Plato's Atlantis in Timaeus and Critias

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History, Myths and Legends reads Benjamin Jowett’s 1871 English of Plato before adding much of its own. Solon, honored in Egypt, offers the oldest Greek memories and is told that Greeks are like children who recall only one flood. The priests say there were many, and that a noble people once lived in the Athenian land, with registers reaching back eight thousand years. A great power then marches, unprovoked, on Europe and Asia. Ancient Athens stops it and frees those inside the pillars, then loses its warriors in one day and night of quakes and floods. Atlantis sinks with them, and the sea is called too thick with mud to cross. Critias claims the tale from Solon, with foreign names swapped for Greek ones. The reading gives the plain, a king whose name passed to the ocean, a metal valued just under gold, ringed harbors, a shrine of Cleito and Poseidon, and springs both hot and cold. The narrator’s close is moral: contact with other lands thinned the old virtue, and the drowning followed the failed campaign.

Key points

The episode stays close to Jowett’s Plato, with short interruptions rather than a new discovery.
Egyptian priests tell Solon that Greek memory holds one flood and misses many earlier ones.
A great power attacks Europe and Asia, and ancient Athens is said to stop it.
Athens’s warriors and the island of Atlantis vanish together in quakes and floods, leaving a sea that cannot be crossed.
The reading then gives the plain, the rings of water, the shrine, and a metal ranked just below gold.
The narrator’s own close is that moral thinning brought divine punishment right after the failed war.