Plato and Atlantis: an expert view
By Angie Hobbs
Plato and his students, in a mosaic from Pompeii of the early 1st century BC. The location is undoubtedly Plato's Academy, with Athens visible in the background. Plato sits under the tree reading from a scroll and pointing to a celestial globe; is he pointing to Atlantis? Aristotle is the figure to the right, the only one with his back to Plato, though he cannot resists looking back to him (Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, inv. 124545).
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I asked one of the world's leading Plato experts, Dr Angie Hobbs, for her views on the truth behind the Atlantis story. Angie has a First Class Honours degree in Classics and a PhD in Classical Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Research Fellow of Christ's College; she is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in England. Among many publications, she is author of the acclaimed book Plato and the Hero (Cambridge University Press, 2000). She has appeared many times on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time' BBC radio programme, discussing topics ranging widely across philosophy and the ancient world. Here is her response:
The only ancient source for the story of Atlantis is the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 427-347 BC), who writes of a fabulously wealthy, powerful and technologically advanced island civilization destroyed by war and natural catastrophe in his dialogues the Timaeus and Critias. The island is situated in the ocean 'beyond the Pillars of Heracles' (the Straits of Gibraltar), a sea of myth and romance to the Greeks as well as geographical fact, and then at the edge of the known world. The central question, therefore, is: did Plato make up the legend in its entirety, or did he inherit all or part of it? And if he did inherit at least the seeds of his story, then could those seeds have originated and been transmitted in the way suggested in David Gibbins' Atlantis?
Certainly Plato possessed the creative imagination to invent the entire account: his dialogues abound with richly detailed utopian fantasies. Yet there are clear signals that he wants us to understand his tale as true on some level. The chronology of transmission that his character Critias so carefully delineates (Solon - Critias' great-grandfather - Critias' grandfather - Critias) is certainly possible, particularly if the dramatic date of the Timaeus and Critias - as opposed to when Plato actually wrote them - is about 425 BC. In the Timaeus, the character of Critias significantly says (Timaeus 20) that Solon, 'the wisest of the seven wise men, once vouched its truth.' Although Plato is perfectly happy to be dismissive of so-called authorities when he feels that they do not deserve their status, it is notable that he always treats Solon with respect. He is also perennially fascinated by, and respectful of, Egyptian culture. Critias, too, calls the tale 'truthful' (Timaeus 21), and at Timaeus 26 Socrates says that it is a great point in its favour that it is 'not a fiction but true history.' In the Critias, Critias makes in addition a pointed reference to Solon's manuscript (Critias 113).
However, there are equally clear signs that the
'truth' of the Atlantis legend is not necessarily to be found in the
surface details. Critias emphasizes that the story was told to him by a
very old man when he himself was very young (Timaeus
21), and mentions the imperfections of an old man's memory at Timaeus
26; in the Critias, too, he says
pointedly at 112 that he will recount the tale of Atlantis if he can remember what he was told as a child. Some elements of the
tale, such as the intermingling between gods and mortals and the
fantastical metal orichalc, seem clearly invented, if not by Plato then
certainly by someone; while the claim at Timaeus
25 that by some 'miraculous chance' an earlier, pre-catastrophe Athens
happened to coincide in all particulars with the ideally just state
imagined by Plato in his Republic
is surely a broad hint by Plato that this idealized Athens is a work of
his own fiction. Critias even tells us at Critias
107 that 'all statements we make are inevitably pictures or images', and
in Timaeus 22 the Egyptian
priest is made to say that, rather than always being literally true, a
myth may symbolize a cosmological process or historic event: such a
sophisticated approach to myth is also sometimes taken by Plato in other
works, such as the Phaedrus. And as well as this symbolic interpretation of some myths, we
also have to remember that in general the Greeks were far less concerned
than we are to differentiate between myth and historical 'fact': their
primary concern is often not with the objective truth of what happened in
the past, but with making 'history' or 'myth' serve a particular ethical,
political or religious purpose.
In the Timaeus
and Critias, Critias makes it
absolutely clear that the account of Atlantis and its war with the
idealized Athens is included because the story is especially 'well-suited'
(Timaeus 26) to what he wants to say. The immediate aim is to provide
a rich and powerful opponent to the former Athens, to show how virtue can
overcome even mighty wealth and dominance (there are surely deliberate
allusions here to the Greeks defeating the sumptuously wealthy Persian
empire in the late fifth century BC, about a hundred years before Plato
was writing). A secondary aim is to use this earlier, idealized Athens to
comment indirectly on what Plato perceives to be the degenerate state of
contemporary Athens and to hint at possibilities for future renewal or
further decline: he is giving us a stark warning about what happens to a
state when it comes to value wealth and power too highly, and to neglect
the cultivation of virtue and self-restraint. In addition, Plato is always
intrigued by the notion of mighty past civilizations (not just Atlantis)
wiped out by cataclysms: the notion allows him to explore the idea that
history is cyclical and that human life, achievements and hopes are
fragile. Above all, it enables him to examine how civilization can develop
again after disaster and near extinction.
The upshot of all this is that Plato is not particularly concerned with a precise factual recovery of the past. He is always willing to mix historical and mythological sources (as we distinguish them), embellished by elements from his own fertile imagination. So even if he did inherit a story about Atlantis from his great-grandfather Critias transmitted as described (as seems very possible), it is highly unlikely that he would have been concerned to reproduce it exactly: he would always have made it serve his own philosophical goals. This, of course, leaves it very much open to us to imagine what story Plato actually did inherit. Nor can we know what alterations occurred to the story during the process of its transmission from Solon to Critias, or whether Solon misunderstood or misremembered what the priests had told him (even, perhaps, after a blow to the head, as David suggests). Furthermore, the priests themselves may have been confused over elements of the tale, or deliberately set out to deceive Solon or simply told him what they thought he wanted to hear: he was, after all, in their eyes merely a member of the gullible Greek race of 'children'. All these possible scenarios allow in turn for the possibility that an original Atlantis story became considerably altered over time and overlaid with folk memories of Minoan Crete, Mycenean Greece, the Persian wars and various individual and communal fantasies of a Golden Age. Could Solon initially have heard what David alleges he heard about the location of Atlantis? On the evidence we have, it is at least a possibility, and on the evidence we have, it is anybody's guess. And that is where the fun starts.
Copyright © 2007 Angie Hobbs