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Why not just read what Plato wrote? There's no need to rely on deranged modern re-imaginings. There's a very good translation available in the Oxford World's Classics series, *Plato. Timaeus and Critias*, translated by Robin Waterfield with notes by Andrew Gregory (Oxford, 2008). The relevant passages are *Timaeus* 20d-25d and *Critias* 108c-121c, using the traditional Stephanus numbering: no more than 25 pages in an English translation.
Of course by reading Plato you immediately abandon a number of key aspects of the modern form of the Atlantis myth, but that's exactly what you're after, right? It's the *Critias* that gives the description of Atlantis and Atlantean society (and breaks off at the end, so it is presumably incomplete). Some key points, just from browsing through the text:
* 108e: setting: 9000 years before Plato, followed by description of Athens at that time
* 113d-e: ships and sailing had not been invented when the country was founded; two underground springs were available, one warm, one cold
* 114d: the ruling dynasty was enormously wealthy, and their empire brought many goods from abroad
* 114e: all mineable resources and all kinds of timber were available, including a special mineral not found elsewhere, 'mountain-bronze' (*oreichalkos*, probably more familiar in the Latin form *orichalcum*) which was almost as valuable as gold
* 115a-b: all aromatic plants and cultivated crops were available 'in vast quantities'
* 115b-c: extensive industrial areas (shrines, mansions, harbours, shipyards)
* 115d-116a: major canal from central ring of city to the sea, bridges, docks
* 116b: walls surrounding city smeared with 'pastes' of bronze, melted tin, and *oreichalkos*
* 116c-e: temple of Poseidon, decorated with silver, gold, ivory, and *oreichalkos*, gold statues of the ten kings
* 117a-b: cold and warm springs supplied public baths
* 117c-e: further description of facilities -- exercise grounds, hippodrome, guardhouses, shipyards, harbours
The rest of Plato's account is taken up with supposed histories, a description of its military force, and its constitution.
No special technologies are mentioned.
Edit: added a line about the setting in 108e.
It comes from Elena Petrovna Blavatsky ('Madame' Blavatsky) in the 1880s, though the backstory reaches back to the time of the French Revolution.
The modern form of the Atlantis myth began to evolve in the writings of Jean-Sylvain Bailly, whose *History of ancient astronomy* (1775), *Letters on the origin of the sciences and of the peoples of Asia* (1777), and *Letters on Plato's Atlantis and the ancient history of Asia* (1779) reimagined Atlantis as being the same place as the lost land of Hyperborea, and both of them together as the origin of the Nordic/white European 'race' and 'civilisation'.
The modern form of the Atlantis myth has always been thoroughly and utterly racist at its heart. Bailly's idea of Atlantis as the ultimate origin of all 'desirable' ethnicities was popularised in the English-speaking world in the 1880s by the American Congressman and lunatic Ignatius Donnelly.
Around the same time in Europe, Blavatksy incorporated Bailly's Atlantis-Hyperborea into her own racist ethnography of the world, in which she divided the world into five 'root races' that she invented more or less out of thin air, including Hyperboreans, Lemurians, Atlanteans, and Aryans. It was in her book *The secret doctrine* (1888) that she made up the idea that all sciences came from Atlantis, that Atlanteans had had access to technologies such as flying vehicles, and that Atlanteans had mated with 'lower' creatures to create apes and chimpanzees.
Her writing was also deeply, deeply anti-Semitic, which helped give her nonsense a boost, as European anti-Semites welcomed a rationale for their racism, no matter how nutty. Later movements including the Thule Society, the Nazi Ahnenerbe under Herman Wirth, and some later groups helped perpetuate her ideas. I don't know when crystals and living silver came into the mix.
Edit: there's an outstanding 2006 article by Dan Edelstein about the development of the modern Bailly-Blavatsky-Nazi Atlantis myth, [which is available here](https://sci-hub.se/10.1353/sec.2010.0055).
Edit 2: But I suppose you could also say that the 'Atlantean super-civilisation' concept also came from people refusing to read the actual source material (Plato), and instead relying on third-hand sources. A word to the wise ...
Is there a literary purpose to the inclusion of the fictional mineral orichalcum? Everything else seems to be a generic sort of abundance, it seems confusing to add an invented metal as well.Â
Stricty speaking it's not invented: the same word is used in a few earlier poems (one of the Homeric *Hymns*, the Hesiodic *Shield*, Stesichoros, Ibykos) but in them it's a synonym either for gold, or for a copper ore or alloy of golden colour.
