should be placed above all others. Our
books tell that the Athenians destroyed an army which came across the
Atlantic Sea, and insolently invaded Europe and Asia; for this sea was
then navigable, and beyond the strait where you place the Pillars of
Hercules there was an island larger than Asia [Minor] and Libya
combined. From this island one could pass easily to the other islands,
and from these to the continent which lies around the interior sea. The
sea on this side of the strait (the Mediterranean) of which we speak
resembles a harbor with a narrow entrance; but there is a genuine sea,
and the land which surrounds it is a veritable continent. In the island
of Atlantis reigned three kings with great and marvelous power. They had
under their dominion the whole of Atlantis, several other islands, and
some parts of the continent. At one time their power extended into
Libya, and into Europe as far as Tyrrhenia; and, uniting their whole
force, they sought to destroy our countries at a blow, but their defeat
stopped the invasion and gave entire independence to all the countries
on this side of the Pillars of Hercules. Afterward, in one day and one
fatal night, there came mighty earthquakes and inundations, which
ingulfed that warlike people; Atlantis disappeared beneath the sea, and
then that sea became inaccessible, so that navigation on it ceased on
account of the quantity of mud which the ingulfed island left in its
place."

This invasion took place many ages before Athens was known as a Greek
city. It is referred to an extremely remote antiquity. The festival
known as the "Lesser Panathenaea," which, as symbolic devices used in it
show, commemorated this triumph over the Atlantes, is said to have been
instituted by the mythical Erichthonius in the earliest times remembered
by Athenian tradition. Solon had knowledge of the Atlantes before he
went to Egypt, but he heard there, for the first time, this account of
their "island" and of its disappearance in a frightful cataclysm. But
Atlantis is mentioned by other ancient writers. An extract preserved in
Proclus, taken from a work now lost, which is quoted by Boeckh in his
commentary on Plato, mentions islands in the exterior sea beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, and says it was known that in one of these islands
"the inhabitants preserved from their ancestors a remembrance of
Atlantis, an extremely large island, which for a long time held dominion
over all the islands of the