The Secret of Plato’s Atlantis (1885)

I read Lord Arundell of Wardour’s The Secret of Plato’s Atlantis for the place he gives Atlantis, the dates he will keep, and the secret he thinks Plato was using. The copy is the Cornell University Library scan, bought with the income of the Sage endowment. The title page prints the author as Lord Arundell of Wardour, London, Burns and Oates, 1885, and under the year a small library mark. The next leaf prints Robson and Sons, printers, Pancras Road, N.W. The title page also names three earlier books of his: Tradition, Principally with Reference to Mythology and the Law of Nations; The Scientific Value of Tradition; and The Nature Myth Untenable from the Scriptural Point of View. The year on the title page is 1885, the same year as the filename, and it is before 1929, so I treat the book as public domain and quote his sentences. I am not comparing him with later Atlantic maps, and the book never mentions Mu or Lemuria. I set him beside the book he is answering, Donnelly’s Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, and beside Plato’s own Timaeus and Critias.

The title page, the printer’s leaf, the preface, and the contents have no printed numbers. I cite those as file pages. Printed arabic numbers begin at 1 on the first page of Chapter I, which is file page 11, and they run to 108, which is file page 118. Printed page N is file page N plus 10. The scan has 124 file pages. The last six are blank.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Secret of Plato’s Atlantis.
• Author: Lord Arundell of Wardour. The title page does not print a personal name beyond that.
• Edition I read: London: Burns and Oates, 1885. Printers: Robson and Sons, Pancras Road, N.W. The Cornell scan is the copy.
• Length: Preface, five chapters, and three appendices. Printed text from p. 1 to p. 108.
• What he claims: Plato’s Atlantis is not a lost continent in the Atlantic, and its sinking is not the universal deluge. The backbone is the Periplus of Hanno, a Carthaginian voyage he dates circa B.C. 500 in the chapter and B.C. 515 in the appendix. Idealised from that voyage, Atlantis would be coextensive with the Carthaginian empire, including the Canary and Fortunate Islands, and the colonising of the islands and of the mainland beyond the Atlas mountains. What is not in Hanno he takes from general or family tradition, above all the deluge, which he keeps as the deluge of Moses and of widespread custom, not as Plato’s subsidence. He thinks the nine thousand years, about 9600 before the Christian era in the figure he quotes from Donnelly, will not stand as history.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The secret, in his own word. At the end of Chapter I he says he has one statement left, and that he hopes in a later chapter to disclose the secret of Atlantis (p. 21). In Chapter II the secret is the Periplus of Hanno. He calls that document the backbone of the Atlantis (p. 24). Plato, he thinks, states no fact about Atlantis that is not taken from it, except what Plato drew from general or family tradition.
• The place. If Atlantis was idealised from Hanno, it would be coextensive with the Carthaginian empire, including the Canary and Fortunate Islands (p. 25). Poseidon’s settling of children by a mortal woman he reads as the Carthaginian colonising of the islands in Hanno’s narrative and of the mainland beyond the mountains of Atlas. Thymiaterium, the first city, two days beyond the Pillars, with an extensive plain, he takes as the modern Mamoura, or Mamora, on a hill near the mouth of the river Suboe. The palace island, five stadia across, he matches to Hanno’s Cerne, a small island with a circle of five stadia, the headquarters of the voyage (p. 28). On that measure the island, or continent, shrinks.
• The date he will not take. He prints Donnelly’s sentence that the Egyptians told Solon the destruction occurred nine thousand years before that date, about nine thousand six hundred years before the Christian era (p. 14). He then sets his own scale on the next page. Chronologies and histories, on analysis, seem to him to terminate about 3000 B.C., or about 6000 B.C. if they include the antediluvian world. Retraced migrations converge on the district between Persia and the Mediterranean, from Armenia to Ethiopia. Mr. Proctor, he says, puts the naming of the shared constellations within those latitudes about the year 2200 B.C. (p. 15). A footnote there, from Colonel Rawlinson, still fixes the plains of Shinar as the focus even apart from the scriptural record. Against a nine-thousand-year memory of slight Atlantis details, he keeps a three-thousand-year memory of paradise, the universal deluge, and the dispersion.
• His own early date. Mr. W. Palmer’s synchronism of the Hebrew and the Septuagint, with Josephus and the Egyptian Chronicle, “within five years four months and seven days,” makes the commencement of the world circa B.C. 5360 (p. 19). He says that so long as Palmer’s system is unrefuted, he may prefer it to the assertions of the Egyptian priests. Strabo’s Turdetani, claiming writings six thousand years old, do not help a subsidence in 9000 B.C.
• Hanno and Plato. The voyage of Hanno took place circa B.C. 500, and Plato was born circa B.C. 430 (p. 23). The appendix heads the same voyage B.C. 515 (Lenormant). I keep both. Hanno sailed with sixty vessels, or sixty ships of fifty oars, and thirty thousand colonists, men and women, to found Liby-Phoenician cities (pp. 24, 85). Phoenician enterprise he dates B.C. 1200, from Lenormant (p. 22).
• Where the Phoenicians started. Not from Erythia on the Atlantic coast of Spain. From the Erythraean Sea, between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Strabo, as he quotes Lenormant, puts the two most ancient sanctuaries of the race on Tylos and Aradus, two of the existing Bahrien islands, later repeated as Tyre and Aradus (p. 23).
• Poseidon and Atlas. He sends Donnelly to R. Brown, Poseidon: a Link between Semite, Hamite, and Aryan (Longmans, 1872), who traces the worship from Chaldaea through Phoenicia, Philistia, Libya, and Greece, and identifies Poseidon with Noah in Libyan mythology. In the Carthaginian reading, Poseidon son of Kronos is the tutelary god of Carthage, Lenormant’s “Libyan Poseidon” (p. 25). Atlas he sets beside Nimrod, or Nimrod beside Atlas, and he will not give up the biblical and cuneiform Nimrod. One form of the Atlas legend makes him king of Mauritania, where the Atlas mountains are.
• The horse, as a direction of travel. If mankind spread from the plains of Mesopotamia, the horse should be traceable from the Tigris toward the Atlantic, east to west. If Atlantis were the first seat, the trace should run west to east. Lenormant, in Premieres Civilisations, finds the horse absent from the monuments of the old empire and of the middle empire, and present as an animal in habitual use when the monuments recommence under the eighteenth dynasty. The philological argument, as he gives it, is that the Aryans already had the horse before they dispersed, some into Europe, others into Persia and India (pp. 20, 21).
• The deluge he keeps. Either the story told at the Apaturia was the deluge of Moses, the Hebrews, the Chaldaeans, and general tradition, or it was the subsidence which Donnelly makes the root of all those traditions (p. 34). He takes the first. He reads the Athenian Apaturia, when he says Plato was ten, as the same kind of custom as Catlin’s Mandan O-kee-pa, witnessed in 1832 (pp. 35, 36).
• What he does with the nine thousand years in Chapter V. Jowett’s view, which he prints, is that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato, and that “nine thousand years ago” for the war is slightly inconsistent with the same date for the foundation of the city (p. 76). His own further guesses are a distorted Egyptian memory of the Persian war, the Amphictyonic council and the Areopagus read into the Atlantean laws, and, more loosely, Solon and Salamis, or the circumnavigation under Necho or Nako in B.C. 611, of which he says no record has survived (p. 80). He thinks the Hanno theory stands on firmer ground than those.
• Egypt dates he uses for the Persian-war guess. Persian rule in Egypt, broadly, from B.C. 527, when Cambyses overthrew the dynasty of Sais, till B.C. 332, the dates from Brugsch (p. 76, footnote). A Greek colony at Sais from about 660 B.C. (p. 77). Solon, circa B.C. 638 to 520. Aahmes or Amasis, 572 B.C. in Brugsch, and 569 to 525 B.C. in Lenormant (p. 83).

For Plato’s dialogue, see Timaeus and Critias. For the book this one answers, see Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

Preface

The papers were written for the Month. They outgrew a magazine article, the third chapter in particular, so he published them separately and left them in the form addressed to the readers of that magazine. The preface has no printed number. It is file page 9.

The following pages were written for the Month, but in the course of writing extended themselves beyond the limits of a magazine article; the third chapter more particularly becoming too elaborate in form for suitable publication in a periodical.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), file p. 9

Donnelly’s work was the occasion. He says it has had a wide circulation, and that he cannot expect the same for this little volume, because the theory it offers is not of the same romantic and popular character. He hopes it may contribute something toward the solution of an interesting and difficult question.

Chapter I. Plato’s Atlantis: Mr. Donnelly’s Theory

The chapter opens on printed p. 1. A book now, in 1883, in its seventh edition seems to him to claim a reply from the point of view of tradition. The footnote names it: Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, by Ignatius Donnelly, seventh edition, Sampson Low, London, 1883. The same footnote says this chapter was written before the controversy on the deluge in the Tablet in 1884, and that he does not know of anything in that controversy which would make him retract a statement in the paper.

A book which is now (1883) in its seventh edition seems to claim some reply from the point of view of Tradition.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 1

What he thinks Donnelly announces is that the deluge, believed universal at least to the extent of the destruction of all mankind, did not occur. The subsidence of the island or continent of Atlantis, at some indefinite period, was attended by similar circumstances, and the tradition of that catastrophe spread and created the impression of a universal deluge. In his words, there was a deluge, but a deluge as revealed according to Plato, and not according to Moses.

