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"King Minos had through conquest, become overlord of Athens and as a tribute demanded each year twelve noble Athenian youths and maidens whom he could sacrifice to the Minotaur. This was the monstrous progeny of Mino's wife Pasiphae, a nymphomaniac whom only a bull could satisfy . It was kept by Minos in a labyrinth - designed by his chief craftsman Daedalus, beneath his great palace at Knossos. So tortuous was this maze, with its many twisting passages, blind alleys and false turnings, that no man having once entered could ever hope to find his way out again unaided. And within it lurked the Minotaur, waiting to devour its victims. Every year, according to the legend, twelve of the flower of Athenian youth, men and maidens, met their death in this way.

Then came the year when the hero Theseus, son of old / Page 112 / Aegus, lord of Athens was numbered among those to be sent to Crete - but, writes Apollodorus:

"some affirm…he offered himself voluntarily. And as the ship had a black sail, Aegeus (the father) charged his son, if he returned alive, to spread white sails on the ship. And when he came to Crete, Ariadne, daughter of Minos, having fallen in love with him,offered to help him if he would agree to carry her away to Athens and have her to wife. Theseus having agreed on oath to do so, she besought Daedulus to disclose the way out of the Labyrinth."

"Daedulus the Smith, another great figure of legend, was a combination of artist, craftsman and engineer whom Minos employed as a kind of Master of the Kings Works."

"…says Apollodorus: "

"…At his suggestion she gave Theseus a clue [ thread] when he went in. Theseus fastened it to the door, and, drawing it after him, entered in. And after having found the Minotaur in last part of the Labyrinth, he killed him by smiting him with his fists; and, drawing the clue after him made his way out again.

And by night he arrived with Ariadne and the children [pre-sumably by this the writer means the rest of the twelve Athenian men and girls destined for sacrifice]at Naxos. There Dionysus fell in love with Ariadne and carried her off; and having brought her to Lemnos he enjoyed her, and begot Thoas, Staphylus, Oenopion and Peparthus.

" In his grief on account of Ariadne [continues the poet]

Theseus forgot to spread the white sails on his ship when he stood for port; and Aegeus (his father) seeing from the Acropolis the ship with a black sail, supposed that Theseus had perished; so he cast himself down and died…"

"But that was not the end of the story. King Minos, when he learned of the connivance of Daedalus in his daughters escape, imprisoned the guilty engineer, with his son Icarus, in the Labyrinth. Then followed the invention of the first flying machine, 3000 years before Leonardo da Vinci…

Daedalus constructed wings for himself and his son, and enjoined his son when he took flight, neither to fly high, lest the / Page 113 / glue should melt in the sun and the wings should drop off, nor to fly near the sea, lest the pinions should be detached by the damp. But the infatuated Icarus, disregarding his father's in-structions, soared ever higher till, the glue melting, he fell into the sea called after him Icarian and perished,"

'Daedalus',…'made no such mistake.'… 'He flew, on unscathed to the court of King Cocalus, in Sicily. But says Apollo-dorus:'

"Minos pursued Daedalus and in every country he searched he carried a spiral shell and promised to give great reward to him who should pass a thread through the shell, believing that by that means he should discover Daedalus."

…"Having come to Camicus in Sicily [ writes Apollodorus] to the court of Cocalus, with whom Daedalus was concealed, he showed the spiral shell. Cocalus (Lord of Sicily) took it, and promised to thread it, and gave it to Daedalus."

"Such a challenge was irresistable to Daedalus."…

…"He knew well that his new Lord, Cocalus, was as incapable of working out math-matically the curves and convolutions of the shell as was Ariadne's handsome but stupid lover in memorizing the twists and turns of the Labyrinth. So, just as he had provided Theseus with the clue of thread which even he could not mis-understand , so he provided the King of Sicily with a method of threading the shell which was brilliant in its simplicity."

"Cocalus took it , and promised to thread it …and Daedalus fastened a thread to an ant, and, having bored a hole in the spiral shell, allowed the ant, to pass through it . But when Minos found the thread passed through the shell, he percieved that Daedalus was with Cocalus, and at once demanded his surrender.

Cocalus promised to surrender him, and made an entertainment for Minos."

