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A deep dive into the connection between the Phoenicians and Greek mythology as described in Homer’s Odyssey.
The two names are easy to confuse, but they belong to different worlds. The Phaeacians are a seafaring people in Homer’s Odyssey. The Phoenicians were a real people of the eastern Mediterranean. Both are remembered for their ships, and this page asks what each may tell about an older sea civilization.
The Phaeacians in Homer
In Samuel Butler’s translation of the Odyssey, the Phaeacians once lived at Hypereia, near the Cyclopes, who plundered them. Their king Nausithous moved them to Scheria, far from all other people, and built a walled city there. Nausithous was the son of the sea god (Neptune in Butler’s English, Poseidon in the Greek) and of Periboea, and his son Alcinous rules the island when Ulysses (Odysseus) arrives.
King Alcinous on the Phaeacian ships:
For the Phaeacians have no pilots; their vessels have no rudders as those of other nations have, but the ships themselves understand what it is that we are thinking about and want; they know all the cities and countries in the whole world, and can traverse the sea just as well even when it is covered with mist and cloud, so that there is no danger of being wrecked or coming to any harm.
Homer, The Odyssey, Book VIII, translated by Samuel Butler, Project Gutenberg #1727, public domain
The Phoenicians in history
In Britannica’s account, Phoenicia was an ancient region on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, matching modern Lebanon with parts of modern Syria and Israel. Its chief cities were Byblos, Sidon, Tyre and Berot, modern Beirut. The Phoenicians were merchants, traders and colonizers, and Carthage, one of their colonies, became the chief sea power of the western Mediterranean. They exported cedar, linen, cloth dyed with Tyrian purple, metalwork and glass. Their alphabet of 22 letters was used at Byblos as early as the 15th century BCE and was later taken up by the Greeks. Their gods differed by city: Baal and Baalat at Byblos, Melqart at Tyre and Eshmun at Sidon, with the goddess Astarte. More on the Phoenician gods is on this page and on the city of Tyre.
The two groups are unrelated. Each is known for seafaring and for links across the sea, and that shared theme can confuse readers who do not know their separate backgrounds.
Plato’s older Athenians
Plato tells of an older race of Athenians, a memory of an even older civilization. That civilization is said to have shaped what is now known as Classical Greece. Plato treats the idea in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias. There he tells the story of Atlantis. This site sees parallels between his account and both the Phaeacians and the Phoenicians.
Plato describes an advanced civilization that existed long before his time. In Timaeus, Egyptian priests in Sais (today’s Sa el-Hagar) tell Solon about these early Athenians. Their city was founded 9,000 years earlier and had the best constitution of any city under heaven. In Plato, Atlantis was a powerful island empire beyond the Pillars of Heracles and a rival of these early Athenians, and it was later destroyed.
The Egyptian priest to Solon:
For in the times before the great flood Athens was the greatest and best of cities and did the noblest deeds and had the best constitution of any under the face of heaven.
Plato, Timaeus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg #1572, public domain
The Phaeacians are an ideal, isolated people with great sea skills and divine ancestry, and in this site’s reading Plato’s Atlantis is described the same way. Their homeland of Scheria is a distant island, as is Atlantis. Phaeacian myth gives them divine ancestry, and Plato gives his ancient civilizations superior abilities.
The Phoenicians were a historical seafaring civilization that shares many traits with Atlantis. They had advanced knowledge of navigation, trade and craft, and their influence spread across the Mediterranean, like that of the legendary Atlanteans. Phoenician cities such as Tyre and Sidon were ruled by kings whose power was limited by wealthy merchant families, as Britannica describes it. Plato describes an organized society in Atlantis too.
In Timaeus, the priest says that floods and fires wipe out the memory of the past in most lands, while Egypt keeps the records in its temples, so that older knowledge survives in one place. The Phoenicians, who spread the alphabet and built trade networks, could be a historical example of knowledge passing between cultures. The Phaeacians and Phoenicians may each reflect a memory of an earlier sea people, real or imagined, that shaped how the Greeks saw their distant past. The priest also says the Greeks forgot their deeper history because of these disasters, and Homeric myths may in the same way hold fragments of earlier contact around the Mediterranean.
The older Athenians of Plato could represent a myth built on a real civilization such as the Minoans or the Phoenicians, an ideal of a time when people were closer to the gods, as with Homer’s Phaeacians, or a mix of memory and myth.
Plato, the Phaeacians and the Phoenicians point to how ancient cultures saw the peoples before them. Those earlier peoples were a source of inspiration. They were also a puzzling reminder of a lost golden age.
The Minoans
The Minoans were a historical civilization. They fit well in the discussion of Plato’s older Athenians, and they also connect to the Phaeacians and Phoenicians. In Britannica’s account, the Minoan civilization of Crete flourished from about 3000 BCE to about 1100 BCE and was named by the archaeologist Arthur Evans, who dug at Knossos in 1900. Crete was the first center of high civilization in the Aegean. The Minoans built great palace complexes, painted frescoes and traded across the Aegean, the Levant and Egypt. Bull-leaping appears in their art, and its exact meaning is still uncertain. The late Minoan decline coincided with the eruption of the volcano on Thera, modern Santorini, which may have caused the destruction of Knossos, and by the middle of the 15th century BCE the palace culture had declined under natural disasters, internal disruption and growing Mycenaean influence.
Plato’s ancient, advanced civilization matches many parts of Minoan culture. Plato places his early Athenians about 9,000 years before Solon. The number may be symbolic. The Minoans still thrived more than a thousand years before Plato, who lived from 428/427 to 348/347 BCE according to Britannica. That makes them much older than Classical Greece.
Like the Phaeacians, the Minoans were islanders with strong sea trade. Like the Phoenicians, they traded widely, and their art and architecture shaped the Mycenaeans, much as the Phoenician alphabet shaped Greek writing.
The Minoans are, in this site’s view, one of the strongest candidates for the historical base of Atlantis. The eruption on Thera was a catastrophe. It likely destroyed settlements and broke trade networks. A wealthy, advanced island civilization brought down by a natural disaster matches the story of Atlantis. The dates differ: Plato puts the war about 9,000 years before Solon, while the Minoan civilization flourished from about 3000 BCE to about 1100 BCE, with the palace culture in decline by the middle of the 15th century BCE.
They disappeared through natural and cultural upheaval. That echoes Plato’s point that human greatness does not last.
