academic-thoughts

[academic-thoughts]

Atlantis and It's Evolution

J.R.R. Tolkien feigned to uncover lost documents when he wove various ancient myths into the lore of Middle Earth.  This is a technique originated by Plato in constructing Atlantis.  Plato claimed he found a source in Egyptian recounting the stories of Atlantis.  His “translation” into Greek is the justification for several phonetically Greek names.

Although Atlantis was not the most significant element in Plato’s dialogues, it has inspired the imagination of successive generations and become a cornerstone of fantastical storytelling.  Nor was it the only fantasy tale in Antiquity, as Lucian of Samosata wrote A True Story in the Second century A.D. to mock the genre of fantasy as a travelog.  Tales beyond the edge of the map of the known world were quite popular in Antiquity.  Of them all though, Atlantis is the only one still widely known by almost everyone in the World and certainly by every adult in the Western World.

In 360 B.C., Plato penned the story of ancient Athens defeating Atlantis.  Plato was discoursing upon the ideal civil state in two dialogues, Critias and Timaeus, written as sequels to The Republic.  In his dialogues, he discusses two different states.  One is the wealthy and luxuriously decadent world power of Atlantis, while the other is the almost spartan ancient Athens.  Plato’s ideal Republic is a system in which men and women are both educated and equal, but only within their state-assigned class, and only the warrior class rules.  Personally, I believe that this system is remarkably similar to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

These two Platonic dialogues both reference Timaeus’ ancestor, Solon as the wisest of the seven sages and lawgiver of Athens who visited Egypt, where he heard the tale from several Egyptians.  Salon told Dropides who told his great-grandson Timaeus, from which Plato found the tale.  It is a tale of a great island, just past the Pillars of Heracles (the modern-day Strait of Gibraltar) in the Atlantic Ocean.  The Kings of Atlantis descended from Poseidon and Cleito.  Atlantis was the source of the metal Oreichalkos, which is only a bit less valuable than gold.  Although Plato places Atlantis 9,000 years into his past, he inserts Athens into the tale as an ally until Atlantis becomes corrupt and imperialistic in its decadence.  Morally superior Athens defeats Atlantis in war, freeing the entire conquered world.  Then Atlantis is sunk beneath the waves with earthquakes and tsunamis as divine retribution for their corruption.

The dialogues are an allegory designed to caution the people of Athens from becoming too decadent or imperialistic.  Plato warns against the decay of morality in favor of decadence, and imperialism, and he cautions against transgressing divine morality. This caution against doing folly may have been influenced by Plato’s experience of the Peloponnesian Wars and by the events and choices made by Athens leading up to the Wars.  His cause was performed for the Panathenaea Games in honor of Athena and may be seen as state propaganda.

Plato’s claim to the historicity of Atlantis is belied by his dating of Athens as an ancient contemporary, making it over 9,000 years old in Plato’s time, older than ancient Egypt, and requiring a reminder of its past by Egyptians.  This is about as realistic as Tolkien’s feign.

Still, people are inspired to look for a grain of true history within Plato’s account.  Some point to the destruction of Knossos and the Minoans from the eruption of the Thera (modern Santorini) super-volcano in the 1,600s B.C.  Others say the “sea people” accused of precipitating the Bronze Age Collapse around 1,200 B.C. may be the source of imperialism or refugees.  Others note the Wars between the Greeks and Persians in which Athens defeated the much larger Persian navy and established itself as the region’s naval power may have been an inspiration.

Perhaps some of these accounts are accurate inspirations, but they do not suggest Atlantis existed.    In the 1880s, Ignatius Donnelly authored Atlantis and the Antediluvian World.  He argued that Atlantis was not a myth, but the birthplace of humanity’s first civilization prior to Noah and the home of the Nephilim and their giant offspring.  He argued that ancient peoples of Europe and America worshiped the Atlantean kings who colonized Egypt, Mesoamerica, and Western Europe, from which we derive Aryans.

Within the context of the 1880s, the remains of the city of Troy, long believed to be a Homeric myth, had just been discovered.  Other archeological sites were slowly being explored, including Knossos and Mykene.  Most people still believed the Biblical flood as literal, with all cultures having an apocryphal flood story, Plato’s timeline placed Atlantis well before Noah.

Donnelly’s theories were adopted as state propaganda by the Nazis.  The Nazis argued they are the living descendants of the true Aryans who survived the fall of Atlantis.  They argue the Atlanteans were superhumans who fell not from divine judgment of their corruption but by intermixing with “lesser races”.  Only by purifying Aryan blood, and removing corrupt lesser races, could the superhuman be restored to rightly rule the world.

In more modern times, people still search for Atlantis, saying Plato had some details of time or place wrong.  Without any real evidence, people have placed Atlantis in the Canary Islands, the Guelb er Richat (Eye of the Sahara), Minoa, and Bulgaria or the Black Sea, amongst other possibilities.  They repeatedly source Egar Cayce, a supposed psychic.  He supposedly had thousands of genuine readings.  He claimed the Atlanteans had been reincarnated as the American people from the United States.  

“Be it true that there is the fact of reincarnation, and that souls that once occupied such an environ [i.e. Atlantis] are entering the earth's sphere and inhabiting individuals in the present, is it any wonder that—if they made such alterations in the affairs of the earth in their day, as to bring destruction upon themselves—if they are entering now, they might make many changes in the affairs of peoples and individuals in the present?" (pg 50 Edgar Cayce on Atlantis by Edgar Evans)

"In Yucatan there is the EMBLEM of same. Let’s clarify this, for it may the more easily be found. For they will be brought to this America, these United States. A portion is to be carried, as we find, to the Pennsylvania State Museum. A portion is to be carried to the Washington preservations of such findings; or to Chicago." (page 89 Edgar Cayce on Atlantis by Edgar Evans)

In the Discovery series Hunting Atlantis, author Stel Pavlou and volcanologist Jess Phoenix, who has a Bachelor’s in history and a Master’s in geology, say Atlantis existed in 4,900 B.C.  They say Plato “based his timeline on ancient Egyptian Kings’ Lists” for his date of the 9,000s B.C. and it was in Bulgaria on the Black Sea.  However, Plato did not have access to these King Lists and any version accessible today is known to have been altered.

