Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (17 page)

What Pythagoras had found was the octave. Because there are seven notes to the CDEFGAB musical scale, two notes eight places apart will have the same pitch, like the first and last
do
in the sequence
do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do
. The higher note has twice the frequency of the other. Pythagoras also noted that the twelve-pound hammer and the eight-pound hammer (a 3:2 ratio) produced the sweet harmony of what musicians call a perfect fifth. The
twelve-pounder paired with a nine-pounder (a 4:3 ratio) created what’s now known as a perfect fourth. As if these discoveries weren’t enough proof of having tapped into the supernatural world, the ratios 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4 would likely have been represented like this:

Pythagoras had uncovered a mathematical foundation for the most ephemeral of human pleasures, music. No wonder he thought all things were numbers.

From here Pythagoras, according to tradition, looked into the night sky and speculated that the distances between the celestial bodies above (the visible planets, the moon, the sun, and the stars) might adhere to the same ratios. Aristotle reported in his
Metaphysics
that the Pythagoreans believed that the orbits of the heavenly bodies produced a sound. This cosmic harmony, which humans other than Pythagoras (allegedly) didn’t hear, became known as “the music of the spheres.” This idea would prove to be so enduring that it would serve as the inspiration for Johannes Kepler’s work on the third law of planetary motion more than two thousand years later.

Perhaps the most important influence of Pythagorean celestial harmony was on Plato’s
Timaeus
, his own attempt to explain the cosmos. The very first words of the dialogue, spoken by Socrates, set
the Pythagorean tone by echoing the sacred tetractys: “One, two, three . . . Where is number four, Timaeus?” In a surprisingly short amount of time, Plato moves through the first part of the Atlantis story to his description of the Divine Craftsman creating the universe from a set of blueprints. Plato proposes that this universe is both the sum total of all matter and a living being, animated by something he calls the World-Soul.

By now you’re asking yourself,
What the hell does all this have to do with Atlantis?
Well, Plato shifts abruptly from extreme obscurity to odd precision by defining the exact proportions into which the Divine Craftsman divided this raw World-Soul material. The measurements are given as 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, and 27. The scholar Crantor—who studied at the Academy in Athens not long after Plato’s death, wrote history’s first known commentary on the
Timaeus
and believed that the Atlantis story was literal history—suggested that it might be helpful to arrange the numbers like this:

A few things about this schema are notable. Let’s set aside the number 1 atop the pyramid because for the Pythagoreans 1 was the symbol of the universe and was a sort of super number from which all others derived. The remaining numbers to the left are evens; to the right are odds. The first number on each side is a prime, followed by its square, followed by its cube. Look closely and you’ll also see that the basic Pythagorean harmonic ratios are there—1:2, 2:3, 4:3,
and 9:8. Plato goes on in the
Timaeus
to explain—somewhat—what he’s up to, using math to show that the Divine Craftsman was weaving Pythagoras’s invisible source code of the universe, the harmonic scale, into the very fabric of the cosmos. Somehow, the World-Soul is also simultaneously formed into a long band that the Craftsman cuts lengthwise into two strips, which he formed into two linked circles. One of these circles he subdivided into seven other circles. These were the orbits of the five visible planets, plus the moon and the sun. The choice of seven is not coincidental. There are seven notes in the CDEFGAB scale.

There is a lot more of this type of stuff in the
Timaeus
, but that’s enough for now. All we need to keep in mind at this point is that Plato wrote the numbers-packed
Timaeus
and
Critias
after hanging around with Archytas, and that their message wasn’t aimed at twenty-first-century readers armed with world maps and satellite photos. Plato wrote the
Timaeus
and
Critias
as lectures to be delivered to his students at the Academy, who were studying a Pythagorean curriculum. It seems highly improbable that Plato would have written a dialogue named for the Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus, filled it with numbers and speculations about the geometric basis of the universe—and then sandwiched it between the two parts of the Atlantis story in which the numbers were intended to be taken literally.

