by Bruce E.R. Thompson.
There was once a time—long ago—and a place. Food was plentiful, work was easy, and society was governed with wisdom, justice, and love. There was peace and universal happiness. We still remember that time and place—at least traces of the memory still haunt our dreams. Books are occasionally written about it. Aldous Huxley’s Island, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, and Samuel Butler’s, Erewhon come to mind. Notice that dystopian visions are always set in the future; paradise is set in a place that is lost to us.
Putting aside Milton’s Paradise Lost and, indeed, the book of Genesis itself, the novels I just mentioned were inspired by one book, Thomas More’s Utopia. More’s Utopia was originally written in Latin. That fact surprised me when I first learned it. More was an Englishman—Lord Chancellor to King Henry VIII, statesman, philosopher, jurist, persecutor of protestants, and eventually a Catholic martyr and saint. I assumed he had written Utopia in English, after decades of experience in government, as an attempt to educate his fellow Englishmen in the philosophy of justice and good governance. In fact, he wrote Utopia as a relatively young man just for the fun of it.
In More’s day an educated man was expected to know Latin. A gifted scholar might also learn Greek, and More knew both languages. He admired the Greek writer Lucian, who was a pamphleteer, lecturer, teacher of rhetoric, and satirist. One of Lucian’s satires was a piece sometimes called Menippus Goes to Hell, although a more accurate title might be Menippus Visits Hades. Menippus was a minor figure in the Cynic school of philosophy. Lucian praised him as one of the greatest of the Cynics—but Lucian was probably being sarcastic. Menippus also liked to express his ideas in satire, and he once wrote a satire of Plato’s two dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. In Lucian’s story Menippus visits Elysium to learn the structure of the universe and then visits Hades to learn the best way to live. Plato’s Timaeus is a dialogue about the structure of the universe; Plato’s Critias was intended to be a dialogue about an ideal society known as Atlantis. More translated Lucian’s book from Greek into Latin when he was 27 years old and wrote Utopia about ten years later. He probably got the idea for Utopia from Lucian, but Lucian got it from Menippus, and Menippus got it from Plato. So, Atlantis was the original utopian society.
Timaeus survives intact. In that dialogue we learn how the story of Atlantis came to be known to the ancient Greeks. The story itself was supposed to be told in the Critias, but that dialogue breaks off after only a few pages. Perhaps the remainder was lost; perhaps Plato died before it was finished. In any case, the few pages we have are enough to give us a tantalizing description of the geography of Atlantis and a few hints concerning what happened to it.
Plato often included myths in his dialogues, but the story of Atlantis is not intended as a myth. Plato’s myths often appear at the end of a dialogue, giving an allegorical summary of a discussion that has reached its conclusion. As allegories, it is not important that the myths be true. By contrast, the story of Atlantis introduces the two dialogues. Much of the point of the introduction is to assure us that the story has come from reliable sources and can therefore be known to be literally true. Critias, who tells the story, says he heard it from his grandfather (also named Critias), who heard it from his father, the poet Dropides, who heard it from his close friend, the revered statesman Solon “wisest of the seven sages.” Solon, in turn, heard it from an Egyptian priest, who laughs at Solon for telling a flood story about Deucalion and Pyrrha, saying, “you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you” (Timaeus, 22b). His point is that, as compared to Egypt, Greece has practically no history. Only among Egyptians is the memory of past events truly preserved.
The Egyptian priest tells Solon that Athens was founded some “nine thousand years ago” (Timaeus, 23e), and that the people of Athens fought a war against Atlantis just prior to its destruction. Remembering that Solon lived around 600 B.C.E., and that we must add an additional two thousand years to account for our own location in history, this gives us a pretty specific date for the destruction of Atlantis: it occurred about 11,600 years ago. The Egyptian priest also tells Solon the approximate size of Atlantis. It is “larger than Libya and Asia put together” (Timaeus, 25a). Of course, “Asia” means Asia minor, the peninsula now occupied by the country of Turkey. So Atlantis must have been roughly the size of the state of Texas. The location given by the Egyptian priest is somewhat vague, except with respect to where it isn’t. Atlantis is beyond “the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles” (Timaeus, 24e), that is, it is outside the modern Straits of Gibraltar. Generations of readers assumed this meant that it was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean—which is why the ocean is named “Atlantic.” In any case, Atlantis isn’t in the Mediterranean Sea, which “is only a harbor, having a narrow entrance” (Timaeus, 25a) as compared to the real sea beyond.
