Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (26 page)

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A few weeks later, I made my way to the Green Mountains of Vermont, where John Bremer had offered to try to untangle all this stuff for me. Bremer was a retired educator; like Plato he had traveled widely and founded an institution of higher learning, Cambridge College, just outside of Boston. He had spent decades thinking about Plato. He knew Ernest McClain personally and considered him brilliant. A half century before Jay Kennedy began his computer stichometric analysis, Bremer was counting syllables of ancient Greek by hand. Like Kennedy, he noticed patterns that seemed too striking to be coincidental.

Still dashing at age eighty-six, with longish hair, a posh British accent, and a peach-colored shirt unbuttoned to his sternum, Bremer continued to wrestle with Plato daily. We met on an unseasonably hot day, so we retreated to his basement, where his large desk sat amid a forest of bookshelves, one devoted entirely to Plato. He called himself a Socratic philosopher, which I supposed meant he asked a lot of questions in order to reach the truth. We assumed the familiar positions of teacher and student, he behind the desk and me across, frantically scribbling lecture notes.

“Have you met Plato’s Divided Line?” he asked, as if making introductions at a party.

We were acquainted, the Divided Line and I, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were friends. Robert Brumbaugh had called Plato’s Divided Line “probably the most famous and most often drawn diagram in the whole history of philosophy.” It is a deceptively simple geometric image that helps explain one of Plato’s most important principles: that knowledge can be classified into four types. The description is spoken by Socrates: “Take a line which has been cut into two unequal parts, and divide each of them again in the same proportion.” Each of these sections represents one of Plato’s four ascending levels of knowledge. If the line is drawn vertically, it looks something like this:

The top two sections of the line represent the intelligible world; the bottom two the visible world. The lowest of the four is
Eikasia
, or conjecture, which Brumbaugh equates with guessing, as in “I guess so”; it is opinion based on hearsay or stories. The next highest level is
Pistis
, or belief “based on first-hand experience,” Brumbaugh
writes. Above that is
Dianoia
, or understanding, using reason to reach conclusions. Mathematics falls into this category.

The highest level,
Noesis
, moves beyond following rules to reach correct answers to comprehending the true essence of the eternal forms, those perfect examples that exist beyond time and space. Plato says this fourth state is attainable only “by the power of dialectic,” or rigorous philosophical discourse. The highest example of this level of knowledge is the form of the good, a concept so abstract that only philosopher-kings can fully understand it. The closest Plato comes to explaining it is by comparison to the role of the sun in the visible world. Instead of illuminating the observable world, the form of the good illuminates truth.

Got all that? I didn’t either the first time Bremer explained it, and he was a very skillful explainer. It was only much later that I realized the Divided Line was where the worlds of Plato, Pythagoras, and the
Da Vinci Code
truly did collide.

Bremer pulled out a large sheet of paper filled with columns of neat, tiny handwritten numbers. It looked like a page from the ledger of a particularly prosperous Victorian merchant. On closer inspection I saw it was his hand-counted tally of syllables in the
Republic
. Sometime during the second Eisenhower administration, Bremer had sat down and determined that the
Republic
had taken twelve hours to read aloud during Plato’s lifetime, and then broke the dialogue down into 240 units of three minutes each. When he examined the content of each of these sections, he found that Socrates’s explanation of the Divided Line fell between the sixty-first percentile and the sixty-third percentile of the
Republic
. Jay Kennedy’s computer analysis fifty years later confirmed Bremer’s work. Both men’s calculations placed Plato’s discourse on the Divided Line almost exactly at what is known as the golden section (or golden ratio), a mathematical ratio usually represented by the Greek letter
phi
.
The ratio is approximately 1:1.618, or the equivalent (for our purposes) of 61.8 percent. For a geometer like Plato, obsessed with uncovering the eternal mathematical laws guiding the universe, the golden section must have been like a glimpse into the mind of the Divine Craftsman.

The golden section can be found by dividing a line into two parts, so that the length of the longer section divided by the length of the shorter one is equal to the entire length divided by the length of the longer section. (The ratio should be approximately 0.618:0.382.) If one takes a golden rectangle, a parallelogram whose sides are in proportion to the golden section, and subtracts the area of a square whose sides include one of the shorter sides of the rectangle, the remaining parallelogram will also be a golden rectangle. This process can be repeated forever. (See the diagram on the facing page.)

