The Story of the Island Kingdom of Atlantis, as Told by the Critias of Plato

Plato, translated by Thomas Taylor · Atlantean Realities Series · 15 pages

The primary source. This is Plato's Critias, or Atlanticus, in the translation of Thomas Taylor, the English Platonist, together with Taylor's own introduction — and it is the one document in the series that a reader sceptical of everything else can take on its own terms.

Taylor's introduction is worth the piece by itself. He observes, as a singular circumstance, that although nothing among the writings of the ancients had more generally attracted the attention of the learned in every age than Plato's Atlantic history, no more than a single passage of twenty or thirty lines had appeared in any modern language before his own translation of the Timaeus. Much had been said and written by the moderns about the Atlantic island, he notes, while the extent of the original source had not even been suspected. He is equally clear-eyed about why the account had been doubted: it is the history of an island and a people asserted to have existed nine thousand years before Solon, which contradicts the received opinion on the antiquity of the world — and yet Plato expressly affirms it to be in every respect a true relation.

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