this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Plato did not suggest ancient Atlantis existed. He was very clear that he was illustrating a hypothetical "great society" to discuss his views on effective and beneficent government.
When he discussed it sinking it was a divine punishment from the gods of Olympus because they had strayed from a righteous path. All of it is meant to be a parable.
I mean that's our interpretation of a translation of something said thousands of years ago. But if they want to they can choose to believe what they want. IMO an ancient island sinking due to gods is no different than saying "high tech civ nuked itself out of existense" but with less context. I'm not saying this really happened, but its not like its impossible, just extraordinarily unlikely to be true.
I'm not sure if you're arguing that it being fictional is an interpretation or that its demise from the ire of the Gods is an interpretation.
If it's the former, you are incorrect. The single best primary source being his own protege and student Aristotle who also makes it clear the whole thing is didactic invention. (There are debates that some individual events within the story are inspired by actual events in Egypt and Athens, but its existence is never presented as fact. The entire idea that this was some historical account came mostly from a judge writing his own history books in the 19th century.)
This is also not debatable due to translation. It's Plato. The best scholars of all time in both language and history have studied this, literally for centuries. There is not any serious or scholarly debate about his intentions with this story. And multiple, equally capable translations of Aristotle corroborate that.
If you're talking about the destruction of Atlantis, it's been too long for me to argue that specifically, but the idea that it was divine punishment is the prevailing view of that story.
Even if all the scholars think it wasn't literal doesn't mean he didn't mean it literally, that could just be how we have been interpreting it
Plato wasn’t writing in some long-dead obscure language that we only have vague translations of, it was Greek. It’s not a matter of interpretation.
You can't even intrepret my English correctly, how can we assume we know what was going through some dudes head several thousand years ago?? Also I'd like to see where Plato wrote "I made it all up about Atlantis" cause AFAIK we just assumed this is the case
Communication isn't what you say, it's what the other person hears.
My brother in Saint Jerome, the best minds in history have been nitpicking Plato's works for centuries. There are libraries filled with commentaries of his works. Of course, they may be all wrong /s
PS: Saint Jerome is the patron of translator.
And for centuries we thought Troy was a myth made up by Homer until we found that shit. The fact that people act like we can make no mistakes and know everything already pisses me off. Way to kill the intrigue of ancient life.
We make lots of mistakes. But shit like this about super races is a tier below "Aliens made this".
But like that's at least interesting, more so than "we crawled out of the woods ~10k years ago, invented everything, end of story" which feels... like it can't be true to me. We have been functionally the same for ~200k years, we didn't do anything in 190k years??
it's basically just that we needed writing to really start building up stockpiles of knowledge and build upon things, and we didn't start really permanently writing things down until we needed bookkeeping for tax reasons, which wasn't necessary until we fucked up by inventing civilization.
Like seriously, everything we know in the modern world may very well stem from our ancestors in the fertile crescent wanting to brew beer and bake bread, it's so fucking funny.
Well our best guess now place farming starting like 12k years ago, which falls in line with the timeframe of Atlantis. Like I get what you're saying but it doesn't necessarily follow that there was definitely no civilization before the fertile crescent, its just very unlikely and extremely difficult to prove.