Timaeus
HERMOCRATES: And we too, Socrates, as Timaeus says, will not be
wanting in enthusiasm; and there is no excuse for not complying
with your request. As soon as we arrived yesterday at the
guest-chamber of Critias, with whom we are staying, or rather on
our way thither, we talked the matter over, and he told us an
ancient tradition, which I wish, Critias, that you would repeat
to Socrates, so that he may help us to judge whether it will
satisfy his requirements or not.
CRITIAS: I will, if Timaeus, who is our other partner, approves.
TIMAEUS: I quite approve.
CRITIAS: Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange,
is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the
wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of
my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many
passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my
grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of
old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city,
which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the
destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all
the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting
monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and
worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival.
SOCRATES: Very good. And what is this ancient famous action of
the Athenians, which Critias declared, on the authority of Solon,
to be not a mere legend, but an actual fact?
CRITIAS: I will tell an old-world story which I heard from an
aged man; for Critias, at the time of telling it, was, as he
said, nearly ninety years of age, and I was about ten. Now the
day was that day of the Apaturia which is called the Registration
of Youth, at which, according to custom, our parents gave prizes
for recitations, and the poems of several poets were recited by
us boys, and many of us sang the poems of Solon, which at that
time had not gone out of fashion. One of our tribe, either
because he thought so or to please Critias, said that in his
judgment Solon was not only the wisest of men, but also the
noblest of poets. The old man, as I very well remember,
brightened up at hearing this and said, smiling: Yes, Amynander,
if Solon had only, like other poets, made poetry the business of
his life, and had completed the tale which he brought with him
from Egypt, and had not been compelled, by reason of the factions
and troubles which he found stirring in his own country when he
came home, to attend to other matters, in my opinion he would
have been as famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet.
And what was the tale about, Critias? said Amynander.
About the greatest action which the Athenians ever did, and which
ought to have been the most famous, but, through the lapse of
time and the destruction of the actors, it has not come down to
us.
Tell us, said the other, the whole story, and how and from whom
Solon heard this veritable tradition.
He replied:—In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river
Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the
district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also
called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The
citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the
Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same
whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the
Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To
this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour;
he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about
antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other
Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On
one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he
began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the
world—about Phoroneus, who is called ‘the first man,’ and about
Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and
Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and
reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the
events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the
priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you
Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old
man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to
say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old
opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any
science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. 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. There is a story, which even you have
preserved, that once upon a time Paethon, the son of Helios,
having yoked the steeds in his father’s chariot, because he was
not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all
that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a
thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really
signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens
around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the
earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who
live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more
liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the
seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our
never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the
other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the
survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on
the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are
carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither
then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above
on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below;
for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most
ancient. The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost
or of summer sun does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in
greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened
either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of
which we are informed—if there were any actions noble or great or
in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by
us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when
you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters
and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual
interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes
pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of
letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again
like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient
times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those
genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon,
they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place
you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous
ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly
dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever
lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a
small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was
unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of
that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a
time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which
now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed
of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to
have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition
tells, under the face of heaven. Solon marvelled at his words,
and earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in
order about these former citizens. You are welcome to hear about
them, Solon, said the priest, both for your own sake and for that
of your city, and above all, for the sake of the goddess who is
the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She
founded your city a thousand years before ours (Observe that
Plato gives the same date (9000 years ago) for the foundation of
Athens and for the repulse of the invasion from Atlantis
(Crit.).), receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of
your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the
constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be 8000 years
old. As touching your citizens of 9000 years ago, I will briefly
inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the
exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at
our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare
these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the
counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the first
place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all
the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several
crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the
class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen;
and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are
distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the law
to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the
weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of
equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in
your part of the world first to you. Then as to wisdom, do you
observe how our law from the very first made a study of the whole
order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which
gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was
needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which
was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess
first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose
the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that
the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce
the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of
war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot
which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And
there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones,
and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children
and disciples of the gods.
Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our
histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and
valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which
unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and
Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth
out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was
navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the