The story of Atlantis is much like other flood myths, such as the ones in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh. At first the people are well-behaved and obedient, but eventually they become wanton, disobedient, and greedy. Zeus decides to punish them. He calls together a council of the gods, and says… but that is where the story, as told in the Critias, breaks off. It is from Timaeus that we learn that Atlantis sank “in the depths of the sea” (Timaeus, 25d).
Finding the lost continent of Atlantis has been a favorite game of scholars since at least the 17th Century, but most of the speculation has been free of any regard for facts. The currently favored theory—in defiance of virtually everything that Plato has told us—is that the true history behind the story of Atlantis involves the eruption of a volcano on the Greek island of Thera (now known as Santorini). This eruption probably caused the collapse of the Minoan Empire, a vibrant and prosperous culture with whom the ancient Greeks were constantly at war. But the Santorini theory has too many holes in it for me to find it persuasive. Santorini is a small mountainous island. Before the eruption it was dominated by a tall volcano. Plato described Atlantis as a fertile plain with a mountain “of no great altitude” at its center (Critias, 113c). Santorini is in the Aegean Sea, just north of the island of Crete, well inside the pillars of Heracles. Santorini and Crete together are miniscule as compared to the size Plato gives for Atlantis. The eruption occurred around 1500 B.C.E., a mere nine hundred years before the time of Solon, not the nine thousand years we find in Plato. Finally, the Minoan Empire did not sink into the sea; it was destroyed by a violent volcanic explosion that left most of it still above water. Almost nothing in Plato’s description suggests that Santorini, or even the whole of the Minoan Empire, was Atlantis.
A more recent theory is that Atlantis was Doggerland, a submerged shelf east of the British Isles and north of the Netherlands. At one time Doggerland formed a land bridge connecting Britain to Europe. It was a relatively warm, verdant region, and it fits Plato’s description of Atlantis to a tee. It was a mostly flat plain about the size of Texas. From Greece it is beyond the Pillars of Heracles—though that can be said of nearly everywhere on Earth. The chief similarity Doggerland has to Atlantis is that, like Atlantis, it sank into the sea—or so it might have seemed to the people who lived there. For someone standing knee deep in water it is hard to tell the difference between rising water and sinking land. The submersion of Doggerland was caused by rising sea levels at the end of the Pleistocene, as glaciers broke apart and melted. The Pleistocene ended roughly 11,700 years ago, closely matching Plato’s date!
Yet if the problem with the Santorini hypothesis is that it leaves us wondering how Plato could have been so wrong about something that happened so near in time and so close to home, then the problem with the Doggerland hypothesis is that it leaves us wondering how Plato could have been so right about something that happened so long ago, so far away, and so isolated from the cultures of the Mediterranean. We have often studied ancient societies on the assumption that they had no contact with each other, and in nearly every case we have turned out to be wrong. But for Doggerland to have had any contact with the ancient people of Greece or Egypt seems impossible.
That said, this is not a question that will remain unanswered forever. Not much is known about Doggerland, for the obvious reason that it is nowadays underwater. Divers have managed to retrieve bones and artifacts suggesting that it was once home to a thriving Neolithic society—early Stone Age farmers. As we learn new techniques for underwater archaeology still more may be learned. Plato’s description of Atlantis tells us that at its center there was a system of waterways arranged in concentric circles (Critias, 113d). Plato describes these as defensive structures like moats, but they sound to me more like the system of canals that presently divide the city of Amsterdam into districts —canals that were once used to provide residents with fresh water and a means of transportation. If canals like those in Amsterdam are someday found in Doggerland it would be compelling evidence that Doggerland is the Atlantis described by Plato.
And if Doggerland is the land Plato described, we should take that as a warning. Like the residents of Atlantis, we are fortunate to live in a civilization that is mostly peaceful and well-governed. We are mostly well-fed, and our work is mostly easier and more fulfilling than the work of our ancestors. But just as global warming destroyed Doggerland by causing it to sink into the sea, the same could happen to us. If we sink into the sea our civilization might also become no more than a lost memory, leaving our descendants to wonder if we even existed.