Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City Read online

  Proof that the Atlantis tale was true wouldn’t just make for a great episode of In Search Of . . . It would also help solve some of ancient history’s greatest mysteries. The details of its sudden destruction may help explain a bizarre chain of natural catastrophes and apocalyptic famines that caused several advanced Mediterranean societies to collapse suddenly at the end of the Bronze Age. Some believed, with good reason, that the details in Plato’s Atlantis tale were closely related to stories in the Old Testament.

  The virus continued to incubate. I set up an e-mail news alert for “Atlantis and Plato.” About once a week I’d receive notice that someone had devised a new location theory, as often as not pinpointing someplace like the Great Pyramid or the Bermuda Triangle.

  The day after the devastating Fukushima tsunami in Japan—descriptions of which eerily echoed the “violent earthquakes and floods” that Plato claimed destroyed Atlantis—I was sitting in my office when Atlantis news alerts started pinging like a pinball machine. Evidently, someone had found the lost island for real this time, or at least serious media outlets around the world were treating the latest discovery as news.

  I was torn. The logical, Aristotle half of my brain told me that it couldn’t be possible, that any search for Atlantis was bound to be the wildest of goose chases. The daydreamy, Plato half of my brain said that nothing was beyond imagining. Perhaps this was something I should look into further, I thought. I searched out a passage I’d underlined in Plato’s Meno, in which the characters discuss the limits of knowledge. One philosopher says to another, “We shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to inquire than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know.”

  Bumper sticker translation: If you don’t ask questions, you’ll never find any answers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Philosophy 101: Intro to Plato

  Lowenstein Academic Building, Fordham University

  When I first read that Plato was the source of the Atlantis myth, I imagined the Atlantis I knew from Saturday morning cartoons: a city of hyperintelligent beings who dwelled beneath the waves in air-locked bubble houses powered by magic crystals. It turned out that Plato’s original version is a bit more complicated and a lot more interesting.

  The Atlantis tale unfolds in two parts, stretched across a pair of Plato’s later works, the Timaeus and the Critias. Few non-Atlantologists without PhDs are familiar with these dialogues, and for a good reason: They are extremely weird. They are also, however, closely related to Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic, which would finish first in a poll to determine the most influential philosophical work of all time. The Republic is logical and forceful and covers a lot of ground—not many books can be called foundational texts of both Christianity and Fascism—and is packed with brilliant, radical ideas.

  The Timaeus, a dialogue that Plato wrote as a sort of sequel to the Republic—and which introduced Atlantis to the world—is messy and confusing. It contains mathematics, cosmology, natural sciences, an explanation of why time exists, possibly ironic musings on what types of animals humans transform into after reincarnation, and, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell drily noted, “more that is simply silly than is to be found in [Plato’s] other writings.” The Critias, which provides most of the details used to search for Atlantis, reads like a Greek myth rewritten by a middle schooler whose grade depends on using lots of numbers and adjectives. It ends unresolved, halfway through a sentence.

  Two painful attempts to plow through the Timaeus and Critias convinced me that I needed a guide. Enter Brian Johnson, who was teaching Introduction to Plato at Fordham University. I was swayed by his near-perfect ratings on RateMyProfessors.com, which included encouraging comments such as “Philosophy can be reallllly boring, but he makes it interesting.” Johnson invited me up to his tiny, windowless office on the eighth floor of a high-rise on Manhattan’s west side. He was slim, bespectacled, and cheerful. We purchased gigantic coffees in the university cafeteria and retired to the silence of the philosophy department.

  One reason why the Timaeus is so confusing, Johnson explained, is that it was the product of a rather daunting assignment Plato had given himself—to formulate a theory that explained pretty much everything in existence, known and unknown. “There’s no such thing as a cosmic book that you can open up and it explains the laws of nature,” Johnson said. “Plato’s concerned about the grounds for knowledge. He’s looking for regularity in a chaotic world. In the Timaeus there’s this attempt to associate all things with numbers,” Johnson said. “He’s trying to give a theological account that provides something like the geometric logic of nature.” According to tradition, over the entrance of the university Plato founded in Athens, the Academy, were posted the words LET NO ONE IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE.

  For Plato, the earth is a globe that rotates because that is the most perfect shape and the most perfect motion. Everything in the natural world can be broken down into four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. These elements are in turn composed of four geometric solids: four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, and twenty-sided. A fifth, twelve-sided polygon represented the universe. Johnson pulled an animated diagram of the Platonic solids up on his computer screen. They looked like the multifaceted dice from Dungeons & Dragons. These five solids, according to the Timaeus, can be subdivided further into two types of triangles, both of which have measurements that correspond to the Pythagorean theorem: A2 + B2 = C2.

  The Timaeus, with its emphasis on a world created by a single god, was hugely influential in the development of Christian and Islamic ideas. The speaker Timaeus explains how the cosmos was fashioned from chaos by a single demiurge, or Divine Craftsman. This creator is good, and therefore the world is good. This will sound familiar to anyone raised in a modern religious household, but it was a fairly radical departure from the traditional Greek pantheon of gods who drank, fought, engaged in various sexual hijinks, and capriciously meddled in the affairs of mortals. Unlike the Old Testament God, Plato’s Divine Craftsman does not create the cosmos ex nihilo. He uses a set of ideal blueprints but must work with the imperfect materials the universe has presented to him, which is why the world often falls short of mathematical perfection.

