Any time I read the Unz Review, which is less than some time ago, I notice that there seems to be a problem in the American and in general Western societies: they apparently have been taken over or corrupted. Plato wrote in Republic (380 BC) about the process how societies develop, or actually decay, from one type of regime to another. Presumably this is what he intended to write in the dialogues of Timaeus, Critias and Hermocrates in 360 BC, but Plato never finished Critias and did not even start Hermocrates, so we cannot know.
I will try to figure it out, as if probably contains either a solution, or at least an important contribution, to the problem in our present societies.
Plato died 348/347 BC and was 68 years when he wrote Critias and Timaeus. Socrates died 399 BC, so the dialogue takes place soon after the the Peloponnesian war, where the Delian League led by Athene lost to the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Critias in the dialogue is often identified as oligarch Critias, who was one of the thirty tyrants Sparta set to rule Athene in 404 BC, who were in power for eight months before the democracy was restored to Athene. Most famously Critias tells the tale of Atlantis. Nothing is known of Timaeus, while Hermocrates was from Syracusa, where Plato tried to create his ideal society.
Many people have looked for Atlantis and one can say for sure that there never was such an island in the Atlantic Ocean in front of the Gibraltar, but there are many places that resemble Atlantis to some extent and probably served as models for Atlantis.
Syracusa is an obvious candidate. Plato lived there, visited the place many times and tried to change the tyrant to a philosophical king. Syracusa had a harbor, not in cicles as Critias tells Atlantis had, but with three strips of water and two of land. The tyrant lived in the center in a castle like in Atlantis. However, Dorian Syracusa was allied with Sparta and Athene tried to conquer Syracusa and Sicilia. If the Peloponnesian war was the war against Atlantis, then it ended very differently than in the story: to a total defeat of Athene.
Of the possibilities for Atlantis, I prefer the Poenician city of Tarsessos in Spain. Phoenicians built circles in their harbors, as one can see in Carthage. Phoenicians tried to conquer Mediterranean from the West and they colonized Libya, Sicily and Tyrrhenian coast. Spain matches the dimensions of Atlantis better than Sicily. In Critias the size of the island is given as 3000 times 2000 stadias. Itinerary stadion, used for measuring a distance of a journey, was 157 m. Thus, the size of Atlantis was about 470 times 310 km (=length 3000*157m, width 2000*157m). If the shape was an ellipse, the area was 460,000 km2. These measures fit rather well to Spain. The Atlantic coast of Spain is 710 km, the width is about 500 km and the area 506,000 km2.
The Atlantis Solon by Sonchis of Sais, the Egyptian priest, described to Solon was probably Hyksos and Crete. Hyksos were a Semitic people who ruled Lower Eqypt and were finally expelled and Crete was founded by King Minos (according to the myth) and his wife Pasiphaë was Phoenician. Santorini in Crete sank to the sea and Hyksos were expelled 900 years before Solon. Greeks of the Mykenae culture conquered Crete and so ended the Minoean culture, so one can say that the Greeks stopped the Atlantians.
Plato also knew that the flood of Deucalion was about 9,000 years before Solon, 9,600 BC, which incidentally is the correct time of the flood after the Younger Dryas. This flood was understood as the destruction of evil people by gods.
None of these possibilities quite match what Critias told of Atlantis, but I think Plato just wanted to modify the true story to fit it into his idea of how the form of a society corrupts from the ideal class society, a god appointed kingdom, to lesser forms.
Greeks fought the First Sicilian war against Carthage in 480 BC, so about 90 years before Critias spoke in the dialogue with the friends of Socrates, not 9,000 years before Solon. Apparently Plato combined 90 years, 900 years and 9,000 years to one destruction of Atlantis 9,000 years before Solon in order to tell a partially true story of the corruption of societies.
Rather than looking for Atlantis, I will try to find the meaning of this truncated dialogue.
Unfortunately Critias is truncated so we cannot know what Plato’s argument actually was, but from Timaeus (the state of the art in 360 BC theory of how the world was created by God) the main idea is rather clear: God created the best order where all people are in their correct places (it is a class society, Plato was aristocrat-minded) but because people are not perfect, the society corrupts, just like imperfect men are reborn as women and even more defective as animals.
