In Our Time - Plato's Atlantis

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Plato's account of the once great island of Atlantis out to the west, beyond the world known to his fellow Athenians, and why it disappeared many thousands of years before his time. There are no sources for this story other than Plato, and he tells it across two of his works, the Timaeus and the Critias, tantalizing his readers with evidence that it is true and clues that it is a fantasy. Atlantis, for Plato, is a way to explore what an ideal republic really is, and whether Athens could be (or ever was) one; to European travellers in the Renaissance, though, his story reflected their own encounters with distant lands, previously unknown to them, spurring generations of explorers to scour the oceans and in the hope of finding a lost world.The image above is from an engraving of the legendary island of Atlantis after a description by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680).With Edith Hall Professor of Classics at Durham UniversityChristopher Gill Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of ExeterAndAngie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, according to Plato, 4th century BC, there was once a great island of Atlantis out to the west beyond the known world of the Mediterranean.

He tells his story across two of his works, the Timaeus and the Critias, along with proof that his story is absolutely reliant. and clues that it's not at all reliable. For Plato, Atlantis is a way to explore what an ideal republic really is and whether Athens could be or if a was one. Yet somehow, he also inspired generations of explorers to scour the oceans and distant lands in the hope of finding this lost world.

With me to discuss Plato's Atlantis are Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University, Christopher Gill, Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter, and Angie Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philadelphia, philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Angie, what is the setting for Plato's telling of the Atlantis story? Yes, we've got four characters. We've got Socrates, Temeus, Critias and Hymocrates.

And the day before, they've been discussing certain elements of the ideally just state, as outlined in Plato's Republic books two to five. And they've had that discussion. and they were, Socrates says, I want to see our ideally just state in action. I want to see how it stands up to the stresses of war. I want to see if our education system,

if the virtues that we've instilled will help it. And Critias, a friend of Socrates, says, well, funny you should mention that because after our conversation yesterday as we were going home, I thought, do you know what? The ideally just state that we were to say, It's discussing reminds me of a story that I heard when I was a very little boy, and I heard it from my grandfather when he was a very old man. And my grandfather said that he'd heard this story from his father, who'd heard it from the great Athenian lawgiver so long about this great event that happened 9,000 years before, in which prehistoric Athens, poor, not very powerful, but very virtuous.

had taken on the might of the great maritime empire of Atlantis. And though it was comparatively poor and powerless, it had defeated Atlantis through its virtue. And Critias says, if you want to see what your ideally just state looks like when tested in war, let's look at this story of the war between prehistoric Athens and Atlantis.

What are the key features of the idea of Republic are gone to Plato? Yes, so you've got a separation between the guardians, class who rule and the producers who produce all the goods. In the Republic, the guardian class itself is divided into two philosopher rulers and auxiliaries. We don't get that distinction in the Tamaeus. We just get a distinction between guardians and producers. The guardians live an austere, communal lifestyle. They are not allowed to possess a wealth of any kind. Communists, really? Exactly. Indeed. And the Producers provide them with all their material needs for it at a subsistence level.

They're educated in a very careful way. So you've got this extremely austere lifestyle. And those are the features that the Temeus picks up on. Editherto, how does Critias describe Atlantis? Atlantis is a very enormous island that's lying in the Atlantic, extending near the coast of Africa from the southern south. Sahara all the way up to Cadiz. It starts out as just one very, very large island with a mountain in the middle. Poseidon falls in love with Clyto, who is this human girl on the mountain. And because he doesn't want

anyone else to ever get to have sex with her, he puts in three canals of water to divide the mountain in the middle from any of the other bits of land so that nobody can get to her. But in time, when he's had his five sets of twins and the kings, they turn into kings, all this engineering takes place, they form bridges across these canals, they make harbours, they make docks, they even build an enormous wall with little houses on that extends all the way from the mountain to the sea. At the very centre is the great temple of Poseidon, who's been booted out of Athens. Poseidon is no longer the co-tututalary god of Athens, that's Hephaistus. He has the most magnificent temple with Clyto,

where he's shown with 100 nirids and six galloping horses, and that is entirely made of silver with golden turrets. There are thousands of golden statues. The central part of the island has this massive racecourse going all the way around it. There are balls roaming all around the central island, but there is incredible noise. This is something that he makes a great point of, because of the fleet.

There's an incredible racket going on with the cutting down of trees and the building of all of these ships and the maritime trade in the ports. Chris, Chris Gill. The text of the Critias ends with Zeus about to intervene and to punish the Atlanteans for their excess and imperialism. But we already know at the end of the Timer's section

that there will be a huge earthquake and flood, and that will destroy both the whole of Atlantis, which will be sunk beneath the waves, and also the army of ancient Athens will be destroyed in the same process. So they will go below the earth. They don't ever have to have contact with the sea. So they go below the earth and Atlantis goes below the sea, and that's the end of it. And Critias, who was he? Critias is the extremely unreliable narrator of the entire.

