The Unlikely Story - An Investigation of the Myth of Atlantis and the Ideal Athens in the Timaeus: Part III.

Perhaps it could be argued that the hubris of the Atlanteans caused the normal order and justice of their state to become diseased, but this observation fails to be very helpful unless it can somehow be textually shown that such a state of disorder would have a causal relation to the tsunami that engulfed Atlantis. This issue is not addressed within the text, and therefore I believe that any argument would have to rely too heavily upon speculation. This is not to say that parallels between the just and unjust city/soul and Athens and Atlantis cannot be made, or even that a loose analogy can be drawn between them, but merely that this kind of analogous relationship would be too weak to make any definitive claim about the fate of Atlantis in relation to the tyrannical soul. The same could be said about the feat of the Athenians. It does not seem like there is a satisfactory amount of evidence to suggest that the just man or city would triumph over injustice in the same way that Athens does over Atlantis, and, on the contrary, it seems that there is quite sufficient evidence to believe otherwise. Plato himself suggests in book II of Republic that the just man will be subjected to more injustice than any other man.

Also, it is interesting to note that, in the great earthquakes described by Plato and deluge following, it is not merely Atlantis that is swallowed up and destroyed, but also all the “warlike men” of the Athenian army (described as “in a body”) who “sank into the earth.” (25d) This textual observation causes a third problem for an argument stating that Atlantis was somehow analogous to the tyrant of Republic IX. It seems that not only was Atlantis not self-destroyed, but also that the god-decreed punishment for her hubris had direct consequences upon the very people that were defending the earth from her. Perhaps this consequence was an accidental effect of the divine retribution enacted upon Atlantis, but surely, if the gods were punishing Atlantis for her hubris, they could have done so without causing harm to the Athenians, those sole defenders of justice in the world. It seems wrong, or at least very impious, to implicate the gods as the accidental agents of destruction of the sole arbiters of justice on the earth.

This problem is further complicated by our in-class discussion of this myth. We had mentioned that just as the just man, without the help of divine intervention, would have to suffer many injustices, Athens would similarly have to submit to the sheer power of the Atlantean Empire eventually. To be sure, through the internal justice that they possessed, Athens beat Atlantis back past the Pillars of Heracles, but in all actuality, this must have been the equivalent to a slap on the wrist to the forces of Atlantis. Were it not for the utter destruction of Atlantis by the gods, Athens would have eventually had to succumb to Atlantis, merely because of the sheer power Atlantis possessed. The problem of the above paragraph is magnified when we claim both this and that the gods, at the very least, seem to be the accidental agents of destruction of the Athenian army. Even more pointedly, the worry is this: it seems antithetical to claim that in acting to protect the smaller forces of justice, the gods inadvertently cause their destruction. It could be true that I am making too much of this passage, but these observations leave me somewhat baffled as to how this myth is to be used as a kind of illustration of how justice is better to possess than injustice, if the myth is indeed to be understood this way. To be sure, to have a rightly-ordered soul seems intuitively better than to have a disordered soul, but what difference does it make when one is dead anyway?