OBSERVATIONS ON THE GEOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY OF
THE ATLANTIS MYTH

Enough, I hope, has been said to indicate the importance of the Atlantis Myth as setting forth the ideal of Imperial Hellas; and now a few remarks may be added on the interesting, though comparatively unimportant, topics of its Geology and Geography.

Mr. Arthur Platt, in a very instructive article on "Plato and Geology," after quoting from the Critias (110 E) Plato's account of the antediluvian Attica as a rolling champaign very different from the broken rocky country of the present epoch, says: "To put this into the language of modern geology we should say, The whole of Attica has suffered great denudation, withstood by the underlying hard rocks, which now accordingly stand out like the skeleton of the country." Mr. Platt does well in claiming for Plato, on the strength of the Critias, rank as an "original geologist." "Sir Charles Lyell," he says, "in his history of the progress of geology, has entirely omitted the name of Plato as an original geologist, and I am not aware that this omission has ever been corrected. Yet it is in reality a serious one. . . This statement of denudation by Plato is, I believe, the first ever made, certainly the first upon so grand a scale. It is true that Herodotus (ii. 10 ff), when he speaks of the formation of the Delta in Egypt, implies denudation of those districts which furnish the alluvium . . . but he does not call attention to this necessary denudation, and does not seem to have appreciated its consequences, his mind being fixed solely on the formation of the new deposit. Plato therefore must have the credit of the first distinct enunciation of a most important geological doctrine." "The next question," Mr. Platt proceeds, " is: Is this doctrine, however true in general, true of Attica in particular?" and he quotes Lyell's authority for an affirmative answer: "The whole fauna,' says Lyell, speaking of the remains of Miocene age discovered by Gaudry in Attica, attests the former extension of a vast expanse of grassy plains, where we have 1 Journal of Philology, vol. xviii. pp. 134-139 (1889). 2 Principles of Geology, chap. ii.

now the broken and mountainous country of Greece,—plains which were probably united with Asia Minor, spreading over the area where the deep Egean Sea and its numerous islands are now situated.' Mr. Platt concludes his article with a quotation from Gaudry (Animaux Fossiles et Géologie de l'Attique, 1862), in which that geologist gives his own personal experience of the effect of short downpours of rain, in Attica and other parts of Greece, in carrying away vast quantities of soil. "A man accustomed to such débâcles," remarks Mr. Platt, "might more easily talk of one night's rainfall' carrying off the whole surface of the Acropolis than could a dweller in our climate." In "compelling nature to do all her work in a single night" Plato was doubtless wrong, as Mr. Platt insists, from the point of view of geology as reformed by Lyell; at the same time, I would have the reader of the Critias bear in mind that the geology of that work is, after all, the geology of the Aetiological Myth, in which a result, which Plato, as scientific observer, may well have conceived as due to a secular process, was bound to be attributed to a "catastrophe."

A few words now on the Geography of the Myth. I do not think that it is necessary to suppose, or that it is even likely, that Plato had any sailors' stories of a great land beyond the Western Ocean on which to found his Myth. Nor can the ostensible source of the Myth-Egypt-have been the real source. Egyptologists know nothing of a lost Atlantis. As for the interesting circumstance that recent Physical Geography assumes the former existence of a so-called "Atlantis," that, of course, is without bearing on the question of the source of Plato's Myth.

Atlantis, I take it, is a creation of Plato's own imagination *—a creation which he knows how to give verisimilitude to by connecting with the accepted "scientific" doctrine of terrestrial catastrophes (which we have already seen presented in the Politicus Myth), and also with what was believed, in

1 Pages 450, 451.

2 So Sander, Atlantis, p. 11, on the authority of Brugsch.

3 See H. J. Mackinder's Britain and the British Seas, p. 98-"a continental 'Atlantis' of which Greenland and the Scoto-Icelandic rise may be remnants"; and see also pp. 100, 103, 140, 177, 179, 354, 355, 357.

4 This, the only reasonable view, as it seems to me, is that of Jowett (Introduction to the Critias), Bunbury (History of Ancient Geography, i. 402), and Sander, Atlantis.

his day, to be a fact-the shallow muddy nature of the ocean outside the Pillars of Hercules. This supposed fact is recorded by Scylax, whose Пepíπλovs, or Circumnavigation, was written some time before the accession of Philip.1 Scylax speaks of many trading stations of the Carthaginians, and much mud, and high tides, and open seas, outside the Pillars of Hercules " —ἀπὸ Ἡρακλείων στηλῶν τῶν ἐν τῇ Εὐρώπῃ ἐμπόρια πολλὰ Καρχηδονίων καὶ πηλὸς καὶ πλημμυρίδες καὶ πελάγη (Perip. § 1). "It is evident," says Bunbury, commenting on this passage,2 « that these seas were never at this time visited by Greek traders, while the confused notions of the obstacles to their navigation, purposely diffused by the Carthaginians, were all that had reached our author's ears." Similarly, in the Aristotelian Meteorologica, ii. 1. 354 a 22, we are told that the sea outside the Pillars is shallow and muddy, and windless —τὰ δ ̓ ἔξω στηλῶν βραχέα μὲν διὰ τὸν πηλόν, ἄπνοα δ' ἐστὶν ὡς ἐν κοίλῳ τῆς θαλάττης οὔσης—which again shows, Bunbury remarks,3 "how little it was known to the Greek mariners." 4

