Great. Fragments quoted in other books are all that remains of the Sacred History; but in them we learn that Euhemerus, or his literary persona, claimed to have found a register of the births and deaths of the gods written on a golden pillar in a temple of Zeus on Panchaea: And Zeus, on succeeding to the kingship, married Hera and Demeter and Themis, and by them he had children, the Curetes by the first named, Persephone by the second, and Athena by the third. And going to Babylon he was entertained by Belus, and after that he went to the island of Panchaea, which lies in the ocean, and here he set up an altar to Uranus, the founder of his family.
Some scholars believe Euhemerus had himself visited Babylon and sailed into what is now the Indian Ocean, perhaps as far as Taprobane or Ceylon; his own report says he went at the request of Cassander of Macedon, one of Alexander’s successors, on a voyage via the Red Sea and around the coast of Arabia. Others assert the Sacred History was a work of imagination. Either way, the lost work charts an island utopia and stands, with Plato’s Atlantis, at the head of our long utopian/dystopian tradition. But Euhemerus was neither a fantasist nor a romantic. He was a skeptic, in the precise philosophic meaning of the word – to assert nothing but only opine – and his description of Panchaea is in the service of a method of interpreting myth in terms of fact. For Euhemerus the Greek gods were originally kings, heroes and conquerors, or otherwise benefactors to men, and this is how they earned their immortality. Zeus, for example, was a king of Crete who had been a great warrior; his tomb was near Knossos. In other words Euhemerus treats mythological accounts as a reflection of actual historical events shaped by retelling: the gods were fictions who might once have been non-fictions.
With Cassander as his patron, Euhemerus must have been aware of Alexander the Great’s deification, and of the pharaohisation of the dynasty founded by Alexander’s general, Ptolemy, in Egypt, as well as the parallel assumption of divinity by the Seleucid kings in Asia; but he was not one of those who worshipped the new god-kings. He was not necessarily an atheist either; rather, he was attempting to explain the ancient belief that the dividing line between gods and men is not always clear. The Greeks had no Bible, no prophetic tradition and their religion was elastic enough to tolerate many contradictory beliefs; yet Euhemerus’s ideas were attacked as heretical, indeed atheistic. Early Christian writers thought so too, but for them his theories provided a convenient means of rebuttal of pagan beliefs. Now his method of reducing religion to what we call anthropology or sociology seems like a forerunner of those social sciences. Euhemerism, the word, survives today as the name for a perhaps simple-minded technique of interpreting religious behavior solely in terms of secular motives.
And yet … if Panchaea was invented, perhaps after the model of Plato’s Atlantis, to illustrate a philosophical point, there is still something in the invention that is profoundly contrary to the spirit of skepticism that inspired it. Atlantis was figured as the tyrannical opposite of democratic and freedom-loving Athens, yet has had a long afterlife as a paradise, and moreover a place many believe to have been real, even one that may become real again. It has been idealised to the precise degree that, for Plato, it was to be condemned. In the same way, the lost island of Panchaea is the model for a long line of literary works in which the deficits of the writer’s civilisation are made up for in a kind of ideal, opposite world. If Atlantis was a dystopia that has been misunderstood as its contrary, Panchaea is an even more fruitful contradiction: an invention that was never meant to be believed, which nevertheless bequeathed a literature of inventions that would, in time, result in the discovery of real lands and the founding of real societies. In the island fantasy we can detect the early signs of a human need to find and occupy a place first conceived as imaginary. Or to imagine a place that will then be made a reality.
THERE WAS ANOTHER tradition, roughly contemporary with these, which sought to describe the world as it was, not as it could or should be. Never mind that the results were sometimes as, or more, fanciful; the intent at least was empirical. This tradition is made up of accounts of actual voyages to the limits of the known world. They were in two primary directions: east towards India, or south down the eastern or western African coast. There are at least three accounts of Phoenician navigation around Libya, as Africa was then usually known, each of which is mentioned by Herodotus:
Libya is washed on all sides by the sea except where it joins Asia, as was first demonstrated, so far as our knowledge goes, by the Egyptian king Necho, who, after calling off the construction of the canal between the Nile and the Arabian Gulf, sent out a fleet manned by a Phoenician crew with orders to sail west about and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by way of the Straits of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians sailed from the Arabian gulf into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year’s harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Herakles in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right – to northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered by sea.
The detail that Herodotus did not believe, that the Phoenician sailors had the sun on their right as they rounded the southern tip of Africa, is the most compelling evidence that the story is genuine. As for the canal that Necho was constructing, this was part of a campaign against the Babylonians who, having recently sacked Nineveh, w
ere now taking on Assyria’s allies, including Egypt. That is, the supposed Phoenician voyage was contemporary, or nearly so, with the last inscription of the standard text of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The second mention of a Phoenician voyage to, or around, Africa comes from the time of the Persian emperor Xerxes. A man named Sataspes was about to be impaled for a rape when his mother interceded with Xerxes, who was her nephew, and requested (disingenuously?) an even worse punishment: let her son, Xerxes’ cousin, be made to circumnavigate Libya. The petition was granted. Sataspes procured a vessel in Egypt and set out through the Straits of Gibraltar before turning south; but found that, far though he had sailed, there was always the need to sail further. At the most southerly point of his journey, where his ships stood still and he could make no further headway, he saw pygmies dressed in palm leaves running away into the hills. Upon his return Sataspes’ explanation for his failure – that he was becalmed in the Doldrums – was not believed and he was impaled anyway.
Herodotus’ third account derives ultimately from a temple inscription set up by one Hanno in Carthage, the Phoenician city on the southern shores of the western Mediterranean. Hanno had sailed, with sixty ships and 30,000 people, east and south down the coast of Libya and had seen there many wonders. Herodotus summarises only a small part of the inscription:
The Carthaginians tell us that they trade with a race of men who live in a part of Libya beyond the Pillars of Herakles. On reaching this country, they unload their goods, arrange them tidily along the beach, and then, returning to their boats, raise a smoke. Seeing the smoke, the natives come down to the beach, place on the ground a certain quantity of gold in exchange for the goods, and go off again to a distance. The Carthaginians then come ashore and take a look at the gold; and if they think it presents a fair price for their wares, they collect it and go away; if, on the other hand, it seems too little, they go back aboard and wait, and the natives come and add to the gold until they are satisfied. There is perfect honesty on both sides; the Carthaginians never touch the gold until it equals in value what they have offered for sale, and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been taken away.
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