Page:Legendaryislands00babcuoft.djvu/25

FACT AND FANCY IN PLATO'S TALE 13 but of the triumph of reason in humanity. . . Not only the Timaeus, but the unfinished whole of which it forms the introduction, is professedly an imaginative creation. For the legend of prehistoric Athens and of Atlantis, whereof Critias was to relate what belonged to internal policy and Hermocrates the conduct of the war, would have been no other than a prose poem, a "mythological lie," composed in the spirit of the Republic, and in the form of a fictitious narrative. 1 Jowett takes substantially the same view in his introduction to the "Critias," indicating surprise at the innocent, literal, matter- of-fact way in which the former existence and destruction of great Atlantis have generally been accepted as sober declarations of fact and accounted for in divers fashions accordingly. Nor is this estimate of the Atlantis tale as primarily a romance of en- lightenment and uplifting a merely modern theory. Plutarch, in a passage quoted by Schuller, lays more stress on Plato's tendency to adorn the subject, treating Atlantis as a delightful spot in some fair field unoccupied, than on ennobling imagination, and avers the described magnificence to be "such as no other story, fable, or poem ever had." 3 But this, whether wholly adequate or no, surely emphasizes the recognition of romance. Plutarch adds a word of regret that Plato began the "delightful" story late in life and died before the work was completed. The precise motive of the fiction is only of minor importance to our present inquiry. It seems hardly possible that the development of the composition in the remaining two parts of the trilogy could have given it a more authentic historical cast. As the matter stands Atlantis is rather succinctly reported in the "Timaeus," more fully and with mythological and architectural adornments in the later "Critias" till it breaks off in the middle of a sentence; but the two accounts are consistent. It seems a clear case of evolution suddenly ar- rested but allowing us fairly to infer the character of the whole from the parts that remain. If there were any corroboration of the tale, it would count on the historical side; but it seems to be agreed that Greek literature 1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth edit.. Vol. 21, p. 823. ' Atlantis, the "Lost" Continent: A Review of Termier's Evidence, Geogr. Rev., Vol. 3, 1917, pp. 61-66; reference on p. 62