“O
Solon, you Greeks are all young in your minds which hold no
store of old belief on along tradition, no knowledge hoary with
age. The reason is this. There have been, and will be hereafter,
many and divers destructions of mankind, the greatest by fire
and water, though other lessor ones are due to countless other
causes. Thus the story current also in your part of the world,
that Phaethon, child of the Sun, once harnessed his father chariot
but could not guide it into his fathers course and so burnt
up everything on the face of the earth and was himself consumed
by a thunderbolt – this legend has the air of a fable;
but the truth behind it is a deviation of the bodies that
revolve in heaven around the earth and a distruction, occurring
at long intervals of things on earth by a great conflagration…
Any great or noble achievement or otherwise exceptional event
that has come to pass, either in your parts or here or in any
place of which we have tidings, has been written down for ages
past in records that are preserved in our temples; whereas with
you and other people again and again, life has only just been
enriched with letters and all other necessities of civilization
when once more, after the usual period of years, the torrents
from heaven swept down like a pestilence, leaving only the rude
and unlettered among you. And so you start again like children,
knowing nothing of what existed in ancient times here or in
your own country… To begin with, your people remember one
deluge, though their were many earlier; and moreover you do
not know that the noblest and bravest race in the world once
lived in your country. From a small remnant of their seed you
and all your citizens are derived; but you know nothing of it
because the survivors for many generations died leaving no word
in writing”.
From
Plato’s The Criteas – Senior Priest to Solon at
Sais, Nile Delta c560 BC.