Another method of reaching the golden ratio is via the Fibonacci sequence. This is a series of numbers in which the sum of any two consecutive numbers adds up to the next number in the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, and so on to infinity. As the sequence progresses and the numbers get larger, the result of any number divided by its predecessor edges ever closer to the irrational number 1.618. . . . (Thus: 8 ÷ 5 = 1.6; 13 ÷8 = 1.625; 21 ÷ 13 = 1.615; and so on.)

What Bremer determined is that the allegory of the Divided Line, which appears roughly 61.8 percent of the way through the
Republic
, separates the dialogue into two distinct sections. Everything up to that point deals with the sensible world. Everything after it deals with knowledge that exists only in the intelligible realm.

Though Plato doesn’t name the golden section explicitly in his works, he quite clearly refers to its perfect proportions in the
Timaeus
when introducing the elemental particles of air, fire, water, and earth. The ratio 1:1.618, like the Pythagorean harmonies, is one
of those cosmic intersections where the natural world and mathematics converge. It appears frequently in nature, most famously in the spiral of a nautilus shell. Its aesthetically pleasing proportions can be found throughout the human body, in everything from the dimensions of a beautiful face to the comparative lengths of your finger bones. The Parthenon and its gigantic statue of Athena were likely designed to adhere to its laws of symmetry.

When Plato lists his five elemental polyhedrons in the
Timaeus
, four of them are matched to the basic elements of fire, air, earth, and water. He singles out the fifth, the twelve-sided dodecahedron, as
that “which the god used for embroidering the constellations on the whole heaven.”
15

The faces of a dodecahedron are pentagons; the ratio of any diagonal drawn between two of a pentagon’s five interior angles to the length of any of its five sides is the golden section.

Mephistopheles himself would get bored counting the various golden sections hidden within a Pythagorean pentagram.

In a Platonic dialogue, this might be the point in the conversation at which Socrates raised an important question: So what? Bremer had already provided an answer of sorts in an essay titled “Plato, Pythagoras, and Stichometry.” The mathematical patterns he’d uncovered in Plato’s works were not “simply a kind of ornamentation, a pleasurable addition to the content of the dialogue, a literary device,” he wrote. Instead, they were “an essential, perhaps the essential, part of the dialogue.”

Which brings us back to Bremer’s basement, and to Atlantis.

“I wanted to mention something to you in the
Critias
,” Bremer
said, flipping through the pages of a translation. “Take a look at the paragraph that states ‘Now first of all we must recall the fact . . .’”

I had practically memorized the words that follow, since they are some of the most important in Atlantology: “. . . that nine thousand is the sum of years since the war occurred.”

“The number of syllables from there to the end of the
Critias
is nine thousand. Nobody in the world—except me, and now you—knows that.”

“There’s no chance that it’s a coincidence?”

“Oh, no, of course not! Plato is far too careful a writer. You must understand that in this stichometric game we’re dealing with a text that was sort of established in the sixteenth century, which in turn was based on manuscripts which were written in the ninth and tenth centuries, fifteen hundred years after the death of Plato. So I don’t feel very upset if it turns out there are 9017 syllables. With all of my numbers, if it’s within 1 percent, it’s probably intentional.”

What the numbers were not, Bremer said, was a secret code that would lead me to the Temple of Poseidon. Mathematics was simply one method Plato used to convey important information to those prepared to receive it.

“In a way, the
Timaeus
is an invitation to those with a disposition of a certain kind to enter into the inquiry into the nature of the cosmos. What the
Critias
tells you is how far you can go. It ends abruptly. Zeus assembles the gods and begins to address them, and then there’s a period. That’s all there is! Don’t try to go beyond this. It’s not the dialogue that’s incomplete—it’s human knowledge!”

“So don’t look for what’s not there?”

“Yes. These are the limits of that kind of knowledge. You can’t go any further.”

In other words, I’d bumped up against my own Divided Line.
Nec plus ultra.
Plato even had a name for this unsatisfactory moment in a philosophical inquiry—
aporia
, or impasse. In the
Meno
Socrates
applauds the purgative effect of
aporia
, for only once someone confronts the dead end of his ignorance can he begin to move forward.

“What would you say if someone came in here and told you they’d found Plato’s Atlantis by following the numbers from the
Critias
?” I asked.