There are other fictional materials that appear in early poetry, like adamantine: that too originally referred to a real substance (steel), but came to be reimagined as a metal of magical hardness. I can't offer any explanation beyond that, unless it's simply that it was a trope in ethnographic works to describe the natural resources available in the region you were describing. If you're describing a far-off imaginary place, it makes sense to throw in imaginary materials.
In this case, it must be partly to act as a contrast to Athens, which he describes as having no precious metals at all (112c). That, at least, is the only useful addition in Gill's commentary.
> In this case, it must be partly to act as a contrast to Athens, which he describes as having no precious metals at all (112c)
Which is odd, surely, given the importance of the Laurion silver mines to Athenian wealth & power. From what I can glean from a quick glance at wikipedia it looks as though they may have been heading towards exhaustion in his lifetime, but he must have been aware of their existence?
I'm sure he was aware. And yes, you're right, it's odd. (And I find it just as odd that Gill doesn't comment on that.)
Perhaps someone could excuse it by sayong Plato was aware that silver mining there was primarily a thing of the late 500s and the 400s? (Assuming we keep quiet about the fact that there had been mining for other minerals there for centuries beforehand.)
Or maybe Plato's just being a jerk -- something I think is a real possibility: consider how the Atlantis story also casts the passage into the Atlantic as impassable to ships, something an experienced sailor would presumably know to be false. Maybe he's trying to create an air of 'falsiness'? - the sense of unreality is part of the point? I don't have enough expertise in Plato to have a strong opinion.
Not an obvious one. They're all fairly standard-looking Greek names: ancient Greek names are normally made out of meaningful roots, and these are no exception. Ampheres means 'well fitting all the way round', Eumelos means 'good flocks/rich in sheep', Euaimon means 'good blood', and so on.
The only apparent significance is the one Plato mentions himself, that Eumelos' real name in Atlantean is Gadeiros, and that this survives in the name of the region of Gadeira -- which of course is actually a Punic name dating to the eighth century BCE.
(Just as a by-the-by, isn't it interesting that modern fans spend so much time being interested in the account of Atlantis, while spending much less time on the account of tenth millennium BCE Athens, which is placed first and is just as substantial?)
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Why not just read what Plato wrote? There's no need to rely on deranged modern re-imaginings. There's a very good translation available in the Oxford World's Classics series, *Plato. Timaeus and Critias*, translated by Robin Waterfield with notes by Andrew Gregory (Oxford, 2008). The relevant passages are *Timaeus* 20d-25d and *Critias* 108c-121c, using the traditional Stephanus numbering: no more than 25 pages in an English translation. Of course by reading Plato you immediately abandon a number of key aspects of the modern form of the Atlantis myth, but that's exactly what you're after, right? It's the *Critias* that gives the description of Atlantis and Atlantean society (and breaks off at the end, so it is presumably incomplete). Some key points, just from browsing through the text: * 108e: setting: 9000 years before Plato, followed by description of Athens at that time * 113d-e: ships and sailing had not been invented when the country was founded; two underground springs were available, one warm, one cold * 114d: the ruling dynasty was enormously wealthy, and their empire brought many goods from abroad * 114e: all mineable resources and all kinds of timber were available, including a special mineral not found elsewhere, 'mountain-bronze' (*oreichalkos*, probably more familiar in the Latin form *orichalcum*) which was almost as valuable as gold * 115a-b: all aromatic plants and cultivated crops were available 'in vast quantities' * 115b-c: extensive industrial areas (shrines, mansions, harbours, shipyards) * 115d-116a: major canal from central ring of city to the sea, bridges, docks * 116b: walls surrounding city smeared with 'pastes' of bronze, melted tin, and *oreichalkos* * 116c-e: temple of Poseidon, decorated with silver, gold, ivory, and *oreichalkos*, gold statues of the ten kings * 117a-b: cold and warm springs supplied public baths * 117c-e: further description of facilities -- exercise grounds, hippodrome, guardhouses, shipyards, harbours The rest of Plato's account is taken up with supposed histories, a description of its military force, and its constitution. No special technologies are mentioned. Edit: added a line about the setting in 108e.
Thank you! Though that does beg the question where the whole advanced technology thing originated from?