He separates two propositions. First, that an island or continent of Atlantis existed and sank. Second, that this submersion is the origin of the diluvian legends of the world. He would have been willing to accept the first for the sake of argument, if historical investigation had not, as he thinks, destroyed the prima facie evidence. He also says the theory is opposed, from their several points of view, by Mr. Wallace, Mr. Darwin, and Professor Geikie, and he points to Wallace’s Island Life. He leaves Wallace’s chapters on the sea and on flora and fauna for Donnelly to settle. The date of Donnelly’s first edition, he says, is not stated.

He quotes Donnelly’s own heads, from the existence of a large island opposite the mouth of the Mediterranean, a remnant of an Atlantic continent, through Plato’s description as history, Atlantis as the place where man first rose from barbarism, the overflow to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian, and Atlantis as the true antediluvian world: Eden, the Hesperides, the Elysian Fields, the garden of Alcinous, the Mesomphalos, Olympos, and Asgard. The heads he prints then jump to 12 and 13: the island sank in a convulsion, with nearly all its inhabitants, and a few escaped in ships and on rafts and carried the tidings, which survived as the flood legends of the old and new worlds. He calls the Atlantis story, in Donnelly’s own term, “a novel proposition,” not the tradition of the human race.

On the site of the descent from the ark, he prefers the mountains of Armenia, from Genesis 11:2, the removal from the East to the plain of Sennaar, and from Berosus, Josephus on Ararat, Nicolas of Damascus, and Epiphanius on the wood of the ark shown in the Koord country. Cosmas, the monk who placed the deluge in the west and paradise in the east, he treats as one flat-earth map, not the prevailing Christian opinion. Cosmas, before he was a monk, had navigated the Indian Ocean, not the Atlantic.

Poseidon he will not leave as a god of an Atlantic island. Brown’s line, from Chaldaea to Greece, ends in Noah. Atlas, son of Japetus, brother of Menoetius (he notes “Mnesius” in Plato and “Menu” in Lenormant), and, in Apollodorus, son of a mother named Asia, he sets beside Nimrod and the tower that was to prop the heaven so it would not fall and inundate them again. He asks which is the tradition of the other, and he thinks the biblical and cuneiform Nimrod is the one with historical evidence. The long footnote on that page collects Josephus on Chus, still the name behind the Ethiopians, Brugsch’s Kush and Ethiopia, and the reappearance of the name Nemaroth in Egyptian writing for Nimrod at the time of the Assyrian conquest. He also notes Orion, Otus, and Ephialtes, and Gladstone’s remark that the two youths recall the tower of Babel.

Donnelly’s best point, as he grants it, is the string of names: the Atlas mountains on the African shore nearest the supposed site, an Atlan town on the American shore, Atlantis along the north-west coast of Africa, an Aztec people from Aztlan, the Atlantic, the deity Atlas, and an immemorial tradition of an island. He answers that one form of the legend already makes Atlas king of Mauritania, where the mountains and the Atlantis are, and that Atlas turned into a mountain by Perseus may be enough to explain a story of a power out of the Atlantic checked by Athens, the city of Athene. He says he will give an alternative later.

He warns that each of Donnelly’s chapters assumes the last. The Irish colonies chapter opens as if Spain and France had already been shown to owe a great part of their population to Atlantis. The Iberian chapter, he says, has nothing to that effect except Strabo on the Turdetani and a claim of writings six thousand years old, plus Basque analogies with Algonquin and a learned chapter on Maya and Phoenician. Language of that kind, he says, proves a common origin and a migration from Mesopotamia as readily as an emigration from Atlantis, unless one is prepared to derive the Mayas from Maia, daughter of Atlas. He quotes Donnelly calling the Iberians, the Basques, Atlanteans, and then deriving Ireland from Iberia.

A passage Donnelly gives as the barbarians’ awe of the civilised people of Atlantis, their tread shaking the earth, their speed, their wisdom, is, he says, Murray on the Olympians. Donnelly has decided that Olympos and Atlantis are the same name, so everything said of one is said of the other. He allows that Atlantis, Olympos, and Asgard can be parts of one common tradition. He does not allow the resemblance to prove that Olympos is a memory of a sunken Atlantic island.

The garden of the Hesperides in the west is the point that looks like confirmation, and then, he says, it fails, because that garden is only one reminiscence of Eden, and Eden in the east is the prominent belief. The onus is on Donnelly to show that Meru, Olympos, Elysium, Asgard, and Midgard centred on Atlantis. Plato, he notes, has a fertile plain, not a garden. The Bible and the Babylonian tradition, as he cites Lenormant, Oppert, and Vigoaroux, place paradise and the “father of countries” in the east.

The shared picture, as he draws it, is a garden or a plain, a palace on or by a mountain, and water all round. The water, he says, is not the proof of an island. Homer and Cosmas both set the world in water. Midgard, the mesomphalos, was equally distant on all sides from the sea. Exploration west, and round Africa to the Chinese seas, found water, and the north was closed. Donnelly’s line, that nations west of the Atlantic look east and nations east of it look west, so that tradition converges on Atlantis, is, he says, equally true if mankind started from the plain of Sennaar.

He then stacks the eastern pictures he wants the reader to set beside Plato. Lenormant on Mount Meru as the original seat, a column uniting heaven and earth. Faber on the Scandinavian fortress built from Ymen’s eyebrows, the residence of the hero-god after the deluge, at once a paradise and a defence against the giants. Dasent on Asgard in the midst of Midgard, the sea in a ring, and Utgard beyond, the old powers dispossessed by Odin. Iranian tradition to match. Hierapolis, Delos, and Ecbatana built with the tradition in view. His own earlier argument, in The Scientific Value of Tradition, pp. 161 to 179, that the ancient state of Meroe, in the island of Meroe, near Mount Gibbainy, in the Soudan, was organised on the same plan. Hanging gardens, staged pyramids, and the tower of Borsippa near Babylon. A bas-relief from the palace of Assur-bani-pal, in Rawlinson’s Five Great Monarchies, a royal paradise on an eminence watered by one stream that divides, like the stream of paradise, the Iranian spring, and the Ganga of Meru.

Against that he sets Plato, as Donnelly prints him. A fair plain toward the sea, in the centre of the island. A mountain not very high, about fifty stadia off. Evenor, and in this printing Lucippe, and an only daughter named Chito. Poseidon encloses the hill with alternate zones, two of land and three of water, turned as with a lathe. Two springs, warm and cold. Five pairs of male children, and the island divided into ten portions. He asks the reader to decide whether Atlantis belongs with the one historic narrative, or whether all the others grew out of the slender reminiscences in Plato.

The date he thinks Donnelly must then occupy is the one I quoted above, nine thousand years before Solon, about 9600 before the Christian era, with the geological claim of five hundred thousand years for cave remains set beside it. He says he has no artillery that will discharge 500,000 years. His own reply is the short scale.

Given the amount of scepticism which will attach to the transmission of traditions of such calibre as the garden of paradise, the universal Deluge, the dispersion during 3000 years, how much will exist as to the preservation of the slight reminiscences of Atlantis, as above, during 9000 years?

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 15

He adds a dilemma. If the tradition of the palace, the mountain, and the canals was preserved before the subsidence, why does it run on the lines of the diluvian tradition, which on Donnelly’s view would be later? If after, why is the direct memory of a subsidence transmitted only in indirect legend, while Genesis, which looks direct, would be a second-hand memory of that legend? Genesis, the cuneiform narrative, and the Indian legend profess a direct tradition: one family, sometimes one man, saved from a universal deluge, and the prominent cause unintermittent and protracted rain. Atlantis, if the geological argument is kept, sank. The news, spread over 9000 years, would have come by many people, not by one family, and none of the records tell the event in the way the geology, or Plato, would require.

He has collated Noah, in Tradition and elsewhere, with Chronos, Poseidon, Saturn, and Hoa. They accrete Shem, Cham, and Japhet, but they describe a primeval legislator at a new order of things, in some relation to the ocean without being the ocean, a lost golden age, and a catastrophe. They plant the vine or the olive. Donnelly, he says, uses that tradition to send the legendary heroes out as survivors of Atlantis and civilisers of the countries they reach, rather than as memories of Noah. Hoa or Hea goes to Assyria. Saturn goes to Latium. Kronos and Poseidon are not sent in the same way, because Donnelly needs them at the start of Atlantis. If Chronos and Saturn are the same, Chronos cannot both be the father of Poseidon, founder of the dynasty, and the survivor who brings civilisation to Latium after many generations. He also asks where Donnelly found a “great Saturnian continent” in the Atlantic, and he suspects a free translation of Virgil’s “Saturnia regna.”

Sanchoniathon, in Eusebius, says Chronos and Il are the same, and Lenormant says the same of Chronos and the Chaldaean Ilu. Lenormant’s Ilu is the god the Greeks likened to Kronos, and one ideographic name is a land cut by canals, explained as cleansing or inundating, “the god of inundation, the god of the deluge.” Poseidon in Atlantis encircles a hill with zones of sea and land and cuts canals. If those are the same diluvian traditions, Plato’s Atlantis would contain diluvian traditions from before the alleged subsidence, which he calls impossible. His inference is the one he will reach again by another route.

