Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City Read Online Free PDF Page A

Stone for building was quarried from beneath the central island and other zones—this stone was white, black, and red. (The tricolor stone: remember that.) The space where stone had been removed was used as harbors for ships, with stone roofs. The walls around the outer rings were decorated in brass and tin; the wall around the central citadel “flashed with the red light of orichalcum.”
    Just think: Solon or one of his assistants was scribbling all this down. Wouldn’t his hand get tired?
    In the innermost circle of the concentric rings, the kings of Atlantis built a spectacular palace, “a marvel to behold for size and for beauty.” There was also a shrine to Poseidon and his wife, Cleito, which was surrounded by a wall of gold. This temple was one stade long and half a stade wide (approximately six hundred by three hundred feet) and had “a strange, barbaric appearance.” The walls and ceilings were covered in precious metals and ivory; inside, gold statues had been erected, including a roof-scraping Poseidon guiding a chariot led by six winged horses. A beautifully crafted altar stood outside the temple. Nearby were two springs, one hot and one cold; their overflow was used to irrigate the grove of Poseidon, in which grew “all manner of trees of wonderful height and beauty.”
    Atlantis was a busy maritime port; its large navy sailed in triremes, warships pulled by oars. A wall fifty stades (about six miles) from the outermost ring of water ran around the central circles. Inside the wall lived a densely populated mercantile society whose ports “kept up a multitudinous sound of human voices, and din and clatter of all sorts night and day.”
    The capital of Atlantis abutted an oblong plain that measured three thousand by two thousand stades, or approximately 340 by 230 miles. The island sloped southward toward the sea, and the central plain was surrounded by mountains that “were celebrated for their number and size and beauty, far beyond any which still exist.” (The plain, the mountains—those will come up again.) These peaks protected the island from strong northerly winds. A great canal was excavated around the entire plain. Water trickled down from the mountains into a grid of massive irrigation channels that crisscrossed the plain, spaced one hundred stades (eleven miles) apart. Atlantis had two growing seasons per year.

    The plain was divided into sixty thousand districts, each ofwhichwas 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