Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (18 page)

Another waiter came bearing apple pie. Katsanopoulou threw her hands up and said something sharp to him in Greek. He scurried away. She shook her head, took a sip of coffee, and continued.

“Another amazing thing is that Plato was alive at the time of Helike and lived very close, in Athens. One of the ancients tells us that the Spartan admiral who tried to take Plato into slavery in Syracuse—to sell him, in fact—this Spartan admiral was in Helike the night of the catastrophe and drowned there. That makes it even more plausible that Plato knew about this event and that it could serve as a model.”

There was an even more direct personal link from Helike to Plato. One of the primary sources about the city’s destruction had been a student of his at the Academy, Heraclides. The whole Atlantis story might have been cooked up at a faculty-student mixer just a mile or so from where we were sitting.

“Would you be shocked if they found a real Atlantis?” I asked.

“Yes, I would, to tell you the truth. Because so far from the evidence known to us I don’t find any good grounds to support the idea that it did exist. I find it quite plausible that Plato had reasons, including political reasons, to create such a story that involves the Athenians.” She stirred her coffee and tilted her head slightly to the side. “On the other hand, we cannot absolutely exclude the possibility.” Katsonopoulou adjusted her scarf and waited a few seconds to see if I found this diplomatic answer satisfactory. “You’re asking if I think it existed?”

“Yes.”

“I cannot say yes. I would be quite, um, cautious.” She seemed to be not quite satisfied with this response.

“Skeptical?” I suggested.

“Yes! Skeptical.”

Katsonopoulou’s theory certainly made sense, if one was looking to explain the disappearance of a sophisticated city connected to Poseidon. It definitely accounted for what Marinatos had called the “one fundamental fact” of Plato’s story, that “a piece of land becomes submerged.” A story based on Helike worked perfectly with Doumas’s idea that the whole point was to illustrate the political ideas in the
Republic
. Looking out at the world’s most famous ruins, though, I couldn’t help but think of Alexander MacGillivray’s description of a flood that had reached the foot of the Acropolis. When it came to trashing cities with natural disasters, Poseidon had a long rap sheet.

Just one floor down from the café is a reconstruction of the sculpture that once decorated the west pediment of the Parthenon. At the center of the triangular scene are the figures of Poseidon and Athena, who according to myth had long ago competed to be the patron of Attica, the city-state of which Athens was capital. Poseidon struck his trident into the rock of the Acropolis and created a saltwater
spring. Athena planted the first olive tree. Athena was chosen as victor and patron, and the city was named in her honor. The furious Poseidon retaliated by sending a massive wave to flood all of Attica.

Tony O’Connell had noted a serious problem with the theory that Plato’s story was simply a political fable dipped in historical detail, intended to illustrate the ideas of the
Republic
: The good guys, the Athenians, suffer the same watery punishment as the bad guys, the Atlanteans. Virtue, rather than being rewarded, drowns right alongside evil. If there was a kernel of truth hiding behind all the myths—and I was almost certain there was, maybe even a big one—it might help unscramble the message Plato had been trying to send. And I was pretty sure I knew the one person on Earth who could help me locate it.

Well, That Explains Everything

Patras, Greece

A
s I was talking on my cell phone in the café of the Patras bus station, the world’s most respected Atlantologist slipped in quietly and took a seat at the table across from mine. He looked about sixty, wore sunglasses and a navy polo shirt, and scrolled through his text messages as if he had nothing more on his mind than catching the eleven thirty local to Thessaloniki. He made no attempt to catch my attention, and if I hadn’t Googled a photo of him the night before I probably wouldn’t have noticed him, let alone known who he was.

Stavros Papamarinopoulos could’ve been a character in a John le Carré novel. He held a government job that gave him access to arcane knowledge understandable only to a select group. He spent long stretches of time in Paris. He had arranged for us to meet in the unfashionable port city of Patras, which required me to ride a bus for four hours in each direction from Athens; I later learned that he kept an apartment in Athens. He had replied to perhaps half of the many e-mails I had sent him, and then only briefly and enigmatically. He hadn’t responded at all to the text messages I’d sent this morning informing him of my arrival time. He believed that 70 percent of Plato’s tale had been proven, a number that seemed
preposterous until I read his essays. He had organized three international conferences on the subject of Atlantis and edited three thick volumes of papers, yet was perhaps the world’s only Atlantis expert who had never appeared in a BBC documentary.

“Stavros?” I finally asked.

“Yes, Mark,” he said, pocketing his phone. “It’s good to meet you.” He stood and motioned toward the door. “Let’s get a taxi. The students are on strike at my university today. It’s stupid because they will have to do makeup work on Saturday. But today I’m locked out of my office. I have arranged a place for us to talk. We have much to discuss.”