Ergo, I should infer, a conclusion at which I shall arrive more definitely by another route, that Atlantis was, in the main, only general tradition taking form and embodiment in the mind of Plato.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 19

The Turdetani writings of six thousand years, the single fact under Donnelly’s chapters on Iberians, Gauls, and Celtic Irish as Atlantes, do not reach a subsidence in 9000 B.C. He thinks the figure 6000 is singular as a date anno mundi, nearly right in Strabo’s time if Palmer’s commencement, circa B.C. 5360, is kept.

Unfortunately, if we are to argue on Mr. Donnelly's lines, and if the submersion of Atlantis took place 9000 B.C., writings extending back only six thousand years do not help us at all.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 19

The last argument of the chapter is the horse. Poseidon and the horse belong together in any legend that starts from Poseidon, and he leaves Brown and Gladstone to worry at that connection. Donnelly’s use of it is that the horse, first domesticated in America on an evolutionist view, could not have passed to Europe without continuous land. Arundell reverses the direction, Mesopotamia to the Atlantic, and he thinks Lenormant’s Egyptian and Aryan evidence is decisive. One statement that still looks like corroboration of Donnelly he holds back. The chapter has already run too long.

This chapter, however, has already run to too great length, and the statement will perhaps be more appropriately reserved for consideration in a subsequent chapter, in which I think I shall be able to disclose the secret of Atlantis.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 21

Chapter II. Conjecture as to the Probable Basis of Plato’s Atlantis

The held-back statement is Donnelly on the Phoenicians. An ancient Persian tradition said they migrated from the shores of the Erythraean Sea, usually taken as the Persian Gulf. Donnelly points to a ruined city of Erythia, near Gades, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, older than Gades, and asks whether that town named the adjacent sea, and whether an island of Erythia was the start of the Phoenician migration into Europe. Arundell says the conjecture rests entirely on Strabo. Between Strabo and the commencement of Phoenician enterprise, which he dates B.C. 1200 from Lenormant, a city could be founded, pass through monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, despotism, revolution, and decay, and still be called ancient.

Strabo himself, as Lenormant gives him (xvi. 766), and Herodotus from the Phoenicians, put the oldest sanctuaries on Tylos and Aradus in the Persian Gulf, the Bahrien islands, later copied as Tyre and Aradus. A footnote adds that the Phoenician tradition gathered at Tyre, Trogus Pompeius, the South Arabian tradition in Strabo, and the tradition current when the Syro-Chaldaic original of the Nabataean Agriculture was written, all agree that the Canaanites first dwelt near the Cushites on the Erythraean Sea or Persian Gulf. Even without Strabo, he says, another line of tradition puts the Phoenician start on the Erythraean Sea between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. He reserves that line. The evidence so far is enough, he thinks, to go back to Plato and ask what the fragment really imports.

The document he sets beside Plato is the voyage of Hanno, posted up in the temple of Kronos. Heeren and Lenormant accept it. He gives Lenormant, Memoires d’histoire ancienne, ii. 414, and Heeren, Historical Researches, African Nations, p. 478. He prints both texts in full in the appendices, Hanno from Heeren and the Atlantis description from Jowett’s Critias.

The voyage of Hanno took place circa B.C. 500, and Plato was born circa B.C. 430.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 23

The Greek translation, he says, may reasonably be presumed to have been accessible to Plato in Sicily or in Cyrene.

It is my contention (1) that this document forms, so to speak, the backbone of the Atlantis.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 24

The second contention is the exception: what Plato drew from general or family tradition. Over the whole is the glamour of Plato’s style.

He then matches the two narratives in order. The allotment of the earth to the gods he sets beside Pheroneus, “the father of mankind” in Clement of Alexandria, who distributed the nations, “idem nationes distribuit” in Hyginus, and whom Plato calls “the first.” Hanno sailed with sixty vessels and thirty thousand colonists.

Assuming that Atlantis was idealised from the narrative of Hanno, Atlantis would be coextensive with the Carthaginian empire, including the Canary and Fortunate Islands.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 25

Poseidon, son of Kronos, is the tutelary god of the Carthaginians. He cites Hamilcar’s sacrifice in the war with Gelon, from Gladstone’s Juventus Mundi, p. 249, and Lenormant’s “Libyan Poseidon.” Poseidon begetting children by a mortal woman and settling them he reads as the Carthaginian colonising of those islands and of the mainland beyond Atlas. Heeren, p. 40, says Hanno’s colonists were Liby-Phoenicians, taken from the country inhabitants, not from the citizens of Carthage.

Hanno, two days past the Pillars, founds Thymiaterium, and below it lies an extensive plain. Plato’s plain, the fairest of all and very fertile, is the plain in which Poseidon settled his children. Bochart’s guess at the Greek name Thymiaterium, a censer, he thinks fanciful. Lenormant identifies the place with modern Mamoura, Mamora, on a hill near the mouth of the Suboe, the waters widening into a harbour for small vessels. He quotes a tour, Lempriere in Pinkerton, on the fertile pastures, trees like a park, plains rich with verdure, and lakes many miles long. McCulloch’s geographical dictionary, as he cites it, says Morocco, the ancient Mauritania, has plains and valleys of great extent and extraordinary fertility, grass as high as on the American prairies, and a healthy climate on the north-western side of the Atlas. Bochart’s other conjecture, from a Hebrew equivalent, is that the town was so called because it stood in a plain. He allows the Hebrew guess because he takes Phoenician for a Shemitic tongue, and he points to J. Pym Yeatman on the Shemitic race in western Europe.

The warm and cold springs under the central island, and the food springing abundantly, he says Plato has moved a little earlier than Hanno’s order, so as to give Poseidon at Atlantis the same feat as at Athens, where in the reign of Cecrops he called forth a well on the Acropolis with his trident. Hanno then goes west, to a place thick with trees, and erects a temple to Neptune, then east to a lake not far from the sea. Alternating sea, land, and lakes, he suggests, became Plato’s zones, two of land and three of water.

Poseidon begets five pairs of sons and divides the island into ten portions. The eldest, the king, is Atlas, and the island and the ocean take the name Atlantic. The name Atlas, he says, is imported from the mainland traditions. Hanno, in the matching place, founds cities after a day’s sail past the lake. Five cities are named, the number of the five pairs.

Plato’s wealth of Atlas breaks off, abruptly, into elephants and animals of lake, marsh, river, mountain, and plain. Hanno, just before the five cities, reaches a lake not far from the sea, full of large reeds, where elephants and a great number of other wild animals were feeding. He thinks the shared abruptness matters.

Plato’s palace island has a diameter of five stadia. The continent shrinks to that.

The Atlantis island, or continent, thus shrinks to these dimensions.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 28

Hanno, a day’s course toward the east, finds in a bay a small island containing a circle of five stadia, settles a colony, and calls it Cerne. He judges Cerne to lie in a direct line with Carthage, the run from Carthage to the Pillars equalling the run from the Pillars to Cerne. A lake reached by a large river has three islands larger than Cerne, and they return to Cerne. What is central in Hanno, the headquarters, becomes the palace of Poseidon. Plato’s three harbours he sets beside the lake with three islands. The long description of the city, the country, and the governments has nothing to match in Hanno’s short narrative. He defers that to Chapter V, p. 77.

At the end of both, he finds the same night scene. Hanno’s sweet-scented mountains, an immense opening of the sea, a plain, fires by night, and then pipes, cymbals, drums, and confused shouts, so that the diviners order them to abandon the island. Plato’s lofty coast, the level plain, the mountains and fragrant woods, and then the bull sacrificed to Poseidon, the fire, the azure robes, and the judgment by night near the embers. One, he thinks, suggested the other.

Hanno’s Greek text, omitting some final words about a savage hairy people, ends in a burning country, streams of fire into the sea, and a lofty fire that seemed to touch the stars, by day a large hill called the Chariot of the Gods. Plato’s fragment ends with the fading of the divine nature, Zeus gathering the gods into his most holy habitation in the centre of the world, and the words “he spake as follows,” with nothing after. Both are fragments. One ends on a volcano. The other leaves a volcanic subsidence impending, to be read with the earlier statement that Atlantis was sunk by an earthquake. He even pairs “the chariot of the gods” with Plato’s gathering of the gods, and with the Chaldaean deluge tablet George Smith published, the gods ascending to the heaven of Anu.

The unfinished Critias had remained a difficulty even for Jowett, who could not say whether accident, age, or the artistic difficulty stopped it. Arundell thinks the Periplus supplies the reason. Hanno’s narrative, or the Greek translation, extends no farther.

He does not mean a fraud on Plato’s contemporaries. He reads the opening talk with Socrates, in Jowett’s Timaeus, 27, as almost an acknowledgment: the narrative is suited to the festival of the goddess, and has the advantage of being a fact and not a fiction, true in so far as it was founded on Hanno. His gloss is that Plato has brought an interesting document from foreign parts and will interweave it with their traditions if they approve.