The Cradle of Atlantology

Athens

W
hen Plato returned to his hometown of Athens for good, having failed to put his ideas into practice in Syracuse, it’s likely that he fine-tuned the ideas that formed the
Timaeus
and
Critias
by strolling the grounds of the Academy with a promising, if somewhat literal-minded, young student from Macedonia with a penchant for untangling complex ideas during ambulatory conversations. That pupil was Aristotle.

Because they are the two most important thinkers in the Western canon, and because their general philosophies were so different—Plato the dreamer asking, “What if?” and Aristotle the realist asking, “What is?”—they are often portrayed in contrast to each other. Aristotle, the story goes, having been passed over to run the Academy upon Plato’s death, went home to Macedonia to tutor Alexander the Great and returned years later to open his own rival school, the Lyceum, which played Yale to the Academy’s Harvard. For Atlantology, one consequence of this insubordination, cited in almost every semiserious Atlantis book and documentary, is Aristotle’s quote “He who invented it also destroyed it.”

When I raised this issue with Tony O’Connell, he insisted that I
take a look at the work of Thorwald Franke, an independent Atlantis researcher in Germany. Franke was diligent about his philological research, to the extent that he had self-published a nifty bit of textual detective work,
Aristotle and Atlantis
, that examined the sources of Aristotle’s supposed doubt. (Franke believes Sicily was the original inspiration for Atlantis but didn’t mention this in the Aristotle book.) Franke argues convincingly that the Aristotle quote can be traced to a conflation of two similar-sounding passages in one of the key works of ancient geography, Strabo’s
Geographica,
published early in the first century AD
.
Over the years a misinterpretation hardened into fact.

What I found even more interesting in Franke’s book was his argument that not only hadn’t Aristotle objected to the idea of Atlantis, but also in many of his works he seems to confirm some belief in its veracity. In his
Meteorology
, he describes the shallow sea outside the Pillars of Heracles as clogged by mud, and Franke notes that “in the context of a geophysical work that deals with matters such as earthquakes and floods, one might have expected from Aristotle an explanation for this phenomenon.” Since there is none, Franke writes, it is reasonable to assume this mud west of Gibraltar was common knowledge. Aristotle supports Plato’s description of the Deucalion flood as a regional, catastrophic event, and—crucially—affirms his teacher’s ideas that knowledge is discovered and lost repeatedly in cycles and that “mythical traditions are remnants of knowledge from before the last cultural demise,” Franke writes. Franke concludes that while none of this proves the existence of Plato’s Atlantis, we can deduce from Aristotle’s “eloquent silence” that at the very least the second-greatest Western philosopher didn’t consider the lost island an outright fabrication.

Modern Athens seemed to be going through its own cycle of catastrophes. A few days before my arrival, Syntagma Square, which I belatedly realized on the train from the airport was about a Molotov cocktail’s throw from my hotel, had been packed with fifty
thousand angry protesters, many chucking rocks at the police, who responded with tear gas. They had come to show their displeasure with the German chancellor, who was in town to squeeze further cuts from the Greek budget. What I found in Syntagma when I emerged from the subway after dark was something less dramatic but sadder—a large park across the street from Greece’s parliament populated by homeless people sleeping on the ground. Stray dogs sniffed around for edible scraps and didn’t seem to be finding much.

In the morning, I stepped over the sidewalk campers outside my hotel and walked a couple of miles, crossing under a highway and over a set of train tracks, to the original site of Plato’s Academy. As a scenic monument to one of the most important pieces of real estate in intellectual history, it falls a little short of the Platonic ideal. The sign warning away nongeometers has long since disappeared, along with just about everything else. In Plato’s time the spot had been a peaceful grove with shrines, a gymnasium, and areas dedicated to lectures and debate. Today, it consists of a few stone foundations that have been excavated inside of a public park in a somewhat shabby neighborhood northwest of the Acropolis. Plato died at a wedding feast in 347 BC, and his body had been buried on the grounds of the Academy, according to Diogenes Laertius’s
Lives of Eminent Philosophers
. Which means that theoretically his grave is within the confines of the park, but like so much about Plato, the location of his final resting spot remains a mystery.

