The Truth About Atlantis
According the ancient story, at its height Atlantis slipped from peace and gentility into a warlike despotism, seeking great conquest and sowing wanton cruelty across the known world, until at last it was punished by the gods and drowned beneath the waves. The Atlanteans themselves told a rather different story. Yes, some still survived, scattered about in small number, passing down the history of their once magnificent civilization from generation to generation. It was true, they would admit, that in time wanton cruelty became a trademark of their society, but it was a cruelty that was thought not to be cruelty and directed only inward at their own people. It was not in seeking to take hold of the riches of the world by force, not in pursuing relentless slaughter across the seas, not in being overcome with an unquenchable thirst for conquest, no, their great sin was an inability to escape the past. Time passed and the Atlanteans became ever more convinced that their Golden Age had before ended and grew ever more fixed upon the notion of bringing about a great restoration. Change, even the idea of change, regardless the kind, became anathema. It was this that inevitably created the viciousness which ultimately damned them; for everything was held fast, from the great matters of state to the life of each ordinary citizen, and nothing new could be introduced lest civilization depart from the old ways and, it was feared, be forever lost. When temples and palaces from ages past fell into ruin, they were rebuilt the same, always the same, to as exact a plan and specification as could be. Houses, too, and marketplaces, and all the great public works, were rebuilt precisely as they had stood and only precisely so. That was merely the beginning, the most trifling detail. To the utmost extremes they took this notion, and great governing departments were tasked with keeping stock and track of the people so that whenever a man or woman died, someone was brought in to take up their exact position and trade and all were assigned a destiny from birth to fulfill such an allotted task in their own appointed place when the time came. This was hardly able to forestall the decay which terrorized them so—indeed it could only be said to have hastened it—and by attempting the impossible task of maintaining their world exactly as it had always been, they sowed the very seeds of its destruction. Failing in this cornerstone, the rulers of Atlantis became ever more desperate, ever more convinced of the necessity of adhering strictly to the wisdom of the ancients, and so to prevent any decline—and all change was decline in their estimation—the people began to be assigned not merely the station but the names and lives of the dead, called upon to continue these past existences into the present and future without end, until as the years drew on it happened all were play acting the lives of a prior generation, none free to do as they chose but only to wear the mask of the dead and act out the past exactly as it had unfurled—down to the daily minutiae of the life of the role into which each had been cast—and at long last inescapably the tremendous stultifying weight of history began to crush the people of Atlantis. The tides of time could not be resisted. Atlantis dwindled and dwindled, diminished and diminished, its people increasingly burdened by their own history until there was nothing left to sustain nor anything left to sustain it. The drowning of Atlantis was thus a metaphorical drowning. So the Atlanteans became a shadow people hidden amongst the other cultures of the world, believed long ago to have vanished, and the story of their civilization took on a different cast in the eyes of others, passed into legend, and the myth of the Great City spread and grew.