Andrew Schulz

So Plato's existing here in 450 BC, and he's relaying a message from Solon who lived in the 600s.

Even people who lived in the 600s are semi-mythical legendary people to people in the 400s because the Greeks don't really have a historical chronology that they can follow very well.

It's all kind of oral tradition and not so much of it was written down.

So you wouldn't even take...

a Greek who's writing about his world just 150 or 200 years earlier seriously because everything else that they write about that was happening in the 600s is wildly inaccurate according to what we found in the archaeological data.

Now...

Does that mean that the entire story of Atlantis is bullshit?

Well, no.

I think that there are kernels of reality that are things that actually happened in the Greek world that exist in legend and they still remember and kind of know about, but maybe these are stories you grow up hearing about, but things that really did happen.

For centuries...

And archaeologists question whether or not the city of Troy that was in Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey was even a real city, let alone did the Trojan War even happen.

Well, then I think it's Schliemann finds the city of Troy right here near the gates to the Black Sea.

And then they find the city of Troy and they realize that it was real.

And this whole time the Greeks were able to like hold on to the story of the end of the Bronze Age.

that that that war was probably about 1150 and then shortly after that bronze age collapses that's a cataclysmic collapse every all the civilizations fall apart they abandon the cities and everyone goes back to being nomadic like farmers right so they lose their whole cultural memory but maybe some of those grand stories survive clearly the trojan war that this there was a grand event that that survived and eventually was written down by homer whoever homer really was um

Now, the first thing that I think that Plato was drawing on when he wrote about Atlantis was there was a city called Helike that was on the Greek coast, just a bit north of Athens, I believe.

And in 373 BC, there was an earthquake somewhere in the Aegean, and it cast this huge wave over the city and sunk the entire city.

And so just like, you know...

In one day, all these people are drowned.

That had happened about 13 years approximately before the story of Atlantis appears in Athens and Plato was talking about it.