Lost city of atlantis myst online shard9/12/2023 This is thousands of years before Athens is founded, not to mention it developing a large population, empire and army. But cautious of being taken too literally, Plato locates the duel between Athens and Atlantis in the distant past, 9,000 years ago, and in a place beyond the familiar Hellenic world beyond the Gates of Hercules, understood as a reference to the Strait of Gibraltar. The appearance of Atlantis in the philosophical dialogue at all is as good evidence as anything else to suggest it was not a real place. Thomas Kjeller Johansen, Professor of Ancient Philosophy, describes it as “a story which is fabricated about the past in order to reflect a general truth about how ideal citizens should behave in action.” A long time ago, far, far away… While Atlantis is damned by the gods, Athens emerges dominant. This is in contrast to their reverent, god-fearing and underdog opponents, an ideal version of the city of Athens. Plato introduced Atlantis to his audience as a proud, impious people. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Stitched together from vatican.vaĪtlantis is introduced in the first instance with his character Socrates inviting others to participate in a simulation exercise, saying, “I’d like to hear from someone an account of our city contending against others in typical inter-city contests.” Their hands demonstrate their philosophical positions: Plato points towards the sky and unknowable higher powers, whereas Aristotle points towards the earth and what is empirical and knowable. The central figures are the elder Plato and a younger Aristotle. The School of Athens by Raphael, c.1509-1511. Here, this hypothesised constitution is cast back in time to imagine how it might fare in competition with other states. Plato had previously outlined an ideal city. Often neglected from retellings of the story is the role of Athens, where Plato lived, which is forced to defend itself from the antagonistic Atlantis. Instead, he was a philosopher employing the story of Atlantis as part of a Socratic debate to illustrate a moral argument. Though there were historians in his day, Plato was not one of them. This story derives from the text Timaeus-Critias by Plato and his contemporaries, the only ancient source for the story. For their vanity and failure to properly appease the gods, the divine powers destroyed Atlantis with fire and earthquakes. It was “an island, which, as we said, was once larger than Libya and Asia, though by now earthquakes have caused it to sink and it has left behind unnavigable mud”.Īlthough it was once a utopia governed by moral people, its inhabitants lost their way to greediness and failed to placate the gods. A wealthy state, Atlantis was supposed to be a formidable power. The dialogues of Plato, Timaeus-Critias, include accounts of a Greek city-state founded by Neptune, the god of the sea. What was its purpose in Plato’s writings? When was it first understood as a real place? And what’s the story of Atlantis that has proved so compelling? Yet since its ascent to modern myth in the late 19th century, there’s been little decline in its hold over the popular imagination.īut the legendary island was introduced to the historical record as an allegory. To the despair of generations of antiquarians, most scholarly opinion squares the story of Atlantis away as a thought experiment conceived by the Greek philosopher Plato. No city by the name of Atlantis has ever existed above the waves, and none has been punitively smote by gods so that it sank beneath them. No wonder, of course, as it didn’t exist. The hunt for the lost city of Atlantis has proven a long and arduous one, with many loose threads and dead ends.
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