  • • •

  Plato’s odd choice to sandwich his theories about the creation of the cosmos between the two halves of the Atlantis tale has been discussed and debated almost since the moment he died. So has the question of whether he meant the story to be true or not. I mentioned to Johnson that Aristotle had famously dismissed the story, and he nodded in agreement. Aristotle spent twenty years studying at Plato’s Academy, which was the world’s first university. During and after his time there he seems to have rejected many of Plato’s ideas. According to one melodramatic bit of ancient gossip, following Plato’s death, his star pupil was angry at being passed over to replace his mentor as the head of the institute. One later writer, Johnson told me, said Plato had referred to Aristotle as “the foal that kicks its mother when it’s had too much milk.”1

  I was curious to know if stories like that of Atlantis were common in Plato’s writings. “There are things about it that are typical,” Johnson said. “It’s a story within a story. It’s a way of Plato distancing himself from making it literal. It allows Plato a little free range.” The philosopher was certainly fond of inserting myths into his dialogues. The Republic ends with the Myth of Er, about a soldier who comes back to life on his funeral pyre after dying on the battlefield. “He claims to have seen the transmigration of souls,” Johnson said. “You get to pick your next life.” According to this myth, those who choose to live justly go to heaven, while those who seek money or power are condemned to misery.

  “One thing I noticed is that Plato stresses over and over that the Atlantis story is true,” I said.

  “You’ve probably heard about the N
oble Lie.”

  I had. This was Plato’s mandate in the Republic that in order to maintain the class structure necessary for an ideal society, the rulers would need to tell the lower caste that the system had been put in place by God. In this way the wisest would continue to lead and the others would be satisfied with their station in life.

  “Maybe when he insists on the truth of Atlantis, that itself is sort of a Noble Lie,” Johnson said. He reached for his thick Collected Works of Plato and scanned the pages with his index finger. “One other thing that seems typical is that the story resolves itself through natural disaster. Here it is, in the Laws.” The Laws was one of Plato’s final works, an attempt to draw up a blueprint for the society he’d outlined in the Republic. It’s infamous for being even harder to comprehend than the Timaeus, and mind-bendingly dull. “Even people who study ancient philosophy tend to dip in and out of the Laws rather than reading the whole thing,” Johnson admitted.

  Johnson read aloud. “The human race has been repeatedly annihilated by floods and plagues and many other causes, so that only a fraction of it has survived.”

  That sure sounded a lot like Atlantis. In the Timaeus, an Egyptian priest tells his Greek visitor, “There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.” Might it have been a story Plato made up to show an idealized state, like the one he proposed in the Republic, that was corrupted and thus had to be punished by the gods?

  “Here’s a hypothesis that could be wildly wrong,” Johnson said, closing the book. “It seems like the Atlantis myth does cash in on some ideas from the Republic. Have you bumped into this idea of the Golden Age?”

  I had. The Greeks were great believers in the Good Old Days. For Plato, who was a bit of a snob, this would have been an imaginary time when Athens was ruled by wise aristocrats rather than a mob ignorant of geometry.

  “I gather that Atlantis was supposed to be like his philosopher-kings model and that it was destroyed by natural disaster,” he said. In the Republic, Plato proposes that the best possible leaders would be philosopher-kings, monarchs who ruled wisely because they had been trained in the philosophic arts, especially mathematics. “Plato says that the ideal state cannot last. He seemed to think its own downfall is built into the very structure of nature.”

  Johnson had a fascinating poster on his wall that at first glance looked like the concentric circles of Atlantis. I was disappointed to learn it was actually a re-creation of a map from the movie Time Bandits. I seemed to recall the movie beginning with a boy’s fascination with ancient Greece and leading through a long, complicated journey based on possibly unreliable source materials. I couldn’t remember if it had a happy ending.

  “I’m guessing Atlantis isn’t discussed much in professional philosophy circles,” I said.

  “It isn’t. Insofar as it is referenced, it’s going to be to ask, what philosophy can we extract from this myth?”

  “So do you think it’s possible that Atlantis ever existed?” I asked. I didn’t mention anything about actually going to look for it.

  We sat in silence while Johnson formulated an answer. He had the sympathetic look on his face that teachers use when they don’t want to discourage classroom discussion, even though the students obviously haven’t understood the assigned reading. The five Platonic solids rotated merrily on his computer screen.

  “I guess I’m open to the idea,” he said, finally. “So long as it’s reasonable.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Disappeared in the Depths of the Sea”

  Saïs, Egypt (ca. 600 BC)

  This is a detective story, one that starts in ancient Greece and follows a twisting path through (to list just a few locations) Pharaonic Egypt, Nazi Germany, and contemporary Saint Paul, Minnesota. And as with any good detective story, it helps to assemble all the available evidence in one place.

