How could Plato know 9,000 year old stories about Atlantis?
Upvote:-3
It didn't happen. It was a myth and story.
(as evidence for it not happening, no-one has found Atlantis)
Upvote:2
While you phrased your question as "how did he know" I think your actual question is whether or not this happened, because there is no way to know where Plato got this information from, though I would assume it was verbal or some manuscript that is long since gone.
Now in regards to whether or not this is true, I doubt it due to the fact that Athens is around 3000 years old, and no where near 9000 years old. So I would say that that is in fact a myth.
Upvote:8
Plato in the Timaeus attempts to give plausibility to the story by attributing it to Critias, who heard it from his grandfather Critias, who heard it from the legislator Solon, who heard it from an aged Egyptian priest during his travels.
Benjamin Jowett's notes on Timaeus comment thus:
Did Plato derive the legend of Atlantis from an Egyptian source? It may be replied that there is no such legend in any writer previous to Plato; neither in Homer, nor in Pindar, nor in Herodotus is there any mention of an Island of Atlantis, nor any reference to it in Aristotle, nor any citation of an earlier writer by a later one in which it is to be found. Nor have any traces been discovered hitherto in Egyptian monuments of a connexion between Greece and Egypt older than the eighth or ninth century B.C.
So basically, the story of Atlantis is founded neither upon history nor mythology, but merely exists as a rhetorical device.
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