Secret of Plato's Atlantis

THE legend of Atlantis, an island-continent lying in the Atlantic Ocean over against the Pillars of Hercules, which, after being long the seat of a powerful empire, was engulfed in the sea, has been made the basis of many extravagant speculations; and anew awakens keenest interest with the revolving centuries.

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In the youth of all nations, the poet and historian are one; and, according to the tale of the elder Critias, the legend of Atlantis was derived from a poetic chronicle of Solon, whom he pronounced to have been one of the best of poets, as well as the wisest of men. The elements of oral tradition are aptly set forth in the dialogue which Plato puts into the mouth of Timaeus of Locris, a Pythagorean philosopher. Solon is affirmed to have told the tale to his personal friend, Dropidas, the great-grandfather of Critias, who repeated it to his son; and he, eighty years thereafter, in extreme old age, told it to his grandson, a boy of ten, whose narrative, reproduced in mature years, we are supposed to read in the dialogue of the Timaeus. Even those are but the later links in the traditionary catena. Solon himself visited Sais, a city of the Egyptian delta, under the protection of the goddess, Neith or Athene.

There, when in converse with the Egyptian priests, he learned, for the first time, rightly to appreciate how ignorant of antiquity he and his countrymen were. "O, Solon, Solon," said an aged priest to him, "you Hellenes are ever young, and there is no old man who is a Hellene; there is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you which is white with age." Solon had told them the mythical tales of Phoroneus and Niobe, and of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and had attempted to reckon the interval by generations since the great deluge. But the priest of Sais replied to this that such Hellenic annals were children's stories. Their memory went back but a little way, and recalled only the latest of the great convulsions of nature, by which revolutions in past ages had been wrought: "The memory of them is lost, because there was no written voice among you." And so the venerable priest undertook to tell him of the social life and condition of the primitive Athenians 9000 years before. It is among the events of this older era that the overthrow of Atlantis is told: a story already "white with age" in the time of Socrates, 3400 years' ago. The warriors of Athens, in that elder time, were a distinct caste; and when the vast power of Atlantis was marshaled against the Mediterranean nations, Athens bravely repelled the invader, and gave liberty to the nations whose safety had been imperiled; but in the convulsion that followed, in which the island - continent was engulfed in the ocean, the warrior race of Athens also perished.

The story, as it thus reaches us, is one of the vaguest of popular legends, and has been transmitted to modern times in the most obscure of all the writings of Plato. Nevertheless, there is nothing improbable in the idea that it rests on some historic basis, in which the tradition of the fall of an Iberian, or other aggressive power in the western Mediterranean, is mingled with other and equally vague traditions of intercourse with a vast continent lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Mr. Hyde Clarke, in his Khita and Khita-Peruvian Epoch, draws attention to the ancient system of geography, alluded to by various early writers, and notably mentioned by Crates of Pergamos, B.C. 160, which treated of the Four Worlds.

This he connects with the statement by Mr. George Smith, derived from the cuneiform interpretations, that Agu, an ancient king of Babylonia, called himself "King of the Four Races." He also assigns to it a relation with others, including its Inca equivalent of Tavintinsuzu, the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World. But the extravagance of regal titles has been the same in widely diverse ages; so that much caution is necessary before they can be made a safe basis for comprehensive generalisations. Four kings made war against five in the vale of Siddim; and when Lot was despoiled and taken captive by Chederlaomer, King of Elam, Tidal, King of Nations, and other regal allies, Abraham, with no further aid than that of his trained servants, born in his house, three hundred and eighteen in all, smote their combined hosts, and recovered the captives and the spoil. Here, at least, it is obvious that "the King of Nations" was somewhat on a par with one of the six vassal kings who rowed King Edgar on the River Dee. Certainly, within any early period of authentic history, the conceptions of the known world were reduced within narrow bounds; and it would be a very comprehensive deduction from such slight premises as the legend supplies, to refer it to an age of accurate geographical knowledge in which the western hemisphere was known as one of four worlds, or continents. When the Scottish poet, Dunbar, wrote of America, twenty years after the voyage of Columbus, he only knew of it as "the new-found isle."

The opinion, universally favoured in the infancy of physical science, of the recurrence of convulsions of nature, whereby nations were revolutionized, and vast empires destroyed by fire, or engulfed in the ocean, revived with the theories of cataclysmic phenomena in the earlier speculations of modern geology; and has even now its advocates among writers who have given little heed to the concurrent opinion of later scientific authorities. Among the most zealous advocates of the idea of a submerged Atlantic continent, the seat of a civilization older than that of Europe, or of the old East, was the late Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg. As an indefatigable and enthusiastic investigator, he occupies a place in the history of American archaeology somewhat akin to that of his fellow-countryman, M. Boucher de Perthes, in relation to the paleontological disclosures of Europe. He had the undoubted merit of first drawing the attention of the learned world to the native transcripts of Maya records, the full value of which is only now being adequately recognized. His Histoire des Nations Civilises aims at demonstrating from their religious myths and historical traditions the existence of a self-originated civilization. In. his subsequent Quatre Letters sur le Mexique, the Abbe adopted, in the most literal form, the venerable legend of Atlantis, giving free rein to his imagination in some very fanciful speculations.