P: Pacata-Mu to Pur-Un-Runa 225
annual Panathenea Festival in Athens, women participants wore a peplum, a broad
skirt embroidered with scenes depicting Athena’s victory over the forces of
Atlantis—not a particularly remarkable fact in itself, except that the Panathenea
was celebrated 125 years before Plato was born. He was about 2 years old when “a
major earthquake caused widespread destruction and tsunami inundation around
the Gulf of Evvia” (Childress, 19). A nearby island partially submerged and
separated from the mainland by the same geologic upheavals was renamed Atalanti,
together with its equally devastated gulf, after Atlantis, whose fate it suggested.
Plato appears to have been supported in his account of Atlantis by most scholars
of the ancient world, if not all, including the noted histriographer, Theopompus,
and the more famous naturalist, Pliny the Elder. His Atlantis Dialogues were
seconded by the renowned Greek writers Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and
Poseidonus of Rhodes, of whom the Roman historian, Strabo, wrote, “he did well
in citing the opinion of Plato that the tradition concerning the island of Atlantis
was something more than fiction.” Only Aristotle, Plato’s adversary, was more
ambiguous: “He that created Atlantis also destroyed it.” Critics have interpreted
this statement to mean that Plato invented the tale. But the ambiguous “he”
mentioned by Aristotle might just as well have referred to Poseidon, the sea-god
attributed in Timaeus and Kritias with the creation and destruction of Atlantis.
In 1956, Albert Rivand, Professor of Classical History at the Sorbonne, declared
that both dialogues embodied ancient, historic traditions and contained results of
the latest contemporary research carried out in Plato’s day. As Ivan Lissner wrote,
“That a distinguished French scholar who had spent decades studying the Platonic
texts should reach this conclusion is most significant, because it invests the
geographical and ontological allusions in the two books with greater weight.”
R. Catesby Taliaferro writes in the foreword to the authoritative Thomas Taylor
translation of Timaeus and Kritias:
It appears to me to be at least as well attested as any other narra-
tion in any ancient historian. Indeed, he (Plato) who proclaims
that ‘truth is the source of every good both to gods and men’, and
the whole of whose works consists in detecting error and explor-
ing certainty, can never be supposed to have willfully deceived
mankind by publishing an extravagant romance as matter of fact,
with all the precision of historical narrative.
(See Dionysus of Miletus, Kritias, Timaeus)Pleiades
Atlantis means “Daughter of Atlas,” and the Atlantides, or Pleiades, were seven
daughters fathered by him. Like the kings listed by Plato, they correspond, through
their individual myths, to actual places within the Atlantean sphere of influence,
and thereby help to illustrate the story of that vanished empire. The souls of the
Pleiades were transformed into the constellation by which they are known because
of their great services to mankind in siring the culture-bearers of post-deluge