Atlantis story, both the short bit in the Temaeus and then the expanded version in the Critias. The historic Critias is a deeply problematic figure. He was what we would call the most right-wing person in Athens. I mean, he was a radical oligarch. He was related to Plato. He was probably the first cousin of Plato's mother. He's some sort of uncle or cousin. and he was murkily involved in the first great counter-democratic coup of 4-11.

So that's about 20 years before this is written. He then managed to get exiled because of his association with the terrible tyranny that was set up in 411, came back. And once Sparta had conquered Athens in 404, became the nastiest of all the 30 tyrants. So we've got Athens and we've got Atlantis. So I'm going to turn to you, Chris. The story's said to being passed down by the Egyptians.

We're told Solon was involved, the great lawmaker. What do you make of it? Well, it's just nonsense, really, as a kind of historical account. But it's a wonderful way of explaining how this extraordinarily ancient story could have been transmitted. So we have the transmission. So as Angie outlined, Critias got it from his grandfather,

who got it from his father, who got it from Solon, the six-century statesman and poet. Solon, in turn, got it from the Egyptians. Now, the Egyptians were very famous for the antiquity of their culture. In this version, they are in a state that was founded 8,000 years ago.

And then, by some means, that are not clear, they knew about primeval Athens, which was 9,000 years from this event. So that's how the transmission is prevented. Egyptian priests to so long, solon, so long through to the family. Now, there's a number of very interesting points that come out about that. First of all, obviously, it establishes the pseudo-antiquity of this. And of course, it's the antiquity is one of the clues to the falseness

because the ancient Greeks had no idea of what happened 9,000 years ago or 8,000 years ago or anything like it. I mean, history for them was contemporary history. That's what Herodotus and Thucydides presented, contemporary history. So that already puts... But Egyptians had history? Well, they didn't, well... On the walls even, but they had history up to a point.

Egyptians knew... Yes, that's why they're used. Of course, they didn't have this history, but they had some history. The other rather interesting feature that comes out of this is, again, relating to this dubious character Critias, It makes it very much a family business. So it was transmitted down in his family, which of course makes, you know, this is an aristocrat.

This is someone for whom family is crucial. And it also makes it very much an Athenian story. Now, Socrates hadn't asked for an Athenian story. Socrates had asked for... When did he ask? At the very beginning. I mean, Socrates said, show me the ideal state in action. He didn't say, show me the ideal state in action in Athens.

So the shifting of the context to Athens is, a move made by Critias. So all these kind of features hang together, I think. There's one quote we have to get in. When Solon is talking to the Egyptian priests and he's saying, oh, we had this great Vladin, you know, we had the Duqueselian and Pira.

And the Egyptian priest says, oh, Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children. There is no such thing as an old Greek. You know, you're just born yesterday. You don't know your ancient history. You don't have all our written records. And

You're gullible also. But who is Plato writing for? He's writing for Greeks. So he's really being mischievous. He's having such fun with this. The question arises, Angie, why does he want to take this? Why does Plato want to take up this Atlantic story?

What's the need for him? He wants to look at the ethical and political and theological implications of the story. He wants to show... Does he believe the story? Well, he's making nearly all of it up. I personally think, and my conscience, colleagues might not agree with me. I personally think there probably are some folklore elements which have

influenced this story. So he believes he didn't ever want to write about it, are that he believes it? No, he's making nearly all of it up. He thinks that there are ethical and political and theological lessons to be learned from it. He's interested in the relationship between myth and account, between Muthos and Logos and how they interplay and why we need both in a, in a flourishing culture. So there's a, there's lots that he's, I think he has an anti-imperialist. message in this because Atlantis does okay as a rich, powerful maritime empire so long as it stays. What's you trying to do with Atlantis? Here he's got an example of a state which is doing all right so long as it doesn't get too

big for its boots. It's when it decides to extend its empire into the east and go beyond Libya into Egypt and try to go beyond Etruria and conquer Greece. that's when the gods get angry and that's when the virtues of poor, but plucky little prehistoric Athens win the day. However, we should note that though virtue can defeat human vice, you're still powerless in the face of the gods, because both virtuous prehistoric Athens and Atlantis,

at a later date in one terrible day and night, they both get obliterated by earthquake and tsunami. They both disappear. I think what Plato is trying to do with this whole story, the underlying motive, is a desire, not just because he's done the ideal state, that's what we've had in the Republic. What he's interested in here,

and it does link again with this idea of fiction, it's putting the ideal into concrete form, into embodied form, into a landscape, into all the physical aspects of a state, its environment. So I think that's what's, at the bottom is going on here.

