cormac mac airt, on 30 September 2010 - 10:27 AM, said:
As the only reason you, I or anyone else even talks about Atlantis is because Plato mentions it in his dialogues, we don't get to pick and choose what we WANT to be relevant, nor do we get to reinterpret what he said to suit our fancy. What he wrote is all there is and it's descriptive of a Bronze Age culture. Anything else is someone else's story.
cormac
I think it's possible for the story to be "true according to tradition" and that Solon may have embellished it in his notes that became the fanciful story told at Apaturia, which is after all, where Critias said he really remembered it from.
I doubt the 'poem' sung at this festival was the same as the Egyptians told Solon word for word.
I do however think the bones and most of it are truth according to how the Egyptians knew it.
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.
Critias, the young has heard him own grandfather tell the story when he was 10 at Apaturia, so since this was a poem of Solon's, which had not gone out of fashion at that time, you could expect at that telling it was quite far from what the words were that actually came out of the priests mouth when he told Solon in Egypt.
Plato is not in the story, so he is really telling us in a 3rd person style his own ideas or is he telling us of a story his friend Critias had told him and he used it when he wrote these narratives...
My own opinion is that he got it from numerous sources. Plato himself had been taught in Egypt, he would have been aware of Solon and any of his works and his laws, he may have known young Critias who also bought up this story at some time or another and that is how he had heard it but maybe not the only time he heard about it. Plato is apparently quite old when he writes this but he has Socrates in it, so we shouldn't take at face value how Plato heard the story as said in the narratives, it's the ideals Socrates wanted to present imo. Diogenes of Sinope may have even had a hand in it's conception for Plato.
What is it? A lesson, an allegory lesson, for who? For what, his students? Yes?
It's unfinished, so they say, or is it?
I say it's finished.
What else is it's purpose but to get us to ask ourselves the answer...?
What Zeus spake...
What did Zeus speak? That is your topic for today kids.
Plato isn't going to tell us the answer, that would be cheating.
People say, if it was there they would have written about it, not necessarily.
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.
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