1. ENGLISH - Atlantis: Myths, Ancient and Modern

Atlantis: Myths, Ancient and Modern

Abstract

In this paper I show that the story of Atlantis, first sketched in Plato's Timaeus and Critias, has been artificially shrouded in mystery since antiquity. While it has been thought from Proclus to the close of the twentieth century that Plato's immediate followers were divided on the issue of whether the story was meant to be historically true, this results from a simple misunderstanding of what historia had meant when the early Academic Crantor was first being cited as an exponent of a literal rather than an allegorical interpretation. The term was then applied to straightforward stories that were told as if they were true. Iamblichus argued for a deeper meaning that did not exclude the truth, and Proclus’ belief in an inspired Plato leads him to assume that a Platonic historia must be true. Hence he misreads Crantor as having been committed to historical truth and opposes him to allegorical interpreters. Scholars have continued to see Crantor as a proponent of the historical Atlantis without adequate examination of the evidence, an indication of our own need to preserve the tantalizing uncertainties of such powerful stories.

Notes

NOTES

1.  See, for example, Raoul J. Mortley, From Word to Silence (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986), 2 vols.

2.  See especially Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

3.  Republic 376e–378b, 414b–415c; Laws 712b–714a.

4.  For a collection of essays that attempts to correct this, see Tomas Calvo and Luc Brisson eds., Interpreting the Timaeus-Critias, Proceedings of the IV Symposium Platonicum Selected Papers (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1997), especially the contribution of Diskin Clay, “The Plan of Plato's Critias,” 49–54. On the artificiality of ancient arrangements of Plato's writings, see Harold Tarrant, Thrasyllan Platonism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

5.  Relevant followers were Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Crantor; on them see John Dillon, The Heirs of Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and on this issue Harold Tarrant, Plato's First Interpreters (London: Duckworth, 2000), 44–46.

6.  A temporal interpretation of the Timaeus was demanded by many, including Plutarch, Atticus, and early Christian authors; see, for instance, John Dillon, The Middle Platonists (London: Duckworth, 1977), 252–54.

7.  Alcinous, Didascalicus, chapters 12–21; strictly speaking, Alcinous (10) has the kind of Aristotelian first god whom one would not associate with creation processes or temporality of any kind, but the universe comes into being (cyclically?) after the intellect of the world-soul has been stirred into response.

8.  See the entry for Critias in Debra Nails, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002); the problem is that if ‘Critias’ is making up his story, then the account of how it was passed down to him is quite as unreliable, and serious prosopography becomes irrelevant.

9.  Serious Platonists have helped to clarify the problem of late. Of these I have particularly used Thomas K. Johansen, Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); but see also Christopher J. Gill, “The Genre of the Atlantis Story,” Classical Philology 72 (1976): 287–304; and also his “Plato's Atlantis Story and the Birth of Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature 3 (1979): 64–78; Gerald Naddaf, “The Atlantis Myth: An Introduction to Plato's Later Philosophy of History,” Phoenix 48 (1994): 189–209.

10.  See here Phyllis Y. Forsythe, Atlantis: The Making of a Myth (Montreal: McGill–Queen‘s University Press, 1980), 1; Diskin Clay, “Plato's Atlantis: The Anatomy of a Fiction,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy 15 (1999): 1–21; also John Dillon, “Pedantry and Pedestrianism? Some Reflections on the Middle Platonic Commentary Tradition,” in Harold Tarrant and Dirk Baltzly, eds., Reading Plato in Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2006), 22–23.

11.  F49.297–303 Kidd = Strabo II.3.6; note that the same verbs (plassô, aphanizô) are used by Strabo and Proclus for ‘invent’ and ‘obliterate,’ verbs are tailored to remarks about the status of the Atlantis story, since Plato himself uses aphanizesthai for the vanishing of Atlantis (25d3) and plassô for the invention of stories (26e4).

12.  The subject to be understood with this was taken to be Plato by Alan Cameron, “Crantor and Posidonius on Atlantis,” Classical Quarterly 33 (1983): 81–91; I prefer to see it as Crantor in the light of the previous ‘he says’; for more on the details of interpretation, see Harold Tarrant (trans.), Proclus: Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 60–70.

13.  See Alan Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); all indexed discussion of historia is potentially useful, especially 90–91.

14.  Note physikôs at 109.9, physikôteron at 109.31, epibolai physikôterai at 110.22. Domninus (110.1) is hailed as the best interpreter in this category.

15.  Note philosophôs at 109.9, which is not further used of the third approach, whose outline commences at 110.22; the key word here becomes hypsêloteron (110.23).

16.  De Antro Nympharum 2.1–4, 4.1–5.

17.  See De Antro Nympharurm 4.1–5.

18.  Here it might be noticed that the view of Plato's character ‘Critias’ which Proclus takes at 70.21–71.15, presumably following Iamblichus, places him at a higher level than the character ‘Hermocrates,’ and goes to some lengths to defend the historical person too. This rosier view of ‘Critias’ is opposed to another, held by unnamed interpreters best identified with Porphyry, that Plato's ‘Critias’ is inferior to ‘Hermocrates’ (71.27). I infer that Porphyry and his contemporaries did not respect ‘Critias’ and hence did not need to avoid having him tell lies. Iamblichus, however, with a tendency to venerate anybody related to Plato, took a more exalted view of him and so elevated him above the status of Iamboulus.

19.  Longinus apparently supported his view that the story was meant to give pleasure with reference to the term charis at Tim. 21a2.

20.  I refer to the language of literary seduction (psuchagôgia), which had occurred at 59.28 (Longinus fr. 28.20) and 83.23 (fr. 32.5). For this term's place in literary criticism, see Michel Patillon and L. Brisson, eds., Longin: Fragments, Art rhétorique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001), 314–15.

21.  Even so, it has to be said that even where there seems to be some confirmation from a travel writer called Marcellus of there having been a great island power in the Atlantic, Proclus seems not to set much store by it (177.10–21).

22.  In Tim. 177.10–21.

23.  James V. Luce, The End of Atlantis (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970); the book followed closely after the excavation of Thera by Spyridon Marinatos begun in 1967, as did less well known books by Angelo G. Galanopoulos and Edward Bacon, Atlantis: The Truth behind the Legend (London: Nelson, 1969), and James W. Mavor, Voyage to Atlantis (London: Souvenir Press, 1969).

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