It's embodiment. And of course, it's very important that this whole story is located within the creation story of the Tamirs, because we have the Tamirs, first of all, which summarizes the story, then this enormous creation story, and then the Critias. And the creation story is all about putting the ideal into concrete form.

So I think that's, That's what makes the Atlantis story different, or different at least from the Republic, though perhaps less different from the laws. Edith, I believe that Atlantis represents the contemporary Athenian democracy of the late 5th century. I think that the Atlanteans are sort of one perspective on Athens and the early Athenians are another. The main reason I say that is that the big difference between. the prehistoric Atlanteans and prehistoric Athenians is actually militarily. The prehistoric Athenians are an inland.

He actually managed to make Athens an inland state by saying there'd been a lot of erosion since. With a land infantry army, that makes them like the Spartans, they had no ships. They had no sailors. The Atlanteans are a massive sea power, what the ancient Greeks called a Thalasocracy. That means a constitution based on the... sea. From that point of view, they're identical to the Periclean-Athenian Empire, and it's their sea-going power that makes them fall. But the point about Critias is that he is deeply, deeply associated with being against the sailors of Athens, and I think we need to get this on

the table very quickly. So the most radical members of the Athenian democracy lived in the harbour town of Piraeus. Aristotle says they are far more democratic than anybody else, because they know they make the money. They're very poor. They've mostly only got one slave maximum each. They're poor but free. And they are the big voting power in the democracy. And Aristotle says that they have this extremely fervent democratic spirit.

Now, Critias actually went when he did the coup with the 30 tyrant and stake out Piraeus and took on the Navy and was actually killed in Piraeus. He was actually killed there by, the then victorious Democrats you reinstated the democracy. Guess where the Republic is set in the Pereus? Why do we go down to the Pereus to think out the Navy-free Calipolis, beautiful city of the Republic, right?

It's all to do with Critias's opposition to the Thalicocritic, Athenian democracy ruled by working-class sailors. So can we just develop that? Plato underlines its by, by, by giving Prime Evil Athens more land. So there is actually, he remodels the landscape of Attica so that the Acropolis, which was relatively small in Plato's Day and ours, becomes much bigger.

So it becomes a land power in itself. It becomes more fertile. And so that's one major difference, from sea to land. The other differences, we've already referred to, is the difference between a democratic state and a quasi-communist state. And the other, of course, difference that would strike anyone immediately is this is an acropolis with no Parthenon, no statues, no artistry, no culture. Architecture and engineering have been screened out of this Athens, primeval Athens.

Why is he doing it in a story form? Well, for me, myth is really important for Plato, because myth speaks to parts of our psyche, which are not purely our rational part. It's also going to engage our emotions. It can really resonate with us. The active philosophising, the active interpretation that's needed to try to decode a myth is a really important philosophical tool. And the Egyptian priest who tells the story to Solon, he says in the Temeus that myths that these stories, They can symbolise cosmological processes and historical events.

So Plato gives us a clue that we need to be decoding here. So that's really important. And then I think he thinks there are some things which are better understood through story, through myth, and the active reinterpretation of myth through the generations. Can I just say that I think that he is actually consciously inventing a new genre, which is historical fiction? I think he is inventing the historical novel here. The thing about Plato is whatever you think of his philosophy,

and he's got a very, very divided reception, he is a magnificent writer and an incredibly experimental writer. And there are three different ways. He goes about trying to explain what the beautiful city is, one in the Republic, one in the Atlantis story, and one in the laws. He is prepared to use incredible varieties of genres of literature and invent them in order to, explore and push at the limits of what philosophical discourse could be.

In the Republic, there's also a political answer to what is the actual literary form of this, which is that Socrates tells what he calls a noble lie, a noble fiction. He says that telling fictions for the good of the people to get them to understand their history is actually a good thing. In that he talks about... Is this anywhere near propaganda? It is absolutely propaganda. He says, when the Guardian...

of the state need to explain something to the thoroughly unwise, uneducated masses, then telling them a story, even if you know it's not true, can be a very good thing. And I think Critias takes the cue from that and comes up with the biggest noble lie of them all. You said noble lie. I mean, it's something that's not true. That's the word in the Republic. So it's something that's not true. It might not, lies quite strong.