In the National Geographic series Drain the Oceans, the show slowly showcases four underwater environments.    All except the third are merely natural environments that are played up for drama, admits the series.  However, the third environment, an ancient town named Pavlopetri,  is a genuine Bronze Age town that had sunk below the sea due to the rise in sea levels and other natural disasters. It seems as if the idea of Atlantis was used simply to garner views instead of something genuinely investigated.

Most people are content to enjoy Atlantis as little more than an interesting setting for adventure stories.  J.R.R. Tolkien had Numenor as a fictional island setting in the first two ages of Middle Earth.  It was the first great kingdom of men, but it was corrupted by the fallen angel Sauron into attacking Valinor, the undying land of the elves and angels.  As punishment, the Creator destroyed Numenor by an Earthquake and tsunami in the second age of Middle Earth, a few thousand years before the Lord of the Rings where Sauron was finally defeated.  This is Tolkien’s Atlantis.

Disney adapted the idea in Atlantis: The Lost World and the sequel, Atlantis: Milo’s Return.  Disney’s original movies have Atlantis still existing in a giant cave under the ocean with its air pocket, and the Atlanteans being trapped primitives aware of the outside world.  Disney’s sequel took inspiration from Donnally’s book.  The characters leave Atlantis to travel to the surface world for further adventures in Norway and Mexico and in other nondescript places before returning to Atlantis and then bringing it back to the surface.

The video game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has downloadable content titled Atlantis DLC, allowing for a story with some time exploring Atlantis, almost as a set-aside.  The first two chapters are set within the Underworld.  The content involving Atlantis only begins in the third chapter.  Atlantis was merely set dressing for the story.  While the setting is as Plato described, the characterization is less true to Plato.  The in-game Poseidon admits to routinely sending great deluges when the Atlanteans prove themselves to not be worthy of mercy.

Others believe that Atlantis was a historical civilization that existed 11,000 years ago.  It’s simply that such knowledge has either been purposefully hidden or lost.

In Secret Origins, the author relays his ideas of  how Atlantis actually existed and how such knowledge might have been kept secret.  He “quotes” Plato, Edgar Cayce, Ishmael Perez, Helena Blavatsky, and Matthias De Stefano, all without citation.  The author merely expects his viewers to believe his claims.  It was certainly an interesting and educational set of videos.

Atlantis seems to have become a lost city-state starting around the late 19th until today with figures such as Ignatius Donally and Edgar Cayce.  Up until then, the city was considered nothing more than a fable and parable created by Plato to flatter Athens and warn of the folly of men.

Acknowledgments:

Louis D’Angelo

He played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey's Atlantis DLC

[academic-thoughts]

“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”

[academic-thoughts]

The Ingredients of Persuasion

Otherwise known as the lauded “big three” of rhetoric in the English language!

Rhetorical Devices are the devices used in the art or study of using language deliberately, (not accidental – intentional!) effectively, and persuasively. Almost all rhetorical devices that are used fall under the categories of ethos, logos, or pathos – otherwise known as Aristotle’s Ingredients of Persuasion. Being able to identify these three devices will make analyzing, annotating, and writing a million bajillion times easier (especially in argumentative settings)!

Ethos: Greek for character. Refers to the trustworthiness or credibility of the writer or speaker. Ethos is often conveyed through tone and style of the message and through the way the writer or speaker refers to differing views. It can also be affected by the writer‟s reputation as it exists independently from the message – his or her expertise in the field, previous record or integrity, etc. The impact of ethos is often called the arguments ethical appeal or the appeal from credibility.

The author is a trained expert in the topic or holds an important position in the topical field.

“My three decades of experience in public service, my tireless commitment to the people of this community, and my willingness to reach across the aisle and cooperate with the opposition, make me the ideal candidate for your mayor.”

Logos: Greek for embodied thought. Refers to the internal consistency of the message – the clarity of the claim, the logic of its reasons and the effectiveness of its supporting evidence. The impact of logos on the audience is sometimes called the argument’s logical appeal.

The author cites a collection of statistics supporting their claim.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: we have not only the fingerprints, the lack of an alibi, a clear motive, and an expressed desire to commit the robbery… We also have video of the suspect breaking in. The case could not be more open and shut.”

Pathos: Greek for suffering or experience. Often is associated with emotional appeal, as it appeals to the audience’s sympathies and imagination. An appeal to pathos causes an audience not just to respond emotionally but to identify with the writer or speaker’s point of view – to feel what the speaker feels. In this sense, pathos evokes a meaning implicit in the verb to suffer – to feel pain imaginably.

The most common way of conveying a pathetic appeal is through the narrative or story, which can turn the abstractions of logic into something palpable and present. Pathos thus refers to both the emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on an audience, the power with which the speaker‟s message moves the audience to decision or action.

The speaker uses diction that has emotional connotations or recalls a personal anecdote to pull the audience’s heartstrings. 

"If we don’t move soon, we’re all going to die! Can’t you see how dangerous it would be to stay?”

So those are the basics of the “big three” of rhetoric, formally known as Aristotle’s Ingredients of Persuasion! Here’s a little printable of these notes too!