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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

There is no "legend" of Atlantis, it's simply an allegory in Plato's works. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the ancient world believed that Atlantis had existed, any more than we believe today that Hogwarts was a real place.

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How does one discern whether a story is a history or a fiction, thousands of years afterward? Language and culture shift dramatically in that time. (Actual question, not rhetorical.)

If Plato is the only one who recounts the story, that doesn't show he invented it. Stories of actual events are lost all the time. Why would it be surprising to hear a story about a thing from only one remaining and preserved source?

You can tell by actually reading the account and knowing a little bit about the context. Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time. Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true. Given that the point of the story is to demonstrate the importance of Athens, (according to the character Critias, Athens is so important that people in Egypt are still relating this story of something that happened thousands of years ago,) it's definitely a fiction.

Plato's dialogues were works of fiction that used fictionalized versions of real people as characters in order to illustrate philosophical points. The guy who relates the story of Atlantis is Critias, one of the members of the Thirty Tyrants, a clique who ruled Athens for a while, and Critias claims that he got the story from his distant ancestor Solon who was one of the lawgivers for Athens. To a contemporary of Plato's this would be as if he'd written a story about George Bush, relating a story that he'd gotten originally from George Washington, about how the United States had once fought a war against a long-lost evil empire back in the bronze-age. You weren't supposed to think it was true.

> Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time.

To me, this barely seems relevant to any criticism of the story. Plato had, at most, 2000 years of written history to draw upon (and I’d guess far far less at his disposal), so his estimate of the age of an ancient civilization is inevitably going to be quite far off.

I don’t disagree with the conclusion, but that seems like a minor glitch.

I'd say that if Plato's account is so garbled that he gets the date off by thousands of years, the entire story is likely to be useless as a source of actual history.

This is where I think the culture barrier may have a major role. If somebody today says a thing happened ten thousand years ago, the listener has an expectation that the true year of the event is 2022 - 10000 plus or minus, what, 1000? And the more scientific the context of the communication, the smaller the expected error would be.

Is is possible that for an ancient Greek to describe an event as "ten thousand years ago", he means nothing more or less than "too long ago to remember when, exactly"? It may be unfair for us to backport our modern conception of numbers as these very precise values.

I guess your argument isn't convincing for me. A clerical inaccuracy is not evidence that whole account is false. And if Plato has some propagandish agenda about Athens (which I can totally believe), then that warns us the story may be exaggerated or one-sided---but altogether false?

It sounds like you're saying it's clear from reading the text that the dialogue is manufactured, even through the ancient language / ancient culture barrier. But why does that imply the content is manufactured?

If you told me a story about George Bush telling a remarkable story that was passed down to him orally through every president from George Washington, the only reason I'd suspect you were making it up is because it's inconsistent with the many other sources I was taught from, which don't mention such a thing, and I trust that they are relatively complete with respect to important events. Did Plato's readers have analogous sources? Do we still have them today?

>Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true.

That is an assumption.

We have many places that use the same or similar names (England vs New England (us state). New Mexico(us state) vs Mexico. Its not inconceivable that there was more than 2 locations named Athens. 1 of which is currently lost buried or unknowingly called that.

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