Was there ever an Atlantis?

[Turtler]

That really depends on what we're looking for when we're asking "Was there ever an Atlantis?"

If we're talking about an island civilization that existed beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, somehow had contact with the cradle of Western civilization, and otherwise fit exactly as Plato (or More, or whoever) described it as? Almost certainly not. That much is another Greek morality fable- one of several- that was spun to have some nationalistic and cultural sting and root for the home team. As esaciar says, the dramatic themes and tools Plato utilized were not alien even in his own time, and could easily be seen as fictional. It's not impossible Plato meant it as a sort of send up to Athens itself and what it had turned out to be (since he was not a fan of Democracy or Res Publica).

If we're talking about something that was loosely based on this? That may be worth talking about more. The savage, advanced but barbaric maritime empire squeezing Athens and a lot of the rest of Greece is a possible jumble up of the old Minoan Empire that we are pretty sure existed on Crete, was (relatively) advanced, and did indeed have a bad rep with the mainland Greeks that gave us things like the myth of the Minotaur. The idea of cataclysmic destruction of an entire island civilization could come from even more places, both half-jumbled ancestral remembrances of the Minoan collapse and other things like a few explosions that occasionally blew entire islands and city-states of the Aegean off the map. While the story Plato crafted is fictional, it's quite likely a lot of the ingredients he used to cook it up were at least partially not.

It's almost certainly not historical like we know the Trojan Myths are not. But it's possibly crypto-historical or historical fiction, for the same reason we are pretty sure Troy existed (as a Hittite vassal/outpost), there was a pan-Greek war against it, and war happened.

[Cyclops]

Atlantis is not based on a myth. Its Plato's invention, a political allegory, to demonstate a point.

Conon mentions Star Wars, perhaps its more like asking "was there an Animal Farm"?

[Turtler]

Atlantis is not based on a myth. Its Plato's invention, a political allegory, to demonstate a point.

Conon mentions Star Wars, perhaps its more like asking "was there an Animal Farm"?

This strikes me as the same sort of brashness that led people to writing off The Illiad as based on absolutely nothing for centuries.

I don't think anybody in their right mind on here doubts that Plato created Atlantic near-wholesale in order to craft a yarn, drive home a point, and feather his laurels. But that is not mutually exclusive with him taking bits and pieces of the past or myth to do it.

Alot of inventions and political allegories were drawn from far, far older sources. It is one of the most common strategies in storytelling, after all. You can write books pointing out all of the various garbled history, mythology, and what have you in Animal Farm and especially Star Wars, whether substantial (consciously basing it off of pre-existing folklore or history) or not (using Nazi-esque uniforms for the Empire because they are associated with "bad" by us).

Stating as a Fact that Homer, Plato or their cohorts did none of that "lifting inspiration" is as sloppy and wrongheaded as stating as a Fact that they did not. Especially in a time when the volcanic destruction of Greek islands was still very much in living memory (Santorini and the Minoan blast were just the most spectacular and far reaching examples everybody remembers, and those probably hung around in the public imagination for centuries like how so many different cultures have legends of floods).

The bottom line is that we do not know and will Almost Certainly Never know for sure exactly what the ancient Greeks did and didn't put in their brew, but we can make educated guesses. Which would make us believe that it's basically Greek fiction with maybe a few Small kernals of truth or assimilated legend tossed in here and there.

[Cyclops]

This strikes me as the same sort of brashness that led people to writing off The Illiad as based on absolutely nothing for centuries.
....

Wait, what? People assumed for two and a half millenia it was true. European dynasties claimed descent from Achilles and Hektor. Its only in the last century or less the impossibility of the Trojan War as a narrative has been demonstrated, both by internal inconsistency (conflating Brionze and Iron Age elements) and archaeology (Troy not matching the described city, and was not destroyed in any matching time period).

...I don't think anybody in their right mind on here doubts that Homer created Atlantic near-wholesale in order to craft a yarn, drive home a point, and feather his laurels. ....

Look its well known Atlantis was unheard of until Plato put it up as a straw man in Critias. It is not attested outside his work and his successors. Others have likewise put up fictional countries like Utopia to make political points.

Atlantis has as much reality as the cave mentioned in the Republic.

[Turtler]

Wait, what? People assumed for two and a half millenia it was true. European dynasties claimed descent from Achilles and Hektor. Its only in the last century or less the impossibility of the Trojan War as a narrative has been demonstrated, both by internal inconsistency (conflating Brionze and Iron Age elements) and archaeology (Troy not matching the described city, and was not destroyed in any matching time period).