The day was hot and the park was nearly deserted. In Plato’s time, scholars throughout the Mediterranean gathered at the Academy for communal meals and ontological discourse. The only group I saw was unwashed men huddled atop the stone remains of an ancient foundation, hiding from the noon sun and drinking large cans of Alfa beer. Their possessions were stuffed into plastic shopping bags that had been stowed between gaps in the ruins. Several stones had been tagged with graffiti. My search for an ancient olive tree under
which Plato was said to have led discussions with students was no more successful than my hunt for his tomb. Later I read that someone had pulled down the tree to use for firewood.

I walked back toward the city center and an outdoor souvlaki joint that George Nomikos had recommended, ordered a large Alfa of my own, and pulled out my copy of
The Atlantis Hypothesis: Searching for a Lost Land
, the collected papers delivered at the first International Conference on the Atlantis Hypothesis in 2005. This compendium is, to put it mildly, eclectic. It opens with Christos Doumas’s essay dismissing Atlantis as a chimera and closes with one by Stavros Papamarinopoulos, the organizer of the conference, making an entirely cogent and convincing argument for its reality. Scattered in between are articles on everything from Freudian interpretations of the Atlantis myth to the effects of sea-level change on coastal geography following the last Ice Age. The essay I was searching for, however, was about another of the great lost cities of ancient Greece, Helike, and its possible influence on Plato.

The accepted history of Helike’s sudden end is strikingly similar to the story of Atlantis. During the winter of 373 BC, this prosperous capital of the city-state of Achaea, situated on a coastal plain near the Gulf of Corinth, disappeared in a single night. For five days prior to the event, the historian Aelian wrote, inhabitants of the city had noticed that “all the mice and martens and snakes and centipedes and beetles and every other creature of that kind left in a body” and fled for higher ground. A huge earthquake struck Helike during the night, destroying houses and killing most of its residents. When day broke, the stunned survivors attempted to flee but were drowned by a massive wave that overwhelmed Helike and erased almost any evidence that a city had existed. The Greek geographer Strabo wrote that the “whole district together with the city was hidden from sight; and two thousand men who were sent by the Achaeans were unable to recover the dead bodies.” In the city’s sacred grove devoted to
Poseidon, only the tops of the trees were still visible. Ten Spartan ships at anchor nearby were also destroyed.

Like Atlantis, Helike had a strong connection to Poseidon. When the Greek geographer Eratosthenes visited the site about 150 years after the catastrophe, he spoke with ferrymen who described a bronze statue of Poseidon that remained standing, visible just beneath the water’s surface in a
poros
, an archaic Greek word that’s usually translated as a narrow passage of water. In its hand the statue held aloft a small sea horse that threatened to snag fishermen’s nets. The second-century-AD Greek geographer Pausanias wrote that the destruction of Helike had been the work of a vengeful Poseidon, a punishment by the god of earthquakes against the people of Helike for refusing to give a statue of himself to a group of supplicants who had voyaged from Asia Minor.

Despite the abundance of historical accounts, physical evidence of Helike is scarce. Spyridon Marinatos spent more than twenty years searching for the lost city; just months before his breakthrough at Akrotiri, he had predicted to a reporter that Helike, which because of its sudden disappearance might contain unimaginable bronze and marble sculptures from the classical era, would be “almost surely the most spectacular archaeological discovery ever made.” Even after Akrotiri became world famous in 1967, Marinatos continued to pursue Helike until his death seven years later.

At the moment Helike vanished in 373 BC, Plato would have been in Athens, less than a hundred miles away, teaching at the Academy. He had likely written the
Republic
by this time and may have been pondering how to expand on some of its ideas in what would become the
Timaeus
. News of an important Greek city with ties to Poseidon being almost instantaneously demolished by an earthquake and resulting sea surge would surely have reached him. If the Atlantis tale was indeed the first example of historical fiction, as some have proposed, then the disappearance of Helike would have
been obvious source material. The eminent Plato scholar A. E. Taylor wrote of Atlantis that “the account of its destruction is manifestly based on the facts of the great earthquake and tidal wave of the year 373 which ravaged the Achaean coast.”

