The moment Britain became an island

BBC News Magazine ^ | Monday, February 14, 2011 | Megan Lane

[Bernard Marx]

IOW, Plato’s literary device was based on very old oral traditions which were, like the secret word in the game of telephone, altered in transmission over hundreds of generations, or perhaps many more generations than that.

That was the exact thought behind my first post on this. Oral traditions (I always think of Bill Clinton when I write that) of catastrophic post-glacial flooding would likely have been passed down to the Greeks. But you don't really have to reach nearly that far back to find catastrophic historic events that very likely gave Plato the Atlantis notion.

In 373 BC, a violent earthquake, accompanied by a tsunami, destroyed Helike and Bura, two cities situated on the southern shores of the Gulf of Corinth roughly 150 km west of Athens. Plato was in his mid 50s at the time. Helike was the capital of the Achaean League and revered throughout the ancient world as the cult centre for worship of Poseidon. (Recall that Plato’s Atlantis was ruled by a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings arose directly from Poseidon, god of sea and of earthquakes).

This was a period when Greece was victimized by numerous large and deadly earthquakes. Earlier, in 426 B.C. an earthquake-caused tsunami had either destroyed or created the island of Atalante (historical accounts differ). I’m pretty well convinced that Plato’s literary/philosophic conception of “Atlantis” was a fictional cautionary tale based on these historic events and others.

Don’t forget the great Spartan earthquake of 464 B.C. that ushered in the “Earthquake War” between Sparta and Athens. As one writer put it: “At the end of a century that had witnessed one of the most violent earthquake storms to have affected the ancient world, ordinary Greeks probably didn't speculate on the origins of the mythical Atlantis; they were too busy surviving its reality.”

[SunkenCiv]

Continual quakes happened during the Pelopponesian War, including the offshore one which swept away an Athenian fort and garrison, the rocky isle of Atalante, which wasn’t much of an island (the account I’ve seen said it hadn’t previously been occupied). The connection between earthquakes and tsunamis was obviously understood — Poseidon was also the Earthshaker — and even in the Iliad, there are events that are probably related to quakes (a river ran backwards, everyone was fleeing in terror, that kind of thing).

The point is, Plato didn’t write about them, he didn’t write about Thera either (the “super-eruption” there is mythical anyway), and for that matter didn’t write about Ryan and Pitman’s Black Sea Flood. He wrote about a disaster caused by the celestial orbs leaving their accustomed places, the Phaethon story, and about shoal mud outside Gibraltar. He may indeed have made up every last detail, or based it on something recent and local, but I don’t find that explanation compelling.

[Bernard Marx]

He may indeed have made up every last detail, or based it on something recent and local, but I don’t find that explanation compelling.

I do. Different strokes and all that...

[SunkenCiv]

Oral traditions (I always think of Bill Clinton when I write that)

BTW, I neglected to say LOL on that one. :')

[SunkenCiv]

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