Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (16 page)

Doumas saw no point in equivocating. When he started working at Akrotiri in 1968, a friend who owned the island’s only hotel had called to ask if Doumas would adopt a neutral stance on the question
of Atlantis in order to attract visitors. “I said I was a scholar, not a tourist agent,” he said. The sour look on his face made clear that forty years later he was still irked by the hotelier’s nerve.

Doumas has never been exactly shy about voicing his skepticism about Atlantis, either. He’d expressed plenty of doubts into a microphone at the inaugural Atlantis conference in 2005, at which he’d been invited to give the keynote address. He started his remarks by calling Atlantis “science fiction,” a description that must have confused a crowd largely comprised of people hoping to find Plato’s lost land. In the version published in the conference proceedings, he concluded with a quotation in French and an appeal to his fellow scholars to “stop pursuing chimeras.”

Over dinner, Doumas was no less dubious. “Those who support a view that Santorini was Atlantis say, ‘Well, it was a mistake,’” Doumas said. “Instead of 900 they wrote 9,000. No. Plato was firm; he was clear. It was nine thousand years before. And of course in the tenth millennium such a culture never existed. It is the postglacial period. Plato has also written about the Cave of the Ideas, yes?” Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, one of the most famous passages in the
Republic
, is where Socrates describes a hypothetical group of prisoners chained underground who experience reality as a set of flickering shadows on a wall. Meanwhile all the colorful, three-dimensional wonders of the sun-filled world transpire a few meters beyond. The scene nicely illustrates one of philosophy’s primary conundrums: the wide gap between the small slice of existence that we’re able to perceive through our senses and any sort of objective truth. “So why don’t we identify the Cave of the Ideas and try to find it?” Doumas asked.

To Doumas, the story of Atlantis was simply a tale that Plato cooked up to illustrate the political theories in the
Republic
. “He wanted to present to his fellow Athenians that for a society to be in harmony, in peace, it has to respect certain rules. And as soon as
these rules are not followed, then the gods are against you. It’s exactly the same thing like in the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Bible. It’s no different. So why do people not try to find Sodom and Gomorrah?”

“Actually,” I said, trying not to sound disrespectful, “I’m pretty sure people are looking for Sodom and Gomorrah at this very moment.”

“They are; I know,” Doumas said, shaking his head. “People are crazy.”

While Doumas and I chatted, George continued filling our wineglasses and quietly ordered a massive spread of seafood. Plates of mussels and shrimp and tiny fried fish arrived in waves until the tabletop was so crowded we had to keep our hands in our laps. Doumas nibbled at a few things and apologized for not being able to indulge more enthusiastically. He’d recently suffered a heart attack. He was nearing eighty years old and with the Greek economic crisis the budget for Akrotiri excavations had been cut to zero. I got the sense that his naturally low reserves of bullshit had long since been burned through.

“If you look at the occupation, or the specialty, of those who are in favor of Atlantis, you will realize that they have nothing to do with classics nor history nor archaeology. Nothing. Somebody’s an engineer, another is a geologist. Well, when Praxiteles made the famous statue of Hermes in Olympia, he called the sandalmaker of Olympia to check if there was anything wrong with the sandals. This sandalmaker came and, admiring, said, ‘I think if the head of the statue was a little bit further left, or if the hair . . .’ So Praxiteles said, ‘Shoemaker to your shoes.’ Don’t get involved in other people’s affairs. I don’t say these people are crooks. I think because they are not specialists in the field, maybe they really believe these things.”

“So why do you think people still get so excited about finding it?” I asked. I was a little drunk at this point—maybe more than a little—and Doumas had just dismissed about a year’s worth of research I
had done. I suddenly felt emotionally committed to the search for Atlantis. I was looking for an honest answer.

“If you remember, the title of my paper at the 2005 conference was ‘The Utopia of a Utopia.’ Atlantis is a utopia. Everyone would like to live in such an ideal city. It’s a dream.”

•   •   •

I didn’t do much dreaming when I crawled into bed after midnight. Around 6:00
A.M.
I woke up unrested, still unsettled by my talk with Doumas, and severely hungover. My mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with volcanic ash, and the words of the physician Eryximachus from Plato’s
Symposium
swished around my throbbing brain: “If I have learned anything from medicine, it is the following point: Inebriation is harmful to everyone.”

I cursed George’s gift for hospitality, pulled on some clothes, and went out in search of coffee. The only place open was a small, open-air restaurant catering to the fishermen who sold their daily catch at a small stand across the street. Seafood was perhaps second on the list of things I didn’t want to think about, behind dry Santorini white wine. After two double espressos, I decided to sweat out the prior day’s overindulgence by walking down the 586 steps from Fira, on the rim of Santorini’s bowl, to the water.