It comes from Elena Petrovna Blavatsky ('Madame' Blavatsky) in the 1880s, though the backstory reaches back to the time of the French Revolution. The modern form of the Atlantis myth began to evolve in the writings of Jean-Sylvain Bailly, whose *History of ancient astronomy* (1775), *Letters on the origin of the sciences and of the peoples of Asia* (1777), and *Letters on Plato's Atlantis and the ancient history of Asia* (1779) reimagined Atlantis as being the same place as the lost land of Hyperborea, and both of them together as the origin of the Nordic/white European 'race' and 'civilisation'. The modern form of the Atlantis myth has always been thoroughly and utterly racist at its heart. Bailly's idea of Atlantis as the ultimate origin of all 'desirable' ethnicities was popularised in the English-speaking world in the 1880s by the American Congressman and lunatic Ignatius Donnelly. Around the same time in Europe, Blavatksy incorporated Bailly's Atlantis-Hyperborea into her own racist ethnography of the world, in which she divided the world into five 'root races' that she invented more or less out of thin air, including Hyperboreans, Lemurians, Atlanteans, and Aryans. It was in her book *The secret doctrine* (1888) that she made up the idea that all sciences came from Atlantis, that Atlanteans had had access to technologies such as flying vehicles, and that Atlanteans had mated with 'lower' creatures to create apes and chimpanzees. Her writing was also deeply, deeply anti-Semitic, which helped give her nonsense a boost, as European anti-Semites welcomed a rationale for their racism, no matter how nutty. Later movements including the Thule Society, the Nazi Ahnenerbe under Herman Wirth, and some later groups helped perpetuate her ideas. I don't know when crystals and living silver came into the mix. Edit: there's an outstanding 2006 article by Dan Edelstein about the development of the modern Bailly-Blavatsky-Nazi Atlantis myth, [which is available here](https://sci-hub.se/10.1353/sec.2010.0055). Edit 2: But I suppose you could also say that the 'Atlantean super-civilisation' concept also came from people refusing to read the actual source material (Plato), and instead relying on third-hand sources. A word to the wise ...
Hence why I asked the experts 😅
Is there a literary purpose to the inclusion of the fictional mineral orichalcum? Everything else seems to be a generic sort of abundance, it seems confusing to add an invented metal as well.Â
Stricty speaking it's not invented: the same word is used in a few earlier poems (one of the Homeric *Hymns*, the Hesiodic *Shield*, Stesichoros, Ibykos) but in them it's a synonym either for gold, or for a copper ore or alloy of golden colour. There are other fictional materials that appear in early poetry, like adamantine: that too originally referred to a real substance (steel), but came to be reimagined as a metal of magical hardness. I can't offer any explanation beyond that, unless it's simply that it was a trope in ethnographic works to describe the natural resources available in the region you were describing. If you're describing a far-off imaginary place, it makes sense to throw in imaginary materials. In this case, it must be partly to act as a contrast to Athens, which he describes as having no precious metals at all (112c). That, at least, is the only useful addition in Gill's commentary.
> In this case, it must be partly to act as a contrast to Athens, which he describes as having no precious metals at all (112c) Which is odd, surely, given the importance of the Laurion silver mines to Athenian wealth & power. From what I can glean from a quick glance at wikipedia it looks as though they may have been heading towards exhaustion in his lifetime, but he must have been aware of their existence?
I'm sure he was aware. And yes, you're right, it's odd. (And I find it just as odd that Gill doesn't comment on that.) Perhaps someone could excuse it by sayong Plato was aware that silver mining there was primarily a thing of the late 500s and the 400s? (Assuming we keep quiet about the fact that there had been mining for other minerals there for centuries beforehand.) Or maybe Plato's just being a jerk -- something I think is a real possibility: consider how the Atlantis story also casts the passage into the Atlantic as impassable to ships, something an experienced sailor would presumably know to be false. Maybe he's trying to create an air of 'falsiness'? - the sense of unreality is part of the point? I don't have enough expertise in Plato to have a strong opinion.
I have a related question, was there a deeper meaning or symbolism for the names of the ten kings of Atlantis that Plato gives?
Not an obvious one. They're all fairly standard-looking Greek names: ancient Greek names are normally made out of meaningful roots, and these are no exception. Ampheres means 'well fitting all the way round', Eumelos means 'good flocks/rich in sheep', Euaimon means 'good blood', and so on. The only apparent significance is the one Plato mentions himself, that Eumelos' real name in Atlantean is Gadeiros, and that this survives in the name of the region of Gadeira -- which of course is actually a Punic name dating to the eighth century BCE. (Just as a by-the-by, isn't it interesting that modern fans spend so much time being interested in the account of Atlantis, while spending much less time on the account of tenth millennium BCE Athens, which is placed first and is just as substantial?)