“What you’re describing is what I would regard as a teaching/learning situation,” Bremer said, leaning forward and folding his hands. “On the whole there’s no point in saying, ‘You’re loony.’ But I think they would be profoundly mistaken.”

Bremer’s landscaper came to mow the lawn and the buzzing drowned out our conversation. We walked upstairs into the humid late afternoon air and I prepared to drive back home. Bremer walked me to my car, gave directions back to the highway, and, Socratic that he was, left me with a question of his own.

“What fascinates me about what you’re doing is why are all these folks devoting untold energy trying to figure out whether this was a historic place or not? What do they think they’re up to? What is it that makes them search for this thing, when rationally they must know there are a very large number of people who consider that they are wasting their time?”

Or are they?

True or False

Atlantis

T
ony O’Connell was on the line from Ireland, describing the new house he and Paul had just moved into right outside their village in County Leitrim. “I suppose you could say we’re now stumbling distance from both pubs,” he said. “Well situated for your next visit.”

My Atlantis odyssey finally having ended, I’d called the wise man of Atlantology seeking some guidance on my preliminary findings. Tony was a bit like Socrates—and unlike virtually every other person I’d spoken with about Atlantis over the past two years—in that he was primarily interested in the things he
didn’t
know about Plato’s lost city. He’d written more than a thousand detailed entries for the Atlantipedia, and while he was as certain as ever that Plato’s story was “generally reliable,” he still hadn’t settled on a single location hypothesis.

We briefly debated the various possibilities for the Pillars of Heracles, but after a few minutes Tony stopped short and said, “Mark, you should be perfectly happy to come up with your own conclusions whether they agree with mine or not. There’s no one dealing with this subject who isn’t speculating.”

Speculation doesn’t have to devolve into theories based on alien visitors or secret rooms beneath the Sphinx’s paw; after all, the
Timaeus
is largely a speculative work. Tony suggested a jurisprudential image to illustrate the burden of proof Atlantologists needed to meet. Because the evidence for Atlantis is “at best circumstantial,” he said, its existence cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, as it would need to be in a criminal case. In a civil court, however, the legal standard is whether something is more likely to be true than not true. By that measure it should be possible, Tony said, to build a convincing case “for the time and location of Atlantis” from largely circumstantial evidence.

Following Tony’s lead, I decided that to reach a verdict about Atlantis, five general points needed to be addressed:

• Plato’s numbers, especially the nine thousand years
  
• The island’s physical characteristics, including its concentric rings, mountains, large plain, and canals
  
• The conflict between Atlantis and Athens
  
• The Pillars of Heracles and the impassable shoals of mud beyond
  
• The cataclysmic event that destroyed Atlantis
  

Plato’s numbers were exhibit A, since they are essential to almost every location hypothesis. If some future Heinrich Schliemann ever uncovers a three-ringed coastal city with a central island five stades across and a temple of Poseidon that matches Plato’s precise 2:1 dimensions, the Atlantis case will be closed.

I think that’s extremely unlikely to happen.

The
Timaeus
and
Critias
are dripping with Pythagorean influence. The dialogues begin with Socrates making a reference to the sacred tetractys: 1, 2, 3, 4. The speaker Timaeus is a Pythagorean who explains to his friends how all matter can be broken down into
minuscule right triangles. In the cosmology he lays out, the heavenly bodies move according to the same mathematical harmonies that Pythagoras supposedly discovered in a blacksmith’s shop. About the only thing that could make the
Timaeus
and
Critias
more Pythagorean would be for Poseidon to carve the words
DON’T EAT BEANS
into the Atlantean plain with his trident.

The philosophical meaning of Plato’s Atlantis numbers has been lost to nongeometers, possibly forever, unless a copy of his
Critias
lecture notes turns up beneath a swing set in the Athens park where the Academy once stood. What hasn’t been lost is Aristotle’s reminder that to the Pythagoreans, numbers were not just amounts but
things
. Robert Brumbaugh’s conjecture that Plato’s opposition of evens and odds symbolized Atlantis’s degeneration, like a black hat on a villain, makes much more sense to me than the idea that such specific numbers had been passed down through the millennia like a land surveyor’s report.

