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howardslowcum t1_ivl1yab wrote

Reply to comment by bolanrox in TIL that the "Lost City of Atlantis" was invented by the philosopher Plato, as a fake enemy for Athens that lost favour of the gods and was sunk in to the sea. by PDRugby

'First time it was heard' is a common statement when referring to Plato. Imagine in 25 years someone writes a fan fic of starwars and 2600 years later people reference that fan fic as the origin of luke skywalker.

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Gyddanar t1_ivo404k wrote

haha, that is a great example really.

The whole concept of "earliest written evidence" is something that needs to be pushed more when discussing history and so on. I suppose it is entirely possible that some poet had written something about Atlantis that just wasn´t valued enough to survive.

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idhtftc t1_ivp7zpg wrote

This makes no sense. If they found that one fanfic, they would also look for corroborating evidence, other scripts, other references, etc. The fact that there is only one place where that name comes up is not definitive evidence, obviously, but it's pretty damning.

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howardslowcum t1_ivpls5n wrote

Pre Plato everything operated upon a verbal tradition. Plato himself while a pioneer of literature was highly critical of the written text saying doctors would stop learning medicine and instead just work out of a book.

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idhtftc t1_ivpyjmh wrote

Then we would have a contemporary or post-Plato account of an empire that attacked "the whole of Europe and Asia", not just one solitary source for a civilization that controlled parts of Africa and Italy. It's obvious if one just reads the texts that it's an allegory.

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howardslowcum t1_ivqcyue wrote

The illiad and the odyssey are only two of six parts of the epic, the remaining four having been lost to history. Remember a 'dark age' does not mean a decline in progress but a loss of that knowledge most likely to purges by an invader. In this example 2400 years from now we have return of the Jedi and the last Jedi as our only extant volumes and the fan fic being the most commonly disseminated piece of literature. Atlantis is the new order, just one of several major antagonist factions presented in the entire narrative.

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idhtftc t1_ivqi184 wrote

Except there's literally zero evidence for any such multiple-continent-spanning civilization, and it only appears in the books. I mean, it works with your example, since Star Wars is also fantasy, but that's not what you were saying above, it would be like saying that Star Wars actually happened because we found the fan fiction.

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howardslowcum t1_ivqoml1 wrote

I guess im talking about Atlantis being real the way Mordor is real today. If we went back to Greece in 600BC and sat around on a saterday night listening to folks tell stories I bet if you brought up Atlantis they would be like 'I know that place, with the three rings? Home of posidon?'

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idhtftc t1_ivrvf7w wrote

Right, and I think we both agree Mordor is not real. I guess I misunderstood the sense of "first time it was heard", I thought it meant something like, "just because Plato is the only written source, it does not mean there weren't oral traditions about it", which might as well be true but cannot really be proven anyway.

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