From history we can find out what happened to Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Phoenicians were a trading nation and a sea power. They built trading posts to many places and established several colonies. They transported tin from the British islands and mined copper in Spain, producing bronze and orichalcum (probably a copper-zinc alloy). They were the ones who invented interest bearing loans and maritime insurance, so banks and insurance companies. As the Libyan coast was ridden with pirates already in the Roman time, we can assume Phoenicians engaged also in piracy. Whether they collected tribute (tax) from cities under their power, like Athene did, is unknown to me, but probably they did as it was the common practise of the time.
Carthaginias joined Persia in Greek-Persian wars and the Greco-Punic wars lasted from 580 to 265 BC, which maybe explains why Greeks were probably not so fond of Phoinicians. Both Greeks and Phoenicians colonized Sicily and had wars over it. Later Carthage again conquered Sicily and Rome had a war against them. Carthage lost this First Punic war, but it did not stop them long: Hannibal attacked a city in Spain that was allied with Rome and so started the Second Punic war. Hannibal attacked Rome, but finally lost. The Third Punic war was provoked by Rome: Roman allies Numidians raided Carthage, which had to defend itself. Romans used it as a reason to start a war. Carthage was destroyed. Today in the Internet these events are presented in Carthage’s favor, as if it was fully innocent to the wars and had the same right to built colonies as any other, like Athene and Rome. Of course it had the same right, as no-one has any special right to build colonies on somebody else’s land. Carthage was an expansionalistic sea power. It got into wars with other expansionalistic countries and lost. For Plato it was a perfect example of a former ideal kingdom (as he imagined all societies originally had been) having been corrupted to an oligarchy of merchants.
For me Atlantis is an example of a sea power, especially an island power. An island country must live on trade and for that reason often tries to build trading posts and colonies, like England in the 19th century. A sea power does not need to be on an island, it can be a costal power, like Phoenicia or Athene, but on a place where natural resources are not sufficient for the econimic growth of its population. The USA of today does not need to be a sea power, but after the world wars it has wanted to be one. A sea power ends up to conflicgts with other sea powers, which all are expansive, or with a land power, such as Rome, Germany or Russia. Naturally, people can live on an island without trying to become a sea power, like Island, and they can become a trade power without being expansionalist, like Japan of today – but not of yesterday. It is just that development of these societies often seems to lead to one direction: they want free trade, increased world trade, control of raw materials, posts in different places and they seem to have their interests everywhere on the globe. Such a growing economy needs banks and loans and will very probably be taken over by an olighary of merchants and financiers. This is just what Plato noticed. In his ideal society the ruling class does not care of gold and silver and holds old moral values, but this will pass in a society with a growing economy. So far Plato is correct, at least if we talk about costal people who are involved in trade, like Atlantis or Phoenicians.
Sparta was also an oligarchy and not the ideal kingdom of Plato: helotes were kept as Spartan servants by force, not by persuation and guidance as Critias tells it originally was in Atlantis. Athene was a democracy (but had slaves, in the Peloponnesian war Sparta freed 20,000 Athenian slaves from silver mines, in Plato’s ideal society there were no slaves), but Plato did not appreciate democracy. For him it was a regime lead by demagogues.
According to Republic, an oligarchy corrputs to a democracy since common people become envious of the riches of the ruling class and rebel. More realistically, what happens is that the interests of the ruling class are in a conflict with the interests of the people. It does not need to be envy of possessions. It can e.g. be that the ruling class imports cheaper work force or move work to cheaper places, as happens today. In the case of Carthaginians the local people, Nubians, did not like being slaves of Carthaginians and having their land stolen, so they raided Carthaginian lands. If the conflict develops into a war, we have a mercenary army on one side and locals on the other. Usually mercenaries win, unless the locals get some help, like Nubians got help from Rome.
According to the process in Republic, an oligarchy corrupts to a democracy, yet Sparta had defeated Athene in Peloponnesian wars 431-404 BC just before the dialogue of Critias. An oligarchy had defeated a democracy, but it is not in contradiction to Plato’s theory: a democracy was a still worse regime than an oligarchy and for that reason lost the war.