It doesn't have to be translated as a lie. have to translate as a lie, but you can translate it as a lie, given the actual technical terms to do with pseudo stuff. Yes, it's a fiction. In the Greek. But the point is that he has told us in the Republic that we can get everybody to believe that they ought to stay in their own classes, right, and not mingle across classes unless they're unbelievably exceptionally brilliant. And he gives a myth about how you don't want to mix metals or you get corrupt alloys. That's one example. This is Critias picking up on the idea that you can tell something which is completely fictive, I believe, in order to brainwash the people, I would go that far into believing that they shouldn't be

a sea power and in particular that they shouldn't give the rabble-rousing sailors as they are absolutely called in the Republic. They're exactly the sort of people you mustn't put on in the theatre because people will imitate them. They're the worst kind of human. You must not have a society where the sailors have that kind of power. And I think this is what the Greeks call an etiological. That's explaining the causes, myth, justifying the preference for a land-based power that is not imperialistic over a maritime power that is.

Chris, Chris Gill. I think another way of looking at this might be in terms of his evocation of wars, the evocation of the first century. Because in this story, Athens plays a double role. He replays, as it were, the two great wars of the 5th century, the Persian War and the Peloponnesian War. So Athens plays two roles. First of all, it plays, this is primeval Athens. Primival Athens plays the role... Primeval being what dates? Well, this is the same one, ancient Athens nine thousand years ago. Yeah. So ancient Athens plays the role, first of Athens in the Persian Wars, standing against the

Puckie little Athens at Marathon and Salamis, and doing so with its army at Marathon, which would be crucial for him. And in that sense, it is successful and defeats Atlantis. And that's one of the big contrasts between Athens and Atlantis. But secondly, Primeval Athens plays the role of Sparta. There's a kind of switch, identity switch. And Primeval Athens then is more like a land power, more like an army. and Atlantis takes over the role of Athens. Atlantis becomes the quasi-democratic, imperialistic state of the later 5th century.

So there's this very interesting and complex replaying of the two wars with Athens having a dual, ancient Athens, that is, having a dual role. And that's another way of communicating the significance of the story in terms of what brings success and failure and what is virtue and not virtue. So this is steering still towards the idea of what is an ideal republic? Yes, the whole thing is the beginning and the end of it is an ideal republic. Andrew, you're going to come in. Yes, in your introduction, you talked about the conflicting clues that Plato soes

about whether we're meant to believe this or not. And I think that's absolutely crucial. because on the one hand, we're told that so long the wisest of the seven wise men once vouch for its truth. Socrates later says the great thing about this is it's not a muthos, it's not a myth, it's an elethenos logos, a true account. As we've already discussed, the chronology works. Plato does always have some respect for Egypt and Egyptian culture throughout his work, so he's a bit ambivalent. So we've got clues that at some level it's true, but also at the same time, there's all sorts of indications that it's not true.

That the heavy irony of Critias saying, you know, oh, it's amazing that this free historic Athens matches are ideally just state in almost every detail. You know, wouldn't you believe it? the initial Atlantis civilization, it's formed when the sea god Poseidon has a union with the human Plato and they give birth to five sets of male twins. So that's that divine human intermingling is obviously fictional. If Plato's not making it up, somebody is. So there are all these sort of fictional elements as well. And I think that's absolutely deliberate on Plato's part. I think he wants to keep us I think he's written a multi-layered story because he doesn't want anybody to know for all time whether it's true or false. Why?

Because that keeps the myth alive. It makes it imperative for us to keep interpreting it to become active philosophizes. It's a great pedagogic tool. And the ancients, even just after his death, they couldn't agree on whether it was true or false. So he really succeeded. it was false, didn't it? But quite a few weren't... Yeah, but the word few... Yeah, but Crantor, Strabo, Posidonius,

quite a few thought that it might well be true. So... Can we talk about the Atlantis? How this... Is this a thought experiment? I think it is a thought experiment. I think that Critias has taken the idea that we want to find these people in action and the metaphor that Socrates actually uses

is of a tableau vivant. It's actually of actors, somehow acting this out. So we've got three different versions, as I mentioned earlier, in Plato of a vision of the ideal republic. In the actual republic, it's in the subjunctive. What if we could make a society like this? In his laws, we have an old Athenian usually identified with Socrates, who plans an actual colony. That's not in the subjunctive, that's in the concrete future tense.

We will do this. We will make an inland city, which has no ships. which has no sailors and which is going to look like that. That's in the concrete future. In the Atlantis story, we set it 9,000 years in the past historical fiction. So it's a past tense. I believe that he is pushing at the limits of what philosophical discourse might look like. But I also think that the role of Critias is absolutely crucial.

Socrates himself agreed with most, I believe Socrates himself, certainly Plato, agreed with almost everything that Christyaz said about the ideal state. But he does not want to go so far as to be the mouthpiece of it. So he puts this person known to be the most radical anti-democrat in the city in it. And there is one absolutely crucial difference between the ideal Athens of 9,000 years ago and the Callipolis of the Republic. And that is this. The Callipolis of the Republic is run by philosopher kings.

and queens. It's run by philosopher monarchs and a brilliant article by one of Britain's greatest platonists Christopher Rowe said why isn't the primeval Athens of Atlantis run by philosopher kings it's actually run by the army.

