Solon Hears a Story in Egypt
An Athenian lawmaker named Solon visits the Egyptian city of Sais and asks the priests about the distant past.
About 590 to 560 BCE, when Solon travelled (Plato gives no exact year)
What the text says
Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages.
Timaeus 20d-e
To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old.
Timaeus 21e-22a
O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.
Timaeus 22b
The story
Plato tells the story through a man named Critias, who is talking with Socrates. Critias says he heard it as a boy of about ten from his grandfather, who was nearly ninety. The grandfather had it from Solon, the famous lawmaker of Athens and a friend of the family.
Solon travels to Sais, a city in the Nile Delta. The people there worship a goddess called Neith, whom they say is the same as the Greek goddess Athena, so they feel a bond with Athens. They welcome Solon with honour.
Solon wants to impress the priests, so he tells them the oldest stories the Greeks know: the first man, Phoroneus, and the great flood that Deucalion and Pyrrha survived. He even tries to work out how many years ago these things happened.
A very old priest stops him. The Greeks, he says, are like children. They have no old knowledge at all. Plato does not say what the priest looked like or what the temple was like; he only gives us the words.
Solon was a real Athenian lawmaker of the early 500s BCE, and the historian Herodotus says he visited King Amasis in Egypt. Sais was a real city in the Nile Delta, and Neith was its goddess. Plutarch, writing more than 400 years after Plato, names two priests Solon studied with, one of them from Sais, but Plutarch's source for the Atlantis part is Plato himself. Jowett, the translator, pointed out that no writer before Plato mentions Atlantis at all.