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"And then follows one of the most mysterious records in the chronicle:"

 "but after his bath Minos was undone by the daughters of Cocalus"

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" These details taken together seem to provide quite strong circumstantial evidence for identifying Atlantis with Crete. Point 3 suits better the hinterland of Phaistos, but, given the transmission of the legend via Egypt, this amount of garbling is understandable. It is probably easier to believe that Plato was utilizing a genuine tradition of the topography and customs of . Crete than to suppose that all the parallels are the result of mere coincidence.

Some other minor details may be added to the list, though there is nothing so distinctive in them as in the list above:

A) 'The island was divided into ten relatively independent ad-ministrative districts under the primacy of the royal metropolis) (Critias, 119 c-d and 120 c-d). Three other palaces, not much inferior in size and splendour to Knossos) have already been found, and also a number of large mansions or villas.

B) 'The laws were engraved on a pillar in the main palace at the temple of Poseidon) (Critias, 119 c-d). This custom can be paralleled from Babylonia. Our copy of Hammurabi)s law code is carved on a pillar with a relief of him receiving it from the sun god Shamash. His dates are 1728-1686 BC, and there is evidence that Crete was in contact with Mesopotamia at this period.

c) 'The kings of the ten districts gathered at the main palace for a grand assize in the fourth and ninth years of each nine-year period' (Critias, 119 d, adapted to our way of counting such intervals). Homer associates a period of nine years in some way with the rule of Minos (Odyssey, 19, 179). Curiously enough) Plato refers to this passage of Homer at the start of the Laws, and interprets it as referring to a consultation with Zeus every nine years prior to revision of the laws.

D) Before giving judgment the kings put on 'most beautiful azure robes) (Critias, 120 b). This could be a memory of the Minoan murex industry.

E) 'Also whatever fragrant things there now are in the earth, / Page 144 / whether roots, or herbage, or woods, or essences which distil from fruit and flower, grew and thrived in that land' (Critias, 115 a). Crete is still noted for the number and excellence of its aromatic plants and herbs. The export of Cretan lichens to Egypt, possibly for perfumery, has already been noted (see 'p. 114).

, F) 'The stone which was used in the work they quarried from underneath the centre island, and from underneath the zones, on the outer as well as the inner side. One kind was white, another black, and a third red' (Critias, 116 a). On Thera and Therasia today the dominant colour scheme of the cliffs is red, black, and white (Plate VI omitted ). I do not press this point. These colours can probably be found in combination on most volcanic islands, and in other regions too. But it is, I think, just conceivable that this detail in the Atlantis legend goes back to an observation of Thera soon after the eruption. The new cliffs would look like the rock faces of giant quarries, and the colours of the freshly exposed lavas topped with the banks of dazzling pumice would have seemed even more strange and striking than they do today."

"G) 'Moreover there were a great number of elephants in the island' (Critias, 114 e). This can never have been true of Crete in the Bronze Age, but nevertheless one of the envoys of Keftiu in the Rekhmire painting is shown carrying an elephant tusk (Plate 74 omitted ). Elephant tusks have also been found in the palace at Kato Zakro, and are now on display in the Herakleion museum. The Egyptians may well have believed, and told Solon, that ivory came from Keftiu. Evans has suggested that the Minoans hunted elephants on the North African coast opposite Crete.132 They could also have traded in ivory with Syria which had elephants in the time of Tuthmosis III.

After drawing attention to all these details counsel for the defence of Plato's veracity then proceeds to review the evidence for contacts between Crete and Egypt. Egyptian stone vases were imported into Crete and imitated there by Cretan craftsmen perhaps as early as 2500 BC. Before 2000 BC the influence of Cretan spiral motifs had made itself felt in Egypt. The Ipuwer papyrus reference to the disruption of Keftiu contacts could relate to the First Intermediate Period, c. 218 1-2040 BC (see above p. 115). Scattered finds of pottery and other objects like scarabs indicate that trade contacts continued all through the first half / Page 145 / of the second millennium, though there is not enough evidence to prove that such contacts were very close or frequent. Minoan master masons assisted at the building of the pyramid of Sesostris II. The dedication at Knossos of a statuette by an Egyptian named User (Plate 76 omitted ) is thought to show that he lived for a time in Crete. By the time of the XVIII Dynasty Egyptian schoolboys were being taught to take an interest in Keftiu (see above p. 42). The important series of pictures of Keftiu en-voys (Plates 74, XIV omitted) confirms that there was fairly close con-tact during the reign of Tuthmosis III, that is to say, precisely at the time when the Thera disaster occurred (see p. 115 f.).

