Solon's Unwritten Epic

The following is an excerpt from the author's doctoral dissertation, Myth in the Timaeus. In this excerpt it is being argued that Plato's Timaeus is set upon the greater festival of the Panathenaia and gives reasons why the story of Atlantis is appropriate to that festive setting. 

One further and perhaps more telling point in favour of nominating the Greater Panathenaia as the "festival of the goddess" seems to have been overlooked. It is important in as much as it further clarifies the respective roles of the Atlanticus of Critias and the peri phuseos of Timaeus in the total scheme of the Timaeus dialogue, and helps to explain the relationship between them. This point is that Critias' story, which he relates as it was transmitted to him and which, as we have just said, goes ultimately back to Solon, constitutes, in a fashion, the material of an epic poem. The recitation of the Homeric epics was, as far as is known, an innovative feature of the Greater Panathenaia. Panegyrics concerning the military glories of Athens were characteristic of either the Greater or Lesser festivals; but the Atlanticus is not just a patriotic panegyric; Critias specifically presents it in the genre of epic. He introduces his story to Socrates and the others by relating his first acquaintance with it. He was, he says, a boy of only ten years of age. He was in attendance with many other boys at the feast of Apaturia and on that occasion the fathers present arranged a contest in recitation. Many poems were read, and amongst them were the poems of Solon which, he adds, were relatively new at that time. It was then that a man named Amynander stood up and declared that in his opinion Solon was not only the wisest of men in all other respects but was also the noblest of all poets. In response to this Critias' grandfather - also named Critias, and ninety years of age

 

 "was much pleased and said with a smile: 'Yes, Amynander; if only he had taken his poetry seriously like others, instead of treating it as a pastime, and if only he had finished the story he brought home from Egypt and had not been forced to lay it aside by the factions and other troubles he found [in Athens] on his return: why then, I say, neither Homer nor Hesiod nor any other poet would ever have proved more famous than he.."

 

This is the invitation for Amynander to ask about the story, to request of the elder Critias that he relate it to them, tell them where Solon had heard it, of what it consisted, and so on. Old Critias relates it, beginning with Solon's conversations with the priests of Sais, as the younger Critias and the other boys listen. The story, then, is, we are informed, the poem upon which Solon was working before he was called to deliver his people from discord and devote all of his energies to law-making and the exercise of justice. The elder Critias bewails this because, had he found time to finish it, Solon would have surpassed "Homer, Hesiod, and the other poets". It is Solon's great - but unwritten - poem. It is epic by virtue of the comparison with Homer and Hesiod and by virtue of its grand scale. This is confirmed when Critias (the younger) finally begins to recount the full story to Socrates, Timaeus and Hermocrates. In a sequence of polite formalities Hermocrates, at Socrates' instigation, invokes Apollo and the Muses in the epic manner on Critias' behalf. Critias thanks him and, to that invocation, adds an especial invocation to the goddess Memory. Clearly, then, we are to understand the 'Atlanticus' not merely as a patriotic speech, and appropriate to the occasion on that account, but as standing in the genre epos. It is not, of course, a poem in the strict sense, but it is an account of the poem that Solon would have written had he not been compelled to devote his time to other things: it is the material for an epic poem that, unfortunately, was never composed, or, at least, never completed. In the Timaeus, and in the Critias, we find Critias playing the Homeric rhapsode: this would be appropriate to what we know of the Greater Panathenaia.