Now Critias was ahead of the army. So we have Critias making a very different ideal republic that's not run by philosopher kings and I think Socrates and Plato is force. the reader to realise that is the one difference. Angie said that Christyaz says in almost every detail, this is identical to what you were outlining yesterday.

What we all ask is the difference, boom, it is not run by thinking, trained philosopher kings. It's run by the military. Yeah, that's really, that is very interesting. It is one of the great puzzles of the Atlantis story, what's happened to the philosopher kings. It is strange because Plato still clearly believes in them, because he, in the introduction, he says,

well, you, Tamirs and Comocrates and Critists, you're just the right people to tell this story. But they're not. They're military men. I know, but that's what he says. So he hasn't given up the ideal. But you're right. It's not there.

It's the Republic, but it stops before you get to the... Exactly. It stops. We've got the so-called auxiliaries. The auxiliaries are there, but no philosophy of rulers. So they've gone. but whether they've got, you know, quite what the implications of that are, are really left open. I mean, it could be that he, you know, just wants a law-bound state.

This has been suggested that he ceases to believe in the philosopher ruler and believes in a law-bound state. But that doesn't really work, because when you come to the laws, we have there something called the Nocturnal Council who become, at any rate, philosophers. So I think he does throughout his life continue to believe in the philosopher king, the philosopher queen. So there is this puzzle with the Atlanta story.

Why do you think he broke it off? It's incomplete, isn't it? Well, I think there's, I can think of at least three reasons. He broke it off. Okay. One was because he decided that he didn't, although he had the idea of historical fiction, he didn't actually want to do it.

He got a bit fed up with all this. I mean, he breaks it off just as the purely fictional, you know, the full creative element begins. We have Zeus making a speech, and he'd have to make lots more speeches, and he would have to have lots more narrative. He really would have to become a kind of Herodotus, Thucydides, a Homer, and he just thought, oh, forget it. I mean, I just can't go through with all this. So he just, I mean, he flings the pen down in mid-sentence. It's a really extraordinary ending. I'm trying.

The other two, the other two, okay. Oh, the other two. The other two is that he says, okay, I still want to do what I originally wanted to do, which is to put the ideal into a concrete form and to look at questions of land and sea and the kind of stuff of political life. But I'll do it properly. I'll do it in a philosophical way. And he does it in the laws.

That's what he actually does right at huge length are the laws. So I think that's another reason why he flung down. the pen. The third reason is that he might have thought, well, hang on, I have really made the main points already at the end of the Critias, because we've got the contrast. We've got the contrast between the two states, Premier Athens and Atlantis. We know the rough outline of the story. We've got Athens, plucky Athens is going to defeat Atlantis. We know that Atlantis is going to decline and become corrupt. So we've got, we've kind of got it. And we don't really need the rest.

Angie, did Plato tell us these sources of inspiration for going for Atlantis? Well, what I think, which I may be the only one on this table who thinks this, I think that Plato has inherited some folklore tales, some oral tales. I think that some of these about cities that are destroyed by earthquake and tsunami, and he doesn't just have to inherit the tales in 373 BCE, Herliquay in the northern Peloponnese was just wiped out overnight in an earthquake and tsunami, so it's going on. But I think he has inherited some tales which have their roots in Minoan Thera and Crete. Now, Plato didn't know about the Minoan civilization.

None of them did at this time, so that we wouldn't be conscious. But to me, there are some telling details. We haven't yet really discussed the kind of luxurious gorgeousness and technological sophistication of Atlantis. Well, because it might not exist. Well, but it's important to get these details right. So it's full of beautiful gardens and fruit, and there are gymnasia, and there's a horse racing track, and they love pleasure. But also there are some very key details. So the kings, when they meet every fifth and sixth year, the ten kings meet in the Temple of Poseidon, in the center of the island.

And in that temple, Bulls Rome. and we know that Minoan civilization had a big bull culture. You said what are Plato's origins? And if he's heard folklore tales about this very fabulously technologically advanced civilization, which he wouldn't have called Minoan. But if he's heard any tales and about how it was destroyed, then I think it's very likely you've got the bull culture, you've got the dolphins. They talk about how the towers are built of red, white and black stone on Atlantis.

have been on Santorini, modern theory, and there are piles of red, white, and black stones everywhere. That's still a thing. So I think that might be one of the inspirations, not that Plato would have known that name, but also I think Plato has got an anti-imperialistic message anyway. After the generation of marathon defeated the Persians, then Athens creates its own empire, and it gets above itself. acts hubristically. I think there are three further sources that he's using that thoroughly imbue it. It is deeply Herodotian.

