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CHAPTER II ATLANTIS About 2,300 years ago Plato wrote of a great and populous island empire in the outer (Atlantic) ocean, which had warred against Athens more than 9,000 years before his time and been suddenly engulfed by a natural cataclysm. According to his statement of the case this prodigious phenomenon, with all the splendor of national achievement that shortly preceded it, Jiad been quite forgotten by the Athenians; but the tradition was recorded in the sacred books of the priests of Sais at the head of the Nile delta and was related by these Egyptians to Solon of Athens when he visited them apparently somewhere near 550 B. C. Solon embodied it, or began to embody it, in a poem (all trace of which is lost) and also related it to Dropides, his friend. It is probably to be understood that he further commu- nicated it to this friend in some written form, for we find Critias in a dialogue with Socrates represented by Plato as declaring: "My great-grandfather, Dropides, had the original writing, which is still in my possession." 1 If so, it has vanished. ELEMENTS OF FACT AND FANCY IN PLATO'S TALE OF ATLANTIS It is evident that the Atlantis tale must be treated either as mainly historical, with presumably some distortions and exag- gerations, or as fiction necessarily based in some measure (like all else of its kind) on living or antiquated facts. Certainly no one will go the length of accepting it as wholly true as it stands. But, even eliminating all reference to the god Poseidon and his plen- tiful demigod progeny, we are left with divers essential features 1 Benjamin Jowett: The Dialogues of Plato, Translated into English with Analyses and Introductions, 3rd edit., 5 vols., London and New York, 1892; reference in Vol. 3, P- 534-