In general, the name Keftiu does not appear very often in Egyptian records and surprisingly little Minoan pottery has been found in Egypt. Crete, it seems, always remained something of a land of mystery, and could be written off as 'missing, pre-sumed sunk' when its power was broken by the eruption and part of its realm literally sank into the sea. But there had clearly been enough contact before this for the sort of particulars to be noted which we find in Plato's account. Egyptian shrines in the Delta at cities like Sais and Buto had a continuous existence from the XVIII to the XXVI Dynasty when Solon's visit took place. There is nothing improbable in the picture of Solon discussing with priestly antiquarians the history of Greece and Egypt in the Late Bronze Age. Nor is it unreasonable to suppose that some detailed, but not well understood, information about the fabled land of Keftiu and its sudden 'disappearance' was in fact transmitted to Solon. Details from the closing decades of the LM I period (1500-1470) may well have been intermingled with accounts based on the Merenptah and Rameses III in-scriptions detailing the great invasions of Egypt between 1225 ar.d 1190 BC. Solon was without any coherent chronological framework for the Late Bronze Age, and could not have detected that the picture was composite. His Egyptian informants may not even have realized it themselves. For them, these old records were all part of the story of relations between Europe and Egypt, culminating in a massive invasion attempt by 'sea peoples and Libyans and northerners from all lands'. The information may even have contained some data about Bronze Age Attica. The priests were priests of the goddess Neith, who had a real affinity with Athena, as Evans has pointed out.

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In this way Solon acquired a picture, garbled in dating and, incident, but basically reliable in outline and some of the details, of some very important events of the Late Bronze Age. In pre-paration for his epic poems he worked-his information into a - 'plot', with the main theme of aggression by an island empire of the west against ancient Greece and Egypt.

This was the shape in which the material was inherited by Plato, partly as an oral tradition from his family circle, partly in the form of a Solonian manuscript with Grecianized forms of the Egyptian proper names, including the crucial one, Atlantis, which Solon substituted for Keftiu. By the time of Herodotus people called Atlantes had been located in Tunisia near a lofty mountain. Herodotus is-also the first to name the western ocean the Atlantic. It was therefore quite reasonable and natural for Plato, inheriting the name Atlantis, to imagine the island as a large land mass beyond the Pillars of Heracles. It was he who made it out to be 'larger than Libya and Asia' with a total area of about two and a half million square kilometres. And we can still detect that this inflation was done by Plato from the fact that the overall size of Atlantis is so vastly out of proportion with the size of its metropolis on a hill 1 km. in diameter. A possible explana- tion of this discrepancy is that the data about the metropolis came from the Solonian tradition and derived ultimately from

actual conditions at Knossos.

Counsel now submits that there is sufficient evidence to estab- lish the truth of the following six propositions with reasonable certainty:

1) There was sufficient contact between Crete and Egypt (Plates 71-8) during the Middle and New Kingdoms for the Egyptians to have received reliable and fairly detailed informa-tion about the nature and extent of the Minoan empire and its sudden collapse about 470 BC.

2) This information was recorded and preserved, and a some- what garbled version made available to Solon on his visit to Egypt, c. 590 BC.

3) Solon assimilated the information to the best of his ability, and re-cast it in the form of notes for an epic poem, with an outline plot, and some Grecianizedlforms of the names, he had been given.

4) Solon did not realize that the information related to Minoan Crete. / Page 147 /

5) The information in the form that Solon imposed upon it was transmitted to Plato, either orally or in manuscript form, and was the basis for his account of Atlantis.

6) Plato exaggerated the size and antiquity of Atlantis, and em-bellished the account with various details gathered from his own reading or personal experience.

At this point in the proceedings we may imagine that Plato himself agrees to submit to cross-examination about his attitude to defence counsel's six basic propositions. He agrees at once with 5 and 6, which are within his own personal knowledge. He also states that he believes 2 and 3 to be true, with the reservation that he never felt sure how much imaginative detail Solon him-self had contributed to the account, and how much of the information of the priests was itself reliable or fictitious.