Herodotus has written these great ethnographies and anthropologies and actually stylistic analysis has shown that this is the most Herodotian passage in all of Plato in terms of the actual language. Secondly, fiatia in the Odyssey, the idea of a wonderful land where the fruit and animals and trees and flowing water are there with practically no labour. That is actually a magical world from the most famous author of all Homer. Thirdly, the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians are the great sea power who, before the ancient Greeks had developed all their triremes, had cracked it. They'd also sailed down the coast of West Africa. They had actually

done that. And the Greeks believed that they'd done that. And they had texts that they had done that. So they had gone into the Atlantic in a way that the Greeks never had. In the Republic, the noble lie or the noble fiction is actually called a little Phoenician tale. So there's something going on

about the Phoenician culture, as well as inherited folk memories of tsunamis, which I absolutely believe because there's constant tsunamis in the eastern Mediterranean, even today on a small scale. So there are all those other different sources. What does this mean to Plato's philosophy?

Well, it affects every single branch, his whole project, as Angie said earlier. So it's ethical and political. That's one branch of Plato's philosophy. The three great branches are how should we live? That's ethics and politics. What is being? That's ontology. Does this place actually exist or not?

If it's in a story, of course it's got some ontological status because we're talking about it. But did it really exist? Ontology, metaphysics, how the gods made the world, did gods make the world? And the third, of course, most importantly of all, in some ways, is epistemology. How do we know things? And by every stage of this story undermining its plausibility and credibility, even to jokes that old men constantly forget what's happened, right? There are jokes about the bad memory of people throughout Plato,

but in particular in this passage. We've got the thousand years where it must have been orally transmitted, very carefully put out there. There are so many ways it's undermined. So the three great branches of Platonic philosophy, which are ontology, epistemology and ethics politics, are all richly evidenced in Critias's silly tale. Chris, how would you? I think there are three features of the difference between Athens and Atlantis that are important and actually different, perhaps from other works. The contrast is partly between unity and structured complexity.

that's quite an important difference. There's a difference between stability and change. Atlantis is, it begins in one physical state and it's completely transformed by engineering and mechanical works. So that's a second contrast. And the third contrast is between moderation, or what the Greeks called sophrosunet, and kind of exploitation and what the Greeks call pleonexia,

the desire for more. there are these three very strong contrasts between the states. And I don't think there's, although it relates in a way to what you find in the Republican laws, this is the only one in which I think we have those three features. And they're not simply there as ideas, but they're also, as I said before, they're embodied. They're given what Shakespeare called a local habitation and a name. And that's what, that's another thing that makes it so different and so distinctive.

Can we, Angie, can we discuss why this story, which Aristotle and a lot like him, said it was a fiction, gathered in power and importance when we came to the Renaissance in the 19th century, what attracted people so much to this story? Was it the feroid? Was the fictional thing? The feroid? What was going on? Well, in the renaissance, you've got the discovery of the new world.

And that, of course, sends people like Thomas Moore back to this tale. and he develops his own utopia, and that interest continues. But it becomes very dark in the 19th century. Various scholars of Mesoamerica started to argue that the fabulously beautiful and technologically advanced Mayan culture, for instance, couldn't have been created by Mesoamericans. It must have been the Atlanteans who somehow got over and created this. So you've got that sort of racist European supremacy comes in.

it gets darker and darker. In 1882, Ignatius Donnelly writes Atlantis, an antediluvian world. And he argues that all ancient civilizations basically stem from Atlantis. Again, a very Eurocentric view. In 1888, Madame Blavatsky, she writes the secret doctrine, where she puts forward her view that there's a racial eugenics and that the Atlanteans somehow give rise to the airy. and then from 1900 a number of German and Austrian scholars really take up on that idea and argue and they locate Atlantis in the far north of Europe and they posit a Hyperbarian Nordic super race who again are the progenitors of the Aryans and they distinguish the Atlantean Aryans from the Jewish races

and Himmler and Rosenberg then make this official Nazi doctor in the 1930s. 84, why do you think it travelled so far away from Plato's idea, original idea? I think that it's a deeply riveting story, the whole idea of the lost world that we might rediscover is something that has engaged every generation since the Renaissance, but it didn't really enter popular culture until the late Regency period,

when it's finally translated into European vernaculars. So, for example, a man called Taylor was the first person to translate the two platonic dialogues into English. So all of a sudden, you start to get popular belesques on the London stage. You start to get spectacles you can pay to go and see. You start to, it enters a much more popular area of culture where it doesn't have these dark overtones that it certainly did with national socialism. It's simply fun. And that, you know, Jules Verne gets the. Nautilus's crew

to come across Atlantis. So it becomes very, very important in all kinds of science fiction writing as a result of that. That leads all the way through to more than 400 films have been made with some relationship to the Atlantis story.

