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> Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time. To me, this barely seems relevant to any crit
by macintux 4y ago
> Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time.
To me, this barely seems relevant to any criticism of the story. Plato had, at most, 2000 years of written history to draw upon (and I’d guess far far less at his disposal), so his estimate of the age of an ancient civilization is inevitably going to be quite far off.
I don’t disagree with the conclusion, but that seems like a minor glitch.
- astine 4y agoI'd say that if Plato's account is so garbled that he gets the date off by thousands of years, the entire story is likely to be useless as a source of actual history.
- cvoss 4y agoThis is where I think the culture barrier may have a major role. If somebody today says a thing happened ten thousand years ago, the listener has an expectation that the true year of the event is 2022 - 10000 plus or minus, what, 1000? And the more scientific the context of the communication, the smaller the expected error would be. Is is possible that for an ancient Greek to describe an event as "ten thousand years ago", he means nothing more or less than "too long ago to remember when, exactly"? It may be unfair for us to backport our modern conception of numbers as these very precise values.