'I always felt', says Plato,

that the Atlantis story, strange though it was, could be basically true, and no mere fiction. Some of the details had an authentic ring about them. However, I thought that some distortion and falsification must have crept in along the long transmission route. Another of my diffi-culties in handling it arose from the fact that I could not relate the story to anything in my own picture of the Aegean world in the two hundred years or so before the Trojan War. You will remember that even Thucydides could only produce a very sketchy and inferential outline of that epoch. To forestall criticism I therefore took the pre-caution of locating Atlantis a long way back in time, and a long way off in space. When in Sicily, I had heard talk about the difficulties of navigation outside the Pillars together with sailors' stories of delectable but mountainous islands a long way west of the Libyan coast. It seemed to me, on weighing up all the available evidence, that I would be quite safe in locating Atlantis out there, and in making it the size I did. Its disappearance was a convenient part of the tradition making it difficult if not impossible for anyone to prove me wrong. Just in case anyone did sail out and find traces of the lost land, you will remember that I allowed some reefs and shoals to remain. Finally, may I say that your propositions 1 and 4 surprise and interest me. I recollect now that Thucydides attributes a thalassocracy to the eldest Minos, but it never occurred to me that such an empire located on Crete and the Cyclades could have had anything to do with Atlantis. I must confess that what you say about Solon in 4 applies to me also. Can you give me any evidence for the advanced civilization which you attribute to Minoan Crete?

At this point, with counsel handing up a copy of The Palace of Minos to the witness box, I drop the fiction of a judicial enquiry, and present the rest of my conclusions in the conventional way. / Page 148 / Atlantis studies have always tended to become, in the words of Paul Couissin, an 'archipelago of hypotheses'. My first main hypothesis is that a fragment of Bronze Age history is embedded in Plato's account of Atlantis., My'second main hypothesis is that the power of Minoan Crete was shattered by a cataclysmic ex-plosion centred on Thera about 470 BC. I believe that this vol-canic destruction of' Crete is part of the history embedded in the Atlantis legend. But the two hypotheses can be taken in isolation. It would not be illogical to reject the first and accept the second. Acceptance of the first hypothesis involves acceptance of the existence and reliability of a long and tenuous chain of human testimony. The identification of Crete with Atlantis depends on the sifting and assessment of a mass of circumstantial evidence. The second hypothesis is supported by direct scientific and archaeological evidence in a way in which the first can never be. It also explains a major problem in Aegean history - the collapse of the Minoan empire."

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Here follow translations of passages from Plato's Timaeus and Critias relevant to the Atlantis legend.

1) In the first extract (Titnaeus 20 d-27 a) Critias explains how Solon acquired the legend in Egypt. and gives a brief summary of it.

Crit. Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told e the story to Critias, my grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the 21 Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival.

Soc. 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?

Crit. I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an aged tnan; 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 b 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. One of our tribe, either because he thought so or to please Critias, said that in his judgement Solon was not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of poets. The old man, c 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 d 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. / Page 161 / 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 e 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 ²² 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 Pyrtha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, b and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. 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 destruc-tions c 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 pre-served, 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, d 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 sea-shore. And from this calamity we are preserved by the liberation of the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour. 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 e 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 tradi- tions preserved here are the most ancient. The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer sun 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 ²³ 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 / Page 162 / 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 b 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 c 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, and 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 marvelled at d 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 e the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the, constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be 8,000 years old, As touching your citizens of 9,000 years ago, I will briefly inform you of ²⁴ 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, b 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 c elements deriving what was needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and arrange-ment 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 most like 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.

Here follows the extract quoted above, pp. 19-20

I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from e Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about Page 163 / 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 ²⁶ 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 yester-day I at once communicated the tale to my companions as I remembered b it; and after I left them, during the night by thinking I recovered nearly the whole of it. Truly, as is often said, the lessons of our childhood make a 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 child-like interest to the old man's narrative; he was c 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 of my preface, I am ready to tell you the whole tale. I will give you not only the general heads, but the parti-culars, as they were told to me. The city and citizens, which you yester-day described to us in fiction, we will now transfer to the world of reality. d It shall be the ancient city of Athens, and we will suppose that the citizens whom you imagined, were our veritable ancestors, of whom the priest spoke; they will perfectly harmonize and there will be no incon- istency in saying that the citizens of your republic are these ancient Athenians. Let us divide the subject among us, and all endeavour accord-ing to our ability gracefully to execute the task which you have imposed upon us. Consider then, Socrates, if this narrative is suited to the pur-pose, or whether we should seek for some other instead. e

Soc. And what other, Critias, can we find that will be better than this, which is natural and suitable to the festival of the goddess, and has the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction? How or where shall we find another if we abandon this? We cannot, and therefore you must tell the tale, and good luck to you; and I in return for my yester-²⁷day's discourse will now rest and be a listener.

