Atlantis Pyramids Floods (7 page)

The Overview

Note
: The
overview covers the discussions that took place leading up to the
telling of the story.

Socrates: Very good. And what is this
ancient famous action of the Athenians, which Critias declared, on
the authority of Solon, to be not a mere legend, but an actual
fact?

Critias: I will tell an old-world
story which I heard from an aged man; for Critias, at the time of
telling it, was as he said, nearly ninety years of age, and I was
about ten. Now the day was that day of the Apaturia which is called
the Registration of Youth, at which, according to custom, our
parents gave prizes for recitations, and the poems of several poets
were recited by us boys, and many of us sang the poems of Solon,
which at that time had not gone out of fashion.

Note
: The
Apaturia was a festival during which people registered the children
who had been born in the previous year. On the third day of the
festival, schoolboys were expected to give recitations as
entertainment.

One of our tribe, either because he
thought so, or to please Critias, said that in his judgment, Solon
was not only the wisest of men but also the noblest of poets. The
old man, as I very well remember, brightened up at hearing this and
said, smiling: Yes, Amynander, if Solon had only, like other poets,
made poetry the business of his life, and had completed the tale
which he brought with him from Egypt, and had not been compelled,
by reason of the factions and troubles which he found stirring in
his own country when he came home, to attend to other matters, in
my opinion he would have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any
poet.

And what was the tale about, Critias?
said Amynander.

About the greatest action which the
Athenians ever did, and which ought to have been the most famous,
but, through the lapse of time and the destruction of the actors,
it has not come down to us.

Tell us, said the other, the whole
story, and how and from whom Solon heard this veritable tradition.
He replied:

In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of
which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is
called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is
also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The
citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the
Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom
the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the Athenians,
and say that they are in some way related to them.

To this city came Solon, and was
received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were
most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the
discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth
mentioning about the times of old.

On one occasion, wishing to draw them
on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient
things in our part of the world—about Phoroneus, who is called “the
first man,” and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival
of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their
descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many
years ago the events of which he was speaking happened.

Note
: The
story of Deucalion and Pyrrha is the Greek version of Noah’s Great
Flood. They thought the flood was a means to punish
humankind.

Greek Version of the Great
Flood:

www.authorama.com/old-greek-stories-6.html

Thereupon one of the priests, who was
of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never
anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon
in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that
in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down
among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with
age. And I will tell you why.

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. There is a
story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time
Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his
father’s chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path
of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was
himself destroyed by a thunderbolt.

Now this has the form of a myth, but
really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens
around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the
earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who
live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable
to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore.
And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour,
delivers and preserves us.

When, on the other hand, the gods
purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your
country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but
those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into
the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time,
does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a
tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions
preserved here are the most ancient.

The fact is, that wherever the
extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind
exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And
whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any
other region of which we are informed—if there were any actions
noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been
written down by us of old, and are preserved in our
temples.

Whereas just when you and other
nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other
requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream
from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only
those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you
have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of
what happened in ancient times, either among us or among
yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours which you just now
recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of
children.

In the first place you remember a
single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next
place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the
fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and
your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them
which survived.

And this was unknown to you, because,
for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died,
leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the
great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in
war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to
have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest
constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of
heaven.

Solon marveled at his words, and
earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in order
about these former citizens. You are welcome to hear about them,
Solon, said the priest, both for your own sake and for that of your
city, and above all, for the sake of the goddess who is the common
patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She founded your
city a thousand years before ours, receiving from the Earth and
Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours,
of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be
eight thousand years old.

As touching your citizens of nine
thousand years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of
their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we
will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers
themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you will find
that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the
olden time.

In the first place, there is the caste
of priests, which is separated from all the others; next, there are
the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do
not intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of
hunters, as well as that of husbandmen; and you will observe, too,
that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other classes,
and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to
military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are
shields and spears, a style of equipment which the goddess taught
of Asiatics first to us, as in your part of the world first to
you.

Then as to wisdom, do you observe how
our law from the very first made a study of the whole order of
things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which gives health,
out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for human
life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to
them.

All this order and arrangement the
goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she
chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw
that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would
produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover
both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that
spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And
there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones,
and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and
disciples of the gods.

Many great and wonderful deeds are
recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds
all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a
mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole
of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end.

This power came forth out of the
Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and
there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by
you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than
Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and
from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent
which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the
Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance,
but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most
truly called a boundless continent.

Now in this island of Atlantis there
was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole
island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and,
furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya
within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as
far as Tyrrhenia.

This vast power, gathered into one,
endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole
of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country
shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among
all mankind. She was preeminent in courage and military skill, and
was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from
her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the
very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the
invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet
subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell
within the pillars.

But afterwards 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.

I have told you briefly, Socrates,
what the aged Critias heard from Solon and related to us. And when
you were speaking yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale
which I have just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I
remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you
agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but
I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed,
and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all
run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would
speak.

And so I readily assented to your
request yesterday, considering that in all such cases the chief
difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our purpose, and that with
such a tale we should be fairly well provided. And therefore, as
Hermocrates has told you, on my way home yesterday I at once
communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered it; and
after I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly
the whole it.

Truly, as is often said, the lessons
of our childhood make wonderful impression on our memories; for I
am not sure that I could remember all the discourse of yesterday,
but I should be much surprised if I forgot any of these things
which I have heard very long ago. I listened at the time with
childlike interest to the old man’s narrative; he was very ready to
teach me, and I asked him again and again to repeat his words, so
that like an indelible picture they were branded into my
mind.

As soon as the day broke, I rehearsed
them as he spoke them to my companions, that they, as well as
myself, might have something to say. And now, Socrates, to make an
end my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole tale. I will give
you not only the general heads, but the particulars, as they were
told to me.