The constellations of the cold Bears tried to plunge into the forbidden sea, and the sun's chariot roamed through unknown regions of the air. It was "borne along just as a ship driven before the headlong blast, whose pilot has let the useless rudder go and abandoned the ship to the gods and prayers." 1
"The earth bursts into flame, the highest parts first, and splits into deep cracks, and its moisture is all dried up. The meadows are burned to white ashes; the trees are consumed, green leaves and all, and the ripe grain furnishes fuel for its own destruction. . . . Great cities perish with their walls, and the vast conflagration reduces whole nations to ashes."
"The woods are ablaze with the mountains. . . . Aetna is blazing
* Ovid, Metamorphoses (transl. F. J. Miller), Book II.
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boundlessly . . . and twin-peaked Parnassus. . . . Nor does its chilling clime save Scythia; Caucasus burns . . . and the heaven-piercing Alps and cloud-capped Apennines."
The scorched clouds belched forth smoke. Phaethon sees the earth aflame. "He can no longer bear the ashes and whirling sparks, and is completely shrouded in the dense, hot smoke. In this pitchy darkness he cannot tell where he is or whither he is going."
"It was then, as men think, that the peoples of Aethiopia became black-skinned, since the blood was drawn to the surface of their bodies by the heat."
"Then also Libya became a desert, for the heat dried up her moisture. . . . The Don's waters steam; Babylonian Euphrates burns; the Ganges, Phasis, Danube, Alpheus boil; Spercheos' banks are aflame. The golden sands of Tagus melt in the intense heat, and the swans . . . are scorched. .
robin-bobin
. . The Nile fled in terror to the ends of the earth . . . the seven mouths lie empty, filled with dust; seven broad channels, all without a stream. The same mischance dries up the Thracian rivers, Hebrus and Strymon; also the rivers of the west, the Rhine, Rhone, Po and the Tiber. . . . Great cracks yawn everywhere. . . . Even the sea shrinks up, and what was but now a great watery expanse is a dry plain of sand. The mountains, which the deep sea had covered before, spring forth, and increase the numbers of the scattered Cyclades."
How could the poets have known that a change in the movement of the sun across the firmament must cause a world conflagration, blazing of volcanoes, boiling of rivers, disappearance of seas, birth of deserts, emergence of islands, if the sun never changed its harmonious journey from sunrise to sunset?
The disturbance in the movement of the sun was followed by a period as long as a day, when the sun did not appear at all. Ovid continues: "If we are to believe report, one whole day went without the sun.2 But the burning world gave light."
A prolonged night in one part of the world must be accompanied by a prolonged day in another part; in Ovid we see the phenomenon related in the Book of Joshua, but from another longitude.
This may 2 "Si modo credimus. irnum isse diem sine sole ferunt."
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stimulate surmise as to the geographical origin of the Indo-Iranian or Carian migrants to Greece.
The globe changed the inclination of its axis; latitudes changed, too. Ovid ends the description of the world catastrophe contained in the story of Phaethon: "Causing all things to shake with her mighty trembling, she [the earth] sank back a little lower than her wonted place."
Plato recorded the story heard two generations before from Solon, the wise ruler of Athens.3
Solon, on his visit to Egypt, questioned the priests, versed in the lore of antiquity, on early history. He discovered that "neither he himself nor any other Greek knew any thing at all, one might say, about such matters." Solon unfolded before tha priests the tale of the deluge, the only ancient tradition he was aware of. One of the priests, an old man,4 said:
"There have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country as well as ours, how once upon a time Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and, because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself perished by a thunderbolt—that story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move around the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals." 6
The Egyptian priest explained to Solon that in these catastrophes the literary works of many peoples and their learned men perished; for that reason the Greeks were still childish, as they no longer knew the true horrors of the past.
These words of the priest were only an introduction to a revelation of his knowledge about lands that were erased when Greece also and
3 Plato Timaeus (transl. R. G. Bury, 1929).
4 According to Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) the name of the priest was Sonchis of Sais.
0 Plato Timaeus 22 C-D.
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the entire world were visited with heavenly wrath. He told the story of a mighty kingdom on a great island in the middle of the Atiantic Ocean that submerged and sank forever into its waters.
Atlantis
The story narrated by Plato of the island of Atlantis that ruled Africa as far as the border of Egypt and Europe as far as Tuscany on the Apennine peninsula and that in one fatal night was shattered by earthquakes and sank, never ceased to occupy the imagination of the literati. Strabo and Pliny thought that the story of Atlantis was an illusion of the elderly Plato. But to this day robin-bobin
the tradition, as revived by Plato, has not died. Poets and novelists have exploited the story freely; scientists have done so with caution. An incomplete catalogue of the literature on Atlantis in 1926 included 1,700 titles.1 Although Plato said clearly that Atlantis was situated behind the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), in the Atlantic Ocean, as is also indicated by the name of the island, travelers and other guessers have placed Atlantis in all parts of the world, even on dry land, as, for example, in Tunisia,2 Palestine,3 and South America. Ceylon, Newfoundland, and Spitzbergen have also been considered. This was due to the fact that traditions of inundations and submersion of islands exist in all parts of the world.
Plato set down what Solon had heard in Egypt from the learned priest. "The [Atlantic] ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the Pillars of Heracles' [Hercules], there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia [Asia Minor] together; and it was possible for the travellers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. . . . Yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and
1 J. Gattefosse and C. Roux, Bibliographie de TAtlantide et des questions con-nexes (1926).
2 A. Herrmann, Unsere Ahnen und Atlantis (1934). 8 F. C. Baer, L'Atlantique des anciens (1835).
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truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, a great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent; and, moreover, of the lands here within the Straits they ruled over Libya as far as Egypt, and over Europe as far as Tuscany." 4
In the nineteenth century ships sailed the Atlantic Ocean to explore its bed in search of Atlantis, and before the Second World War scientific societies existed for the sole purpose of exploring the problem of the sunken island.