The zigzagging trip to the bottom was peaceful and pretty enough that I wished I’d brought my camera. Out ahead of me, Nea Kameni smoldered in the center of the caldera. Doumas’s doubts had made me more skeptical than ever that any temple of Poseidon had ever occupied the same space. The return trip to the top was far trickier. Every two minutes a small team of mules came charging down the steps like the bulls at Pamplona, shitting everywhere, followed by a mule tender with no sympathy for anyone who lacked the good sense to pay him for a ride to the top. I finally reached the summit, soaked with sweat, smelling of yesterday’s wine from the waist up
and barnyard from the ankles down. George called, sounding less than fresh himself. He suggested we push our scheduled visit to Akrotiri back a couple of hours. “No strike today, Mark,” he croaked. “Meet me at my café at eleven.”

By noon, George was wheedling complimentary passes from the ticket sellers at Akrotiri. (I recognized the universal hand gestures signifying “This guy is a travel writer; can’t we come in for free?”) Visitors have to enter a modern building, covered by a new steel-beamed roof, in order to see the ancient buildings dug out of the earth. (The site had only recently reopened after a seven-year hiatus because part of the old roof had collapsed and killed a tourist.) Even on a hot sunny day the ruins felt spooky, recently deserted. They looked like abandoned sand castles. Walking down the excavated streets made me feel creepy, like I was visiting a crime scene. No human remains had yet been found. Doumas believed that future excavations might find large numbers of bodies once the area near the former port was cleared. His hypothesis was that the people of Thera had been waiting to escape on ships when the island blew sky-high.

We circled the ruins for an hour, George snapping plenty of high-resolution photos for future projects. The frescoes had all been removed and shipped off to the national museum in Athens. There were no Atlantis revelations to be found here.

“Mark, you look like you could use a glass of wine,” George said, patting me on the shoulder. Ten minutes later we were seated on the terrace of a winery of which George was, I wasn’t shocked to learn, part owner. After two glasses of dry white, our hangovers lifted. In a pleasant haze, I met some more of George’s cousins. We ate a huge lunch at Character Café, polished off a bottle of Santorini rosé, and watched the sun sink over the caldera, the most gorgeous sunset I’d ever seen. But just thinking of the blast that had formed a thousand-foot-deep hole gave me chills.

In the
Odyssey
, Homer writes of the importance of
xenia
, or
“guest-friendship,” the ancient Greek tradition of offering hospitality to strangers who are far from home. I thanked George for showing me
xenia
, but he said he didn’t recognize the word and changed the subject to restaurants that I should check out in Athens, where I was heading next. Perhaps I was butchering the pronunciation. Early the next morning, when I checked out of the hotel, the owner handed me my bill, along with two shopping bags stuffed with postcards, calendars, books, dried fava beans, olive oil, and wine.

“
Kalimera!
” he said. “George left these for you.”

Triangulating Pythagoras

Plato’s Academy, Athens (ca. 360 BC)

I
f Christos Doumas was correct, the Atlantis tale was solely a literary invention, like the Cave of the Ideas, created to illustrate the political model Plato placed at the center of what is probably the most influential work in the history of philosophy, the
Republic
. Near the start of the
Timaeus
, Socrates reminds his friends that “the chief theme of my yesterday’s discourse was the state—how constituted and of what citizens composed it would seem likely to be most perfect.” He then expresses a desire to see his ideas brought to life, in a story about how Athens “when at war showed by the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities a result worthy of her training and education.” This is Critias’s cue to start telling the story he heard of the war between Athens and Atlantis.

But what was Plato’s ideal state? Strange though it may seem today, one of the Cradle of Democracy’s greatest citizens was no populist. His noble lineage predisposed him to negative feelings toward democracy, which he wrote “distributes a sort of equality to both equals and unequals alike.” Average citizens were easily swayed by rhetoric; a majority had repeatedly voted in support of the disastrous military
campaigns of the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, which ended with the defeat of Athens in 404 BC, including a reckless invasion of Syracuse that ended with the loss of thousands of Athenian soldiers and two fleets of warships. Following the war Athens was briefly ruled by a brutal oligarchy installed by the Spartans. When democracy was restored, Socrates, who was himself no populist, was prosecuted for the crimes of “refusing to recognize the gods of the state” and “corrupting the youth of Athens.” Socrates was found guilty by a majority vote and sentenced to death. He chose to die by drinking hemlock rather than escape into exile. In Plato’s beautiful dialogue the
Phaedo
, one of the witnesses to Socrates’s death presumably speaks for the author when he says, “My own tears came in floods against my will.”