False. People assumed more or less until the Renaissance that it was true or at least assumed to be, At which point it dropped like a stone, as those internal inconsistencies got brought up and looked over the coals for *centuries* before our one. In large part because people took a look at how the royal and noble houses of Europe and the near East had abused the heck out of it and people got sick of it. By the time a deluded, quasi-incompetent German came around with a lot of bribes and TNT the Enlightenment and Victorian intelligentsia had more or less assumed it had absolutely no validity whatsoever. Which was why a crackpot playing with high explosives, destroying many valuable artifacts, and engaging in corruption became lauded when he actually turned up something.

This isn't advanced archaeology. This is pretty much part of the basic story of anything to do with archaeology, let alone studies of the Trojan Myths or Anatolian research into matters like the Hittites. Whose diplomatic archives have reported issues of people from the West across the Aegean attacking their coastal tributaries.

Which makes me wonder how much study you actually have done on it, and how prepared you are to give an informed opinion.

Look its well known Atlantis was unheard of until Plato put it up as a straw man in Critias. It is not attested outside his work and his successors. Others have likewise put up fictional countries like Utopia to make political points.

Atlantis has as much reality as the cave mentioned in the Republic.

We seem to be talking past each other. We agree Atlantis in the Critias dialogue was something Plato pulled out of his backside, like multiple authors before and since have done. It was a strawman to be propped up and then knocked down in a morality play. Any resemblance to reality is at best partial and insanely diluted, much like Shakespeare's MacBeth and Richard III.

It's just that like MacBeth and Richard III were hilarious straw men loosely based on real events (even if Shakespeare did do it) and his fiction like Othello was cribbed roughly from what he knew, it is Possible to Probable that some parts of the portrayal of Atlantis and particularly the *events* were based off of some events that were hanging around in the public imagination of the time or even around the time of the writing.

But taking inspiration from Greek islands getting blown up by volcanoes and possibly mythological conflicts with a Minoan hegemony or other Dark Age Greek powers does not make the barbaric, futuristic empire of Atlantis true. No more than some possible Greek raiding on Asia Minor makes the Trojan War true- Zeus and all-, or the fact that there was an actual MacBeth and Richard III means that their theater portrayals are accurate.

[Cyclops]

False. People assumed more or less until the Renaissance that it was true or at least assumed to be, At which point it dropped like a stone, as those internal inconsistencies got brought up and looked over the coals for *centuries* before our one.....

Well perhaps the Renaissance is too early, the 17th and 18th century was when the French began to tear down the received classical edifice. Lets say the 1650's to the 1820's is when Homer gets his dose of skepticism. However the story was taken as fact for far longer than it was doubted. Even in the Enlightenment there were "believers" looking, looking.

...
Which makes me wonder how much study you actually have done on it, and how prepared you are to give an informed opinion....

If you're going to play the condescension card you really shouldn't make mistakes like this:

...I don't think anybody in their right mind on here doubts that Homer created Atlantic near-wholesale in order to craft a yarn, drive home a point, and feather his laurels...

...but we all make mistakes. I myself make spelling mistakes because I get so interested in the subject and I type too fast.

...
We seem to be talking past each other. We agree Atlantis in the Critias dialogue was something Plato pulled out of his backside, like multiple authors before and since have done. It was a strawman to be propped up and then knocked down in a morality play.....

Agreed.

......Any resemblance to reality is at best partial and insanely diluted, much like Shakespeare's MacBeth and Richard III.

It's just that like MacBeth and Richard III were hilarious straw men loosely based on real events (even if Shakespeare did do it) and his fiction like Othello was cribbed roughly from what he knew, it is Possible to Probable that some parts of the portrayal of Atlantis and particularly the *events* were based off of some events that were hanging around in the public imagination of the time or even around the time of the writing.

But taking inspiration from Greek islands getting blown up by volcanoes and possibly mythological conflicts with a Minoan hegemony or other Dark Age Greek powers does not make the barbaric, futuristic empire of Atlantis true. No more than some possible Greek raiding on Asia Minor makes the Trojan War true- Zeus and all-, or the fact that there was an actual MacBeth and Richard III means that their theater portrayals are accurate.

Look of course there may be ripples of reality in Plato's Atlantis, to the extent that there were ships in real life, and men and islands and so on. I don't agree its the same as Shakespeare who was buttressing a dodgy regime by rewriting agreed history. Shakespeare was writing entertainment to an agreed political formula for a popular audience. Plato is proposing a political formula to an elite audience.

