So much for the royal city. Atlantis itself was a mountainous island, save for the plain in which the royal city stood. This plain was oblong, extending 3000 stades in one direction, and 2000 inland through the centre of the island. The mountains which enclosed it were great and beautiful, and sheltered it from the north wind. A fosse 10,000 stades long, one stade broad, and a hundred feet deep-a work, it may be thought, of superhuman magnitude-was carried round the whole oblong of the plain. The streams from the mountains poured into it, and it had an outlet into the ocean. From the furthest inland part of it parallel canals were cut through the plain at intervals of one hundred stades, and these were connected by cross canals. By means of this system of canals, timber and fruits were brought down to the city. There were two harvests, one after the winter rains, the other in summer, raised by irrigation from the canals. The plain was divided into 60,000 lots, each lot being a square with sides measuring ten stades. Over those fit for military service in each lot was set a Leader; and there were likewise Leaders of those who dwelt in the mountains and other parts of the country-a vast population—according to their settlements and villages. Each Leader was bound to supply a sixth part of the cost of a chariot of war-in this way 10,000 chariots were furnished; he was also bound to supply two horses with riders, and a light chariot for a pair of horses, with a shield-bearer to go on foot with it, and a driver to ride in it and drive the horses; each Leader was also bound to supply two heavy-armed soldiers, two archers, two slingers, and, as skirmishers, three stone-throwers and three men armed with javelins, also four sailors to help to man the fleet of 1200 war-ships. Such was the armament of the capital; and the nine provinces had also their own different armaments, but it would be tedious to describe these.

In each of the nine provinces, as well as in the capital, its own King was supreme over the lives of the citizens and the administration of the laws; but the dealings of the ten governments with one another were determined by the Commandments of Poseidon, which were engraved by the first men on a Table of orichalcum, which was preserved in the Temple of Poseidon on the island-mountain. There, every fifth year and every sixth year alternately, a meeting was held for the dis

cussion of affairs and the judgment of transgressions; and this is how they conducted their business:-There were sacred bulls, which were kept within the precincts of Poseidon. The Ten, who were left alone in the precincts, after they had prayed to the god that they might take that bull which should be an acceptable sacrifice to him, began to hunt the bulls, without weapons of iron, with staves and nooses; and when they had taken one of them they brought him to the Table of the Commandments, and there struck him on the head and shed his blood over the writing, and afterwards burnt his members, and mingled a bowl, casting into it clots of his blood, one clot for each of the Ten. Then they drew from the bowl in golden vials, and poured a libation on the fire, and swore that they would give judgments, and do all things, according to the Commandments of their Father Poseidon written on the Table. When they had drunken of the vials, and dedicated them in the Temple, they supped; and after supper, when it was dark and the sacrificial fire had died down, they put on azure robes exceeding beautiful, and sat down on the ground about the embers, all the lights in the Temple having been extinguished, and there, in the darkness of night, judged and were judged; and when day dawned they wrote the judgments on a golden tablet, and laid it by, along with their robes, for a memorial.

There were laws also regulating the behaviour of the Ten Kings towards one another. They were not to make war against one another; they were to aid any one of their number if his subjects rose against him in rebellion and tried to overthrow his dynasty; they were to take counsel together about war and other matters, always recognising the suzerainty of the line of Atlas; and a majority of the Ten must agree before a King could put to death one of his kinsmen.

For a long while the people of Atlantis preserved the divine nature that was in them, and obeyed the laws and loved the Gods, honouring virtue above gold and all other possessions, and using their wealth in temperance and brotherly love. But in course of time their divine nature, from admixture with human nature, became feeble, and they were corrupted by their prosperity, so that, in the end, their life, at the very time. when it seemed most glorious, was indeed most debased, being filled with lust of wealth and power. Then Zeus, God of Gods,

whose kinganip is the rule of law, perceiving that a milk nation was in a wretched plight, and wishing to punish the that they might be reformed by chastisement summoned al the Gods to an assembly in his most boly mansira which bey situate in the centre of the Cosmos, bebolds all things partake of generation; and, when the Gods were assemblet spake unto them thus:

OBSERVATIONS ON THE GEOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY OF
THE ATLANTIS MYTH

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

Mr. Arthur Platt, in a very instructive article on "Plato nd Geology," after quoting from the Critias (110 E) Plato's ccount of the antediluvian Attica as a rolling champaign very lifferent 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 denudaion, 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.2 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.

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.