The three-ringed city was almost certainly intended as a geometric metaphor. Plato
loved
circles, which exemplified the otherworldly perfection of his eternal forms. In the
Timaeus
, the world is a sphere because that is the ideal shape. Both the individual human soul and the soul of the living cosmos—the circles that the Divine Craftsman scissors out of the World-Soul like a chain of paper rings—are said to move in a circular motion. That doesn’t necessarily mean Plato didn’t have a real-world model in mind. Santorini’s rough bull’s-eye shape could have inspired the concentric circles of Atlantis, and Michael Hübner’s giant stone donut in Morocco was certainly intriguing. Better matches could have been found in the ancient Mediterranean, though. Carthage was famous for its annular naval harbor, constructed around a circular center island, with a single entrance like that of Atlantis. Plato would have been quite familiar with Carthage, since his tyrannical host in Syracuse, Dionysius, was at war with the Carthaginians. But if you want my honest
opinion—and if you’ve read this far, you presumably do—I think Plato just had a thing for circles.

Viewing Plato’s numbers and geometric shapes as symbols instead of raw data allowed me to avoid the explanatory gymnastics required to squeeze the key figure of nine thousand years into any hypothesis. With a stroke, some of Atlantology’s biggest problems vanished: the lack of evidence for a Paleolithic Athens; the reliance on Egyptian lunar calendars;
16
the parsing of Plato’s words to mean
seasons
instead of
years
. The complicated interpretations required to reconcile nine thousand years with dates like 2200 BC in Malta and 1500 BC for the Thera blast simply disappeared.
Poof
. When did Atlantis sink?
We don’t know.
Or rather: We don’t know
yet
.

Removing the numbers alleviated the headache of accounting for checkerboard canals that supposedly covered an area as large as Nebraska, but it didn’t bring me any closer to understanding their purpose in the Atlantis story. Tony reminded me that Critias pauses to comment on how unrealistic Solon’s measurements seem—
I know this may sound crazy!
—and his skepticism indicates this piece of information really did come from Egypt, since such doubt would otherwise make Plato’s book
less
believable. The channel’s perimeter totals ten thousand stades, or a
myriad
, the largest number for which Greeks of Plato’s time had a written character. Perhaps Solon’s assistant was using shorthand. Or maybe Rainer Kühne was right, and Plato was making a math-nerd joke. The canals remain an
aporia
.

Erasing the canals and numbers from my list of clues felt so satisfying, like a thorough spring cleaning, that I couldn’t resist hunting for other criteria to purge. Skimming through the various location
hypotheses, I noticed that many of the identifying details in Plato’s story are so common throughout the world known to the Athenians as to be almost useless in identifying a single location. Hot and cold springs, tricolored stone, and relics from ancient bull ceremonies are almost as common around the coastal Mediterranean as middle-aged men in Speedos. (Admittedly, Santorini has a
slight
quantitative advantage in all four categories.) Other descriptions Plato used seem of relatively minor importance—he may have employed terms such as
triremes
or
chariots
to describe less sophisticated war machines. The meaning of Atlantis being “greater than Libya and Asia put together” is uncertain enough to strike from the record, and the definition of
nesos
as any sort of land that touches water, rather than a solitary island, is so broad as to be almost meaningless.

Once I’d scrubbed away several layers of Atlantean chaff, I had a brief moment of panic. How big a kernel of truth remained? To my relief, I saw the outlines of a pretty big one.

The Athens half of Plato’s story—the physical description of the Bronze Age city, the earthquake that blocked the springs on the Acropolis, the loss of literacy—rings historically true. Plato could not have invented so many accurate details. In fact, as the historian Eric Cline demonstrates in his recent book
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed
, the rapid, well-documented end of the Late Bronze Age throughout the eastern Mediterranean coincided with a near-simultaneous “‘perfect storm’ of calamities”: famines, drought, climate change, and a fifty-year-long series of earthquake storms caused by an unstable fault line slowly “unzipping” as it released pressure. The whole region, including Athens, was shaken up, figuratively and literally.

The year 1177 BC is when the Sea Peoples, probably driven from their homelands by this convergence of disasters, launched their second and more devastating invasion of Egypt. Since the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean were interconnected by the sort of trade
seen in the cargo of the Uluburun wreck, word would have filtered back to Egypt that the same swarms of mysterious attackers who had been repulsed by Ramses III had annihilated some of its commercial partners. This information could have been twisted—by Plato, Solon, the Saïs priest, or some earlier Egyptian chronicler—into a tale of a mighty naval power attacking from a land far, far away. (This was the period when the Greeks were tinkering with the transition from myth to a radical new information technology, recorded history.) Assuming that Solon really did visit the temple at Saïs—and it seems to me he did—it’s logical that a fascinating war story chronicled by an esteemed ancestor would have been passed down through the generations to Plato.

