Earthly Paradises
[The Golden Age, Lucas Cranach, 16th c.]
Plato describes his ideal society in the Republic, a dialogue to which Timaeus and Critias are sequels. In these it is Plato's Athens and not Atlantis that is made out to have realized his ideal, more or less. Empires decayed, small well-organized city-republics such as Athens had superior moral force, and, though they also could decay, they had a power of regeneration. It is an irony of historic interpretation, therefore, that thanks in large part to his literary skill in creating this political fable, the doomed Atlanteans would come in many ways to outshine his virtuous Athenians.
For Atlantis came to represent a theme that has captured human imaginations
through the centuries: the tragedy of a primordial glory, a pristine
utopia, that has been forever lost. Sir Thomas More in his Utopia
of 1516 located his ideal commonwealth on an island and not in any known
country. Francis Bacon, following More's precedent, invented another Utopia
himself, an island in the Pacific. He referred to it as 'The New Atlantis',
considering America to be Plato's original Atlantis. His Atlantis would
be an island, but an island beyond the pale, with institutions that embodied
his hopes for the advance of science.
The first sign of Atlantis itself becoming Utopian is in
the poetic mythology of William Blake, who spoke of an Atlantic
continent uniting Old and New Worlds, and interwove this with the
broader themes of Ancient Wisdom, a past paradisiacal Golden Age, and a
subsequent Fall. In this Blake shared much in common with themes in
other mythologies. For Christianity it was the paradise of Eden that was
forfeited through the Fall, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God. Blake's
complex equivalent of this event included the vanishing of his Atlantis,
the bridge from Britain to the New World, "now barr'd out by the Atlantic
sea"--a disaster that was functional in his scheme, because humanity
was now forever divided. Blake had few readers who came anywhere near to
understanding him. But the theme of the lost Atlantic land would reemerge
spectacularly a century later.
Woodcut from Sir Thomas More's Utopia, 1518
Title-page to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, 1628