Table of Contents
Plato’s Atlantis story has two sides, and the side I tend to forget is ancient Athens. In my sources the early Athenians are the ones who stood against Atlantis and won, before both were lost in the same catastrophe. These are the pages where I wrote about them.
Plato’s account
The Egyptian priest tells Solon in the Timaeus, as I give it on Timaeus & Critias – Plato’s Island of Atlantis in Bury’s translation:
This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind.
Plato, Timaeus, translated by Bury
On the same page the priest goes on to say that Athens, left to stand alone, defeated the invaders, and that afterwards, in a single day and night of earthquakes and floods, the Athenian warriors sank into the earth and Atlantis disappeared into the sea. Critias, the story of Atlantis shows Critias telling the story he had from his grandfather, who heard it from Solon. Atlantean Wars follows the same war and its end.
A memory kept in festivals
Ignatius Donnelly takes the war as history. In The Deluge Legends of Other Nations he writes:
More than this, we know from Plato's history that the Athenians long preserved in their books the memory of a victory won over the Atlanteans in the early ages, and celebrated it by national festivals, with processions and religious ceremonies.
Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
Lewis Spence, on The History of Atlantis (1926), cites a scholiast who says the Athenian victory over the Atlanteans was shown on the robe dedicated at the Lesser Panathenaea, which he dates to at least 125 years before Plato. Michael LaFlem makes the same point on Channeled Atlantis: Steiner, Tesla & Cayce: the Athenians commemorated Athena’s victory over the Atlantides at the Lesser Panathenaia, so the story is older than Plato.
Dating the war
Randall Carlson, on Solon 11,600 Catastrophe | Egyptian Priests knew America, reads the priest’s pre-flood Athens, 9,000 years before Solon, as about 11,600 years ago, which he aligns with the Pleistocene-to-Holocene transition and the Younger Dryas. Robert Sepehr, on Atlantis, Fallen Angels, and Archaic DNA, recounts Plato’s story: about 8,000 years before the Trojan War the Atlanteans tried to conquer the Mediterranean world and were defeated by the Athenians and their allies. Jürgen Spanuth, in my summary on Jürgen Spanuth’s Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled (1956), Chapter by Chapter, ties the story to the Egyptian records of the northern invaders around 1200 BC. He says the North peoples came south through Greece and destroyed the Mycenaean palaces, while the Athenians held out on the Acropolis.
The goddess of the city has her own page, Pallas Athena: High Priestess in the Temple of Truth.
Related pages
- Timaeus & Critias – Plato’s Island of Atlantis
- Critias, the story of Atlantis
- Atlantean Wars
- The Deluge Legends of Other Nations
- The History of Atlantis (1926)
- Channeled Atlantis: Steiner, Tesla & Cayce
- Solon 11,600 Catastrophe | Egyptian Priests knew America
- Atlantis, Fallen Angels, and Archaic DNA
- Jürgen Spanuth’s Atlantis: The Mystery Unravelled (1956), Chapter by Chapter
For every page I tagged with Athenians, see the Athenians tag archive.
