106 DANIEL WILSON ON 
fondest imaginings. There, on the far horizon, Homer pictured the Elysian plain, where, 
under a serene sky, the favourites of Zeus enjoyed eternal felicity; Hesiod assigned the 
abode of departed heroes to the Happy Isles beyond the western waters that engirdled 
Europe; and Seneca foretold that that mysterious ocean would yet disclose an unknown 
world which it then kept concealed. To the ancients, Elysium ever lay beyond the 
setting sun; and the Hesperia of the Greeks, as their geographical knowledge increased, 
continued to recede before them into the unexplored west. 
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 Timzeus 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 “Timæus.” Even these 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 genera- 
tions 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 nine thousand 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, three thousand four hundred years ago. The warriors of 
Athens, in that elder time, were a distinct caste; and when the vast power of Atlantis 
was marshalled against the Mediterranean nations, Athens bravely repelled the invader, 
and gave liberty to the nations whose safety had been imperilled ; but in the convulsion 
that followed, in which the island-continent was engulphed 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 iraditions 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 
