Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (3 page)

The plain was divided into sixty thousand districts, each of
which
was led by a military commander who was expected to raise at least twenty men, including ten armed soldiers, four sailors, four horses, and four horsemen. The Atlantean navy had twelve hundred ships.

(One can almost imagine Timaeus counting on his fingers and giving Socrates the side eye.)

The ten kings of Atlantis ruled according to the laws of their father, which had been inscribed on a pillar of orichalcum in the Temple of Poseidon. The kings gathered every fifth and then every sixth year to determine if any of them had violated the sacred laws and to take part in the ritual capture of bulls that had been set free in the temple. They caught the beasts using only staffs and ropes (“but with no iron weapon”), then slaughtered them on the pillar as a sacrifice. The kings put on magnificent blue robes for a ceremony in which they passed judgments and swore to rule fairly. Above all, the kings vowed never to war among themselves. If one of their number should attempt to overtake the kingdom, all the rest promised to join forces against the insurrection. They understood their great material fortune and saw their wealth as a burden.

Over the generations, though, the Atlanteans became debased, filled with “avarice and unrighteous power.” Zeus could see that the Atlanteans must be punished for their waning virtue. So he hailed the gods to their pantheon, from which all the world could be seen. “And when he had called them together, he spake as follows—”

There, Plato breaks off the story abruptly, as if someone has kicked the plug out of the phonograph. Whether Plato terminated the story abruptly for dramatic effect or because Aristotle had just arrived with his lunch order is impossible to know.

Mr. O’Connell’s Atlantipedia

County Leitrim, Ireland

G
etting philosophy professors to rank their top ten thinkers had been surprisingly easy. Getting academic specialists to discuss searching for Atlantis proved to be somewhat more difficult. Brian Johnson had been correct; those philosophy professors who wrote about it tended to dismiss it outright as a clever invention, a literary device created by Plato to illustrate his political ideas. Julia Annas, perhaps America’s preeminent expert on Plato, decreed that it has been “convincingly established” that the story was fictional. A symposium held at Indiana University devoted to the topic “Atlantis: Fact or Fiction?” had awarded the title to the latter in a knockout. Most of the e-mails I sent and re-sent to addresses ending in .
edu
went unanswered. One prominent archaeologist whom I contacted wrote back to inform me that no serious scholar would ever entertain the idea that any part of the Atlantis tale had been real, and that I was foolish even to inquire about such things. Her definitive sign-off was ominous: “I hope you listen, for the sake of your reputation as a writer.”

I couldn’t blame academics for being wary. Any online search for information about Atlantis quickly sucks one into a wormhole of
conspiracy theories and magic portals to untapped dimensions. Anyone with credentials who dared to entertain the possibility of Atlantis having existed was probably inundated by weirdos.

As I typed Atlantis-related search terms into Google, one glaring exception came up again and again, a site called the Atlantipedia. It was comprehensive, with hundreds of entries, all of which were written in an evenhanded style, offering dry commentary where appropriate. (Of one theorist who suggested that the Atlanteans had access to space travel, lasers, and cloning, the site’s author noted, “A cynic might be forgiven for attributing his outlandish views to his unrepentant support for the use of marijuana.”) The tone was skeptical but not dismissive. The range of subjects was exhaustive. Several feasible location theories were presented and dissected. The Atlantipedia, it emerged, was the work of one person, an Irish retiree named Tony O’Connell.
4

I e-mailed Tony and asked if he might be open to answering a few questions. He suggested a list of books to read and invited me to come over to Ireland and stay with him as long as I liked. “The simple fact is that these theories cannot all be right and quite possibly all are wrong,” he cautioned. “Take it slow or your head will spin.”

A month later, as Tony and I drove west from the Dublin airport, he explained over the sound of the windshield wipers how he’d gotten involved in Atlantology. Years before, he had owned a small trucking dispatch company in Dublin, an all-consuming job that required him to keep track of thousands of details. One early morning while he and his longtime boyfriend, Paul, were working late in the warehouse, a gang of robbers entered and held guns to their necks. Afterward, Tony had a revelation. “I was sitting atop a forklift and I realized, I can’t do this anymore.” He left the city for a tiny village in
County Leitrim, which is probably best known for being Ireland’s least-populated region. When Tony’s mother began to suffer from dementia, she moved in with him. “As she descended into madness I decided that I needed a distraction,” he told me. He had the idea of compiling an Atlantis encyclopedia.

The more evidence Tony amassed about the various location theories, the more he became convinced that Plato’s story was probably true. And the more he learned about the subject, the more he felt able to narrow down the area in which Atlantis might have existed.