In speaking of the Atlantis as a fiction I by no means intend that it was a fabrication intended to deceive his contemporaries.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 32

Chapter III. Further Conjectures, Diluvian Traditions

The printed chapter title uses a long dash before “Diluvian Traditions.” I use a comma so the heading stays plain. The chapter runs from p. 33 to p. 56. It is not a second site for Atlantis. It is his case that the story told to the child at the Apaturia was the universal deluge, and that Greek festival custom and American, and later African and Australian, custom are divergent lines of one primitive tradition. If that is granted, Donnelly’s subsidence is not required to explain the flood stories.

In the last chapter I ventured to contend that the Periplus of Hanno was the main foundation for Plato's myth of Atlantis.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 33

Even if that is conceded, he says, something more is required to dispel the mirage. Jowett, as he quotes him, lists the places where interpreters have looked, without regard to Plato’s description and without suspecting a fabrication: America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Sardinia, Sweden. The story also affected the navigators of the sixteenth century. If Plato had known the full extent of exploration beyond the Pillars and had still asserted a lost continent, the opinion would have weighed. All Plato says, in the words he quotes, is that after the subsidence the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable because of the quantity of shallow mud. He reads that as the Mare di Sargasso, heard of, but not very directly. Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, p. 39, suggests that the gulf-weed itself originated the idea of the sunken island. If the weed was an impassable barrier, it would have been a constant subject of speculation for Phoenician mariners.

The conception arose as a myth in Plato’s mind, but a great deal of floating tradition was used, and that residuum remains after the mirage goes. The statement that falls in with tradition is the one about the child of ten at the Apaturia, the registration of youth, told the history of the deluge. He prints Jowett: an old-world story heard from an aged man, Critias at that time nearly ninety, and the speaker about ten, on the day of the Apaturia called the registration of youth (Timaeus, p. 517). Whether the story was true or false, universal or only the drowning of Atlantis, it was either the deluge of Moses, the Hebrews, the Chaldaeans, and general tradition, or the subsidence Donnelly puts under all of them.

He does not repeat Chapter XI of his Tradition. He supplements it. The ceremony he uses is the one Catlin witnessed among the Mandan Indians in 1832. The account is attested by J. Kipp, agent to the Missouri Fur Company, J. Crawford Clark, and Abraham Bogard. A later account, Trubner, 1867, prints a letter of the Prince of Neuwied, who lived a winter among the Mandans, did not see the ceremony, and still corroborated what he heard. In Tradition, p. 272, he had noted that Ceremonies religieuses described it a century before Catlin. It is performed once a year, in the spring, when the willow leaves are full grown under the bank, because the twig the bird brought to the big canoe was a willow bough with full-grown leaves. Catlin’s surprise, as he quotes it, is that this came from a man eighteen hundred miles from the nearest civilisation.

The O-kee-pa, in Catlin’s italics a religious ceremony, with abstinence, sacrifice, and prayer, had three objects. First, the annual celebration of the subsiding of the waters, Mee-ne-ro-ka-ha-sha, the settling down of the waters. Second, the bull dance, for the coming of the buffaloes in the ensuing year. Third, an ordeal of the young men who had reached manhood, so the chiefs could judge who could lead a war party. The book he cites is Catlin’s O-kee-pa of the Mandans, Trubner, 1867, p. 9.

Two facts, then, are in evidence: (1) that when Plato was ten years old, at a feast called the "Apaturia" or the "registration of youth," he heard a discourse delivered which collected various diluvian traditions; and (2) that under strangely different circumstances of time and place Catlin came upon a curious ceremony professedly commemorative of a universal deluge, in which again a principal feature or interlude was a ceremony which might be exactly described as a registration of youth.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 36

He calls the ten-year-old Plato. The Jowett lines he has just printed make the speaker the child, and Critias the man of ninety. I leave both as he writes them. On p. 80 he uses the same sentences again for the child who had studied a family manuscript.

If further resemblances hold, he thinks an American tradition cannot be explained by local conditions alone. A note added after the chapter was written cites Reville, Les religions des peuples non-civilises, i. 263, on an initiation of youth, especially severe among the Dacotas and the Mandans, like the one he has seen in Africa among Caffre and Hottentot groups. He also notes Leviticus 23:39-40, the feast of ingathering on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, and the willow of the brook.

Aristotle, Ethics viii. 11, says the ancient sacrifices and festivals appear to have taken place after the ingathering of the crops, as first-fruits. Virgil’s rustics, in his reading of Eclogue v. 90, invoke Bacchus and Ceres yearly. Later Greek festivals were innumerable, especially at Athens, as Xenophon says, but those that trace to the remote past reduce, on his analysis, to one or two primitive traditions. Setting aside local and historical origins, and using about 319 festivals in Bishop Potter’s chapter on Grecian festivals in the Archaeologia Graeca, he concludes that the more ancient were held for Jupiter, Apollo, Minerva, Bacchus or Dionysus, Neptune or Poseidon, Ceres, and Diana. Potter too thought that originally, as Aristotle reports, there were few or none except those after harvest or vintage. Apollo, if he represented what Arundell calls the Messianic tradition, could have a festival without a special deluge memory. He has discussed that in the Month for April 1877 and omits it here. The other primitive festivals, he says, connect with the deluge.

Jupiter he writes as Dyaus pater, Zeus pater, Jupiter, from Max Muller and from his own Tradition, p. 169. The Hydrophoria carried vessels of water, poured into a gulf in the temple of Jupiter, in memory of ancestors who had been submerged. He cites Boulanger and Pausanias i. 18, and cakes of meal and honey thrown into the same chasm. In the O-kee-pa the opener of the ceremony, who says he alone was saved in the big canoe and now dwells in the west, demands an edged tool from each lodge as a sacrifice to the water, and on the last day at sundown the tools are thrown into deep water. Zeus sends the flood of Deucalion, in Murray. He says he has not met a refutation of his arguments, in Tradition, pp. 222 to 235, identifying that flood with the universal deluge. Lucian describes the same pouring of water into a cleft at Hierapolis in Syria. Brett, on the Indian tribes of Guiana, gives a legend very like Deucalion’s. Grote says the Deucalionian deluge was blended with religious impressions and commemorated by sacred ceremonies. Boulanger says the waters of Attica disappeared by that chasm, that Deucalion raised an altar there, and that tradition gave him the first foundation of the temple of Jupiter Olympius.

A husbandman people would show Ceres, a hunter people Diana, a pastoral people a more scattered tradition. Iron thrown into the water in one case, and meal in another, would be the same sacrifice in tribes of different work. One feast, in the month of Posidon, honoured Ceres and Bacchus with fruits of the earth, or commemorated Greeks who lived among vines and corn. Another harvest feast had a procession for Neptune. A further festival, kept almost throughout Greece except by the Eretrians, honoured Ceres as the first who taught the use of laws, which he reads as law commencing again with Noah. The whole of one such festival was called Aloa, and Aloa bread was the first bread of the new corn. He sets Potter’s account of the women who judge the new corn beside Catlin on the village community adjoining the Mandans, where old women bring ears to the council-house and, when the corn will do, criers announce that the Great Spirit has been kind and the tribe must meet to return thanks. There was a feast when the new wine was tasted, the Protrugeia for Neptune and Bacchus, and at Athens a festival called elenophoria, with vessels of rushes and ears of willow. The Mysian festival of Ceres ran seven days, and on the third the men and dogs were shut out and the women remained. In the Mandan festival the women and children retired, and the dogs were muzzled, on the day that belonged to the Great Spirit.

He then matches the Mandan “evil spirit,” painted black, arriving from the west during the last dance, checked by the medicine pipe until the women withdraw, then disarmed by an old woman who dashes yellow dirt in his face and by another who breaks his wand. He sees in that the promise that the woman should crush the head of the serpent, and he points forward to p. 70. Greek festivals that exclude men, or in which women turn a battle, an Argive exchange of clothes in memory of a woman who led a defence against the Spartans, and the fourteen venerable women of the older Dionysia, he puts on the same side. After the Mandan woman disarms the spirit, one woman holds the government for that night and the chiefs are old women and have nothing to say.

The name Apaturia means deceit, and nothing in the recorded Athenian festival explains the word. Two legends do, on his reading. Aphrodite entices the giants into a cavern for Heracles. Or Melanthus, king of Athens, tricks Xanthus, king of Boeotia, by crying that a figure in a black goat-skin stands at Xanthus’s back, so that Xanthus looks round and is killed. He sets that beside the Mandan woman coming behind the black-painted spirit. The link he wants is that both sit on a registration of youth. The Mandan heroine stops the bull dance, has the four tortoise drums brought in, hangs buffalo and human skulls on four posts, and calls the chiefs to watch the voluntary tortures. The Apaturia of Plato’s time did not show those horrors, but other Greek festivals did. At Sparta, youths were flogged before the altar of Diana Orthia, sometimes to death, parents exhorting them, and those who died were garlanded and given a public funeral. Some traced it to Lycurgus, some to Diana Taurica and an oracle that required human blood. He prints the Mandan and Spartan accounts in two columns. The Mandan custom was preceded by the bull dance and followed by the feast of the buffaloes, and the operator sat with a dried buffalo skull. In Sicily youths beat each other with sea-onions. In Arcadia boys beat the statue of Pan with sea-onions when the hunt failed. The Lacedaemonians detested the Tauric worship and feared the goddess. The Mandans looked to their custom for the annual supply of buffaloes. His own theory of the bull he reprints as Appendix C.