2) In the second extract (Critias 108 c-109 a and 113 a-end) Critias recounts the Atlantis legend in greater detail.

Crit. Friend Hermocrates, you, who are stationed last and have another in front of you, have not lost heart as yet; the gravity of the situation will soon be revealed to you; meanwhile I accept your exhorta-tions and encouragements. But besides the gods and goddesses whom d you have mentioned, I would specially invoke Mnemosyne; for all the important part of my discourse is dependent on her favour, and if I can recollect and recite enough of what was said by the priests and brought hither by Solon, I doubt not that I shall satisfy the requirements of this theatre. And now, making no more excuses, I will proceed.

Let me begin by observing first of all, that nine thousand was the sum e of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken / Page 164 / place between those who dwelt outside the pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe: Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were com-manded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as I have said, once existed, greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and afterwards when sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to those voyagers from hence who attempt to cross the Qcean which lies beyond. The progress of the history will unfold the various nations of barbarians and ¹⁰⁹ families of Hellenes which then existed, as they successively appear on the scene; but I must describe first of all the Athenians of that day, and their enemies who fought with them, and then the respective powers and governments of the two kingdoms. Let us give the precedence to Athens.

Critias next gives a detailed account of prehistoric Athens and Attica, here omitted as only marginally relevant to the identification of Atlantis. He then introduces the' Solonian' account of Atlantis, as follows:

Yet, before proceeding further in the narrative, I ought to warn you, ¹¹³ that you must not be surprised if you should perhaps hear Hellenic names given to foreigners. I will tell you the reason of this: Solon, who was intending to use the tale for his poem, enquired into the meaning of names, and found that the early Egyptians in writing them down had translated them into their own language, and he recovered the meaning of the several names and when copying them out again translated them into our language. My grandfather had the original writing, which is b still in my possession, and was carefully studied by me when I was a child. Therefore if you hear names such as are used in this country, you must not be surprised, for I have told how they came to be introduced. The tale, which was of great length, began as follows:

I have before remarked in speaking of the allotments of the gods, that they distributed the "Whole-ea:rth into portions differing in extent, and made for themselves temples and instituted sacrifices. And Poseidon, c receiving for his lot the island of Atlantis, begat children by a mortal woman, and settled them in a part of the island, which I will describe. Towards the sea, half-way down the length of the whole island, there was a plain which is said to have been the fairest of all plains and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the centre of the island at a distance of about fifty stadia, there was a mount~in not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, d and they had an only daughter who was called Cleito. The maiden had already reached womanhood, when her father and mother died; Poseidon fell in love with her and had intercourse with her, and breaking the ground, inclosed the hill in which she dwelt all round, making alter- nate zones of sea and land larger and smaller, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe, each having its circumference equidistant every way from the centre, so that no man could get to the island, for ships and voyages were e not as yet. He himself, being a god, found no difficulty in making special arrangements for the centre island, bringing up two springs of water from beneath the earth, one of warm water and the other of cold, and making every variety of food to spring up abundantly from the soil. He also begat and brought up five pairs of twin male children; and dividing / Page 165 / the island of Atlantis into ten portions, he gave to the first-born of the ¹¹⁴ eldest pair his mother's dwelling and the surrounding allotment, which 1 was the largest and best, and made him king over the rest; the others he made princes, and gave them rule over many men, and a large territory.