Following the death of Socrates in 399 BC, Plato escaped Athens to travel widely for a decade, stopping in Libya, Italy, and Egypt, all three of which, of course, later appeared in his Atlantis tale. In 390 BC, he began a long stay in southern Italy and Sicily, a period during which he encountered two men who would greatly influence the path of his life and thinking. In the city of Taras (now Taranto), he met Archytas, a statesman who led his city according to the principles of Pythagoreanism. This school of philosophy, founded by the Greek expatriate Pythagoras around 530 BC, held that mathematics provided a key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Plato’s conversations with Archytas seem to have left him a convert to the Pythagorean veneration of numbers.

In Sicily, Plato met the dictator Dionysius I, a very different type of ruler. Dionysius controlled the powerful city of Syracuse absolutely. Plato liked dictatorships even less than he did democracies, an opinion he shared freely with Dionysius. The king responded by having Plato arrested and (according to one version of the story) sold into slavery. By luck, a friend of Plato’s was at the auction and purchased his freedom.

Having completed one of history’s most fruitful study-abroad trips, Plato returned to Athens in 387 BC and founded the Academy on a plot of land about a mile from central Athens. He was already predisposed toward authoritarianism by his aristocratic roots, but the execution of Socrates by referendum seems to have cemented the military oligarchy of Sparta in Plato’s mind as the least-worst model for a society. Plato provides a framework for such a society in the
Republic
.

In the
Republic
, the character Socrates compares running a large state to steering a large ship. To do so by majority rule invites calamity. “The true pilot must give his attention to the time of year, the seasons, the sky, the winds, the stars, and all that pertains to his art if he is to be a true ruler of a ship,” Plato writes. And just as trained navigators are the only ones suited to captain ships, only rulers trained in philosophy are capable of governing. The very best ruler would be both a philosopher and a king, or what Plato calls a philosopher-king.

Socrates also describes one of Plato’s most important philosophical concepts, the Theory of Forms, by which the world is divided into two regions—that which we can intuit through our senses and a higher, abstract perfection (the forms) that exists outside of space and time. This latter idea is where we get the Platonic ideal, the unattainable model.
10
We see a spindly legged animal with a long face and mane and we think “horse,” but that animal is merely a flawed example of the form of a horse.

Plato’s ideal city-state in the
Republic
more closely resembles Sparta
than Athens. All classes were expected to live austerely. Children were to be raised communally; no child would know the identity of his parents and vice versa. Men and women who possessed desirable characteristics would be encouraged to breed. Rigid state control of education would be essential. Children’s exposure to literature would be limited—Homer in particular was to be banned—so as not to expose them to tales that featured poorly behaved gods or soldiers who showed doubt or remorse.

Stories, Plato knew, were much more than entertainment. Used properly, they could be powerful tools.

•   •   •

If classics scholars are correct in estimating that Plato wrote the
Timaeus
and
Critias
around 360 BC, his writing would have been colored by a disastrous real-world attempt to create a model society like that of the
Republic
. One might think that after being sold into slavery at the end of his first extended visit to Syracuse (just imagine the nasty TripAdvisor review he could leave today), Plato would have sworn off the place. But when Dionysius I died in 367 BC, his brother convinced Plato to return to Syracuse to train the new ruler, Dionysius II. Under Plato’s tutelage the young dictator might develop into a philosopher-king.

If Plato was hoping to use the
Republic
as a training manual, his expectations were wildly unrealistic. In book VII of the
Republic
, Socrates explains that good philosopher-kings will require, in addition to extensive work in mathematics, five years of study in dialectic and fifteen years of practical training in governing. A true philosopher-king should be prepared to rule by age fifty—not exactly the sort of advice a young dictator is eager to hear. Whatever soured Plato’s second extended visit to Syracuse, he ended it under house arrest. When Plato’s old Pythagorean friend Archytas, the widely
respected leader of nearby Taras, received word that Plato was being held captive, he dispatched a rescue ship.

Archytas was himself a mathematician, famous for devising a nifty formula to double the size of a cube. (He seems to have been a most extraordinary man; among his achievements he is also credited with inventing a toy bird that could fly—possibly history’s first robot.) Some scholars believe he was the model for the philosopher-king in the
Republic
. It seems quite likely that his ideas were on Plato’s mind during the composition of the
Timaeus
, Plato’s attempt to impose order on a chaotic world. The Pythagorean basis of the
Timaeus
would have been obvious to anyone studying at the Academy. The school’s curriculum was based on the four disciplines of the Pythagorean quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics. Aristotle even wrote a book, since lost, about the relationship between Archytas’s works and the
Timaeus
.

