LP0069 - Timaeus & Atlantis - The Forgotten Enemy, from Plato's Timaeus

Legendary Passages #0069 - Timaeus & Atlantis - The Forgotten Enemy, from Plato's Timaeus. The next six episodes focus on Atlantis. This passage is an overview of the story, focusing on the forgotten history of Athens and their triumph over the Atlanteans. This story was told by an Egyptian priest to Solon, who told Critias, who told his grandson (also named Critias), who told Socrates and was recorded by Plato. Solon tries to impress the Egyptian priest by recounting their oldest stories of the flood of Deucalion and their earliest genealogies. The priest dismisses them as children's tales, for there have been many floods and disasters, and the written word and the greek histories lost several times over. Ancient Athens was founded nine thousand years before. Their greatest act was the defeat of Atlantis, which had conquered Europe and Africa from beyond the Mediterranean. Athens led the Greeks and their allies in losing war against Atlantis. Yet she prevailed, and liberated the enslaved and the subjugated. But then disaster struck and the brave men of Athens perished, and the island of Atlantis sank beneath the waves. http://sacred-texts.com/cla/plato/timaeus.htm Timaeus & Atlantis, a Legendary Passage, from Plato's Timaeus, trans. by Benjamin Jowett. Crit. Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival. Soc. Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of the Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon, to be not a mere legend, but an actual fact? Crit. I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an aged man; for Critias, at the time of telling it, was as he said, nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten. Now the day was that day of the Apaturia which is called the Registration of Youth, at which, according to custom, our parents gave prizes for recitations, and the poems of several poets were recited by us boys, and many of us sang the poems of Solon, which at that time had not gone out of fashion. One of our tribe, either because he thought so or to please Critias, said that in his judgment Solon was not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of poets. The old man, as I very well remember, brightened up at hearing this and said, smiling: Yes, Amynander, if Solon had only, like other poets, made poetry the business of his life, and had completed the tale which he brought with him from Egypt, and had not been compelled, by reason of the factions and troubles which he found stirring in his own country when he came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he would have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet. And what was the tale about, Critias? said Amynander. About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which ought to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of time and the destruction of the actors, it has not come down to us. Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom Solon heard this veritable tradition. He replied:-In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is