Plato is just making up stuff to make a political point. His attitude to honesty is well known, he's happy lying to people less smart than himself (which I think he thinks is everyone), and his attitude to reality is its all a pale shadow of the ideal world (ie whats in his head). I don't think he's shaping an old story for a new purpose, he's just making it up wholesale 9to the extent anyone can make up anything new).

I think the comparison to Star Wars is apposite: Lucas' Sith are about as democratic as Plato's philosopher kings, and about as likely.

As for Homer, well I don't see him rewriting the Iliad "Achilles shot first".

Homer was passing on poetic artifacts, chunks of rhyme like the ship list, and chunks of myth like the location of Typhon's defeat (Errima in Asia Minor, or Arim of the coast of Italy?), making what sense he could of received stories from the past and present. I agree his work is patched together from other stories, old and new, written over one another like a bunch of data copied from multiple hard disks and operating systems into something beautiful.

I do think there are differences of many orders of magnitude between Troy and Atlantis. Troy is an agreed name in a shared story ornamented by multple writers from someone trying to make sense of poorly remembered past and a poorly understood present. Atlantis like Tatooine or Animal Farm is a new idea from a single author with only as much relation to reality as necessary to make it comprehensible.

Atlantis is not a myth or muthoi, a popular story passed on by oral sources, it is a literary artifact with a recognisable point of creation. I am happy to be corrected if someone has an earlier source than Plato for the name Atlantis, describing a large (bigger than Asia and Libya combined) but small (320 miles long) island, reachable by land, with a small island inside it, ruled by a confederation of Kings that fought a war with Athens.

[Turtler]

Well perhaps the Renaissance is too early, the 17th and 18th century was when the French began to tear down the received classical edifice. Lets say the 1650's to the 1820's is when Homer gets his dose of skepticism. However the story was taken as fact for far longer than it was doubted. Even in the Enlightenment there were "believers" looking, looking.

"Perhaps", but just like there were believers looking for it well into the Enlightenment, there were skeptics that had already begun taking a chisel to it during the Renaissance, with things picking up in the Reformation. As it turned out, having a bunch of European monarchs and rulers with grievances and claims against each other- and a lot of money to throw around for people to "prove" each other's lineage a lie- helped expose a bunch of lies in their family trees. And it turns out that having Europe get ripped in halves fighting each other speeds up the process.

But the bottom line is that it started far before the last century that your earlier post claimed.

If you're going to play the condescension card you really shouldn't make mistakes like this:



...but we all make mistakes. I myself make spelling mistakes because I get so interested in the subject and I type too fast.

Thank you for the forgiveness and understanding and I appreciate having it pointed out; as it turns out talking about ancient Greek pseudo-history about doomed civilizations in a morality play can jumble my focus a bit. I'll fix it up right now.

But for what it is worth, I screwed up the authors by mixing them up, which is an easily correctable mistake. I find mixing up the timeline's a bigger issue than what people slap on it (though I will be the first to admit I've done that too).

Agreed.

Look of course there may be ripples of reality in Plato's Atlantis, to the extent that there were ships in real life, and men and islands and so on.

Well, I'd argue that any ripples of reality would have to be more substantial in order to truly qualify as such. I wouldn't say that Great Flood myths represent ripples of reality from a great worldwide flood simply because somewhere in Venezuela there was a (more minor) flood. If one loosens the standards enough you can claim anything is some sort of historical ripple/reflection of reality. Hell, that's what the Atlantis Industry has been doing for decades if not centuries.

I figure if we are to judge it, it would have to be far tighter. Not merely that there were ships, men, and islands (which might as well be props rather than the story/event itself), but something recognizably similar using them. If that's not the case, a historian should throw up their hands and say that they're looking at a more or less pure myth, even beyond the "cobble of possibly historical inspirations latched on to whatever BS *insert author here* had" definition.

I don't agree its the same as Shakespeare who was buttressing a dodgy regime by rewriting agreed history. Shakespeare was writing entertainment to an agreed political formula for a popular audience. Plato is proposing a political formula to an elite audience.

That would depend on how fine a gradient we're using; especially since I meant to include several of Shakespeare's more "straightup" fictional plays, like Othello etc. al. but for some reason I didn't. But regarding his "historical plays" and comparing them to the Ancient Greeks, both were writing entertainment and/or elevated- let's say as opposed to high- culture according to agreed formulas for a relatively elite audience. There were massive gaping differences between them, since Shakespeare was relatively low brow while Plato was anything but and how they approached things and their profession were very different, but they both conformed to those relatively broad roles.

