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History of Atlantis by Lewis Spence
Index | Chapter: 1 | 2 |3 | 4 |5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |9 | 10 |11 | 12 |13 | 14 |15 | 16
CHAPTER III.
THE SOURCES OF ATLANTEAN HISTORY
II. FROM THE FOURTH CENTURY B.C.
DIODORUS SICULUS, a historian, of Agyrium, in Sicily, who flourished contemporaneously with Julius Caesar and Augustus, has vouchsafed us nearly as much information regarding Atlantis and its history as did Plato himself. His Historical Library is a general history of the world as known in his time, from the earliest ages to Caesar's conquest of Gaul. If Diodorus was essentially a compiler, he was also a great traveller, and traversed a large part of Europe and Asia for the purpose of collecting materials for his work. Dealing with the geography of the eastern Atlantic region in the fourth chapter of his third book, Diodorus asserts that the Amazons of Africa were much more ancient and famous than those of Pontus in Asia Minor. But they were not the only race of warlike women inhabiting African soil, the Gorgons being nearly as celebrated for courage and valour. The Amazons inhabited an island called Hesperia (the Hesperides, or island of Hesperus, the evening star, son of Atlas, where grew the famous golden apples or oranges, guarded by a dragon) lying to the west, near to the morass named Tritonides, a fen so called from the fact that it was traversed by the River Triton. This morass borders upon Ethiopia, under Mount Atlas, which itself extends to the ocean. (I follow Diodorus in his use of the present tense). The island Hesperia, he says, is very large, abounding in all sorts of fruit trees, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep and goats. But corn is unknown to its inhabitants. The Amazons, inspired by war-like ambition, subdued all the cities of this island, with the exception of one called Mena, accounted sacred, and now inhabited by the Ethiopians called Ichthophages, or fish-eaters. It is frequently scorched by eruptions of fire, which break out of the earth, and is rich in precious stones.
Having subdued many of the neighbouring African and Numidian tribes, the Amazons founded a great city in the morass of Triton, which, from its shape, they called Chersonesus, or the City of the Peninsula. But, not content with their numerous conquests, they invaded Mount Atlas, a rich country, full of great cities, where the gods had their origin in those parts bordering upon the ocean. Led by Merina, their queen, an army of 30,000 foot and 2,000 horse, clad in serpent skins, and armed with swords, javelins and bows, with which they were most expert, hurled itself upon the country of the Atlan tides, and routed those which dwelt in the city of Cercenes. They pursued them so closely that they entered the town at their heels, and took it by storm, putting the men to the sword and carrying off the women and children as captives. The remaining Atlantean communities, stricken with panic fear, submitted incontinently, whereupon Merina made a league with them, built another city in place of Cercenes, calling it by her own name, and peopled it with the captives and other Atlanteans.
The Atlanteans, who appear to have entertained a wholesome dread of the warrior-queen, showered rich gifts and honours upon her, and this treatment seems quite to have won her heart. Shortly afterwards, the Atlanteans, being attacked by the Gorgons, Merina, at their request, invaded the country of the Gorgons, slaying large numbers of them and taking 3,000 prisoners. The rest fled to the forests, which Merina tried to set on fire.
But, baulked in this amiable intention, she returned to her own country.
Both Amazons and Gorgons were subsequently conquered by Perseus and Hercules. "It is reported likewise, that by an earthquake the tract towards the ocean opened its mouth and swallowed up the whole morass "of Triton." Merina during her reign, however, extended her conquests to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean Islands, and formed a league with Horus, King of Egypt.
Diodorus then proceeds to give a more particular account of the Atlanteans, and the fabulous statements they made of the genealogy of the gods, which, he says, do not differ much from the fables of the Greeks.
The Atlanteans, he tells us, inhabited a rich country bordering upon the ocean, and were notable for their hospitality to strangers. They boast that the gods were born among them, and say that the most famous poet among the Greeks confirms this assertion when he makes Hera say:
" The utmost bounds of earth far off I see
Where Thetys and old Ocean boast to be
The parents of the gods."
