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

way the wisest would continue to lead and the others would be satisfied with their station in life.
    “Maybe when he insists on the truth of Atlantis, that itself is sort of a Noble Lie,” Johnson said. He reached for his thick
Collected Works of Plato
and scanned the pages with his index finger. “One other thing that seems typical is that the story resolves itself through natural disaster. Here it is, in the
Laws
.” The
Laws
was one of Plato’s final works, an attempt to draw up a blueprint for the society he’d outlined in the
Republic.
It’s infamous for being even harder to comprehend than the
Timaeus
,
and mind-bendingly dull
.
“Even people who study ancient philosophy tend to dip in and out of the
Laws
rather than reading the whole thing,” Johnson admitted.
    Johnson read aloud. “The human race has been repeatedly annihilated by floods and plagues and many other causes, so that only a fraction of it has survived.”
    That sure sounded a lot like Atlantis. In the
Timaeus
, an Egyptian priest tells his Greek visitor, “There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.” Might it have been a story Plato made up to show an idealized state, like the one he proposed in the
Republic
, that was corrupted and thus had to be punished by the gods?
    “Here’s a hypothesis that could be wildly wrong,” Johnson said, closing the book. “It seems like the Atlantis myth does cash in on some ideas from the
Republic
. Have you bumped into this idea of the Golden Age?”
    I had. The Greeks were great believers in the Good Old Days. For Plato, who was a bit of a snob, this would have been an imaginary time when Athens was ruled by wise aristocrats rather than a mob ignorant of geometry.
    “I gather that Atlantis was supposed to be like his philosopher-kings model and that it was destroyed by natural disaster,” he said.In the
Republic
, Plato proposes that the best possible leaders would be philosopher-kings, monarchs who ruled wisely because they had been trained in the philosophic arts, especially mathematics. “Plato says that the ideal state cannot last. He seemed to think its own downfall is built into the very structure of nature.”
    Johnson had a fascinating poster on his wall that at first glance looked like the concentric circles of Atlantis. I was disappointed to learn it was actually a re-creation of a map from the movie
Time Bandits
. I seemed to recall the movie beginning with a boy’s fascination with ancient Greece and leading through a long, complicated journey based on possibly unreliable source materials. I couldn’t remember if it had a happy ending.
    “I’m guessing Atlantis isn’t discussed much in professional philosophy circles,” I said.
    “It isn’t. Insofar as it is referenced, it’s going to be to ask, what philosophy can we extract from this myth?”
    “So do you think it’s possible that Atlantis ever existed?” I asked. I didn’t mention anything about actually going to look for it.
    We sat in silence while Johnson formulated an answer. He had the sympathetic look on his face that teachers use when they don’t want to discourage classroom discussion, even though the students obviously haven’t understood the assigned reading. The five Platonic solids rotated merrily on his computer screen.
    “I guess I’m open to the idea,” he said, finally. “So long as it’s reasonable.”

CHAPTER THREE
    “Disappeared in the Depths of the Sea”
    Saïs, Egypt (ca. 600 BC)
    T his is a detective story, one that starts in ancient Greece and follows a twisting path through (to list just a few locations) Pharaonic Egypt, Nazi Germany, and contemporary Saint Paul, Minnesota. And as with any good detective story, it helps to assemble all the available evidence in one place.
    The story begins in the
Timaeus
, which takes its