Poor Irish farmers and Scottish clansmen didn't exactly see any of Shakespeare's plays when he was alive, even if they were far more "popular" and low brow then almost any Ancient Greek philosopher would allow himself to accept being thought of.

But beyond the "historical" plays of the Wars of the Roses Cycle, MacBeth, and the like, Shakespeare wrote plenty of more or less outright fictional plays (which were understood at the time as such) like Hamlet, Othello, and the Merchant of Venice. Which are probably a similar level of "accuracy" (or rather, lack thereof) to this sort of "dialogue genre" that the Greeks had. You tended to have recognizable states or locales, relatively recognizable tech, societies, and themes, and a whole brew of popular mythology mixed into a theater-approved morality play and then served hot.

Shakespeare admitted that Bohemia didn't have a coastline or a king by the name he gave him, and likewise Plato might have admitted there was no hegemonic empire or geography by the name or identity he gave it. But both might point out the little slivers of truth they claimed to have.

Plato is just making up stuff to make a political point.

Agreed; which is another reason why I pointed to the Shakespeare parallel. Shakespeare likewise was happy just making stuff up to make a political point. Or rather, to make money and clear the obligatory checklist of political points he needed to grab it. Even if their attitudes and intents in doing it were different, that much can be drawn.

His attitude to honesty is well known, he's happy lying to people less smart than himself (which I think he thinks is everyone), and his attitude to reality is its all a pale shadow of the ideal world (ie whats in his head).

Agreed, but that in no way meant that he was opposed to telling the truth or incorporating reality- either as it was or as he understood it- into his yarns and lies, much less what he saw as true. His other dialogues are sterling examples of this, and there's a reason why we look to him as one of the primary sources for events like the suicide-execution of Socrates in spite of how we know he's willing to lie, spin, invent, and the like in order to make his point.

I don't think he's shaping an old story for a new purpose, he's just making it up wholesale 9to the extent anyone can make up anything new).

Perfectly fine, and I can understand that perspective. However, it's not like Plato is unknown for shaping old stories (or chopped up bits of one) into a new (ie: his) purpose. Which is why I'm not sure it's so easy to write off what he says.

I think the comparison to Star Wars is apposite: Lucas' Sith are about as democratic as Plato's philosopher kings, and about as likely.

Agreed, and to be honest I haven't seen them anywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised if Lucas came up with them as a sort of send up to that part of Plato's philosophy. And what it would degenerate into, as we see.

As for Homer, well I don't see him rewriting the Iliad "Achilles shot first".

Agreed, though as a bard it's possible he might have; the "accepted story" of the Trojan Wars was in dispute even in Ancient Greece- where people were inclined to accept it as actual history rather than a kindasortamaybe mythologized story that might reflect some sort of historical war with the Hitties or someone else in Anatolia-, so I wouldn't be surprised if that variation got told somewhere.

Homer was passing on poetic artifacts, chunks of rhyme like the ship list, and chunks of myth like the location of Typhon's defeat (Errima in Asia Minor, or Arim of the coast of Italy?), making what sense he could of received stories from the past and present. I agree his work is patched together from other stories, old and new, written over one another like a bunch of data copied from multiple hard disks and operating systems into something beautiful.

Exactly; and for obvious reasons I don't think we should accept what we receive from him as actual history. However, the presence of those "poetic artifacts" and "received stories" also mean I wouldn't jump to saying there's absolutely no actual history in there somewhere. What it would be is an ungodly field of educated guesswork with some actual records and evidence we can find, but I do think some of the most meaningful archeological and historical work comes from just those "out on a limb" studies.

I do think there are differences of many orders of magnitude between Troy and Atlantis. Troy is an agreed name in a shared story ornamented by multple writers from someone trying to make sense of poorly remembered past and a poorly understood present. Atlantis like Tatooine or Animal Farm is a new idea from a single author with only as much relation to reality as necessary to make it comprehensible.

I agree cautiously. Troy is something at least the ancient Greeks could agree on (which is saying something, considering how little they could agree on) and so is a relatively strong "footprint" that far in the past. Atlantis is something we had to have Plato tell us while being Plato, and that means we have no reason to believe its' connection to reality (such as it is) is not far more tenuous. If there at all.

However, I'm not sure I agree with the comparisons or the implied conclusions you come form them. For one, Animal Farm in particular was one far-from-new idea (at least as far as the themes and meanings went) that was ornamented and made in "Eric Blair"'s skillful and stylish mold. So in terms of ideas and original ones, it's closer to one of half a dozen well-worn morality plays dressed up in new clothes and acted out under new direction; the fantastic elements in it probably owe more to making it fictional or the author's own story.

