Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City Read Free Page A

looking for regularity in a chaotic world. In the
Timaeus
there’s this attempt to associate all things with numbers,” Johnson said. “He’s trying to give a theological account that provides something like the geometric logic of nature.” According to tradition, over the entrance of the university Plato founded in Athens, the Academy, were posted the words LET NO ONE IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE.
    For Plato, the earth
is a globe that rotates because that is the most perfect shape and the most perfect motion. Everything in thenatural world can be broken down into four elements: fire, air, water, and earth. These elements are in turn composed of four geometric solids: four-sided, six-sided, eight-sided, and twenty-sided. A fifth, twelve-sided polygon represented the universe. Johnson pulled an animated diagram of the Platonic solids up on his computer screen. They looked like the multifaceted dice from
Dungeons & Dragons
. These five solids, according to the
Timaeus
, can be subdivided further into two types of triangles, both of which have measurements that correspond to the Pythagorean theorem: A 2 + B 2 = C 2 .
    The
Timaeus
, with its emphasis on a world created by a single god, was hugely influential in the development of Christian and Islamic ideas. The speaker Timaeus explains how the cosmos was fashioned from chaos by a single demiurge, or Divine Craftsman. This creator is good, and therefore the world is good. This will sound familiar to anyone raised in a modern religious household, but it was a fairly radical departure from the traditional Greek pantheon of gods who drank, fought, engaged in various sexual hijinks, and capriciously meddled in the affairs of mortals. Unlike the Old Testament God, Plato’s Divine Craftsman does not create the cosmos ex nihilo. He uses a set of ideal blueprints but must work with the imperfect materials the universe has presented to him, which is why the world often falls short of mathematical perfection.
    •   •   •
    Plato’s odd choice to sandwich his theories about the creation of the cosmos between the two halves of the Atlantis tale has been discussed and debated almost since the moment he died. So has the question of whether he meant the story to be true or not. I mentioned to Johnson that Aristotle had famously dismissed the story, and he nodded in agreement. Aristotle spent twenty years studying at Plato’s Academy, which was the world’s first university. Duringand after his time there he seems to have rejected many of Plato’s ideas. According to one melodramatic bit of ancient gossip, following Plato’s death, his star pupil was angry at being passed over to replace his mentor as the head of the institute. One later writer, Johnson told me, said Plato had referred to Aristotle as “the foal that kicks its mother when it’s had too much milk.” 1
    I was curious to know if stories like that of Atlantis were common in Plato’s writings. “There are things about it that are typical,” Johnson said. “It’s a story within a story. It’s a way of Plato distancing himself from making it literal. It allows Plato a little free range.” The philosopher was certainly fond of inserting myths into his dialogues. The
Republic
ends with the Myth of Er, about a soldier who comes back to life on his funeral pyre after dying on the battlefield. “He claims to have seen the transmigration of souls,” Johnson said. “You get to pick your next life.” According to this myth, those who choose to live justly go to heaven, while those who seek money or power are condemned to misery.
    “One thing I noticed is that Plato stresses over and over that the Atlantis story is true,” I said.
    “You’ve probably heard about the Noble Lie.”
    I had. This was Plato’s mandate in the
Republic
that in order to maintain the class structure necessary for an ideal society, the rulers would need to tell the lower caste that the system had been put inplace by God. In this