Masters of Atlantis

That faint, muffled, oh-so-distant sound you hear is the Eternal Form of Plato having a hearty laugh.

Plato was, of course, a big kidder. That’s something the majority of his modern interpreters don’t seem to understand, but it’s undeniable. Some scholars acknowledge it in a sort of humorless way by talking about “Socratic irony,” but that concept does little justice to Plato’s true jocularity.

Some of the modern thinking about his ideas could only cause Plato frustration and exasperation, of course. The way people want to reduce the Republic, for example, to a treatise on political systems must be truly infuriating. Expostulations on politics were a dime a dozen in Plato’s day, and what is totally missed by modern interpreters is the extent to which the Republic satirizes those polemics. Children taken from their parents and raised by the state, men and women exercising together (naked!) in the Gymnasium? Bada bing, but seriously folks.

OK, here’s another one: In two dialogues, Republic and Laws, Plato apparently proposes that legislators who want to make new laws must write them in verse and then sing (and dance!) them before the assembly.

One could come up with all sorts of theories about why Plato would recommend such a thing – for example, maybe if they had to put them in verse, lawmakers would think harder about the laws they impose on the rest of us – but there’s actually a really simple explanation: The Greek word for “law,” nome, also means “melody.” It’s a pun, the purpose of which – it seems to me – is to point up the absurdity of the whole legislative process. (Not that our modern legislators need any help in making their absurdity obvious.)

But what I’m thinking Plato must be laughing about now is the latest claim that someone has found the “Real Atlantis.” There have been stories about it in the media for a week or so, part of the drumbeat of publicity for a documentary about the “discovery” that’s being broadcast on TV tonight.

And while I have no doubt that the team of archeologists who made this discovery have in fact discovered something, and perhaps something significant, I am certain that they have not discovered the Real Atlantis, though claiming to have done so might boost their TV ratings and, perhaps, their funding.

It’s one thing to go into Plato’s dialogues looking for the passages in which Atlantis is mentioned and to try to connect those mentions to places or events in the actual, historical world. It’s quite another thing to study Plato in some real sense, to read at least, say, a half-dozen of the dialogues all the way through and give serious thought to what they might mean.

The most common mistake people make in reading Plato’s dialogues is to assume that some statement or line of argument within a dialogue is Plato’s statement of what he’s trying to say. Most often, people want to select something said by the character of Socrates as the articulation of Plato’s position. But in fact, it’s the dialogue as a whole that expresses Plato’s position.

With that in mind, I’m convinced that to anyone who has seriously studied Plato, it’s blindingly obvious, crystal-clear, transparently apparent – in short, very easy to see – that the whole Atlantis story is something Plato just made up to make a philosophical point.

Consider, first, that the two dialogues in which Plato discusses Atlantis, Timaeus and Critias, are the second and third installments in a trilogy of dialogues that begins with Republic.

In Republic, the participants have agreed to construct in words a perfectly ordered society. As I suggested above, there are pitfalls in taking anything about this dialogue literally.

In Timaeus, the discussion on the morning after the conversation recorded in Republic begins with Socrates’ wish that he and his companions could set their ideal society in motion and watch its unfolding in real time and space. The notion of Atlantis is introduced (but not in isoloation, as will be discussed further below) as a story that can be told that would, perhaps, satisfy Socrates’ wish. But to tell the story properly, we must first go all the way back in the unfolding of events to explain the origin of the universe itself. That explanation then occupies the remainder of the dialogue, and is remarkable for its opacity to the modern mind.

In Critias, finally, we are to expect the full unfolding of the story of Atlantis. But it is not just the story of Atlantis; rather, it is the story of a war between Atlantis and a long-ago version of Athens, an Athens that once flourished as brilliantly as Atlantis did, though for different reasons, but which vanished so completely that the Athenians of Plato’s time had no idea it had ever existed – just as no one then living was familiar with the existence of Atlantis.

Plato tells us that his ancestor, Solon, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, learned of these matters on a journey to Egypt, the only society where knowledge reached back into such remote times, something on the order of 10,000 years before. The priests of Egypt told Solon the story that Plato is proposing to relate about the war between this long-forgotten, primal Athens and the equally forgotten Atlantis.

The dialogue then goes on to tell us something about each of these societies and the reasons for their flourishing – and then stops. The dialogue Critias was never finished. The promised account of the war between Athens and Atlantis was never set down in writing.

From what was set down, it seems clear that Plato planned to tell a tale that would contrast the two civilizations in a way that would help illuminate the point(s) he was making in Republic and Timaeus. Based on my own interpretation of those dialogues and Plato’s teachings in general, my guess is that the story would tell us that it didn’t ultimately matter which country won the war, both were going to vanish: Atlantis suddenly, the primordial Athens gradually. Maybe.

As far as the modern search for the Real Atlantis goes, my main point is this: If you believe Plato was talking about a real place in reference to Atlantis, then why aren’t you also digging deep, deep down under present-day Athens to find the 10,000-year-old city that Plato also described? I’m not talking, obviously, about some Neolithic village where people at most had learned to make pottery and not to eat each other; I’m talking about a city that was advanced enough to make serious war against the putatively oh-so-advanced Atlanteans.

Plato made up a lot of stuff in his dialogues that philosophers and historians of philosophy happily admit was always intended to be myth. Indeed, the French philosopher Luc Brisson has written a book on the subject, Plato the Myth Maker, which notes among other things that Plato was the first writer to distinguish between myth and history. And Atlantis clearly is not the latter.

The myth of Er that concludes the Republic and the stories of winged souls and two-horsed chariots in Phaedrus are perhaps the best-known examples of Plato’s talent for describing more-or-less concrete images to illustrate metaphysical concepts. It’s a fault of our modern attitudes, not of Plato’s insights and skills as a philosopher and writer, that we want to take the concrete image as the reality and miss the real point.