bigmarlon
Winger
As I said in my original post... imo, myths are just stories used to pass down ideas. Atlantis, imo, is just a cautionary tale of what happens to societies that fail to protect themselves from [insert villain of choice here].Well, there issues with this - not aimed at you btw, I'm just broadly addressing the thread.
1. Solon died 100 years before Plato, so even if Plato was presenting this as a genuine statement of fact, he'd be doing little more than Chinese whispers - unless Solon wrote this down in detail.
2. However, Plato's timing of Solon visiting Egypt is in conflict with Herodotus and later, Aristotle.
3. His use of Solon is quite complicated to break down without assuming knowledge of Plato, Solon and the political context. However, he is probably using Solon (and by extension Egypt) authoritatively to reinforce his own ideas in the Republic - which I have studied academically, but not so much the Timaeus and Critias.
4. Plato's description of Atlantis matches no civilisation that ever existed, as far as anybody else bar Plato is aware of - which is absolutely bizzare. Nobody else anywhere, mentioned Atlantis prior to Plato, and every person since, relies entirely on him as the source. This is absurd, if we assume Atlantis was real.
5. The source that Solon is alleged to have seen, is also impossibly unreliable. Neither Egypt nor Athens existed 11,500 years ago. In addition, there was no mathematics, no way of measuring 'years', and nobody could write any of this down until several thousand years later - which means that attempts to post hoc map this onto geological events from similar periods, doesn't grant any knowledge by Plato - as he would have no reasonable way of knowing that, or anything else that happened such a vast period of time pre-history.
In the late Archaic/Classical periods in Greece, anything written which discusses events from more than about 100-120 years, is hugely unreliable anyway. We can study Thucydides and Herodotus and see this in action, but it is fascinating.
There is a lot more I could say, but I don't want to bore everybody
But I heard a quote from a particular Classics scholar (whose name escapes me) that I liked: 'People looking for Plato's Atlantis essentially set out looking for their lost pet dog in Dundee, and then don't find it, so instead they point to a recovered parakeet found in Bolivia, and claim to found the dog'.
There are some good, accessible academic books on Plato that I could recommend if anybody was interested.
I am interested in where you got this information though. You sound like you've either done your research or have stumbled onto a website worth knowing about. I like to learn.