He thinks the closing immorality of the Mandan ceremony recalls the Bacchanalia, and that the “big canoe” in the centre of the village, shaped like a hogshead, shows a confusion of wine-butt and canoe, if Bacchus carries a later tradition of Noah, or possibly of Cham and the scene in Genesis. Water-sacks that the Mandans said had held the water of the deluge ever since, beaten by four old men during the bull dance, he sets beside an Athenian festival of Bacchus at which the goat’s skin was made into a sack, filled with wine and oil, and leapt on by the husbandmen. Roman young men took the toga virilis at the Liberalia, a festival of Bacchus. He cites Dollinger.

A long footnote on pp. 47 and 48 reports Jesuit missionaries who found a northern tribe whose only worship was an old man calling “Ye-ho-wah” three times at midday, taken as an invocation of Jehovah, and Adair’s ark-bearing Indians who invoked Yo-he-wah. Faber reads that cry as the Bacchic Evoe, not as the Hebrew name. Arundell leaves the reader to decide, and he points to Clement of Alexandria on the Bacchantes crying Eva. I use Jehovah here because the book does.

If flesh-meat was first permitted to Noah, he expects an indirect memory, and he finds it in festivals of Bacchus as eater of raw flesh. The direct memory he takes from Porphyry, De Abstinentia, an opponent of Christianity, quoted in Gainet: the neighbours of the divine generations ate nothing that had life, and the proverb of a later age was that the acorn sufficed. He thinks that tells against a theory of primitive barbarism.

The Hydrophoria at Athens, on the 25th of Thargelion, which he compares with Catlin’s season, poured water into an aperture “in memory of those who perished in the Deluge,” like Lucian’s Syrian rite. Every citizen contributed an ox and olive branches. Outside the city an engine in the form of a ship carried the sacred garment of Minerva hung as a sail, to the temple of Ceres Eleusinia. Old men, and some say old women, led with olive branches. Sojourners carried little boats and were called boat-bearers. Women carried water-pots. He says he has excluded obscenity and solar worship from the inquiry, and he will justify the exclusion of the sun later.

The Mandan opening, a great white man from the west at sunrise, addressed as Nuh-mohk-muck-a-nah, the first or only man, who landed on a high mountain in the west in his canoe and still resides there, he sets beside Athenaeus on the Peloria. Baton of Sinope says the Saturnalia was a Greek festival, called Peloria by the Thessalians. While the Pelasgians were sacrificing, one Pelorus brought news that an earthquake had torn the mountains of Tempe, and the lake had fallen into the Peneus and left a pleasant plain. They instituted a feast to Jupiter surnamed Pelor, and they invited foreigners, prisoners, and slaves, and waited on them. He connects the slave-feast with other Greek festivals and with the Persian spring feast at which husbandmen sat at the king’s table. He cites Gibbon, ii. 8.

He protests that Sir G. W. Cox’s Mythology of the Aryan Nations mentions Bacchus only once, and then as “Bacchos the son of Dionysos,” against Lempriere, Smith, and Murray where they agree. He wants the older theory recognised: Bacchus or Dionysus as a memory of Noah, or Cham, or Nimrod, any of whom might be a nucleus. His nine heads, as he numbers them, are these.

1. Legends of a youthful Bacchus and of a double birth can be solar, or can be the second birth after the deluge. Adonis, saved in an ark or chest, is the same story in one version. The surroundings locate him in the primitive ages.
2. “Three Bacchuses” are forms of one legend. Dionysus, like Adonis, is placed in a chest, cast into the sea, and carried to Brasiai, where his mother is buried. The extinct mother can be the former world, not only night or winter.
3. Various legends connect him with the sea.
4. He is the first legislator.
5. He first discovered and planted the vine. Diodorus, writing at a period he marks B.C. 8, gives the naturalist view, the god as the strength in the vine, and then says the mythologists who make the god a man unanimously give him the finding and first planting of the vine. He prints the Greek and Booth’s translation. Cox, Murray, Smith, and Lempriere, he says, ignore that statement.
6. Horace’s “Bacche pater,” Odes i. 18.
7. The punishment of Pentheus, in Theocritus, Idyll xxvi, which he reads as a memory of the curse of Canaan. He prints Calverley’s English, including the lines that the godly seed fares well and the wicked is accursed.
8. Bacchus as god of the drama, natural if the commemorative ceremonies were older than the stage.
9. The Orphic epithets: double, or two-faced, like Janus looking back on the lost world and forward to the new; three, for the three sons; and first-born. Because antediluvian tradition meets in Noah and passes through him, Adam is reduplicated in Noah, and “first-born” applies. He notes the likeness to the Mandan “first or only man.” Janus he describes, from Bryant, with two faces, a ship’s prow on the reverse of his medals, and on Sicilian coins at Eryx a dove in an olive crown. Diodorus says the ancient Dionysus always wore a long beard, and in the other aspect is a young man.

He thinks the cumulative evidence points to Noah, or to some progenitor immediately in contact with him, if Noah is assumed. Calling Bacchus the sun does not suffice. Those who believe Genesis can still say Noah or Cham was deified in connection with the sun after the deluge, and that the mythology then absorbed that event. Those who take Genesis only as a historical record are asked to treat the deification as probable because it matches the tendency of the time. He quotes Faber, Pagan Idolatry, ii. 327: Egyptian priests, in Plutarch, taught that Cronos, Osiris, Horus, and the principal deities were once men, and that after death their souls migrated into heavenly bodies. Sanchoniathon says Ilus or Cronos was once a man, deified by the Phoenicians, his soul passing into the planet that bears his name. Cicero, De natura deorum iii. 21, is cited for the same tendency.

The chapter ends on the state of the argument. Taking Genesis, as revelation or as record, the first planting of the vine by the first progenitor after the deluge, or after a deluge, is followed by a scene of intoxication that would have stayed in memory. Tracing backward, he finds ceremonies of a deluge, a first legislator, a first planting of the vine, a first cultivator, almost always ending in riot or intoxication, not always with every feature, but with enough to show a common parentage. On the other side, the deluge of Genesis would be only one line of the tradition of the submersion of Atlantis, “that great deluge of all,” as Plato calls it. Against that, he has pointed to a document which Plato’s narrative closely matches, and which could have been the foundation of the fiction if the narrative is not to be taken literally. That is how the argument stands.

Chapter IV. Recent Testimonies

This chapter, pp. 57 to 74, still adds no new Atlantic coastline. It answers the nature-myth school with customs he had met since Chapter III, and he reads them as further lines of the same deluge tradition.

Andrew Lang’s Custom and Myth had just appeared, Longmans, 1884. Lang’s complaint against Max Muller and Cox is that the orthodox mythologists differ among themselves. Lang’s method is to set a puzzling custom of a civilised race beside a similar custom among savages, and to conclude that the civilised puzzle is a relic of ancestral savagery. Arundell says that view assumes primitive barbarism. His own contrary belief, that the race began in civilisation and in survival from a deluge, and that the similar customs then need no explanation but community of origin, cannot be overthrown by a theory that merely assumes the barbarism. He drops Lang’s theory and keeps Lang’s facts. He notes that folklore, rather than etymology, was already the aim of his Tradition with Reference to Mythology, printed in 1872.

The bull-roarer is a pointed piece of wood on a string, whirled to make a roar. He identifies it with turbines and with the Greek rhombos, sometimes called a magic wheel, and with the Mandan rattles. It is tied to mysteries and initiations. In Australia the roar warns women away, as Pentheus was killed for profaning the rites of the women who worshipped Dionysus. Among the Kurnai the boys are shown the turndun at initiation and told that if a woman sees it the earth will open and water will cover the globe. He had already given four similar stories in The Scientific Value of Tradition, pp. 173 to 174: Central Africa, the Indian tribes of Guiana in Brett, and Hayti. Two are from letters of H. M. Stanley written from Ugigi. A man and a woman possessed the secret of a fountain full of fish. She betrayed it. Her lover put in his hand, the well burst, the earth opened, and an enormous lake replaced the plain. That is his account of the origin of Lake Tanganika, as he spells it. Lang’s further Kurnai story is that children showed a turndun to the women, the earth crumbled, all was water, and the Kurnai were drowned. As at Athens, in Syria, and among the Mandans, the Australian deluge tradition is connected with the mysteries.

An Australian woman believed she had heard Pundjal, the chief supernatural being, descend in a mighty rushing noise, the turndun, when boys were being made men. Winwood Reade’s Savage Africa, and Captain Smith on Virginia, give Mongilomba flogged in the fetich house and plastered with goat dung, which he compares with the Spartan flogging before Artemis and with Mandan daubing. On the Congo, Johnson found the same ritual of initiation. Catlin records the offering of little fingers of the left hand, or a forefinger, struck off on a buffalo skull.