The Island of Atlantis, then, is a creation of Plato's imagination, rendered "probable" by the confirmation of "science" and "observed facts"- -a creation intended to contrast with the Kaλiоs, the creation of the Republicintended to stand as "the negative," as Sander puts it," of the antediluvian Athens. The People of Poseidon (commerce) must yield to the People of Athena (wisdom) and Hephaestus (handicraft). Carthage, of course, may well have helped Plato to seize the type described in this selfish Commercial Atlantis, greedy of Empire-like England, as she appears to her rivals.

While the attempt to trace Plato's Atlantis to the tales of Phoenician or other navigators who had visited the American islands or continent is, I feel sure, as mistaken on the one side as the Neo-Platonic exegesis is on the other side, which interprets the Myth as an allegory of the struggle of matter

2

o.c. i. p. 386.

3

O.C. i. 398.

1 Bunbury, o.c. i. 385-386. The pseudo-Aristotelian de Mundo (see Rose de Ar. lib. ord. et auct. pp. 90-100) "bears," says Bunbury (i. 398), "the unquestionable stamp of a much more advanced stage of geographical knowledge than that of the age of Aristotle." See also Grote's Hist. of Greece, ii. 462 (ed. 1862).

5 F. Sander, Atlantis, p. 6.

against form, yet it must be noted that the Platonic creation was not without practical influence on the age which produced Columbus. Plato was then for the first time being read in Greek by Western scholars, and his wonderful land across the ocean, so circumstantially described in the Critias, came to be talked about as a possibility at least. Maritime discovery soon converted the possibility into a reality; and Plato was very naturally credited with knowledge which a more critical scholarship than that of the Renaissance now sees that he could not have possessed.

Before closing these observations I must notice a scholium on the opening sentences of the Republic which might be taken to imply that the war between Athens and Atlantis was a stock Athenian Myth. The scholium says that at the Little Panathenaea a peplus was woven, and embroidered with the War of Athens and Atlantis.3 Of course, it might be argued that this custom was subsequent to Plato's time, and that the Myth on the peplus was taken from Plato; for Critias introduces his story as unheard before. This, however, is very unlikely. A popular ceremony can hardly have originated in that way. If the scholiast is right, it is pretty plain that the story of the War of Athens and Atlantis (in spite of what Callias says about its being hitherto unknown) was known at Athens long before Plato's time. But the scholiast is not

1 See Sander, o. c. p. 17.

2 The Atlantis Myth as it appears in the Critias was then being read in the West for the first time; but the Timaeus, to 53 c, was already known in the Latin version of Chalcidius (circ. Cent. V.). It is strange that Dante, who knew the Timaeus in this version (either directly, or as Mr. Toynbee, Dante Dict. art. "Timeo2," thinks more probable, through Albertus Magnus and S. Thomas Aquinas), nowhere mentions or refers to Atlantis. The land which Ulysses sights (Inf. xxvi.) is the Mount of Purgatory in the Southern Hemisphere, not Fortunate Islands or an Atlantis in the Western Ocean. The commentary of Chalcidius does not touch the introductory part of the Timaeus, which is, however, contained in the version; and Dante's references to the Timaeus (the only work of Plato of which he shows any special knowledge) are limited to topics occurring in the Discourse of the chief speaker, with which alone the commentary of Chalcidius deals. This seems to make for the view that Dante knew the Timaeus only through his own study of the commentary, or through the references of other writers to it and the corresponding part of the version, and that he had no first-hand acquaintance with the version itself as a whole. If he had read the first part of the version, it is difficult to understand his not having been struck by the Destruction of Atlantis, and his not having made use of an event so suitable for poetic treatment.

3 τὰ δὲ μικρὰ Παναθήναια κατὰ τὸν Πειραιᾶ ἐτέλουν, ἐν οἷς καὶ πέπλος ἄλλος ἀνεῖτο τῇ θεῷ, καθ ̓ ἂν ἦν ἰδεῖν τοὺς ̓Αθηναίους, τροφίμους ὄντας αὐτῆς, νικώντας τὸν πρὸς ̓Ατλαντίνους πόλεμον.—Schol. on Republ. 327 Α.

right. His note is founded on a stupid misunderstanding of a passage in the commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus, where the remark is made that Callias has woven a Myth worthy of Athena. Proclus is evidently speaking metaphorically. There is no question of the Atlantis Myth being actually represented on a peplus.1

So far as the Republic scholiast is concerned, then, we may adhere to our view that the Atlantis Myth is the product of Plato's own imagination.

1 See Sander, Atlantis, p. 13.