They assert* that Uranus was their first King, and that he civilised the people, causing them to dwell in cities and till the soil. He had under his dominion the greater part of the world, especially toward the west and north. Addicted to the study of Astrology, he prophesied many future events, and instituted the solar year and the lunar month as measures of time. The people, struck with admiration for his skill, paid him divine honours after he was dead, and called the starry heavens after his name.
* Diodorus in this passage seems to speak of the Atlantean State as if it existed in his time. He may, of course, refer to the people of Atlas in Africa, as some parts of his narrative would seem to indicate; but that his account has, as regards its more ancient application, a reference to Atlantis, the southern continent, and not to the remains of its population in Africa, cannot be doubted.
Uranus had forty-five children by various wives, and eighteen by Titea or Terra, who thus came to be known as Titans, or the Terrene people. His most celebrated daughters were Basilea, and Rhea or Pandora. Basilea, the elder, was so solicitous in her care for her brothers that she came to be known as the Great Mother, and on the demise of Uranus was elected queen by the general suffrages of the people. She espoused her brother Hyperion, and bore him Helio and Selene, later the gods of sun and moon respectively. But her remaining brothers, dreading that Hyperion might usurp the throne, slew him and drowned the infant Helio in the River Eridanus or Po, in Italy. Selene, his sister, who passionately loved her brother, cast herself from the housetop and perished.
Basilea, on learning of the death of her children, became demented, and wandered up and down, with hair dishevelled and bedizened with ornaments, playing wildly on the timbrel and cymbal. When the people endeavoured to restrain her, a dreadful tempest of rain, thunder and lightning suddenly broke forth and she was seen no more. Divine rites were established in honour of her children and herself, and these included the playing of the instruments she had employed in her madness, and the erection of altars on which sacrificial offerings were made.
On the death of Hyperion the children of Uranus divided the kingdom among themselves. The most renowned among these were Atlas and Saturn. Atlas assumed control of the country bordering upon the ocean, called the people inhabiting it Atlanteans, and its great mountains Atlas, after his own name. Like his father Uranus, he was a wise astrologer, and was the first to discover the knowledge of the sphere, whence arose the legend that he bore the world upon his shoulders. The most celebrated of his sons was Hesperus, who, while observing the motions of the stars upon Mount Atlas, vanished in a tempest. The people, lamenting his fate, called the morning star after his name.
Atlas had also seven daughters, who were called after their father, Atlantides. Their names were Maia, Electra, Taygeta, Asterope, Haley one and Celaeno.* Their offspring were the first ancestors of several nations, barbarian as well as Greek. The Atlantides became the constellation of the pleiades, and were adored as goddesses. Nymphs, too, were commonly called Atlantides, "because nymphs is a general term in this country applied to all women."
* Only six names are here given.
Saturnus, the brother of Atlas, was profane and covetous. Marrying his sister Rhea, he begat Jupiter, who must not be confounded with Jupiter, the brother of Ccelus, or the sky. This Jupiter either succeeded to his father Saturn, as King of the Atlanteans, or displaced him. Saturn, it is said, made war upon his son with the aid of the Titans, but Jupiter overcame him in a battle, and conquered the whole world. "This is a full account of all the gods mentioned and recorded by the Atlanteans."
In the second chapter of his Fourth Book, Diodorus returns to the subject of Atlas and the origin of the Hesperides. In the country called Hesperis, he says, dwelt two famous brothers, Hesperus and Atlas. They owned a flock of surpassingly beautiful sheep, of a ruddy and golden colour, for which reason poets allude to them as "golden apples." *
* Melon, in Greek, signifies both a sheep and an apple.
Hesperis, the daughter of Hesperus, married her brother Atlas, and the pair had seven daughters, the Atlantides, also called after their mother the Hesperides. Busiris, King of Egypt, fell in love with the maidens, and despatched a number of pirates to capture them. But Hercules intercepted the pirates, and rescued the young women, whom he restored to Atlas, their father. In gratitude Atlas taught him the art of Astrology, instructing him in the use of the sphere, from which circumstance the Greeks invented the fable that Hercules had for a season relieved Atlas of his burden in bearing the world upon his own shoulders.