David Collins’s Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 1798, describes an initiation he witnessed on 25 January 1795. Males between eight and sixteen lost a front tooth. The explanation offered at the time, a tribute exacted by the strongest tribe, did not satisfy Collins, because the conquering tribe also lacked the tooth. He argues that a wanton demand for a front tooth would have been felt as tyranny, but that a voluntary offering or customary sacrifice would have been the tribute every conqueror seized, because it showed, by the people’s own custom, the adult strength of a subject population. Once it was a tribute, the religious sense would die. The time was when certain shrubs were flowering. The place, named yoo-lahng, was an oval twenty-seven feet by eighteen. One man was painted white to the middle, except beard and eyebrows. He compares that figure with Catlin’s “first or only man,” body, face, and hair covered with white clay, in a robe of four white wolf skins, looking at a little distance like a very old white man. The youths imitate dogs. On the white man’s entry the Mandan order is to muzzle all the dogs. Rawlinson’s Illustrations of the Old Testament, p. 18, gives the Cherokee legend of mankind destroyed by a deluge and one family saved in a boat, after a dog had incited them to build it. A log the Australian youths face may, he suggests, do duty for the big canoe, which Catlin says was shaped like a hogshead. A grass kangaroo stands where the buffalo stands, if the kangaroo was the principal food. A mournful sound like distant thunder suggests the bull-roarer. The scene called Boo-roo-moo-roong he thinks sounds like the boomerang, used in a way that resembles the roarer. Spears presented to the boys recall Lang’s spears pointed at the boys’ eyes. The tooth is extracted with a splint and a stone, with the cry “Ewah, ewah,” which he sets beside the Bacchic “Evoe.” The rite ends, like the Mandan, in a rush on the town, the right to wield spear and club, and the seizing of wives. Before the ordeal the Mandan youths had reached the middle of the fourth day without food, drink, or sleep, and the Australian youths sat with heads down, hands clasped, legs crossed, neither looking up nor taking refreshment until the ceremony ended. An edged tool was taken from every Mandan lodge as a sacrifice to the water. Collins’s informant said his own tooth was buried, and that others were thrown into the sea. Priests, car-rah-dis, drew the teeth, as medicine men lopped the fingers.

Captain John G. Bourke’s The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, Sampson Low, London, 1884, he thinks cognate with the Mandan custom, even if Bourke had not read it so, and even if the Moqui tradition is less direct. The dance propitiates a higher power for the growth of corn, as the Mandans attributed buffaloes to fidelity to their annual custom. Meal is scattered with prayer. An old man rattles, lifts his hands to the sun, grumbles for thunder, hisses for lightning, draws a sinuous line, and says “plenty of corn.” Snakes or streaks of lightning, white, red, green, and yellow, dart from a bank of clouds on a ground altar. Bourke’s own point, which Arundell adopts, is that the undulation of the serpent and the meander of lightning are the resemblance other writers on serpent worship had missed. Rain may be what the present dance asks for. He thinks that was not the original leading idea, because lightning goes with wind, storm, flood, and deluge as often as with a gentle rain, and because the rattlesnake, the prominent snake of the Moqui rite, is already in the Mandan bull dance, where two men called rattlesnakes shake rattles at the close. Three of five snake names he picks out as alluding to Mandan symbols: the rattler, a yellow-and-black snake that may be the bull snake, and a water snake. The mystery lodge is the pivot, and it is covered with a buffalo skin, in a country where the buffalo is not known and had to be brought from a great distance. The Mandan sacks of deluge water answer, in his reading, to a bowl of salt-tasting water with three large sea shells. Olivella shells touched on the wrist mean a great distance in the west. Bourke’s conviction, which he quotes, is that the shells, the salt water, the sand, and the abalone betray a derivation from a people who once knew, and perhaps worshipped, the ocean. A wooden sling whirled at the head of the procession sounds like rain driven by wind. Lang mentions the bull-roarer among the neighbouring Zuni.

The dance opens with three old men, one a head priest with a platter of water and an eagle-feather wand, a garland of cotton leaves, sprinkling the ground. A second carries corn meal. A third rattles a fan-shaped instrument painted white. Men and boys march in single file with rattles, collars of white shell beads, and abalone. They circle a sacred lodge and trees. The second division mimes the planting of corn. The snake dance proper answers to the bull dance. It ends, like the Mandan and the Australian rites, in a dispersal: snakes released to the four quarters, the sling still sounding like rain and wind. A sacred rock stands where the big canoe stands. He notes Bourke’s water-worn fragments of sandstone, roughly shaped, and a plate on which the rock matches that description. Faces painted black from brow to upper lip, white below, reptiles in the mouth, recall the Mandan demon. Women mass between the rock and the lodge and throw sacred meal on the reptiles and into the faces of the men who carry them. He reads that as the woman’s power over the serpent in Genesis 3:15, not as serpent worship in the strict sense. He does not recollect direct evidence of serpent worship among them. The refrain “Oh-ya-haw” he sets beside the Australian “Ewah,” and beside Clement and Virgil on the Bacchic cry.

Everard im Thurn, on the Indians of Guiana, is the next witness, chosen because im Thurn is on guard against missionaries reshaping myths. Dancers beat hollow bamboos skinned at one end, and whirl-sticks with seeds that rattle. They march round the paiwari or liquor trough, chanting, then break up in loud cries. One feast has a dance in which they lash each other till the blood flows, which he takes as a test of endurance, like the Spartan and Mandan ordeals. im Thurn’s own sentence, which he quotes, is that festivals, dances, and games often remain little altered long after most other distinctions of a people have disappeared.

Among the Moqui the initiation is milder. A boy race, the boys as antelopes, tries stamina before the dance. Youths handle the snakes. An infant Hercules holds a five-foot snake. Their guide Tochi said that when rain did not come they danced for it in the estufa, and that after the big dances the young men who were to learn the secrets had their heads washed by the old men, a few drops poured on the head of someone kneeling. Tochi’s Spanish was broken, “bautista por cochinos,” and Bourke doubted how far this was baptism and how far a memory of early missionaries. Arundell asks how, if it were only missionary baptism, the same outward form appears among the Maori. He quotes J. G. Wood, The Natural History of Man, Routledge, 1870, p. 177, from Dieffenbach: an old priest, a tohunga, under a tree, a boy at his feet repeating words that seemed to have no meaning, a piece of a man’s skull filled with water, and a green branch dipped and moved over the boy’s head. Water and the green branch are, on his preceding pages, Mandan and Moqui signs.

One thing he leaves obscure. The Moqui, the Snake Indians, call themselves Hopii, or Opii, a term not used in everyday speech, and referred by Bourke to the Pueblo custom of banging the hair at the eyebrows. That surmise does not touch the likeness of Opii to the Greek word for snake. He will not solve it. He leaves it as a crux for the philologists. Further festival evidence, Mandan, Dahoman, the Indian Pongol and Pota, and Patagonian, he points to Chapter XI and the appendix of Tradition (Burns and Oates, 1872), p. 247.

Chapter V. Alternative Theories

The passages still to clear are the ones that do not come from Hanno. The one Donnelly would not forget is the Egyptian priests at Sais, in Timaeus as Jowett gives it, on the greatest action of the Athenians, which lapse of time and the destruction of the actors have hidden. A mighty power aggressed wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia, and Athens put an end to it. The power came out of the Atlantic Ocean. If Atlantis is Plato’s fiction, every imported tradition will be located there.

His view agrees with Jowett. The mythical conflict is prophetic or symbolical of Athens and Persia, and perhaps in some degree of the wars of Greeks and Carthaginians, as the Trojan war prefigures the Persian in Herodotus, or the first part of the Aeneid foreshadows Carthage and Rome. The “sacred register” cannot be strict history. Jowett points out that nine thousand years ago for the war is slightly inconsistent with the same date for the foundation of the city. Jowett’s conclusion, which he prints, is that the entire narrative is due to the imagination of Plato. His own earlier conjecture is that it was founded on Hanno.

If the war story is a confused and exaggerated tradition of the Persian war, Plato imported it. Plato was in Egypt, if Valerius Maximus is followed, as Lewes and G. W. Collins report, or he was at Syracuse, and he might have heard there the statements he attributes to Solon which do not come from Hanno. The visit would have fallen during the Persian domination.

The Persian rule in Egypt may be broadly said to have extended from B.C. 527, when Cambyses overthrew the dynasty of Sais, till B.C. 332.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 76

The dates are from Brugsch. The twenty-ninth and thirtieth dynasties, he says, would not have changed the feeling at Sais against the Persians. “Brought to an end” fits the close of the Persian war, and it does not fit a subsidence that destroys both sides. The priests of Sais, the city Amasis came from, where a Greek colony had been established from about 660 B.C., would have cherished a Greek victory and veiled it, while the domination lasted, under a legend of a common deluge and destruction. History was not yet a digested record. Manuscripts of Herodotus and Thucydides were drifting, but recollection was in the main traditional.

The laws and customs, which he had skipped in Chapter II, “regulated by the injunctions of Poseidon as the law had handed them down” and “inscribed by the first men on a column of orichalcum,” he now matches to the Amphictyonic council and the Areopagus. Those institutions had fallen since Pericles, and Plato might have wanted an indirect way to revive their authority. Amphictyonic laws were attributed to the son of Deucalion. The Ionian federation met at a sacred place on Mount Mycale, where they had dedicated a temple to Neptune. A column of orichalcum he sets beside the brazen column of the Latin League, still preserved in the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a fact that might have reached Plato earlier. The Atlanteans were to deliberate about war and not to take up arms against one another, like the ancient oath of the Amphictyons in Aeschines, not to destroy one another’s cities or debar them from their fountains in peace or war. Special laws inscribed about the temple cover, he thinks, the procedure of the Areopagus. Some gave that court to Solon and some to Cecrops, both in the line of the ancestors Plato’s speakers claim. The judges sat in the open air, because they took cognisance of murder and the murderer and the accuser might not be under one roof, and they heard causes and passed sentence at night, so as not to be swayed by seeing the parties. Plato’s kings also judge in the open air, and when darkness has come and the sacrificial fire is cool they put on azure robes, sit on the ground, and at daybreak write the sentences on a golden tablet and deposit them with the robes.