One thing I had noticed about the Atlantologists I’d met was that while almost all of them took Plato’s numbers quite seriously, none had much considered the possible influence of his Pythagorean thinking. Perhaps this is because the Pythagoreans themselves were such an odd bunch.

Though we can’t be completely certain that the historical figure Pythagoras even existed—some historians think that he was invented, and there is a general consensus that all mathematical discoveries made by Pythagoreans were routinely attributed to their founder—classical sources paint him as a brilliant, charismatic philosopher from the Greek island of Samos. He may have traveled to Egypt, where he could have picked up some basic geometry, and eventually settled in Crotona, on the front part of the Italian boot’s instep. It was here that the Pythagorean Order was founded, a religious community (
cult
might be a more accurate description) based on his teachings. The Pythagoreans were secretive and wrote nothing down,
but there is no doubt that their core beliefs blended two basic ingredients that do not mix well today—mathematics and mysticism.

Pythagoras is famously credited with saying, “All things are numbers,” an idea that fascinated not only Plato but also Aristotle. In his
Metaphysics
, Aristotle wrote of the Pythagoreans that “in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist . . . fire, earth, and water,” but also justice, soul, reason, opportunity, “and similarly almost all other things.” The discovery of mathematical formulas such as the Pythagorean theorem about 3-4-5 right triangles or that the sum of sequential odd integers starting with the number 1 always adds up to a square (i.e., 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16 = 4 squared) must have felt like divine revelations. It was as if bit by bit they were unraveling the binary code behind reality.

The Pythagoreans were equally well-known for their esoteric dogmas. Chief among these was a belief in the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. Austerity was prized. Property was held in common. Women were considered equal to men. Pythagoreans were vegetarians—the term
Pythagorean diet
was commonly used to describe abstinence from meat until the nineteenth century—possibly because of their belief in transmigrating souls. Their list of dos and don’ts was long and strange. Never touch a white rooster. Always remove the right shoe first but wash the left foot first. Do not leave the impression of one’s body in the bedclothes upon rising. And never eat—nor even touch—beans.

As often occurs with charismatic religious leaders, Pythagoras himself became the subject of various astounding stories, many of them involving animals. He was said to have once persuaded a bear to give up eating meat. On another occasion he heard a dog yelping as it was being beaten and intervened, insisting that he recognized the animal’s bark as the voice of a reincarnated friend. Aristotle noted that Pythagoras was believed to have a golden thigh, had
traveled to the underworld, and was reported to have been seen in two different cities at one time.

If all things were numbers to the Pythagoreans, those same numbers were also, to a certain extent, living things. They had personalities and meanings beyond representing amounts. The number 1, for instance, represented reason and indivisibility. The number 2 represented opinion and imperfection, 3 represented harmony, and so on. Odd numbers were male, even numbers female. Numbers were represented by groups of monads, or dots, which is why 9 is still called a “square” number—it would probably have been depicted as three identical rows of three pebbles. The most perfect number of all was 10, which was the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 and would have been represented like this:

This figure was called the sacred tetractys, and it would have been packed with meaning for a Pythagorean. Not only does this equilateral triangle have three equal sides, but also the four rows correspond to four of the fundamental concepts of geometry: a point (zero dimensions), a line (a one-dimensional segment between two points), a plane (a two-dimensional shape, in this instance a triangle), and a polyhedron (a 3-D solid that occupies space, in this instance a
pyramid). The Pythagoreans believed that numbers gave off vibrations, an idea that is still popular with numerologists, who proudly cite Pythagoras as their founder. It should come as no surprise that the Pythagoreans were really into pentagrams, which they apparently used as symbols of health.

But what might strike us as a particularly modern goofball idea—is there any term more self-evidently flaky than
good vibrations
?—seems to have instead emerged from one of the greatest mathematical discoveries ever made. Historians agree that this discovery had a major influence on Plato, and on the
Timaeus
. Which means that it might help explain Atlantis, too.

•   •   •

According to Pythagorean lore, one day Pythagoras was walking past a metalworker’s workshop. From within he heard the surprisingly harmonious sounds of hammers beating iron on anvils. The philosopher entered the shop to discover the source of this concordance. Within he learned that when two hammers, one twice the weight of the other—a six-pounder and a twelve-pounder—struck metal simultaneously, they were in perfect harmony. The key was the ratio of their weights, 1:2. Pythagoras later re-created the same effect by plucking two strings, one twice the length of the other. (Musically inclined blacksmiths should not attempt to replicate these results at home. Subsequent tests have shown that the hammer demonstration doesn’t actually work, but the string does.)