  The story begins in the Timaeus, which takes its title from the character of that name, whose elaborate musings on the nature of the universe have kept philologists busy for two millennia. As was common in Plato’s dialogues, some of the speakers are historical figures whom Plato knew personally. Socrates, who in real life was Plato’s beloved philosophical mentor, sets the scene by reminding everyone that the previous day he had given a speech on the ideal city, a reference to the Republic. He asks his three companions—Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates—to each tell a story to illustrate his ideas. Hermocrates suggests that Critias should start by sharing “one that goes back a long way.”

  Critias, a relative of Plato, prefaces his tale by saying it is “a very strange one, but even so, every word of it is true.” To stress its veracity, Critias explains that he heard it from his very old grandfather, who heard it from his father. The original source was unimpeachable: Solon, one of the great statesmen in Athenian history and Plato’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. The story Critias tells his friends recounts a great moment in the history of Athens, “the most magnificent thing our city has ever done.”

  Following so far? Two historical figures, Socrates and Critias, have a presumably invented conversation about a supposedly true story passed down by one of Plato’s ancestors. Let’s proceed.

  Long ago, Critias tells his friends, Solon paid a visit to the Egyptian city of Saïs. He was greeted as an honored guest by priests who were scholars of ancient history. One day Solon began to speak with his hosts about figures from Greek antiquity, but one of the Egyptians interrupted him and said, “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.” The priest explained that Greek society had been repeatedly wiped out by floods or fire, while Egypt had been spared these disasters. The collective history and culture of the Greeks had been all but erased many times, leaving behind only an illiterate band of survivors on each occasion. Therefore, the priest told Solon, the Greeks had no memory “that the finest and best of all the races of humankind once lived in your region.” The Egyptians, having avoided such catastrophes, had maintained in their temples records of the great or noble acts of all peoples, including those of the Athenians.

  Before the most devastating of all floods, the priest explained, the laws and military deeds of Athens had been the greatest ever known. This was in the far distant past, nine thousand years ago. The most glorious Athenian deed of all, the priest continued, was its halting of a vast sea power called Atlantis. Atlantis had insolently attacked all of Europe and Asia, and its empire was larger than Libya and Asia combined. Atlantis was situated on an island in the infinite Atlantic Sea, located in front of the straits that the Greeks called the Pillars of Heracles.2 Without provocation, Atlantis had conquered all lands up to Egypt and Tyrrhenia. It sought to subdue and enslave Egypt, Greece, and all other countries within the Mediterranean. But the noble Athenians, deserted by their allies, fought on alone and defeated the invaders, thus freeing all those “within the boundaries of Heracles.”

  Plato, via the priest, has spun a classic story of heroism—the virtuous underdogs defeating the powerful, evil empire. Star Wars in sandals. But then Plato adds the twist that has made the Atlantis story immortal. After the Athenian victory, the priest continues, “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.”

  Then, just as the story is heating up, Critias pauses to tell Socrates that actually, Timaeus should speak first, because his tale deals with the creation of the entire universe. Timaeus, a Pythagorean philosopher from Italy, takes over the dialogue by asking a very Platonic question—“Wha
t is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is?”—and then commences to explain at length Plato’s kaleidoscopic scientific speculations about the order of the cosmos and how at the atomic level everything is composed of tiny triangles.3

  • • •

  We’re only part of the way into the Atlantis story—we haven’t even gotten to its supernatural creation—but already Plato’s character is giving an account that a TV judge would call unreliable, considering that it would need to have been transmitted absolutely error-free through six generations from Solon to Plato. Unfortunately, Plato also contradicts himself on its source. In the Timaeus, Critias claims to be speaking solely from memory and complains of having lain awake all night trying to remember the story’s details as he’s heard them from his grandfather. In the Critias, however, the speaker Critias says that he possesses Solon’s original notes from his conversation with the Egyptian priest at Saïs.

  Even if we take the leap of faith and assume that Solon did write Dictaphone-perfect notes of his conversations in Saïs, there is the question of whether the priest himself was a reliable source. He tells Solon—whom most experts agree really did visit Egypt—that the great events of antiquity had been inscribed in Egyptian temples. The temples were certainly real; Saïs has long since vanished, but researchers are still digging out archaeological clues in the area where it once stood. It seems certain, though, that Solon neither spoke the Egyptian language nor read hieroglyphs. Thus, the absolute best-case scenario is Plato having two-hundred-year-old, thirdhand information, relayed by a priest who might have wanted to impress his distinguished visitor. Not exactly evidence you’d want to bring before a grand jury.

  Then there’s the question of what defined accurate information in Plato’s day. Recorded history in the fourth century BC was a fairly recent invention. Herodotus, celebrated as the “father of history” by Cicero, began compiling his historical narratives based on firsthand accounts more than a century after Solon died. Prior to that time, events had been recorded in stories passed down orally, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Plato himself was ambivalent about the relatively new technology of preserving information through writing. In his dialogue the Phaedrus, he has Socrates discredit writing as inferior to memory because it cannot be probed by questioning and so offers “the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”