Elsewhere, in the fourth chapter of his Fifth Book, Diodorus confirms in a measure the statement of Plato concerning the submergence of a portion of the Greek peninsula. He states that the Hellenic coast opposite the island of Rhodes and Cos was so damaged by the flood of Deucalion, which occurred in the Seventh Generation, that it lay "under pressing and grievous calamities, for the fruits of the earth were rotted and spoiled for a long time together, famine prevailed, and through corruption of the air, plague and pestilence depopulated and laid the towns and cities waste."
Diodorus, in his Fifth Book, also states that a certain Atlantic island was discovered by some Phoenician navigators, who, while sailing along the west coast of Africa, were driven by violent winds across the Ocean. They brought back such an account of the beauty and resources of the island, that the Tyrrhenians, having obtained the mastery of the sea, planned an expedition to colonise the new land, but were hindered by the opposition of the Carthaginians. Diodorus does not mention the name of the island ; and he differs from Plato by referring to it as still existing. Pausanius relates that a Carian, Euphemus, had told him of a voyage during which he had been carried by the force of the winds into the outer sea, "into which men no longer sail; where he came to desert islands, inhabited by wild men with tails, whom the sailors having previously visited the islands called Satyrs, and the islands Satyrides," whom some take for monkeys. Perhaps the whole narrative was an imposture on the grave traveller.
Strabo (b. 54 B.C.) mentions in his Seventh Book, on the authority of Theopompus and Apollodorus, the same legend, in which the island was called Meropis, and its people Meropes. He also remarks in his Second Book that Poseidonius (fl. 151-135 B.C.) says that, as the land was known to have changed in elevation, the account of Plato ought not to be regarded as fiction, and that such a continent as Atlantis might well have existed and disappeared. The passage is as follows: "Poseidonius correctly sets down in his work the fact that the earth sometimes rises and undergoes settling processes, and changes that result from earthquakes and other similar agencies, all of which I, too, have enumerated above. And on this point he does well to cite the statement of Plato that it is possible that the story about the island of Atlantis is not a fiction. Concerning Atlantis, Plato relates that Solon, after having made inquiry of the Egyptian priests, reported that Atlantis did once exist, but disappeared an island no smaller in size than a continent; and Poseidonius thinks that it is better to put the matter in that way than to say of Atlantis : "Its inventor caused it to disappear, just as did the Poet the wall of the Achaeans.'"
Pomponius Mela (b. A.D. 80) expressly affirmed in his First Book the existence of such an island as Atlantis, but places it in the southern temperate zone.
Theopompus of Chios, a Greek historian of the fourth century B.C., none of whose works has survived, save in the Varia Historia of Elian, a compiler of the third century A.D., alludes to an account of the Atlantic area given by the Satyr Silenus, the attendant of Dionysius, to Midas King of Phrygia, who seized him when intoxicated, and recovered much ancient wisdom from his lips. " Silenus," says Theopompus, "told Midas of certain islands named Europa, Asia and Libya, which the ocean sea surrounds and encompasses. Outwith this world there is a conti- nent or mass of dry land, which in greatness was infinite and immeasurable, and it nourishes and maintains by virtue of its green meadows and pastures many great and mighty beasts. The men who inhabit this clime are more than twice the height of human stature, yet the duration of their lives is not equal to ours."
The account of the great continent of Saturnia from the dialogue attributed to Plutarch, "On the Face appearing in the Orb of the Moon," and printed with his Morals, tells us that "an isle, Ogygia, lies in Ocean's arms, about five days' sail west from Britain, and before it are three others of about equal distance from one another, and also from that, bearing north-west, where the sun sets in summer. In one of these the barbarians feign that Saturn is detained in prison by Zeus." The neighbouring sea was known as the Saturnian, and the continent by which the great sea was circularly environed was distant from Ogygia about five thousand stadia, but from the other islands not so far. A bay of this continent in the latitude of the Caspian Sea, was inhabited by Greeks, who once in thirty years sent certain of their number to minister to the imprisoned Saturn. One of these paid a visit to the great island, as they called Europe, and from him the narrator learned many strange things, especially regarding the state of the soul after death.