As I sifted again through the various possibilities for the Pillars of Heracles, their location came into sharper focus. Unless the Pillars that Critias described were a metaphor for the end of the known world, they were almost certainly the Strait of Gibraltar. Herodotus describes the Pillars at Gibraltar several times in his
Histories
.
Critias places them near Gadeira, the Carthaginian port just beyond the blockaded mouth of the Mediterranean. (Pindar, the greatest of Greece’s lyric poets, wrote a century before Plato’s time, “Westward of Gadeira none may pass / Turn back ship’s tackle to Europe’s land!”) Plato likely heard Carthaginian propaganda in Syracuse, which would have emphasized the dangers of sailing beyond Gibraltar; it seems impossible that such tales would not also have been carried to a major seaport such as Athens.

What about the impassable muddy shoals mentioned by both Plato and Aristotle? The likeliest candidate is the sailing dead zone Herodotus described on the West African coast, citing the Carthaginians as his source. Stories filtering back eastward from this unknown territory could account for the blue vestments worn by the Atlantean kings (tinted with the indigo snail dye from the island of
Mogador), as well as the elephants, which the Carthaginians first spotted in the coastal marshes near Senegal around 500 BC.

The last major item on my checklist was the most famous of all, the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis. Many of the geologists and mythologists I’d spoken with equated the Thera explosion with the earthquakes and floods the Saïs priest describes. I suspect the Thera blast—and the Minoan Hypothesis—appeals to experts because there’s a great deal of physical evidence that
something
terrible happened. Since the effects of the disaster are still largely mysterious, specialists feel safe speculating there might be some connection between the Minoans and Plato’s story. But Plato took his catastrophism pretty seriously, and unlike Hesiod’s
Theogony
, there’s nothing in the
Timaeus
or
Critias
about volcanoes—no loud explosion, no magma boiling under the sea, no ash cloud, no volcanic lightning.

Unless there was a mix-up on the Egyptian end—admittedly, a possibility—Thera was most likely an accessory to the story of Atlantis’s sinking rather than the perpetrator: perhaps the cause of one of the three other great floods the priest mentions. Which means the experts who endorse the Minoan Hypothesis for Atlantis are probably mistaken.

Helike’s disappearance would have been another likely model for what Spyridon Marinatos called the “one fundamental fact” of the Atlantis story, that “a piece of land becomes submerged.” The sequence is identical—earthquake, flood, sinking—and unless Plato was deep in a cave testing ideas for the
Republic
,
he must have heard about the disaster. I e-mailed Dora Katsonopoulou to check on her dig, which she confirmed was progressing—
slowly
. If the city buried there is half as wonderful as described in ancient accounts, Katsonopoulou will one day be as famous as Schliemann, and Helike will almost certainly supplant Santorini as the leading establishment candidate for Atlantis. (This is speculation, of course; the only
absolute certainty is that its discovery will launch a thousand ships carrying cable-channel documentary crews.) But Helike was not at war with Athens, hadn’t conquered most of the Mediterranean, wasn’t anywhere near the various purported Pillars of Heracles, and certainly didn’t vanish prior to Solon’s visit to Egypt. Its destruction probably colored Plato’s account, and perhaps even reminded him of an old family story. But the event doesn’t seem to be his primary source.

If Atlantis were to be found on the basis of sheer enthusiasm, Anton Mifsud’s argument for Malta would be difficult to beat, yes? Yes! But the more I thought about it, the more his essential source, the manuscript from Eumalos of Cyrene, seemed just a little too convenient to be true—antiquity’s equivalent of a
Scooby-Doo
confession when Shaggy yanks off the villain’s monster mask. Malta has no mountains and hasn’t been attached to any sort of plain for a very long time, and while no one can say definitively what the cart ruts were (grooves worn by hauling sledges seems the most probable explanation), they definitely weren’t irrigation canals, unless Malta was also the original Lilliput. I would gladly let Dr. Mifsud remove my child’s appendix, but I can’t agree with his Atlantis conclusions.