94 : The Atlantic 



circulated from Plato's time to our own day. It has stimulated conjec- 

 ture and discussion which is no doubt exactly what Plato intended it 

 to do. Some writers have supposed that Plato's Atlantis must have 

 been based on a memory of some real event and, with this in mind, 

 they have suggested a number of changes in the story. 



One of the more reasonable conjectures is that there did circulate 

 in Egypt a fable of an island that disappeared. This referred to the 

 island of Crete where, as we know, the Minoans built an advanced 

 and powerful society and from which they sailed in their own ships 

 to trade with Egypt. When the Achaean and Dorian Greeks overran 

 Crete the trade with Egypt ceased so completely that the legend grew 

 that the island had sunk beneath the waves. 



Other less comprehensible conjectures flourish. Perhaps Plato, when 

 he spoke of the Pillars of Hercules, didn't really mean the Straits of 

 Gibraltar. If this is so, then he didn't mean the Atlantic Ocean as the 

 location of the island. Possibly instead he meant a coast near a place 

 where there had been a temple to Hercules. This could have been a 

 place along the North African Mediterranean coast and maybe there 

 had been colonies of early Greeks or Phoenicians and maybe the coast 

 had suffered from volcanic shock or other changes so that sand and 

 the desert had encroached and finally maybe they hadn't meant to 

 refer to 9,000 years, but to some other time scale, and so on and so 

 forth. As you can see, this is the kind of game that can become very 

 complicated. 



The sciences of geology and oceanography show clearly that there 

 never could have been in the Atlantic, within the hfetime even of the 

 earliest human forms, a continent or a large island which disappeared 

 beneath the sea. The studies of history and anthropology, on the other 

 hand, would show us how easy and how universal is the human habit 

 of developing fables and legends and that the legends and fables that 

 have no basis or relationship to natural fact are just as frequent as 

 those that do. It seems much more sensible to conclude that Plato is 

 simply trying to interest his students of philosophy and, with this in 

 mind, invents an attractive allegory or illustration. In this respect it is 

 like his use of the banquet or his figure of the people who had to 

 guess at reality by studying the shadowy images which were cast on 

 the walls of a cave. 



It is interesting to note that Plato's legend of Atlantis seems to 

 reflect a more intelligent and sophisticated knowledge of the world 

 than the primitive river of Homer's world. Plato's own words seem 

 to make it clear that he really means that there is a large and naviga- 