Proclus reports that Marcellus, a writer of whom nothing else is known, in a work entitled The Ethiopic History, speaks of ten islands situated in the Atlantic Ocean, close to Europe. He says that the inhabitants of these islands preserved the memory of a much larger Atlantic island, Atlantis, which had for long exercised dominion over the other islands of that ocean. Of the islands, he says seven were consecrated to Proserpina, of the remaining three, one was consecrated to Pluto, another to Ammon, and the third, a thousand stadia long, to Poseidon.
Arnobius, a Christian apologist, of Sicca, in Africa, who flourished in the fourth century A.D., in his First Book says: ". . . ransack the records of history written in various languages, and you will find that all countries have often been desolated and deprived of their inhabitants. Every kind of crop is consumed, and devoured by locusts and by mice: go through your own annals, and you will be taught by these plagues how often former ages were visited by them, and how often they were brought to the wretchedness of poverty. Cities shaken by powerful earthquakes totter to their destruction: what did not bygone days witness cities with their populations engulfed by huge rents of the earth? or did they enjoy a condition exempt from such disasters?
"When was the human race destroyed by a flood? Was it not before us? When was the world set on fire, and reduced to coals and ashes? Was it not before us? When were the greatest cities engulfed in the billows of the sea? Was it not before us ? When were wars waged with wild beasts, and battles fought with lions? Was it not before us? When was ruin brought on whole communities by poisonous serpents? Was it not before us? For, inasmuch as you are wont to lay to our blame the cause of frequent wars, the devastation of cities, the irruptions of the Germans and the Scythians, allow me, with your leave, to say In your eagerness to calumniate us (the Christians) you do not perceive the real nature of that which is alleged.
" Did we bring it about, that ten thousand years ago, a vast number of men burst forth from the island which is called the Atlantis of Neptune, as Plato tells us, and utterly ruined and blotted out countless tribes?"
A summary of the remaining classical data concerning Atlantis must here suffice. Pliny the Elder, in the Second Book of his Natural History, cast doubts upon the tale, but Philo the Jew, a Platonist, in his Indestructibility of the World> embraced it in its entirety on the word of his great master. Longinus believed that the Atlantean episode in the Timceus was simply a literary ornament without either historic truth or philosophic significance. Syrianus, Proclus's master, regarded the tale as historically accurate, and as a symbol of the dogmatic philosophers. Amelius saw in it the opposition of the fixed stars and the planets, Numenius that of good to evil. Origen, the Christian father, considered the account as an allegory of the constant war between the good and evil genii, and Porphyry saw in it the strife between the flesh and the spirit, lamblichus was of the opinion that its circumstances bore a striking resemblance to the war between the Greeks and Persians, the strife of the Gods and Titans, and the combat between Osiris and Typhon or Set, or the continual strife between chaos and order, duality against unity.
The notions of the Alexandrian School with reference to Plato 's account are to be found in the Eighteenth Book of Ammianus Marcellinus, who mentions the destruction of Atlantis as an historic fact. The Byzantine geographer, Cosmos Indicopleustes, in his Christian Topography, included Atlantis in his cosmographical system, but altered its circumstances so as to agree with scriptural authority. He believed that the earth was flat, and that a vast continent environed the ocean. On this continent man had his origin, and for its existence he invokes the authority of the Timceus. Plato 's account, he thought, was a legacy of the original Mosaic tradition, but Atlantis was to be looked for in the east, and was the land of the ten generations of Noah.
Coming to later times, Serranus, in 1578, declared that he had discovered in the Mosaic writings the sesame to the stone which blocked the entrance to the Atlantean labyrinth . The hint was avidly seized upon by Huet, Bochart and Vossius, an eager trio, who by ingenious misreadings of the Pentateuch, bemused their credulous contemporaries into an acceptance of Plato's island as the theatre of patriarchal history.