Tony lived about a mile outside of a village that consisted of two pubs, the ruins of two medieval abbeys, a grade school, and a visitors center that never seemed to be open when I passed by. He and Paul (who had moved in for a while with his own ailing mother) lived in a house that had until the 1950s been the station for a narrow-gauge railway line. Their home was cozy, with two bedrooms upstairs and a small office on the ground floor that held Tony’s impressive Atlantis library. The kitchen smelled of spices and cigarettes, since Paul was a passionate cook and smoker. Tony did most of his Atlantis-related work in the front room, tapping away on a laptop perched atop a coffee table as the BBC News played on the television, muted. He was round and bald and walked with a limp from gout. A mischievous gleam in his eye hinted that he might be pulling someone’s leg and made you hope that it wasn’t yours. He raised his eyebrows above his wire-framed eyeglasses whenever emphasizing his doubts about something. When he laughed, which happened often, his whole body shook. He reminded me of an off-duty department store Santa Claus.

Like most men of a certain age, Tony had a daily routine that varied only slightly. Tony and Paul kept almost opposite hours. Tony got up early. Paul, who was a couple of decades younger, was a night owl and usually woke in the afternoon, when Tony brought him breakfast in bed. After dinner, Tony usually dropped Paul at one of
the two local pubs; Paul carried a reflective vest and penlight for his 2:00
A.M.
walk home. His mortal enemy, a nasty Doberman, lived a few doors down. “If you decide you’d like to go for a walk, you’d best go in the other direction,” Paul warned me, lighting another cigarette to steady his nerves.

Tony usually conducted his online Atlantis business in the mornings while drinking a mug of tea and wearing his bathrobe, which gave the impression that he was puttering about on the web. Later, I’d log on to the Atlantipedia site and find that he’d written three new entries while I was in the kitchen eating my morning muesli. The Atlantipedia served as a sort of clearinghouse for amateur, and occasionally professional, Atlantologists. “Some person has identified Mesopotamia as an island surrounded by two rivers,” he called out one morning from the living room. “Not the Mesopotamia where Iraq is, which might make some sort of sense. It’s the one located in Argentina.”

•   •   •

Late each morning, Tony and I drove over to the small city of Carrick-on-Shannon to do a little shopping and run some errands, like placing horse racing wagers for Paul at the off-track betting office. One day we stopped by the local registry so that Tony could pick up the paperwork for a civil partnership. After twenty-odd years as a couple, Tony and Paul were making things official. Once our tasks were completed, we’d stop for a coffee and slice of cake.

When I had initially asked Tony why he thought the Atlantis story was true, he had pointed me to a fascinating scholarly essay by a former NASA scientist, the late A. N. Kontaratos, which cites twenty-two instances in which Plato attests to the veracity of the Atlantis story.

“Solon was a very important lawmaker, a very just man, and highly
regarded,” he told me at the coffee shop, whose jazzy decor made it seem as though we were discussing lost cities on the set of
Friends
. “Plato using him would be like you writing a book and invoking Benjamin Franklin as your source. You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t true. I think the most powerful argument is when he expresses reservations—like he does about the ditch around the plain.” Critias pauses his description of the enormous channel carved by generations of Atlanteans to explain that while he knows that its incredible proportions seem unrealistic, he’s only passing along what he was told. “No one’s ever going to express reservation about his own argument,” Tony said. “That’s counterproductive.”

On the other hand, Tony noted, “no one ever asks if Solon made it up. Or if the Egyptians made it up to impress their visitor. You’ve got to tread very carefully.”

But though Tony believed that the core story—that a large maritime power had waged a war against the eastern Mediterranean—was true, almost everything else should be viewed with skepticism, most particularly numbers and measurements, such as the claim that Atlantis had been larger than Libya and Asia combined. Libya in Solon’s day was the coastal strip of North Africa from the Atlantic Ocean up to Egypt. Asia was Asia Minor, or modern Turkey. The Greeks of Plato’s era had no methods to measure large areas of interior land. Greek sailors followed the coast and navigated by landmarks and other recognizable features, as in Herodotus’s advice, “When you get eleven fathoms and ooze on the lead, you are a day’s journey out from Alexandria.”

“Plato wouldn’t have known how big Atlantis was,” Tony scoffed. “He was remembering things discussed as a child.” Tony also wasn’t convinced that Plato was talking about physical size. The ancient Greek word he used,
meizon
, can be translated as “greater.” Most readers took that to mean the island of Atlantis was enormous, so
large that it had nowhere to fit except in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Tony argued that by
greater
Plato might have been speaking of the military power of Atlantis.

I asked him for his thoughts about the location. Again, the translation of a single word was the source of much speculation.