And it was very early on in cinema because of the spectacical, because of the great visual detail of the Platonic account, my favourite is actually if you go to Legoland, Denmark, the Beulunt, Legoland, you can actually scuba dive into a huge artificial lagoon. You can scuba dive down to the Lego submerged Atlantis. So on top of the very dark reception that is to do with

racism and the superiority of the Aryan race, you've also got a really, I think, delightful popular culture. And I love the fact that when I look at little children looking at all the Atlantis Lego, I love to think that this is Plato. I think, hey, classics for the masses, we've got there. Really? Chris, can you tell us, we come at the end of the programme now, tell us what effect you think on philosophy and on the development of the idea of how city should be run

this had these two books to Mayers and Critters. I'm not sure that it has, at that serious level, I'm not sure that it has had that much effect. I think it has a kind of green meaning for us because the contrasts between Athens and Atlantis it's embodied, it's placed in the land, the landscape and the contrast between them is very interesting in this respect in Athens, primeval Athens is the kind of sustainable state

has a steady population, 20,000 of the guardians, no more, no less, it's very moderate, there's no excess. In Atlantis, on the other hand, anything goes. It's expansionist, their constant, doing engineering, architecture, they're imperialistic. They're cut down all the timber, and they mine all the metals.

Exactly. So Atlantis has a big carbon footprint. Exactly. So I think, you know, for our age, the Atlanta story is a great green legend. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Edith Hall, Angie Hobbes, and Chris Gill and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's Electron.

and how their place of the outer reaches of atoms makes them a driver of modernity. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I'd love to explore the anti-imperialistic message more because we've talked about how Atlantis comes to cropper when its imperialistic ambitions become too hubristic, and it tries to extend its power further.

East. We've mentioned how Plato's also thinking about how the generation of marathon defeat the mighty Persian army in 490 and then again in 480 and 479. So we've talked about that, the dangers of empire building. But I think there's more to it because after Athenians beat off the Persians and they develop their own empire and they get too big for their boots and they end up in a horrific civil war with Sparta, which they lose horribly. And one of their most hubristic actions in that war was the expedition to Sicily in 415 to 413,

which they lose disastrously. Now, one of the characters in the conversation is Hermocrates, and he's from Syracuse. And actually, for me, that's why it's so sad. We don't have Hermocrates' as promised conversation. I also think Plato's giving a warning, to the Athenians of his own day. He's writing this probably in the 360s because they're starting to get maritime imperialistic ambitions again. And he's saying, look, watch out. And at the end of

the Critias we hear, if you lust after money and par too much, you will end up destroying what, not only not getting any more, you will end up destroying what you've already got. And I've got an eccentric theory of my own, for which I have no hard evidence, but I want to run it by you to see what you think. So in 367, Aristotle comes down from northern Greece to study at Plato's Academy. Aristotle's father

had been the court doctor at the court of the Macedonian kings. He was a great friend of Amintus III, the father of Philip, grandfather of Alexander the Great. Aristotle would have known about Macedonian ambitions and the growth of Macedonian power. He might

well have tipped Plato off about the danger now, it's not so much, Sparta, look to the north, because Athens was very slow in seeing the threat from Macedonia. I think Plato might have known about this, and I think he might also be giving a warning about empire. So for me, it's a powerful anti-imperialist story. So are you suggesting that he's warning Athens needs to play again the marathonic role in fighting on?

I think he's saying, don't get any ideas about building an empire of your own, but also watch out. Mind your back. Exactly. You've got all these people making speeches about beware of Sparta. But look north. You're missing the main game. Julius. I am actually quite keen on talking a little bit more about popular culture because it really is one of the words.

It's like the Odyssey. It's one of the four or five words from ancient Greek literature and philosophy. that everybody in the world knows. But they do not know it's Plato. So if you go to Dubai, you can go to the most extraordinary thing called the Aqua Adventure Resort. It is enormous, and you can spend a whole week

going to different bits of Atlantis. There's an aquarium part, there's a scuba diving part, there's a dining part, you can actually dine amidst the statues of Poseidon and so on. I think that there's a very important,

element of the pleasure of world building, right? And this is very important in computer games. There's a whole subset of computer games that depend on you creating your own world. So it's the modern equivalent of when we used to have farm yard sets and build our own big farm yard, right? You actually build your whole virtual world. And I have a child who's a very great expert in computer games

and has shown me six where you actually build at Landau. or you actually get it back out of the sea again and you play survival games against other Atlanteans. So it's penetrated to a layer of popular culture that only the Odyssey and ESOP have. Except in popular culture, how often is it recognised

