It is evident that the Atlantis tale must be treated either as mainly historical, with presumably some distortions and exaggerations, or as fiction necessarily based in some measure (like all else of its kind) on living or antiquated facts. Certainly no one will go the length of accepting it as wholly true as it stands. But, even eliminating all reference to the god Poseidon and his plentiful demigod progeny, we are left with divers essential features which credulity can hardly swallow. Atlantis is too obviously an earlier and equally colossal Persia, western instead of eastern, overrunning the Mediterranean until checked by the intrepid stand of the great Athenian republic. The supreme authentic glory of Athens was the overthrow of Xerxes and his generals. Had this been otherwise we must believe that we should not have heard of the baffled invasion by Atlantis. Again, we are asked to accept Athens, contrary to all other information, as a dominant military state more than 9,500 years before Christ, when presumably its people, if existent, were exceedingly primitive and unformidable. Moreover, the sudden submergence of so vast a region as the imagined Atlantis would be an event without parallel in human annals, besides being pretty certain to leave marks on the rest of the world which could be recognized even now. The hypothesis of fiction seems reasonably well established. We must remember that Plato did not habitually confine himself to bare facts. His favorite method of exposition was by reporting alleged dialogues between Socrates and various persons--dialogues which no one could have remembered accurately in their entirety. It is recognized that in arrangement, characters, and utterance he has contrived to convey his own theories and conceptions as well as those of his revered teacher and leader, so that it is often impossible to say whether we should credit certain views or statements mainly to Plato or to Socrates. Possessed by his meditations, he would even present as an instructive example and incitement a fancied picture of an elaborate system of social and political organization, chiefly the product of his own brain. He did this in the “Republic” and apparently had planned a larger partly parallel work of the kind in the triology of which the “Timaeus” and the fragmentary “Critias” are the first part and the unfinished second. A writer (Lewis Campbell) in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, article “Plato,” states the case very clearly.