Wouldn't You Like to Find Atlantis?

     When most people think of Plato they think philosophy. Maybe they think of his book The Republic or they think of him starting the Academy of Athens.  He was a brilliant intellect, a student of Socrates, and later a mentor to Aristotle. This guy had one nice pedigree! By the time of Plato, Athens was the intellectual capital of Greece if not the whole  Mediterranean world. How many other writers can claim the distinction of having multiple schools of thought named after him? ( Platonists, Middle-Platonists, and Neo-Platonists) Notice that I never said you have to be good at naming things to be a philosopher.  Yet despite these over-flowing accolades, there is still a group of people who are driven crazy by Plato....the archaeologists.

    You see, Plato was also the guy who first started talking about this "totally real place"  called Atlantis.  The thing is, while most people consider Atlantis to never have existed there is always that chance that it is true. If you are an archaeologist exploring the bottom of the ocean for instance, how could you not hope that you find something that says "Atlantis" on it?  The idea of finding a place that was previously considered mythological is the pipe dream of the archaeologist, historian, explorer etc. It really got started when Henrich Schliemann read Homer's The Illiad and decided that even though people thought Troy was not a real place, he was going to go find it. It turns out he did just that, and so the precedent was set. As another example, archaeologists have found ruins of the Hittite civilization that previously had only been mentioned in the Bible,once again showing the possibility of finding places we like to call "mythological."

The people of Atlantis always wondered what the dolphins were trying to tell them right before Atlantis went underwater, but it wasn't until a brilliant twentieth century writer named Douglas Adams that we figured out they were saying "So long and thanks for all of the fish!"

     It turns out that while Plato had a huge impact on the Ancient and Medieval worlds' thoughts and philosophies, it seems his biggest contribution to our society is to our sense of adventure, our sense of treasure hunting, and most importantly to our vocabulary.   After all,  how many words evoke as many images in our minds as "Atlantis?"

-Jason

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