that Atlantis is actually the bad guy in the story? I mean, are we not being presented with this? It's very materialistically rich, opulent culture as something to admire, which is exactly what Plato. doesn't want. Well, you think Plato doesn't want it. I do find that

fascinating because it's a bit like you know, Satan in Milton. I do think he gets so carried away with describing not this slightly boring inland hop-like army with very little pretty architecture and no balls going around

having their blood drunk. I think he actually does get carried away and I think that's because he's competing with Homer. He's actually competing with Homer. Homer's fiatians there. And Plato does like to compete with Homer. You only have to read his eye on to see that he likes competing

in a rhapsodic, descriptive way. Yeah, I think that is one of the very interesting things about the Critias, is that it's not obvious. It's not obvious that this is a bad state. At first. You can, you can,

no, by implication, it is. But it's not, I mean, if you think of the comparison, say, with the Republic, and we have the four states, the monarchy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. And it's very clear that all of them are highly defective. But if you just read the critics, it's not on the surface. It's not spelled out in completely obvious ways that it is the baddie.

So I think that's why we do get this, why history has fallen in love with Atlantis and not Athens. And also, I think that's why there is this sense of ambiguity. about the truth status of the story. I think those two are hanged together. Very quickly. Critias was said by, later antiquity had all his speeches to be a great orator.

So he may not have been a philosopher king. He was a sophist and an orator. So he shows off incredible verbal skills in those word portraits. And that would have been expected by anybody who had remembered Critias speaking in public. Except, I mean,

I agree with you and I agree that Plato does really fall in love, you know, part of him does fall in love with this date he's created and his wonderful imaginative ability runs away. But before we even get any description of Atlantis, in the brief summary at the beginning of the Tamaeus of the outline of Republic 2 to 5, which they've been discussing the day before, one of the few facts that's mentioned is that the guardians have no personal possessions or wealth or property and and aren't allowed to go anywhere near gold or silver. So we've already had this very pure divorce of power than money. Quite an interesting idea.

One class has all the power, the other class has all the money. So we've already had that. So before we even start the description of Atlantis, Plato's already sowed in our minds the thought, do you know what? Actually, there's a little implicit criticism of its life. Even before it degenerates, it's always in love with bling.

Yeah, I agree that if you have, if you're drenched in Plato, as soon as you read the Atlantis, you're going to see it's bad. But it's much less obvious and overt and upfront than you might have expected. That's what's true. There's another aspect of that in a rightly way. And I know I'm more of a literature person than a philosopher. But I've actually examined the tenses used in these two texts. And would you believe

Primordial Athens is almost all described in the imperfect tense and in the plural So these unnamed people They were farming They were singing to the gods They were doing this out

The next thing They were forming an army So it creates this timeless continuum When it comes to Atlantis It's all named individuals We're given all these named The Son of So and Soes The Son of Atlas

And then Lytto and Ivans and all these people, and they're in the heiast. And then they did this, and then they did that, and then they did that. Now, that creates this very different world of a specific, sort of analytic, analytic chronology that goes through time, which makes it much easier to identify with than these glorious people in this imperfect ideal world who just carried on doing it forever. So that's been very carefully done to create, as I say, a subjunctive world in terms,

I do think it's a sort of subjunctive even though it's in the past. And this actually very specific, precise history of precise people, which is just like Herodotus. Although it also fits in with the contrast I mentioned earlier about the contrast between stability and change. Yes, it does. That Athens, ancient Athens goes on and on doing the same thing. Like ancient Egypt. like ancient Egypt, whereas in Atlantis there's constant change and variation. But you know, there's only one plough perfect in the whole of both of them.

And that is Athena and Feisters had been forever made the tutelary daties of Athens. It's the only one. And that implies by using the blue perfect, both it was a very, very, very long time ago. And it is now and forever will be. That's what happens with perfect tenses. is they're perfective. Only gods can have pre-perfect. Well, it's very funny.

And in fact, Christias, at one point, I was talking about the undermining of the memory, says, when we were here yesterday, well, we weren't. We've been told we're not in Peres anymore. That was where we were yesterday, as guests. We're now hosts back somewhere in Athens. And he actually forgets where he was.

This is the guy whose memory we're relying on for something that somebody said it. In fact, it's a chain of nine. It's the Egyptian priest, two solon, two droppides and then to a father and a grandfather to grandson it is then said at a place

at a meal that Plato wasn't at so one of the people at the meal will have had to tell Plato we as the readers of it are number nine is the chain of nine oh no criticises the young critic's father has never mentioned

he said he heard it straight from his grandfather his grandfather heard it from his father yeah you missed that one of her He will about to be interrupted by the producer Simon Tillison. Would anyone like to your coffee? I can have a herbal tea. Would you like a herbal tea? No, I'd like a herbal tea, please.

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