Of Wars and Endings

This implies that there were no cultural-memory-erasing events from the time of that great flood until Plato's day; if there had been then their cultural memory of that flood would have been erased.

In Plato's day, the Deucalion flood story starts out something like this:

Earth was filled with violence and war. Zeus became angered and decided to punish mankind. He called all the gods to gather at his palace at the center of the universe. They took the road in the sky that went there (namely the Milky Way). Having assembled them he told them he was going to strike Earth with his ultimate weapon, lightning. Then he recalled, or else Athena reminded him, that the weapon might destroy all those on Earth and in those Heaven. So he struck the Earth with his waters (the waters above, as in rain) and, to be sure he commanded Poseidon to add his weapons; the waters of the seas and earthquakes. [Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1]

So this was the gist of the common story of the Deucalion flood, as Plato's original audience knew it.

In Timaeus, Plato's readers first read of a war when the priest tells Solon:

"For verily at one time, Solon, before the greatest destruction by water, what is now the Athenian State was the bravest in war and supremely well organized also in all other respects." [Timaeus 23]

This "greatest destruction by water" would infer to the reader the flood of Deucalion's day. In fact, Critias confirms this flood to be the "greatest" in Critias 112a where he described three earlier floods as destructive but emphasizes the Deucalion flood with the adjective meaning extraordinary and violent.

So the first thing they hear about the war places it before this flood. However, there is no mention of how long before that flood the war had occurred.

Next, [Timaeus 24d - 25d] the reader gets a synopsis of the war, after which, Plato wrote that (after the war was won by Greece) the army of Greece and the island of Atlantis were destroyed by floods and earthquakes.

At this point a contemporary Greek reader may, or may not, have assumed that these floods and earthquakes were the same as those of the Deucalion flood (which Plato had mentioned just a little earlier in the scroll). So they could easily have assumed at this point that Atlantis was destroyed at the time of Deucalion's flood.

At this point, the original reader has read a specific mention of war before the flood, and a description of destruction that parallels the common flood story, with which they were quite familiar.

The reader would then read the Critias dialogue. Unfortunately, Critias ends abruptly. So was the reader left in the dark?

Well, maybe not. If Critias ended abruptly then, as it does now, what is the last thing the original readers read?

This:

"And Zeus, the God of gods, who reigns by Law, inasmuch as he has the gift of perceiving such things, marked how this righteous race was in evil plight, and desired to inflict punishment upon them, to the end that when chastised they might strike a truer note. Wherefore he assembled together all the gods into that abode which they honor most, standing as it does at the center of all the Universe, and beholding all things that partake of generation and when he had assembled them, he spoke thus: . . ." [Critias 121]

Sound familiar? It should, and it would have to the original readers.

Critias ends with a passage that very closely parallels the beginning of the story of the flood of Deucalion. Plato's readers would have put this together. Plato probably intended them to do just that.

A war mentioned in relation to the flood. Destruction of Atlantis in terms of floods and earthquakes. A conclusion that can be directly related to the start of the flood story.

One can easily surmise that the original readers (Plato's intended audience) would have concluded that Atlantis was destroyed during Deucalion's flood; an event late enough in history to still be in the cultural memory of Greece.

If they didn't conclude this, what other conclusion would they have come to? And upon what specific statements in Plato's dialogue would they base that conclusion?