Papamarinopoulos is a professor of geophysics at the University of Patras, one of the best universities in Greece. “My job is to find ancient cities through geophysics, by means of software and computers,” he explained as we rode along the coast in the backseat of the taxi. His accomplishments were impressive. He had helped Dora Katsonopoulou find Helike using magnetometry to map beneath the site and conducted seismic surveys to prove that a fantastic-seeming story from Herodotus—that the Persian king Xerxes had ordered his men to dig a canal across the Mount Athos peninsula wide enough for two warships to pass each other—was true. He had once talked an Olympic Airways pilot into carrying two thousand pounds of geophysical equipment to Egypt when he supervised an unsuccessful search for the tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria. “If it was there, we would have found it,” he said with a shrug.

The taxi stopped in a commercial district of Patras. We rode a tiny elevator up to the suite of offices of Papamarinopoulos’s friend, an economist, who introduced himself as Yannis and then went off to buy coffees for everyone. Papamarinopoulos and I sat down on opposite sides of a conference table in the front room. It was a sunny Mediterranean day, and through the open windows we received the cicada buzz of motorbike traffic and a hint of a breeze from the
Ionian Sea, a few blocks down the hill. Papamarinopoulos removed his sunglasses; he had a kind face and the sunken eyes of an exhausted man.

Most Greeks I’d met looked worn-out by their recent economic troubles, and Papamarinopoulos certainly had his own: The government had been gradually cutting his salary since the economic crisis began. He had also spent decades suffering the insults—implied and direct—of his academic peers. Dora Katsonopoulou described her fellow archaeologists’ reactions to Papamarinopoulos’s Atlantis theory as “very hostile,” which was probably an understatement. A prominent French historian had once mocked him openly at an assembly in Athens. When Christos Doumas had condescendingly suggested to me that sandalmakers would be better off leaving archaeological questions to the professionals, he was referring to Papamarinopoulos.

“I’m going to ask you a question,” Papamarinopoulos said, leaning forward across the table. “Who defined science?”

“Plato did, in the
Phaedrus
,” I said. I didn’t mention that I’d learned this about two hours earlier while reading one of Papamarinopoulos’s essays on the bus from Athens, but I suspected that he knew. In the
Phaedrus
, Plato has Socrates explain how a subject can be isolated, then divided into smaller chunks and analyzed until it becomes understandable.

“Very good! Since you know that, you know at least part of the personality of Plato.” He pronounced the name
Plah-toh
, which seemed to give it even more gravitas than usual. “Plato also defined mythology. He differentiated between genuine and fabricated myths. It is advisable then to ask if Atlantis is a genuine or a fabricated myth.”

The word
myth
is slippery because it has multiple meanings. The most common one, at least among nonspecialists, is something that is generally perceived to be true but is actually false. (Such as when Kermit explains in
The Muppet Movie
that contrary to popular belief,
a person can’t get warts from touching a frog.) What Papamarinopoulos calls a fabricated myth is an invented story, the sort of tale that Plato in the
Republic
says is useful for instructing children. At the end of the
Republic
, Socrates tells the Myth of Er, in which a soldier returns from the land of the dead. The moral of this fabricated myth is that only the souls of those who live virtuous lives as outlined in the
Republic
will find eternal peace.

The definition of
myth
that matters to folklorists (and Atlantologists like Papamarinopoulos) is this: a very old story, often containing supernatural elements, that explains an event or phenomenon from the distant past. These sorts of myths often include real historical truths, such as the Trojan War myth that led Heinrich Schliemann to Turkey. This is what Papamarinopoulos calls a genuine myth. Plato, in addition to stating several times in the
Timaeus
and
Critias
that the Atlantis story is true, also says that “the fact that it is no invented fable but genuine history is all important.”

The respected classics scholar John V. Luce, a rare Atlantis possibilist in an otherwise suspicious field, noted that Plato always used the term
logos
when writing about Atlantis, rather than
muthos
(or
mythos
). A
logos
is an account of something that occurred, and its use typically refers to logical, fact-based thinking. A
mythos
is a traditional story that seeks to explain things that have no rational explanation—long-ago historical events for which there are no records. A myth might explain the existence of evil or the creation of the world. “Myth is about the unknown,” Karen Armstrong explains in
A Short History of Myth
. “It is about that for which initially we have no words.”

To tease out the possible kernel of truth in Plato’s Atlantis tale, Papamarinopoulos approached the story from an unconventional direction. The most vivid and memorable elements of Plato’s Atlantis story are those that describe the rise and sudden fall of a mysterious lost civilization: the huge navy, the concentric rings, the
magnificent temples, the catastrophic watery end. Papamarinopoulos instead began by taking a hard look at what Plato said about Athens. “In the
Republic
Plato presents an imaginary Athens,” he told me, referring to the ideal state ruled by a class of guardians. “But in the
Critias
, he presents a real Athens. One completely unknown to him.”

This raised an obvious question: How could Plato write about an Athens that was completely unknown to him? Because, Papamarinopoulos said, the information had been passed down to him orally through many generations, via a chain that included Solon two hundred years earlier. “The Athens in the Atlantis tale is proved as a reality by geological and archaeological science,” he said.

