E: Ea to Exiles of Time 111
In Plato’s Kritias, we read that Atlantean expansion extended to Italy, and
specifically, that Etruria came under the influence of Atlantis. Some significant
Atlantean themes survive in Etruscan art, such as the large terra-cotta winged horses
of Poseidon at Tarquinia. Some scholars suspect that the name “Italy” is Etruscan.
If so, it is another link to Atlantis, because Italy is a derivation of Italus, or “Atlas.”Euaemon
A king of Atlantis mentioned in Plato’s account, Kritias. In non-Platonic Greek
myth, Euaemon married Rhea—after her husband, Kronos, was banished by the
victorious Olympians—and fathered Eurylyptus, the king of Thessaly. Several
elements of the Atlantis story appear even in this brief legend. Kronos was syn-
onymous for the Atlantic Ocean, “Chronos maris” to the Romans. Rhea was
the Earth Mother goddess, referred to as Basilea by the 1st-century B.C. Greek
historian Diodorus Siculus, who reported that she had been venerated by the
Atlanteans. They probably knew her by names mentioned in Kritias: either
Leukippe, Poseidon’s mother-in-law, or Kleito, the mother of Atlantean kings.
Euaemon’s role as a progenitor of Thessaly’s royal lineage is likewise in keep-
ing with the tradition of Atlantean monarchs as far-flung founding fathers.
Euaemon has an intriguing connection with the Canary Islands, where the
Guanche word for “water” was aemon. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,
the Arawak Indians of coastal Venezuela and Colombia believed a god called
Aimon Kondi drowned the world to punish the wickedness of men.
But Euaemon appears to be most closely identified with Eremon, the founder
of a united, pre-Celtic Ireland. His similarity with the fourth monarch of Atlantis
is more than philological. Long lists of regents’ names were kept in ancient
Ireland by successive generations of files, or poet-historians. They traced each
ruler’s line of descent from Eremon as a means of establishing royal legitimacy.
In the Book of Invasions, a medieval compilation of oral traditions rooted in
early Celtic and pre-Celtic times, Eremon is described as the leader of a “Sea
People” who landed on Irish shores in 1002 B.C. The date is interesting, because
it is precisely 200 years after the final destruction of Atlantis in the Bronze Age.
These relatively close time parameters and Eremon’s appearance in two unrelated
ancient sources on either side of Western Europe, together with his Irish character-
ization as the king of a “Sea People” arriving as refugees in a pre-Celtic epoch,
clearly define him as an Atlantean monarch.
Eremon was said to have sailed to Ireland with fellow storm-tossed survi-
vors after an oceanic catastrophe that drowned most of his people, known as
the Milesians. Though originally founded by an earlier race, the seat of Irish
kings, Tara, was named after Eremon’s wife. She herself was a daughter from the
royal house of the Blessed Isles lost beneath the sea. All these native elements
remarkably combine to identify themselves with Plato’s account. His Euaemon
was doubtless the Eremon of Irish tradition.
(See Basilea, Kleito, Kronos, Leukippe)