 

This ought to be the starting point for any analysis of Critias' account. As it is, in the truly voluminous secondary literature that the story of the lost continent of Atlantis has spawned in the course of Western history, few readers have approached the story in this light. For some Critias' story has been the spring-board for Utopian visions. More recently the story has given rise to wild archeological speculations with author after author taking the story at face value and proclaiming that they had in fact located the lost continent. More credible attempts have been made to read the story as an allegory of political events contemporaneous with Plato, while others have adopted the story and grafted it to their own fabulous theosophical schemes. From what we are told in the text, though, the proper approach to the story is to see it in the genre of the type of epic poetry recited at the great festival of Athene. It should be considered as a story in the same class as the Homeric poems. This is illuminating because at least a few scholars in the past have noted certain similarities between the story and Homer's Odyssey, though they have failed to bring the observation to a plausible conclusion. In the seventeenth century the Swedish scholar Olaf von Rudback noted, investigated and documented a number of parallels between Critias' description of Atlantis and Homer's description of the mysterious island of Phaeacia. Both the Atlanteans and the Phaeaceans are described as sea-going people descended from the god Poseidon, for instance. In both cases the centre of their civilizations lay not on the coast but some way inland, with the inland cities connected to the sea by a series of canals. Both Phaeacia and Atlantis are surrounded by steep cliffs that fall sheer into the sea. The temple of Poseidon given in both accounts is similar, as are the religious observances described. Phaeacia has a sacred grove with fruit trees watered by two springs. In Atlantis the sacred grove of Poseidon is watered by two springs, one hot and one cold. The Phaeacians "come into contact with no other people" and the Atlanteans at one time were "unmixed with other, mortal stock". Atlantis sinks into watery oblivion and Phaeacia is "encircled" by Poseidon, cutting it off from all contact with the outer world. There are more general parallels, too. In the framework of Homer's epic Odysseus' quest for home is played out on the divine level by a rivalry between Poseidon and Athene. Athene is his patroness, protecting him and helping him on his way. Poseidon, however, has been offended by the hero and thwarts his every attempt at progress. Similarly, in the Atlantean war Poseidon and Athene stand in contrast in the sense that the Atlanticus is the story of the struggle between an Athenian and a Poseidonian civilization in which the people of Athene, though the under-dogs, like the much suffering Odysseus, finally triumph. These parallels also appear to have been noted by at least one ancient reader. Diodorus Siculus, the encyclopedic but notoriously unreliable historian, embroiders his 'history' of Atlantis with material taken from Homer, implying a recognition of their common ground. It is not wise, perhaps, to push these parallels too far, but given that Critias' story is presented as Solon's epic - albeit one that was never written - they are at least surer observations than most that have been made concerning Atlantis through the centuries. The story of Atlantis has captured the Western imagination since ancient times and has given rise to the most extraordinary speculations; we are on much safer ground in seeing allusions in it to the poems of Homer and the epic tradition.

 

In this respect one more important point should be made here. This is that, while Critias' story discernibly follows Homer in certain general respects and even in respect to the history and topography of the lost continent, in other respects Critias is at pains to show how different Solon's 'unwritten' epic is to Homer's and how it diverges from the epic tradition. This may be part of the sense in which Critias the elder proclaims that the story, had it ever been completed in epic form, would have surpassed "Homer, Hesiod and the others". Critias (the younger) begins his second and fuller installment of his story with these words:

 

Once upon a time the gods divided up the earth between them - not in the course of a quarrel, for it would be quite wrong to think that the gods do not know what is appropriate to them, or that, knowing it, they would want to annex what properly belongs to others...

 

He then proceeds to draw the battle lines between Atlantis on the one hand and antediluvian Athens on the other. In the context of a Platonic dialogue this must be a disapproving reference to Homer. We are immediately reminded by these words of the most common criticism of Homer and the 'other poets' found in Plato, namely that the epic poets portrayed the gods as quarrelsome and as not knowing their rightful place in the scheme of things. As mentioned at an earlier point, Plato's reverence for Homer was not unqualified. Though, like all Greeks, he considered Homer to be the best and most authoritative source of information regarding the gods, there are many famous instances, as in the Republic, where Homer is censured for showing the gods to be petty, frivolous, cantankerous or silly: it is their quarrelsome nature to which Plato seems to have most strenuously objected. He, or at least his Socrates, saw the idea that the gods fought and squabbled amongst themselves, that they did not know their rightful domains, as a major theological error. This criticism goes back to the very earliest dialogues. Most significant, and of great relevance to this present study, is the passage in the dialogue called the Euthyphro. Socrates and Euthyphro are discussing the question of whether or not the gods can be at variance with each other or even, at worst, whether they waged war upon each other. Socrates maintains that it is blasphemous to say so, although it is blasphemy against the gods that he himself is charged with, precisely because he is critical of tradition on this matter.