Employing the standard interpretation of
poros
as a narrow passage of water, Marinatos sought the lost city on the seabed of the Gulf of Corinth. Others, including Jacques Cousteau, turned up to try their luck. (Cousteau actually came twice, to no avail.) It was only when a young classics scholar paused to question the meaning of
poros
that a breakthrough was made.

That scholar, Dora Katsonopoulou, invited me to meet her at the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. It occurred to me as I waited outside for her to arrive, looking up at the hilltop ruins, that when Plato wrote the
Critias
these temples were younger than the Empire State Building is today. Katsonopoulou, now in her fifties, was easy to spot from fifty yards away—effortlessly glamorous, with long dark hair and a red scarf.

We took the escalator to the museum’s third-floor café, where a wall of windows provided a breathtaking panoramic view of the Acropolis, the afternoon sun illuminating the geometric perfection of the ruined Parthenon. Heads at other tables turned in our direction, trying to figure out if Katsonopoulou was someone important, which she certainly was to anyone interested in Atlantis. We ordered coffees and split a piece of apple pie. By this time I’d met enough Atlantologists for coffee that my Pavlovian response to the scent of roasted beans was to start asking questions about concentric circles, but Katsonopoulou preempted me by explaining how she had gotten involved in hunting for lost cities.

“I was a graduate student getting a PhD in classics at Cornell University, back in ’85 or ’86,” she said. One day her adviser phoned and said someone from the astrophysics department was interested in Helike and wanted to speak with her. Steven Soter was a well-known
scientist who, among other achievements, had cowritten Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos
documentary series. While helping a colleague research ancient literature about the possible causes of earthquakes, he had become fascinated by Helike. Katsonopoulou knew the story well—she had studied ancient Greek and had grown up on the Peloponnesus near the rumored site of Helike. She had heard tales of its disappearance as a child. Soter and Katsonopoulou organized the Helike Project to conduct an archaeological search for the lost city. In 1988, following the strategy employed by their predecessors, they conducted a thorough sonar survey of the muddy waters of the Gulf of Corinth. They found nothing.

After this failure, Katsonopoulou went back and reviewed Eratosthenes’s account of his visit, focusing on the detail of the statue sunk in the
poros
. She realized that the ferrymen whom Eratosthenes had interviewed were not transporting people across the larger gulf, but rather across “a sort of lake or lagoon that was connected to the sea,” she told me. Today, the spot occupied by this
poros
is dry land, covered with a thick layer of sediment. “So I said we should look on land, not in the sea,” she said, pointing her fork at me. “And I was right!”

In 2000, having moved their search inland, the Helike Project team dug four trial trenches and began finding evidence ten to twenty feet beneath the ground—ceramics, masonry stones, and a bronze coin from the fifth century BC. Predictably, the BBC marked these discoveries by airing a documentary titled
Helike: The Real Atlantis.

A waiter brought another slice of pie to the table, unsolicited. Katsanopoulou arched an eyebrow and waved him away. I asked how the just-completed archaeological season at Helike had gone. “Amazing! Very exciting! In one trench we found a very impressive destruction layer, as we call it in archaeology. It means you don’t have the remains of walls or buildings, but you have . . . like someone just
hurled everything! I suspect that this is the layer of the 373 earthquake.”

Such a violent dispersal would require extremely powerful seismic activity. Sedimentological analysis, still pending, could prove a tsunami had followed. Naturally, I steered the topic toward Atlantis. How closely were the two related?

“I think for Plato, Helike is the model of the destructive phenomenon,” Katsonopoulou said. “The same things are described, the sea and the tsunami and how the city disappeared from the face of the earth. Exactly what our sources say about Helike. Poseidon was the patron god of Helike and the patron god of Atlantis and also the god of earthquakes and underground waters. Poseidon destroyed Helike, and he probably destroyed Atlantis—in both cases for being impious. In
Critias
, Plato’s text stops abruptly at the end. I believe that the continuation would have been for Zeus to ask Poseidon to come in and punish Atlantis.”