The bull he will not separate from the diluvian customs. Before business the Amphictyons sacrificed an ox and cut the flesh small, as a sign of union. In Plato the ten are left alone in the temple of Poseidon, hunt the bulls with staves and nooses, not with weapons, lead the bull to the column, strike it on the head, and slay it over the sacred inscription. They burn the limbs, mingle a cup, and cast in a clot of blood for each. He says the extracts are taken somewhat at random, but that pieced together they exhaust Plato’s disclosures about Atlantis.

He then asks, the Hanno basis and the later imports being conceded, whether some of the original figment might still have come down in family tradition from Solon, as Plato says, and been reconstructed by Plato. The conception of Atlantis probably originated in some development of the diluvian tradition. It might have been brought to Solon or to the priests of Sais by a circumstance like Plato’s use of Hanno: the circumnavigation of Africa in the reign of Necho or Nako, which he dates B.C. 611.

No record, however, of this exploration has survived.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 80

Even on that conjecture, if Plato had not seen Solon’s manuscript since he was ten, he might have rebased the fiction on the narrative more recently in his knowledge. He quotes the claim: “My great-grandfather Dropidas had the original writing, which is still in my possession, and was carefully studied by me when I was a child,” and the other sentence, Critias nearly ninety and the speaker about ten. Phrases such as “if I can recollect,” “if I have not forgotten what I heard when I was a child,” and the invocation of Mnemosyne imply, he says, that if the manuscript existed he was separated from it and had not seen it since childhood.

What Plutarch preserves of Solon makes a covert allegory natural. The contest of Athens and Megara for Salamis had gone badly enough that a law forbade writing or saying anything to urge a renewal. Solon feigned madness, mounted the herald’s stone, and recited a hundred-line elegy calling on the Athenians to reconquer the lovely island. The law was repealed. An allegory of Atlantis, in the interval, would have served the same enthusiasm. The legend would then have had a different shape from Plato’s. The descriptions in Plato, he says, fit the dimensions of Salamis better than those of a lost continent, just as they fit Hanno’s islands. Solon’s love of Salamis lasted, but the secret of it is not apparent.

His guess is genealogy. Solon was said to descend from Codrus, last king of Athens, and Codrus was the reputed representative of Cecrops. Cecrops is a local aboriginal ancestor and also wears the attributes of the primeval progenitor: half man and half fish, set beside Dagon, and, like Bacchus and Saturn, the first cultivator. The several Cecrops figures of Boeotia and Euboea are, in Smith’s dictionary, multiplications of one hero. The migration from Sais is rejected by some ancients and, he notes, by Muller and Thirlwall. A personage one degree less mythical is Cenchreus or Cychreus, king of Salamis, who delivered the island from a dragon, son of Salamis by Poseidon, the mother named Asopis. Cychreus-Asopis might contract into Cecrops, and a king of Salamis might have extended his dominion to the mainland. If that Cecrops founded the Athenian line, Solon’s love of the island would be the love of a descendant. A later legend, that a dragon appeared in an Athenian ship during the battle of Salamis and that an oracle declared it Cychreus, is a slight confirmation. The speculation wants an Egyptian journey in Solon’s youth, and Plutarch is the authority he cites for Solon as a foreign trader when young.

If “the city from which Amasis the king was sprung” means a visit while Amasis was king, the journey was late. He prints Solon circa B.C. 638 to 520, from Smith’s dictionary; Aahmes or Amasis, 572 B.C. in Brugsch, and 569 to 525 B.C. in Lenormant. Aristotle records the tradition that Solon’s ashes were to be scattered on Salamis, so the sentiment was as strong in old age as in youth, and a covert allusion might still have had a reason.

That, he says, exhausts the few facts available for Solon. The Periplus seemed tangible. Beyond it, conjecture.

Beyond this point we can only float in a "mare di sargasso" of conjecture.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 83

He will not, for all that, banish the legend from poetry. He hopes that if it dies out everywhere else it may survive in lines he appends from Donnelly’s book, p. 421, a poem of Miss Eleanor C. Donnelly of Philadelphia, “The Sleeper’s Sail,” in which a starving boy dreams of a pleasant land and sees, at sunset, a fairy city his mother names Tir-na-n’oge. I do not copy the poem. It is not his historical claim. His historical claim is the one he has just called firmer: Hanno, not the lost continent.

Appendix A. The Periplus of Hanno

Printed pp. 85 to 88. He gives the text he has been matching, from Heeren’s Historical Researches: Africa, p. 478, and he dates it in the heading from Lenormant.

The Periplus or Voyage of Hanno, commander of the Carthaginians, is here B.C. 515 (Lenormant). In Chapter II the same voyage was circa B.C. 500. He does not discuss the difference. Heeren will not believe any critic now doubts the authenticity in the whole, though he may doubt the completeness. Lenormant expresses no doubt. The official report of the voyage round the coast of Africa, deposited in the temple of Baal-Hamon, in the Greek text the temple of Kronos, has been preserved entire in a Greek version, and it is, Lenormant says, the single historical Carthaginian document of any extent which has reached us. A footnote sends the reader back to p. 23.

The Carthaginians decreed that Hanno should voyage beyond the Pillars and found Liby-Phoenician cities. The bracketed sentence, which repeats Heeren, says the colonists were Liby-Phoenicians from the country, not citizens of Carthage. He sailed with sixty ships of fifty oars each, and a body of men and women to the number of 30,000, with provisions.

He sailed accordingly with sixty ships of fifty oars each, and a body of men and women to the number of 30,000, and provisions and other necessaries.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 85

Two days beyond the Pillars they found Thymiaterium, and below it an extensive plain. Westward, at Solocis, a wooded promontory of Libya, they erected a temple to Neptune. Half a day east, a lake not far from the sea, full of large reeds, with elephants and other wild beasts. After about a day’s sail, cities near the sea: Cariconticos, Gytte, Acra, Melitta, and Arambys. Then the great river Lixus, the shepherd Lixitae, and beyond them inhospitable Ethiopians and the Troglodytes, swifter than horses. Interpreters from them. Two days south along a desert, then a day east, to a small island in a bay, a circle of five stadia, colonised and named Cerne, judged to lie in a direct line with Carthage. A large river, Chretes, a lake with three islands larger than Cerne, savage men in skins of wild beasts who drive them off with stones. Another large river, full of crocodiles and river-horses, and back to Cerne. Twelve days south along a shore of Ethiopians who flee, their language unintelligible even to the Lixitae. Sweet-scented mountains, two days, then an immense opening of the sea and fires by night. Five days to a large bay the interpreters call the Western Horn: a large island, a salt-water lake, another island, trees by day, fires and pipes and cymbals and drums and shouts by night. The diviners order them to leave. A country burning with fires and perfumes, streams of fire into the sea. Four days, a country full of fire, and in the middle a lofty fire that seemed to touch the stars, by day a large hill called the Chariot of the Gods. On the third day after, the Southern Horn, an island, a lake, another island, full of savage people, the greater part women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom the interpreters called Gorillae. The men escape. Three women are taken, kill their resistance with teeth and hands, are killed, and their skins are brought to Carthage. They sail no further. Provisions fail.

These are the names and the order he has used in Chapter II. The five cities answer to the five pairs of sons. Cerne answers to the palace island. The elephants, the temple of Neptune, the plain, the night fires, and the Chariot of the Gods are the matches he thinks decisive. The hairy people are the words the chapter said the short narrative omitted at its close, there conjectured by Lenormant to be a wrong substitution for gorgons or gorgades.

Appendix B. Plato’s Atlantis

Printed pp. 89 to 99. This is not an argument. It is the text he has been quoting, Professor Jowett’s Plato, volume ii, pp. 602 to 612, Critias 113 to 119, given so the reader can follow the matches. I do not copy it out again. Plato’s own dialogue is on Timaeus and Critias. What I keep here is the inventory as this appendix prints it, because these are the names and measures he has been setting beside Hanno.

Poseidon receives Atlantis, begets children by a mortal woman, and settles them. In the centre, toward the sea, the fairest plain. About fifty stadia off, a mountain not very high. Evenor, his wife Leucippe, their only daughter Cleito. In the Donnelly extract in Chapter I the same three were Evenor, Lucippe, and Chito. I keep both printings. Poseidon encloses the hill with alternate zones, two of land and three of water. Ships and voyages were not yet heard of. Two springs, warm and cold. Five pairs of male children, the island divided into ten portions. The eldest is king: Atlas, and from him the island and the ocean are Atlantic. His twin, whose lot is the extremity toward the Pillars of Heracles as far as the region still called Gades, is Eumelus in Greek and Gadeirus in the language of the country. The second pair are Ampheres and Evaemon. The third, Mneseus and Autochthon. The fourth, Elasippus and Mestor. The fifth, Azaes and Diaprepes. They and their descendants rule islands in the open sea, and also the country within the Pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia.