 

Do you believe, he asks Euthyphro, that the Gods actually quarrel among themselves, that Zeus, for instance, shackled his own father (Cronos), and that Cronos gelded his father (Uranos), and such stories?'

 

EUTHYPHRO: Yes, Socrates, and things even more amazing, of which the multitude do not know.

 

SOCRATES: And you actually believe that war occurred among the gods, and that there were dreadful hatreds, battles, and all sorts of fearful things like that? Such things as the poets tell of, and good artists represent in sacred places: yes, and at the Great Panathenaic festival the robe that is carried up to the Acropolis is all inwrought with such embellishments? What is our position, Euthyphro? Do we say that these things are true?

 

Euthyphro, a representative of orthodox piety and a theologian by profession, responds that such things are indeed the case.

 

The reference to the poets and the Greater Panathenaia are, of course, the object of our interest here. What we have so far said of Critias' Atlanticus responds exactly to this passage, even though, by the traditional reckoning, Critias' story was written by Plato some thirty or forty years later. In the Euthyphro we find Socrates explicitly critical of stories told by 'the poets' and given legitimacy in the rituals of the Great Panathenaic festival, of the gods being at war with each other. In the Atlanticus of the Timaeus-Critias ensemble Critias presents an alternative, with the offending theological error corrected. Instead of "Homer, Hesiod and the others" we are presented, indirectly, with Solon as the surpassing epic poet, and instead of the quarrelsome gods we are presented with gods that know their place and their limits. In insisting, at the very outset of his account of Solon's 'poem', that the gods do not quarrel Critias is saying, in effect, that Solon would have brought to epic a more noble conception of divinity. Athene and Poseidon do not themselves quarrel in the story of the Atlantean war - Critias stresses this. Athene, he tells his audience, became patroness of Athens because that land fell to her (and her brother, Hephaistos) by lot, and it was by lot that Poseidon was given Atlantis. The gods, then, merely founded the two opposing civilizations of the story. That the Atlanteans became the aggressors and that the Athenians were called upon to defend the Hellenic world from them was no direct fault of the gods. Poseidon is described as the father of the first Atlantean Kings, and, in fact, so long as the Atlanteans continue to be born from his divine stock they remain a noble and law-abiding race. It is only when the mortal stock in them comes to predominate and the sacred blood of Poseidon grows thin in their veins, that they become imperialistic and want "to annex what properly belongs to others". One of the morals of Critias' story is then that envy is not of the gods, but is a mortal trait.

 

 

* * * 

 

At the very beginning of this study instances were given of Timaeus correcting what Plato perceived as errors in the thinking of the Presocratic philosopher-poets in their own field of discourse. The monologue of Timaeus, it was said earlier, is Plato's peri phuseos; a work in which he meets the Presocratics on their own ground, in their own style, and brings their ideas into an orthodox perspective. Timaeus' speech is, firstly, the most conspicuously Pythagorean of Plato's works, but it is also the work in which he confronts the challenges posed by his philosophical opponents most forthrightly. Parts of Timaeus' account take otherwise objectionable doctrines, such as the theory of atoms, and 'rectifies' them within the teleological framework of a Pythagorean, or rather Magna Graecian, cosmology. On other occasions Timaeus' words pointedly counter doctrines held by the phusiologoi , such as the multiplicity of worlds, that Plato rejected out of hand. Now, in Critias' contribution to Socrates' 'feast of discourse' we can see the same thing being done, not to the Presocratics, but to the epic poets that came before them. In the speech of Critias Plato is correcting the poets in their own field of discourse. Just as the speech of Timaeus is Plato's most Presocratic undertaking, so the speech of Critias is his most Homeric: and in this 'Platonic epic', if it may be so called, he takes the opportunity to 'rectify' what he regarded as an objectionable element in the poems of Homer. We said at a much earlier point that Timaeus' speech was notable as the most extended single speech in the entire Platonic corpus. Similarly, the Atlanticus of Critias is the longest mythic narrative to be found in Plato's works; both in this respect and in such internal evidence as the invocations to the Muses and the parallels with certain aspects of the Odyssey, it stands in the tradition of epic, meeting the epic poets in their own domain. This is how we must understand its relationship with Timaeus' account. One is Plato's great excursion into the world of the Presocratic cosmologists while the other is his great excursion into the world of the epic poets. The evidence of the Euthyphro tells us, furthermore, that Plato had long been critical of certain aspects of the Panathenaic festivities; it is here that he 'rectifies' those errors as well.