“Plato mentions an island
before
the Pillars,” Tony said. The Greek word Plato used was
pro
. “Was that inside or outside? I have to depend on the English translation, so I’d be wary of that. We only have Plato’s works. Anything else isn’t evidence. People get an idea and they just find a theory to match. They’ve drawn up these checklists and conveniently leave out anything that might work against their theories. It doesn’t work to get nine out of ten things to match up but the tenth is no good.”

Kontaratos, the NASA scientist, had listed helpful criteria for finding what he termed “a potential resting site for Atlantis,” the basic elements of which were

1. Atlantis must have been located someplace where an island exists or once existed.
   
2. The island must have once sunk, entirely or partially.
   
3. The island must agree with Plato’s description of Atlantis’s “distinct geomorphology.” It should have concentric rings of water, mountains, and a large plain.
   
4. The island must have been home to “a literate population with metallurgical skills.”
   
5. The island must have suffered a cataclysmic natural disaster.
   
6. The island must have been “routinely reachable from Athens.”
   
7. The island must have been at war with Athens when the cataclysm occurred.
   
8. The island must have been situated “just outside” of the Pillars of Heracles.
   
9. The island must have been destroyed around 9600 BC.
   
10. The island must have been as large as a continent or connected to a body of land of that size.
    

It’s a very sensible-sounding checklist, but as I was slowly learning, every single one of these criteria was open to interpretation. Kontaratos, for example, argued that the rings of Atlantis were inspired by a semicircular earthworks in Poverty Point, Louisiana, a landlocked spot in the northeast corner of that state. How would news of this structure, which wasn’t exactly “routinely reachable from Athens,” or even New Orleans, have traveled to the Mediterranean? Kontaratos believed it had been brought back by European seafarers who had traveled up the Mississippi River to mine a deposit of high-grade copper found near Lake Superior.

“The name
Cyprus
means ‘copper,’” Tony said, referring to the mineral-rich island off the coast of Turkey, well-known to Athenians of Plato’s time. “Why bother going all the way up the Mississippi?”

Meizon
and
pro
weren’t the only ancient Greek words up for philological debate.
Some
Atlantologists were arguing that the word
island
in the original Greek, for example, might signify something other than land surrounded on all sides by water. A surprising number of theories were based on the notion that the Greeks applied the name
Pillars of Heracles
to any number of narrow channels around the Mediterranean, and therefore Plato wasn’t necessarily referring to the Strait of Gibraltar. Tony thought that the term might not represent an actual place but rather the furthest limits of Greek exploration during Plato’s lifetime.

•   •   •

Over the days and various desserts, Tony and I discussed the pros and cons of the leading theories and how they stacked up against Plato’s story. After a week, I’d narrowed my list of candidates down to four.

The most popular theory by far was what’s known as the Minoan Hypothesis. This was the idea that Plato had been inspired by the massive eruption of the volcano at the center of the Greek island Thera, now called Santorini. Like Atlantis, Santorini has a circular shape, almost like a bull’s-eye. In the 1960s, archaeologists had uncovered there an entire lost city buried for thirty-five hundred years beneath a thick layer of ash. This city was filled with extraordinary artworks and architecture and had evidently been home to a technologically sophisticated people with close ties to the Minoans of Crete, who had built the spectacular Palace at Knossos. But Tony wasn’t convinced. “Remember, Plato said it was an earthquake, not a volcano,” he said, his raised eyebrows punctuating his doubts. The Thera eruption had almost certainly caused a tsunami, though, a logical explanation for the floods that sank Atlantis. A few scholars had even connected the Thera eruption with the biblical plagues recorded in the book of Exodus. Some theorists had made a big deal about the similarities between Minoan artworks with a bull motif and Plato’s description of the bull-killing ceremony practiced by the kings of Atlantis. Tony was dubious. “Stories about bulls are all over the place,” he said. “We have them here in Ireland.”

Another location that had recently gained in prominence was the coast near the city of Cádiz in southern Spain. Geographically, it seemed a better match than Santorini, since it was located just outside the Pillars of Heracles at Gibraltar and in the Atlantic Ocean. Plato had even mentioned it by name. The area was rich in copper, which could account for the orichalcum mentioned in the
Critias
. Historians generally agreed that another famous lost city, Tartessos, had once existed in the vicinity. Tartessos might have served as the model for what Plato called Atlantis. The region had a well-established history of earthquakes and massive tsunamis. Satellite photos seemed to show large shapes, including concentric circles, buried beneath what was now a swampy nature reserve. “But it
doesn’t exactly have a sign saying
WELCOME TO ATLANTIS
, with the population and elevation numbers, does it?” Tony said, crossing his arms. There also was no large island in southern Spain, and Plato had been clear about Atlantis being an island.