224 The Atlantis Encyclopedia
peace that has been made between mankind and me after the Deluge. Humans
once disobeyed my sacred laws, so I punished them with water. So long as you
abide by my words, peace will prevail over the land. Another big trouble will come
if you stray from the law. On this understanding, smoke the pipe as a reminder to
live well and make peace among yourselves.”
Besides peace pipes, the images most commonly rendered in catlinite are fish
and turtles. The “great lodge” and its destruction by fire and flood after the
degeneracy of its inhabitants closely parallel Plato’s Atlantis account.Plato
Together with Socrates and Aristotle, he was the most important philosopher
in the Western World. Alexander Whitehead, a prominent 20th-century meta-
physician, declared, “the safest general characterization of the European philo-
sophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” It is impossible
to imagine a more credible source for Atlantis-as-fact.
Born in Athens around 428 B.C., he inherited the story from Solon, the
influential Greek legislator, who heard it narrated during a visit to the Nile Delta,
early in the fifth century B.C. However, many historians believe Plato traveled to
Sais himself, perhaps specifically to verify the Egyptian account. The existence of
this temple record was documented by two other highly influential thinkers. The
last major Greek philosopher, Proclus, wrote 800 years after Plato, but in his
Platonis theologiam (Platonic Theology), he cited the veracity of Atlantis by pointing
out that Egyptian columns inscribed with the story were visited and identically
translated more than half a century after Plato’s death. They were examined by
yet another influential thinker, Krantor of Soluntum, described by Proclus as
amicus Plato, sed magis amicus veritas: “Plato’s friend and a powerful friend of
truth.” He went to Sais as part of his research for Plato’s first biography, near the
end of the fourth century B.C., and reported that Krantor found the Atlantis story
preserved exactly as described in the Dialogues.
There may be no other account supported by men of such stellar credentials.
Yet, modern skeptics, particularly archaeologists, dismiss Atlantis as entirely
legendary. They fail to consider that beyond his position as the seminal philosopher
of Western Civilization, Plato based his whole body of thought on ruthless pursuit
of the truth. Timaeus and Kritias cannot comprise a fictional allegory for his
notion of the ideal state, as some critics insist, because the Atlantis he portrays is
far from his utopian conception, as developed in The Republic. It seems likely,
however, that Plato, had he completed the Dialogue, would have used the rise
and fall of Atlantis as an historical example illustrating the fatal consequences of
civil degeneracy. In the Kritias, he did not inexplicably change from philosopher
to historian, and his intended use of the lost civilization to provide factual basis
for his political ideas appears probable.
Some of Plato’s critics accuse him of inventing the Atlantis story out of whole
cloth. Yet Greeks knew about the lost civilization before he described it. At the