But widespread as was agreement with their conclusions, they seemed to Mathew Olivier, a grave advocate of Marseilles, to miss the point and pith of Serranus's main argument. Enlarging upon his master's theory, Olivier placed Atlantis in Palestine itself, assuming, logically enough, that if the Biblical patriarchs were in reality the denizens of Atlantis, and were known historically to have inhabited the Holy Land, that region must indubitably have been Atlantis! About a quarter of a century later, in 1754, Eumenius, a learned Swede, developing the views of Olivier, pushed the theory to its natural conclusion, and explained the entire Atlantean mythology by means of Jewish history. He had, however, been preceded by another Scandinavian of even more portentous erudition, for in 1692 Olaus Rudbeck had published his amazing Atlantica, which, in a weird spirit of patriotism, maintained that the Norse Edda rather than the Mosaic writings held the true interpretation of the Atlantean secret. For him Sweden was Atlantis, and Upsala the capital of Plato's shadowy Utopia. In four folio volumes he undertook to prove that the Scandinavian peninsula was not only the centre from which all European civilisation had radiated, but the source of an original world-mythology of which the Edda was a surviving fragment.
The theory of a northern site for Atlantis dies hard. Indeed it still survives, for M. Gattefosse of Lyons has triumphantly asserted it in his La Verite sur Atlantide, published so lately as 1923. But he had a worthy forerunner in Bailly, a contemporary of Voltaire, who, like Rudbeck, sought to discover the Atlantean region in the frozen north. Not long before Buffon had made popular the idea that the "central fire" which maintained the temperature of the earth had cooled in the course of ages, and Bailly, seizing upon the notion, boldly asserted that the now frozen north had formerly enjoyed almost tropical climatic conditions. Its inhabitants during the torrid period, he maintained, were the Atlanteans of Plato, who upon the gradual cooling of the region, betook themselves to Asia, carrying with them their scientific knowledge and religious beliefs, which they scattered broadcast among the nations. In his History of Ancient Astronomy and Letters on Atlantis he brought to bear the whole battery of his learning to prove that Spitzbergen was once a fertile and populous country, and was, indeed, the veritable Platonic Atlantis. Strangely enough, his thesis has assumed the quality of legend, and in some parts of Northern Europe the tradition still flourishes that somewhere in the neighbourhood of the North Pole fertile valleys actually exist. In fact the belief has lately received a new lease of life from the statements of recent explorers of the Far North from the American side, who have provided glowing accounts of low-lying valleys in the polar area, fragrant with flowers and swarming with butterflies.
Bailly was a thorough-going disciple of Euhemerus of Thessaly, and believed that all myth had a historical basis. For him Atlas was a king of the once tropical Spitzbergen-Atlantis, an actual human ruler and a distinguished astronomer, the inventor of the sphere. His Hyperborean Atlanteans finally came to rest, after a prolonged migration, on the plains of Tartary. But Bailly's farrago of erudite nonsense was much too gross even for that somewhat credulous Paris which was then on the brink of a human catastrophe even more stupendous then the wreck of Atlantis. In his Lettre Americain the Comte de Corli, while neatly disposing of Bailly's absurdities, sprung on a readily accepting public the theory that Atlantis was none other than the American continent itself. Even the imperturbable Voltaire, who had hesitated a humorous doubt regarding the non-existence of a great Atlantic continent, was somewhat taken aback by the boldness of the Arctic hypothesis which Bailly, grasping at straws, had wantonly dedicated to him.
But an even more erudite and determined effort to locate Atlantis elsewhere, in Asia, to wit, was that made anonymously in 1779, and by Delisle de Sales, a member of the Institute, in his History of the Atlanteans. De Sales attempted to prove, by the aid of geology, that the actual Atlantis had been situated in a vast ancient sea which formerly occupied the site of Greece and a large part of the Italian peninsula. The globe, he argued, had in primitive times been almost completely covered by water, but in the course of ages this had evaporated, leaving, however, an immense sea, which united the Caspian to the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. From the midst of this ancient oceanic waste ran the Caucasus range, and this De Sales identified with the early Atlantis. Thence migrated its cultured inhabitants, one stream betaking itself to the Atlas range, then also an insular sub-continent, and another to Central Asia. The Atlantis of Plato De Sales disposed of by identifying it with the Ogygia of Homer, the magical island of the enchantress Calypso, situated "between Italy and Carthage," and this, he averred, had been destroyed by an earthquake, the island of Sardinia remaining as a fragment of the wreckage. The Atlanteans he called "the benefiters of humanity," and described his system as "the key to ancient history."
