(Syncroblog suggested by Mahud: Theme “Landscapes”)
I’ll tell you a story about Atlantis, the Lost Land.
Once upon a time, a Greek philosopher named Plato was writing about his mentor Socrates and their circle of learned friends. Sometimes they would talk about right and wrong, the soul and other erudite matters by telling stories that illustrated what they meant. In the Republic, Socrates told of a man who died and learned the nature of the soul, but that myth isn’t so well remembered. In the Symposium, Aristophanes told a myth about how people are descended from separated twins, to explain love and why some people are homosexual. That story was written off by the Middle Ages as a joke. In the Timaeus and Kritias, Socrates’ old friend Kritias told about a powerful civilization that Athens had fought 9000 years before his own day. That story, the legend of Atlantis, has taken on a life of its own, so that people who have never read Plato have heard of it, and many people who did read Plato have spent their lives searching for it.
Plato wrote that Kritias said that Solon said that he heard the story from some Egyptian priests. Have you got all that? That’s the first report we have of Atlantis; everyone afterwards was writing with Plato’s story in mind. We’ve never found any records about Atlantis in Egypt. The archaeological record shows no major settlement at Athens 9000 years before classical Greece. The civilization Kritias describes sounds Bronze Age, not Stone Age, which it should have been so long ago. But historical accuracy was irrelevant to these philosophers. They were using stories instead of just dry dusty reason to show how people ought to live in harmony with the land and with their gods.
The marvellous thing about Atlantis, the lost land that may not even have existed, is that so many people have found it. They’ve found it in the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, in the Bahamas and in the Yucatán. Eden is more elusive, and the Tower of Babel — well, we know where that is. There’s oil wells instead of a single tower in Babylonia nowadays, but we’re still fighting over it.
There have been many myths of Atlantis. Atlantis wakes something in us that yearns for a Lost Land, a golden age when civilization and the land were one — until the land (or rather, the sea) ended it.
Let me tell you about my Atlantis.