And he named them all; the eldest, who was the first king, he named Atlas, and after him the whole island and the ocean were called Atlantis. b"

"To his twin brother, who was born after him, and obtained as his lot the extremity of the island towards the pillars of Heracles, facing the country which is now called the region of Gades in that part of the world, he f gave the name which in the Hellenic language is Eumelus, in the lan- t guage of the country which is named after him, Gadeirus. Of the second pair of twins he called one Ampheres, and the other Evaemon. To the elder of the third pair of twins he gave the name Mneseus, and Autochthon to the one who followed him. Of the fourth pair of twins he c called the elder Elasippus, and the younger Mestor.And of the fifth pair he gave to the elder the name of Azaes, and to the younger that of Diaprepes. All these and their descendants for many generations were the inhabitants and rulers of divers islands in the open sea; and also, as has been already said, they held sway in our direction over the country within the pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia. Now Atlas had a numerous and honourable family, and they retained the kingdom, the d eldest son handing it on to his eldest for many generations; and they had such an amount of wealth as was never before possessed by kings and potentates, and is not likely ever to be again, and they were furnished with everything which they needed, both in the city and country. For because of the greatness of their empire many things were brought to them from foreign countries, and the island itself provided most of what e was required by them for the uses of life. In the first place, they dug out of the earth whatever was to be found there, solid as well as fusile, and that which is now only a name and was then something more than a name, orichalcum, was dug out of the earth in many parts of the island, being more precious in those days than anything except gold. There was an abundance of wood for carpenters' work, and sufficient maintenance for tame and wild animals. Moreover, there were a great number of elephants in the island; for as there was provision for all sorts of animals, both for those which live in lakes and marshes and rivers, and also for those which live in mountains and on plains, so there was for the animal which is the largest and most voracious of all. Also whatever fragrant things there now are in the earth, whether roots, or herbage, or woods, or essences which distil from fruit and flower, grew and thrived in that land; also the fruit which admits cultivation, both the dry sort, which is given us for nourishment, and any other which we use for food - we call them all by the common name of pulse, and the fruits having a hard rind, b affording drinks and meats and ointments, and good store of chestnuts and the like, which furnish pleasure and amusement, and are fruits which spoil with keeping, and the pleasant kinds of dessert, with which we console ourselves after dinner, when we are tired of eating - all these that sacred island which then beheld the light of the sun, brought forth fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance. With such blessings the earth freely furnished them; meanwhile they went on constructing their temples and palaces and harbours and docks. And they arranged the whole country in the following manner:

First of all they bridged over the zones of sea which surrounded the / Page166 / ancient metropolis, making a road to and from the royal palace. And at the very beginning they built the palace in the habitation of the god and of their ancestors, which they continued to ornament in successive generations, every king surpassing the one who went before him to the tmost of his power, until they made the building a marvel to behold for d size and for beauty. And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this, which became a harbour, and leaving an opening sufficient to enable the largest vessels to find ingress. Moreover, e they divided at the bridges the zones of land which parted the zones of the sea, leaving room for a single trireme to pass out of one zone into another, and they covered over the channels so as to leave a way under-neath for the ships; for the banks were raised considerably above the water. Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two zones, the one of water, the other of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was ¹¹⁶ situated had a diameter of five stadia. All this including the zones and the bridge, which was the sixth part of a stadium in width, they sur-rounded by a stone wall on every side, placing towers and gates on the bridges where the sea passed in. The stone which was used in the work they quarried from underneath the centre island, and from underneath the zones, on the outer as well as the inner side. One kind was white, another black, and a third red, and as they quarried, they at the same time hollowed out rocks double within, having roofs formed out of the b native rock. Some of their buildings were simple, but in others they put ogether different stones, varying the colour to please the eye, and to be a natural source of delight. The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which en-compassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalchum. The c palaces in the interior of the citadel were constructed on this wise: In he centre was a holy temple dedicated to Cleito and Poseidon, which remained inaccessible, and was surrounded by an enclosure of gold; this was the spot where the family of the ten princes was conceived and saw the light, and thither the people annually brought the fruits of the earth in their season from all the ten portions, to be an offering to each of the ten. Here was Poseidon's own temple which was a stadium in length, and d half a stadium in width, and of a proportionate height having a strange barbaric appearance. All the outside of the temple, with the exception of he pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles with gold. In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously wrought every-where with gold and silver and orichalcum; and all the other parts, the halls and pillars and floor, they coated with orichalcum. In the temple they placed statues of gold: there was the god himself standing in a chariot - the charioteer of six winged horses - and of such a size that he e touched the roof of the building with his head; around him there were a hundred Nereids riding on dolphins, for such was thought to be the number of them by the men of those days. There were also in the nterior of the temple other images which had been dedicated by private persons. And around the temple on the outside were placed statues of / Page 167 / gold of all who had been numbered among the ten kings, both them and their wives, and there were many other great offerings of kings and of private persons, coming both from the city itself and from the foreign cities over which they held sway. There was an altar too, which in size and workmanship corresponded to this magnificence, and the palaces, in like manner, answered to the greatness of the kingdom and the glory of the temple.¹¹⁷