A little later Bartoli, in his Essai sur V explication, tendered a hypothesis seemingly more modest, but in reality equally bizarre. Solon, he said, had invented the fable of Atlantis, and had made it the subject of an allegorical and political poem, in which the Atlanteans represented the Athenian faction of the Paraliens. Plato, seizing upon this fiction, had adopted it to later events, among them the Peloponnesian war. Plato's Atlanteans who besieged Athens, were, according to Bartoli, the Persians, and the whole story a mythic representation of their struggle with Hellas and their final overthrow.
Equally curious are the attempts made to identify the lost Atlantis with America. Treatises on the subject began to appear shortly after the discovery of America, and extraordinary efforts seem to have been made to attach the name of Plato's island to the new continent. In 1553 Gomara in his Historia de las Indias unhesitatingly identified America with Atlantis, and eight years later Guillaume de Postel drew attention to the similarity of the native name for Mexico, Aztlan, with that of Atlantis, which he proposed to confer on the New World. Bacon in his Nova Atlantis identified America with Plato's isle, although certainly in such a spirit of fantasy as might be employed by Sir J. M. Barrie. In any case he places it in the Pacific. But that Shakespeare had at least some memory of the Atlantis story at the back of his mind when he set the scene of his Tempest in a fantastic Atlantic isle, seems not improbable.
But the French geographers, Nicholas and Guillaume Sauson, were by no means designedly fantastic in their methods. In 1689 tnev published an atlas representing the primitive geographical divisions of America, its partition between the ten royal families who had issued from Poseidon, the father of Atlas, and displaying those portions of the Old World which, according to Plato's story, they had succeeded in colonising. So late as 1762 Robert de Vaugoudy produced a similar atlas in verification of the theories of the Sausons, to the accompaniment of Voltaire's ribald and inextinguishable laughter. Even Stallbaum, the serious critic of Plato's Timceus and Critias, upheld the identity of America with Atlantis, and thought it probable that the ancient Egyptians had a knowledge of the Western Continent. Harles in his Bibliotheca Greeca inclined against the American theory, and Humboldt in his Examen Critique regarded it as fabulous, although he believed that Solon had actually brought back the story from Egypt. Among other more modern writers Buffon, Ginguene, Mentelle and Raynal were not unfriendly to the general theory of the existence of Atlantis, and Athanasius Kircher and Becman, Genebrard, and Portia d'Urban embraced it in its entirety. Baudelot, Tournefort, d'Engel, Cadit, De la Borde and Bori de Saint-Vincent were its enthusiastic advocates.
Many of these later authors agreed in thinking that Atlantis had formerly existed, as stated by Plato, but were at variance regarding the circumstances of the events which occurred thereon, and the marvels of which he spoke. Some of them sought to explain the names of the divinities connected with the tale symbolically, or as cosmogonical elements personified. The ten Kings of Atlantis were for some of them representative of the ten great antediluvian epochs, and they argued that the history of Atlantis was in reality an allegorical account of the early history of mankind. Kircher, Ginguene, Mentelle and others believed that the Atlantic Islands were the remains of the sunken continent, and Buffon argued that Ireland, the Azores and America had once been portions of the great isle of Plato. De la Borde actually included the Moluccas, New Zealand and other distant insular masses in the original Atlantean landmass, and Engel and the Comte de Corli learnedly insisted that the Atlantean boundaries had touched Europe and Africa on one side and America on the other. According to them, man had passed from the Old World to the New by way of an Atlantean land-bridge, the submergence of which had destroyed the ancient communication between the two continents.