Prove
is a pretty risky word to use in relation to Atlantis. It is interesting, though, how Plato piles up what seems at first to be a lot of irrelevant detail about Athens in the Atlantis story. He describes how the Acropolis had once been the site of a fortified Mycenaean castle, very different from the Golden Age collection of stone temples and buildings. In those ancient times, Critias explains, warriors spent winters living communally in simple structures located on the north side of the rock outcropping. These soldiers drew water from a single spring that “gave an abundant supply of water” but was choked off when a massive earthquake hit Athens. That quake was accompanied by torrential rains that swept most of Greece’s fertile soil into the sea, leaving behind “the mere skeleton of the land.” These natural disasters, the priest at Saïs told Solon, were so severe that only “a small seed or remnant” of the population survived. Written language died out, for as the priest at Saïs said, when “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.”

Until fairly recently, the Athens half of Plato’s tale was largely
ignored by Atlantologists. Ignatius Donnelly, who seems to have crammed every fact he could find about ancient history into
The Antediluvian World
,
mentioned Athens just once in his four hundred–plus pages of argument, and the Acropolis not at all. In his groundbreaking 1913 article linking Atlantis with the Minoans, K. T. Frost wrote, “The whole description of the Athenian state in these dialogues seems much more fictitious than that of Atlantis itself.” John V. Luce’s scholarly book
Lost Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend
summarizes every single detail in the
Timaeus
and
Critias
related to Atlantis
except
for the parts about Athens, which the author dismisses with a note explaining that the “detailed account of Athens and Attica” has been “omitted as only marginally relevant to the identification of Atlantis.”

Yet Plato’s precise descriptions of the ancient Mycenaean city—the evidence of which had been buried for several centuries at the time he wrote, and of which no written records remain—have been shown to be remarkably accurate. In the 1930s, the Swedish-American archaeologist Oscar Broneer was excavating at the Acropolis when he located a subterranean spring that had evidently been smothered by the debris from an earthquake. Relics found in the bottom of the spring dated to around 1200 BC. “They found pottery in this well from the early twelfth century, the Mycenaean period,” Papamarinopoulos told me. “That defines the time framework.” Mycenaean-era housing similar to that used by Plato’s ancient warriors has also been uncovered on the northern slope of the rock, exactly where he placed it in the
Critias
. Even the story of the shrinking Acropolis might have had some truth to it. I later asked Michael Higgins, coauthor of the definitive
Geological Companion to Greece and the Aegean
if it were possible, as the priest told Solon, “that a single night of excessive rain washed away the earth and laid bare the rock.” Higgins replied that the meaning of
acropolis
(which means “high place”) might have changed over time. The rock outcropping on which the buildings
sit actually juts out from the base of a much larger elevated area. As for storms, “You know the Greek climate. It is indeed possible that much soil and loose matériel could have been removed during a single storm.”

The disappearance of written Greek, Papamarinopoulos believed, was another crucial historical event mentioned only by Plato, and only inadvertently. Historians generally agree that around 1200 BC Greece entered what is sometimes called its Dark Ages. Near that date, several Bronze Age civilizations around the Mediterranean, including that of the Mycenaeans, mysteriously collapsed. Use of the Linear B script that Arthur Evans had uncovered at Knossos, and which had also turned up at various sites throughout Greece, stopped abruptly around the same time.

Up until the 1950s, most classical scholars concurred that pre-Homeric Greeks were illiterate. Then in 1954 the London architect and former World War II cryptographer Michael Ventris stunned the world by demonstrating that one of the two mysterious scripts that Arthur Evans had found on the tablets at Knossos, Linear B, was in fact the earliest known written form of Greek. (One of the names Ventris deciphered was
Poseidon
.) The Linear B script, it emerged, had been brought to Crete by Mycenaean invaders. When literacy once again become widespread in Greece several hundred years later, the Greeks had adopted an entirely new alphabet containing vowels, derived from the Phoenician one, which had only consonants.

“Plato said the Greeks were giving Greek names to their offspring,” Papamarinopoulos said. “Obviously they were speaking Greek, because if you speak Greek, you write it. But what sort of Greek? It was Linear B. He talks about the Linear B writing before the discovery of archaeologists in the modern period, before the decipherment of the Linear B!”

For Papamarinopoulos, this meant one of two things. Plato
either invented uncannily precise details about Mycenaean-era Athens, which was extremely unlikely, or he was passing along truthful information that had been passed down to him orally. “Therefore, 50 percent of
Timaeus
and
Critias
has proved data,” he said. “It has maybe some inaccuracies, some exaggerations, but the core of this information has been proved. To ignore this 50 percent is completely unscientific.” Any professor dismissing Plato’s story of Atlantis and Athens as fiction was guilty not only of poor scholarship, but also of academic malpractice, he said. “Science, as defined by Plato, has the conduct of honesty.”

Papamarinopoulos argued that most Atlantis doubters, poisoned by their bias, have subsequently been led astray by laziness. Such people “take for granted Atlantis as a gigantic island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, exasperated. This was a result of their perfunctory reading of Plato’s work in ancient Greek. Much as Dora Katsonopoulou revitalized the search for Helike with her reinterpretation of
poros
, Papamarinopoulos argued that the search for Atlantis hinges on Plato’s use of the ancient Greek word
nesos
,
almost always translated as “island.”