In the next place, they had fountains, one of cold and another of hot water, in gracious plenty flowing; and they were wonderfully adapted for use by reason of the pleasantness and excellence of their waters. They constructed buildings about them and planted suitable trees; also they made cisterns, some open to the heaven, others roofed over, to be used in b winter as warm baths; there were the kings baths, and the baths of private persons, which were kept apart; and there were separate baths for women, and for horses and cattle, and to each of them they gave as much adornment as was suitable. Of the water which ran off they carried some to the grove of Poseidon, where were growing all manner of trees of wonderful height and beauty, owing to the excellence of the soil, while the remainder was conveyed by aqueducts along the bridges to the outer circles; and there were many temples built and dedicated to many gods; also gardens and places of exercise, some for men, and others for c horses in both of the two islands formed by the zones; and in the centre of the larger of the two there was set apart a race-course of a stadium in width, and in length allowed to extend all round the island, for horses to race in. Also there were guard-houses at inter-vals for the main body of guards, whilst the more trusted of them were appointed to keep watch in the lesser zone, which was nearer the Acropolis; while the most d trusted of all had houses given them within the citadel, near the persons of the kings. The docks were full of triremes and naval stores, and all things were quite ready for use. Enough of the plan of the royal palace.

Leaving the palace and passing out across the three harbours, you came e to a wall which began at the sea and went all round: this was everywhere listant fifty stadia from the largest zone or harbour, and enclosed the whole, the ends meeting at the mouth of the channel which led to the sea. The entire area was densely crowded with habitations; and the canal and the largest of the harbours were full of vessels and merchants coming from all parts, who, from their numbers, kept up a multitudinous sound of human voices, and din and clatter of all sorts night and day.

I have described the city and the environs of the ancient palace nearly in the words of Solon, and now I must endeavour to represent to you the nature and arrangement of the rest of the land. The whole country was¹¹⁸ said by him to be very lofty and precipitous on the side of the sea, but the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape, extending in one direction three thousand stadia, but across the centre inland it was two thousand stadia. This part of the island looked towards the south, and was b sheltered from the north. The surrounding mountains were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist, having in them also many wealthy villages of country folk, and rivers, md lakes, and meadows supplying food enough for every animal, wild or tame, and much wood of various sorts, abundant for each and every kind of work. / Page 168 / I will now describe the plain, as it was fashioned by nature and by the labours of many generations of kings through long ages. It was naturally c for the most part rectangular and oblong, and where falling out' of the straight line had been made regular by the surrounding ditch. The depth, and width, and length of this ditch were incredible, and gave the impression that a work of such extent, in addition to so many others, could never have been artificial. Nevertheless I must say what I was told. It was excavated to the depth of a hundred feet, and its breadth was a stadium everywhere; it was carried round the whole of the plain, and d was ten thousand stadia in length. It received the streams which came down from the mountains, and winding round the plain and meeting at the city, was there let off into the sea. Farther inland, likewise, straight canals of a hundred feet in width were cut from it through the plain, and again let off into the ditch leading to the sea: these canals were at intervals of a hundred stadia, and by them they brought down the wood from the mountains to the city, and conveyed the fruits of the earth in ships, cut-ting transverse passages from one canal into another, and to the city. Twice in the year they gathered the fruits of the earth - in winter having the benefit of the rains of heaven, and in summer the water which the land supplied, when they introduced streams from the canals As to the population, each of the lots in the plain had to find a leader for the men who were fit for military service, and the size of a lot was a ¹¹⁹ square of ten stadia each way, and the total number of all the lots was sixty thousand. And of the inhabitants of the mountains and of the rest of the country there was also a vast multitude, which was distributed among the lots and had leaders assigned to them according to their districts and villages. The leader was required to furnish for the war the sixth portion of a war-chariot, so as to make up a total of ten thousand chariots; also two horses and riders for them, and a pair of chariot- b horses without a car, accompanied by a horseman who could fight on foot carrying a small shield, and having a charioteer who stood behind the man-at-arms to guide the two horses; also, he was bound to furnish two heavy-armed soldiers, two archers, two slingers, three stone-shooters and three javelin-men, who were light-armed, and four sailors to make up the complement of twelve hundred ships. Such was the military order of the royal city - the order of the other nine governments varied, and it would be wearisome to recount their several differences.

