Plato's account of Atlantis

In order to discover the fate of Atlantis, let us look to Plato's Dialogue of Critias, where the legend is first mentioned:

... nine thousand was the sum of years which had elapsed since the war which was said to have taken place between those who dwelt outside the Pillars of Heracles and all who dwelt within them; this war I am going to describe. Of the combatants on the one side, the city of Athens was reported to have been the leader and to have fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as I was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean.

Nine thousand years before Plato? Not during the Roman Republic, as indicated in the novel's summary? Yep, you read that right.

In Atlantis On the Shores of Forever, the characters will refer to Plato's allegory as a criticism to the degenerate state of the Atlanteans and their culture. Though the applauded philosopher was “only expressing his disapproval” in our version of history, his account will serve as a foreshadowing of what we all know will come at the end of the trilogy: the inevitable sinking of the island continent.

But how exactly did the catastrophic event go down, really? According to Plato,

...human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power. Zeus, the god of gods, who rules according to law, and is able to see into such things, perceiving that an honorable race was in a woeful plight, and wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the center of the world, beholds all created things. And when he had called them together, he spake as follows-

And...and?!

Sorry, folks! The rest of the Dialogue of Critias has been lost. Yeah...it kills me, too. Just what did Zeus spake?

My first thought was along Bill Cosby lines, “I'm gonna make it rain for a thousand days and drown 'em right out!” To which his version of Noah responds, “Right... Here's a way to save water: let it rain for forty days and nights, and wait for the sewers to back up.” Yep, that's the way my mind works.

In all likelihood, we'll never know how/when/why Atlantis was destroyed, or if it even existed for that matter. But then, that's why I wrote a novel about it.

Picture source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#mediaviewer/File:Plato-raphael.jpg

For further information:

Plato's Critias. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/critias.html

Bill Cosby's “Noah”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfU92tDr8rg

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