In Republic a democracy corrupts to a tyranny. After Athene lost to Sparta, the winner set a tyrant rule in Athene and Critias was one of these tyrants (or his grandson was), but this regime of Thirty Tyrants was short-lived and if was not a tyranny as such, it was an oligarchy. However, soon after Plato wrote Critias (360 BC) Philip II of Makedon and Alexander the Great conquered Greece, and that rule can be called a tyranny in the Greek meaning of the word. Likewise the republic of Rome changed to a tyranny at the time of Julius Caesar. This time the tyranny was called the Imperial Rome. It does not matter what title the tyrant uses, as it was not the ideal god-appointed society Plato believed it should have been. There was a time of five good emperors in Rome, philosopher kings, but that time did not last.
What could have been the continuation to Critias? I think it must have been a story telling how the Atlantis people forgot the old values, a merchant oligarchy took over and gold become the goal of the life. The soldier class disappeared and the army was made by mercenaries. They did not stay in the area appointed to them by gods but tried to colonize new areas. And then they went to a war with the Greeks lead by the ancestors of Athene, which at that time was not a democracy (as Plato did not think highly of democracy). Probably Atlantis changed the oligarchy to a democracy and the demagogue leaders started catastrophic invasions, similar to the invasion of the democratic Athene to Sicily in the Peloponnesian war. The bloody war went on and at the end of it most Greeks died and Atlantis sank, and everybody forgot the past, that is, that one should stick to the old ways and not let the merchant class get to rule the country and not to expand to other areas but stay in the allocated land.
And what could have spoken Hermocrates from Syracusa? He probably explained how the Sicilian colony of Atlantis and later of Greeks developed into a tyranny as the final stage of the process in Republic. He would also have explained how a tyranny could be changed to the original regime ruled by a philosopher king, something that Plato tried to accomplish in Syracusa. Plato failed, and this may be the reason he never wrote the end of the dialogues.
But what can be learned from this tale? It is a true tale in a sense, though not in a strict historical sense.
One thing we can learn is that the enterpricing Phoenicians were the ancestors of the present day Lebanese. Lebanese genes are thought to be 90% Canaaite, that is, Phoenician. The average IQ in Lebanon is today 82. It is somewhat lower today than thousands of years ago because Islamic people in the Middle East have a significan share of Sub Saharan admixture from female slaves. Thus, the IQ in the old times was around 90. It is about the same as in Greece today, 92, and in Mizraim Jews, 91. Romans had maybe a bit higher IQ, but still well under 100. Egyptians have today the average IQ of 81 (before Sub Saharan admixture it could have been 90), but in those days Greek philosophers went to Eqypt to lean higher knowledge. Clearly, there were no major IQ differences between these peoples, yet some succeeded in trade and become very rich, some did not. IQ differences were not the explanation to these economic differences, and this is largely true also today. If IQ had been measured at that time, people from a richer and higher developed country would have got higher scores, just like today, but they would not have strongly correlated with genetic intelligence. There are genetic intelligence differences between main races, but local differences in an area are typically not genetic.
Instead we can explain a part of the Phoenician success with interest bearing loans. I do not know if they lended money to other ethnic groups and got income from the interests, but giving loans to the own population is quite useful in starting and expanding business activities. Athene got most of its income from tributes it collected from subordinate cities and from silver mines. Phoenicians also had silver mines in Spain. Basically, the economic differences between nations at that time depended on the different ways the econimies were run. Some built a strong army, expanded their area and collected tribute, some earned on trading, or pirating, on slave trade, or what ever. I think it is very much the same today. National IQ is not necessarily the main explanatory factor with GDP differences.
Another thing to learn is to try to compare the situation then with the situation today. Is it so that the USA and the Western world in general is being taken over by an oligarchy? It may be the banks or big business. The original Western democracy was not Plato’s democracy. He meant people like Alcibiades, while the USA was founded by the founding fathers, who can be compared to Plato’s philosophical kings, to some extent at least. This original carefully planned order where everything is in its place and checks and balances keep it stabilized will corrupt in time. The media is taken over, also academia. The oligarchy can develop into a democracy of the demagogue type, or it may end into a war, like Atlantis in the tale. And finally the end stage is a dictatorship. The leader may of course call himself what he chooses: president, king or caesar, but the regime is run by a strong man. Then there remains the problem Plato did not solve: how to turn a tyranny into the original god-appointed kingdom.
I do not say Plato was all wrong, but he sure liked a class society much more than I do. Everything in its place, no unplanned movement. It may be possible to learn something from the dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, or maybe not. But it is actually quite simple, the world will sink like Atlantis. It is not possible to stop the ice from melting.