 

It may be objected, at this point, that, as was explained in an earlier chapter, Timaeus follows the Presocratic tradition which derides the genealogical cosmologies of the poets of 'early times' and, by extension, the world-view of those poets. He claimed, for his cosmology, the status of 'likelihood' as against the mere tales of the archaic poets. Why then is he not critical of Critias' story if it belongs to that 'unlikely' world of understanding, the realm of legend and outright myth? Similarly, if we are to understand Critias as delivering a type of epic poem, why is he not affronted by Timaeus' criticism of the unsubstantiated tales of 'earlier times'? That there is no open hostility between the two speakers is, however, understandable: the whole atmosphere of the 'feast of discourse' is one of impeccable cordiality. It is a festive occasion and Socrates, characteristically, presides over civilized and at times excruciatingly polite conversation. Nor is there much occasion for an interchange of opinions: other than their programmatic links the two speeches are, as we have pointed out, remarkably self-contained. Critias makes no remarks about Timaeus' speech, nor does the Locrian comment on Critias'. The actual 'dialogue' in this work consists solely of pleasantries and laudatory introductions; there is no debate or contesting of ideas. This does not mean, though, that the contrasts between Timaeus' and Critias' respective contributions to the feast are not apparent and, in some places, pointed. We have already mentioned briefly the one that is most relevant to the line of exegesis taken in this book. In his contribution to the proceedings Critias makes explicit mention of the myth of the earth-born. In his account, the priests of Sais tell Solon that the story they have to relate to him concerns the antediluvian citizens of his city, citizens that were the adopted children of Athene but the seed of Ge and Hephaistos. In Timaeus' contribution, however, we are not told this myth, though it underpins his whole account in fundamental ways. His task was to "create by his words, so to speak" the first Athenians, ready for Critias' full narrative. In doing so he does not retell the myth; rather, he presents a cosmology based upon the myth. Hephaistos becomes the Demiurge. Ge is refashioned, at least in some measure, into the Receptacle of Becoming. In another manner, the two gods of the myth become fire and earth respectively, the two principal components of the creation. Thus, what is myth in Critias' account is transformed in Timaeus' into the eikos muthos. That Timaeus' is the more 'likely' account is plain enough. By Timaeus' own criteria his account is the superior one. Critias' story is nakedly far-fetched; as far-fetched as the genealogies of the gods. Socrates' remark at 26E that it is all "fact [and] no invented fable...but genuine history" is bluntly ironic. Timaeus, on the other hand, brings to this mythopoeic material the Presocratics' standard of 'likelihood' according to the procedure we outlined earlier. To put it another way, it is Critias who supplies us with the old myths of 'earlier times' and Timaeus who re-forms them into the new and more 'likely' myth typical of the Presocratic cosmologists. What happens here, then, is identical to what happens in the Politicus myth, only here there are two speakers involved. In the Politicus the Stranger tells both the old myths and the new meta-myth. In the Timaeus Critias tells the old myths; Timaeus recasts them. This, above all, is why we cannot regard the Atlanticus as "all but irrelevant" to the study of Timaeus' cosmology.

©Copyright R. Blackhirst, 2000.