Likewise, I'd also argue that even when looking at a fantasy like the Atlantis of the Dialogues obviously is, the "relation to reality necessary to make it digestible" is worth looking at in and of itself. The sorts of tropes, plots, props, and what have you a writer- even one as clever and deceitful as Plato- uses can tell you a lot about the history that it was made during, or even before. That's why I'm not so sure I would write it off as being entirely devoid of merit as a historical research, or Atlantis as being utterly unmoored from reality even as an individual concept that Plato defined when he pulled it out of his backdoor.

Atlantis is not a myth or muthoi, a popular story passed on by oral sources, it is a literary artifact with a recognisable point of creation.

Agreed, but in many ways that may be beside the point. Atlantis is a creation of Plato that we can recognize. However, the tropes and story associated with it are not so easy to dismiss, especially with the recent discoveries we have of things like the Minoan hegemony and the Santorini explosion coupled with some new going over of other myths with similar themes ("great island city that met its' doom by offending the Gods/morality" is not exactly a cliche Plato created, which might explain why in the actual dialogue Atlantis is just part of the story). Even as a literary artifact with a recognizable PoO, we have good reason to believe not all the "ingredients" were things Plato invented wholesale. And if anything, the mooring of a common creation can help analyze that.

I am happy to be corrected if someone has an earlier source than Plato for the name Atlantis, describing a large (bigger than Asia and Libya combined) but small (320 miles long) island, reachable by land, with a small island inside it, ruled by a confederation of Kings that fought a war with Athens.

To the best of my knowledge there isn't one. However, large hegemonic powers that have harassed and fought wars with Athens-and even moreso the Proto-mainland Greeks- are far from so specific. Which is why I would advise anybody who honestly wants to look for "Atlantis"- to the extent it existed- should look into those. While leaving any wild eyed dreams of millenia-in-the-future tech or strict fidelity to Plato's yarn at the door.

[Cyclops]

...
But the bottom line is that it started far before the last century that your earlier post claimed.....

Thanks for the correction and an interesting post.

Yep there isn't anything older than Plato for Atlantis so I'll hang my hat on that (and I'll be blown away in the event of anything turning up, wouldn't that be fascinating if there was some evidence?)

I'm re-reading Robin Lane Fox Travelling Heroes atm, its his worst bookm I've read so far but still pretty good. He goes over the mental and physical geography of Homer and Hesiod and their often entirely divergent myths.

It is astounding the layers that appear in stories to his trained eye. Stuff about a heaven-god being castrated, and a son-god being substituted for a stone, and a storm/mountian god fighting and whipping a many-serpent monster. It turns up in the Bible, Canaan, old and neo-Hitittes (am I the only one that gets a mental image of Keanu Reeves when they see the term Neo-Hittite? "Hattusili, it seems you've been leading two lives...").

Shards and fragments of these stories shear off into other legends and become metaphors (the ground shakes like Typhon in Artima, wherever that is-there's a few possibilities). There's the possibility of Mykenean transmission and Helladic "superinfection" through various trade and cultural contact networks (Fox sees Euboea and Krete as central agents) and we end up with christmas puddings of myths confected and concocted into unlikely masses.

I'd be picking over those two boys (Hesiod and Homer), they have absolute catalogues of myths crusted onto their works like they were rolling around in the myth shop. If there's traces of Atlantis as an ongoing myth it'll be there.

Where do we find traces of the Minoan Thallassocracy? I know Herodotus gives it a mention. Its definitely present in Theseus, is he a later mythic figure? I've heard it proposed he was put up by Athens as an Ionian hero to match the Dorian Herakles, which makes him post-Mykenean. IIRC Minos gets a mention in the Iliad as a king in Krete...hmm we need a myth catalogue for all the versions, wiki says there's a verison (but whose?) where there's actually 2 Minoses (Minoi?).

[Antiochus Seleukos]

Even if the Plato version of Atlantis doesn't exist, what explains later navigators, poets and historians to write of it?

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Plato maybe?

[conon394]

This (above)

Even if the Plato version of Atlantis doesn't exist, what explains later navigators, poets and historians to write of it?

Umm and do any of them have any independent source outside of Plato's fable - no!

[DarthShizNit]

Atlantis is certainly just a story. Any historical tidbits it's made up from is almost certainly references to the Minoan civilization. Pretty much ends your search right there.