As to offices and honours, the following was the arrangement from the c first. Each of the ten kings in his own division and in his own city had the absolute control of the citizens, and, in most cases, of the laws, punishing and slaying whomsoever he would. Now the order of pre-cedence among them and their mutual relations were regulated by the commands of Poseidon which the law had handed down. These were inscribed by the first kings on a pillar of orichalchum, which was situated d in the middle of the island, at the temple of Poseidon, whither the kings were gathered together every fifth and every sixth year alternately, thus giving equal honour to the odd and to the even number. And when they were gathered together they consulted about their common interests, and enquired if anyone had transgressed in anything, and passed judgement, and before they passed judgement they gave their pledges to one another on this wise: There were bulls who had the range of the temple of Poseidon; and the ten kings, being left alone in the temple, after they had offered prayers to the god that they might capture the victim which / Page 169 / was acceptable to him, hunted the bulls, without weapons, but with e staves and nooses; and the bull which they caught they led up to the pillar and cut its throat over the top of it so that the blood fell upon the sacred inscription. Now on the pillar, besides the laws, there was inscribed an oath invoking mighty curses on the disobedient. When therefore, after slaying the bull in the accustomed manner, they proceeded to burn its ¹²⁰ limbs, they filled a bowl of wine and cast in a clot of blood for each of them; the rest of the victim they put in the fire, after having purified the column all round. They they drew from the bowl in golden cups, and pouring a libation on the fire, they swore that they would judge accord-ing to the laws on the pillar, and would punish him who in any point had already trangressed them, and that for the future t,hey would not, if they could help, offend against the writing on the pillar, and would neither command others, nor obey any ruler who commanded them, to act b otherwise than according to the laws of their father Poseidon. This was the prayer which each of them offered up for himself and for his descendants, at the same time drinking and dedicating the cup out of which he drank in the temple of the god; and after they had supped and satisfied their needs, when darkness came on, and the fire about the sacrifice was cool, all of them put on most beautiful azure robes, and, sitting on the ground, at night, over the embers of the sacrifices by c which they had sworn, and extinguishing all the fire about the temple, they received and gave judgement, if any of them had an accusation to bring against anyone; and when they had given judgement, at daybreak they wrote down their sentences on a golden tablet, and dedicated it together with their robes to be a memorial.

There were many special laws affecting the several kings inscribed about the temples; but the most important was the following: They were not to take up arms against one another, and they were all to come to the rescue if anyone in any of their cities attempted to overthrow the royal house; like their ancestors, they were to deliberate in common d about war and other matters, giving the supremacy to the descendants of Atlas. And the king was not to have the power of life and death over any of his kinsmen unless he had the assent of the majority of the ten.

Such was the vast power which the god settled in the lost island of Atlantis; and this he afterwards directed against our land for the follow-ing reasons, as tradition tells: For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well- e affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them they are lost, and virtue with them. By such reflections and by the continu-ance in them of a divine nature, the qualities which we have described grew and increased among them; but when the divine portion began to fade slowly, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being b unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an / Page 170 / eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were becoming tainted with unrighteous ambition and power. Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, c perceiving that an honourable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them that they might be chastened and im-prove, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things. And when he had called them together, he spake as follows:

At this point the unfinished Critias breaks off

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Page 143

"c) 'The kings of the ten districts gathered at the main palace for a grand assize in the fourth and ninth years of each nine-year period' (Critias, 119 d, adapted to our way of counting such intervals). Homer associates a period of nine years in some way with the rule of Minos (Odyssey, 19, 179). Curiously enough) Plato refers to this passage of Homer at the start of the Laws, and interprets it as referring to a consultation with Zeus every nine years prior to revision of the laws."