The wealth is mineral and metal, and orichalcum, then something more than a name, esteemed next to gold. Elephants, and provision for animals of lake, marsh, river, mountain, and plain, including the largest and most voracious. Fragrant roots, herbage, woods, and the cultivated fruits, among them the hard-rinded fruits that afford drinks. Temples, palaces, harbours, docks. A bridge over the zones of sea. A canal three hundred feet wide, a hundred feet deep, and fifty stadia long, from the sea to the outermost zone. The largest zone three stadia, the next land zone equal, the next two zones two stadia, the zone about the central island one stadium. The palace island five stadia in diameter. A stone wall, towers, and gates. Stone white, black, and red, quarried from under the island and the zones, and double docks hollowed in the rock. The outermost wall coated with brass, the next with tin, the wall of the citadel with orichalcum. A temple of Cleito and Poseidon, inaccessible, in an enclosure of gold, where the ten princes were begotten, and where the fruits of the ten portions were brought yearly. Poseidon’s own temple a stadium long and half a stadium wide, silvered outside except the pinnacles, which were gold, the roof ivory, the interior orichalcum. The god in a chariot of six winged horses, touching the roof, and a hundred Nereids on dolphins. Gold statues of the ten kings and their wives. Baths for the king, for private persons, for women, and for horses and cattle. A grove of Poseidon, a racecourse a stadium wide running round the island, guard-houses, and docks full of triremes. Three outer harbours. A wall beginning at the sea, fifty stadia from the largest zone, the area crowded, the canal and the largest harbour full of merchants night and day.

The country is lofty and precipitous on the seaward side. The plain about the city is level, oblong, three thousand stadia one way and two thousand up from the sea, lying toward the south and sheltered from the north. A rectangular ditch, a hundred feet deep, a stadium broad, ten thousand stadia long, receiving the mountain streams and let off into the sea. Canals a hundred feet wide at intervals of a hundred stadia. Two harvests, winter rain and summer water from the canals. Each lot in the plain a square of ten stadia, sixty thousand lots, each with a chief of men fit for service. The leader furnishes the sixth part of a war-chariot, to a total of ten thousand chariots, with horses, riders, heavy-armed men, archers, slingers, stone-shooters, javelin men, and four sailors, to a complement of twelve hundred ships. Each of the ten kings has absolute control in his own division. The relations of the governments are the injunctions of Poseidon, inscribed by the first men on a column of orichalcum in the middle of the island, at the temple. They gather every fifth and sixth year alternately. Before judgment they hunt the bulls with staves and nooses. The oath on the column invokes curses on the disobedient. They judge in azure robes by night, by the embers, and write the sentences at daybreak on a golden tablet. They are not to take up arms against one another. They come to the rescue if anyone tries to overthrow the royal house. Supremacy stays with the family of Atlas. The king has no power of life and death over his kinsmen unless a majority of the ten agrees.

The divine nature lasts for many generations. When it fades, Zeus calls the gods to his habitation in the centre of the world and begins to speak. The appendix ends, in brackets: here Plato’s story abruptly ends. That break is the point of Chapter II. Hanno’s Greek text also stops, and he thinks that is why the Critias was never finished.

Appendix C. Theory as to the Prominence of the Bull in Tradition

Printed pp. 100 to 108. He reprints a pamphlet written against an article by the Rev. H. W. Lucas in the Month, Lucas’s exposition of the “nature myth.” He is not aware that the counter-theory has been advanced before. He has referred to it in the text, so he reprints it. It is not a new site for Atlantis. It is his reason for the bull in the Mandan dance, in the Amphictyonic sacrifice, and in Plato’s temple of Poseidon.

Lucas and Cox take Indra as the rain-giving firmament, the solar god, the bright heaven, the rain-bringer. De Gubernatis calls the sun hidden in the cloud a powerful bull, the bull of bulls, invincible son of the cow. Arundell asks how the luminous sky got the bull. All agree it is through rain. De Gubernatis’s reason, that the bull is male perfection and the cow is the Aryan ideal of increase, he thinks too large an effort for the “gelatinous stage” of pure imagination: grass grows when rain falls, bulls fatten when grass grows, rain falls from heaven, therefore heaven is a bull. Cox, he says, keeps the bull-name in the background and then, by a further effort, identifies the bull Indra with the lord of the pure ether.

His own explanation he wants treated as primary, because it is tied to the deluge and to the second commencement of the human race.

There is a tradition that Noah entered the ark when the sun was in the sign of the Bull in the Zodiac.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 102

That date, the start of the unintermittent rain, would have stayed in memory, and the sign of the Bull would have stayed tied to rain and water, first in fear, and later, on the Indian plains, in hope, once drought was the greater evil. The swing from gloom to rejoicing, destruction to renovation, death to life, matches Genesis as the swing from light to darkness matches the solar myths. He then rereads the Rigveda passages Lucas and Cox use. Indra cleaves the cloud and casts the waters down. Striking the first-born of the clouds, or striking the clouds with the point of his horns, is the commencement of the deluge. Engendering the sun, the dawn, and the firmament means, on his reading, that Indra is not identical with the firmament. If the firmament is the new one after forty days and forty nights, the notion is the renovation, Indra as the sun in the serene heaven after the clouds have passed. Cox’s gloss, that the clouds “destroyed (the distress of drought),” he rejects as Cox’s own. “Dry places” may be places never reached by the waters before. “Resplendent” at Indra’s birth may be a star or constellation, and the birth the new era when it stood prominent at the start of the deluge. The cloud as a great-bellied barrel carried by the divine bull, the bull with a thousand horns who rises from the sea, the monster destroyed by fire, the cow with one foot, then four, then eight, then nine, he thinks more applicable to a constellation than to the rain-giving firmament. The cavern where the cows are hidden is, in Bryant and Faber, a common form of the ark. Three or seven brothers and sisters answer to the three sons of Noah, or to the seven persons saved if counted apart from the patriarch. He compares Horus as the eighth, conducting the bark with the seven great gods, and his own Tradition, p. 193. The seven shiners, when mentioned with the bull, may be the Pleiades in Taurus, in the neck of the bull. The Hyades in the same constellation Lucas associates with moisture, and he adds the “tristes Hyades,” an ill omen to mariners.

He then says he cannot at that moment recall where he first met the tradition that Noah entered the ark in the sign of the Bull. What follows is the confirmatory evidence, not the original source. I keep that limit. He does not pretend to have the first citation in front of him.

The zodiac begins with Aries, the Ram, and he presumes the primitive months did too. George Smith’s Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 69, the fifth tablet of the creation legend, arranges the stars in figures of animals, twelve months or signs in three rows, to fix the year. At p. 73 Smith compares that with Genesis, the lights set for signs and seasons, days and years, and notes two further bands, as the Greeks had two sets of twelve stars, north and south of the zodiac.

In our tables Taurus is the second sign.

Now Genesis (vii. 11) tells us that Noah entered the ark on the 17th of the second month.

Lord Arundell of Wardour. The Secret of Plato's Atlantis (1885), p. 106

Lenormant, Fragments cosmogoniques de Berose, 1871, p. 211, says the second Assyrian month was named “the Bull,” and so was the Accadian second month, and so was the Hebrew. He adds Lenormant’s French, that the names of the Jewish months are the names of the Chaldaeo-Assyrian months. That is the evidence he thinks establishes the point.

Canon Rawlinson’s Illustrations of the Old Testament, p. 18, gives the Cherokee legend again: mankind destroyed by a deluge, one family preserved in a boat, incited to the building by a dog. He has already used that sentence in Chapter IV. The Vedic dog, Canis Major, is connected with Indra in De Gubernatis. Plutarch, De facie in orbe lunae, chapter 26, as he takes it from Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Astronomy of the Ancients, p. 491, says the people of the island of Ogygia pay the principal honours to Saturn and after him to Hercules. When the planet Saturn is in Taurus, once every thirty years, they send out men chosen by lot to seek their fortunes across the sea. He footnotes Lenormant on the two Greek deluge traditions, Ogyges, a wholly mythical figure whose name was derived from a root that implied the deluge, Sanskrit augha, the waters reaching the heavens, escape in a vessel with some companions, and then the Thessalian legend of Deucalion. He asks Lucas not to reject the story because the latitude of Ogygia is not precisely known. True tradition, he says, may sit inside fabulous narration.

He thinks other traces could be found. The list is casual and not exhausted. He and Lucas at least agree that the inquiry matters. He extends Proudhon: at the bottom of every question one finds theology, and he adds mythology. No theory, not excepting Darwinism, so seductively takes the history of the race back into an indefinite lapse of ages as the mythology of the winds and the elements. His own attempt, he says, is perhaps only a feeble one to get at the back of the north wind. Any attempt that succeeds will reveal as much to science, however grim and disappointing to golden dreams, as the discovery of the North Pole.

That is the last page of the book, printed p. 108. He has not placed a continent under the Atlantic. He has placed Plato’s story on a Carthaginian voyage along the African coast and the islands beyond the Pillars, and he has placed the flood, the bull, the first legislator, and the ten-year-old’s feast on the deluge he still calls universal.