Indonesia, my homeland, is a rich country. We call it "Tanah Surga" (Paradise Land). No one of us ever think that Indonesia was Atlantis. Maybe, until we read the book titled "Atlantis, The Lost Continent Finally Found" by Prof. Arysio Santos.
Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias. In Plato's account, Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune".
Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written in 360 BC, contain the earliest references to Atlantis. For unknown reasons, Plato never completed Critias; however, the scholar Benjamin Jowett, among others, argues that Plato originally planned a third dialogue titled Hermocrates. John V. Luce assumes that Plato, after describing the origin of the world and mankind in Timaeus and the allegorical perfect society of ancient Athens and its successful defense against an antagonistic Atlantis in Critias, would have made the strategy of the Greek civilization during their conflict with the Persians a subject of discussion in the Hermocrates. Plato introduced Atlantis in Timaeus:
For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe, and Asia to boot. For the ocean there was at that time navigable; for in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,' there lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.
The four persons appearing in those two dialogues are the politicians Critias and Hermocrates as well as the philosophers Socrates and Timaeus of Locri, although only Critias speaks of Atlantis. While most likely all of these people actually lived, these dialogues, written as if recorded, may have been the invention of Plato. In his works Plato makes extensive use of the Socratic dialogues in order to discuss contrary positions within the context of a supposition.
source : hotarticle.org
