In the Scholia to Plato’s _Republic_ it is said that at the great Panathenaea there was carried in procession a _peplum_ ornamented with representations of the contest between the giants and the gods, while on the _peplum_ carried in the little Panathenaea could be seen the war of the Athenians against the Atlantides. Even Humboldt accepted this as an independent testimony in favor of the antiquity of the story; but Martin has shown that, apart from the total inconsistency of the report with the expressions of Plato, who places the narration of this forgotten deed of his countrymen at the celebration of the festival of the little Panathenaea, the scholiast has only misread Proclus, who states that the _peplum_ depicted the repulse of the barbarians, _i. e._ Persians, by the Greeks.[393] To these passages it is customary to add references to the Meropian continent of Theopompus,[394] the Saturnian of Plutarch, the islands of Aristotle, Diodorus and Pausanias,—which is very much as if one should refer to the _New Atlantis_ of Bacon as evidence for the existence of More’s _Utopia_.[395] Plutarch in his life of Solon attributes Solon’s having given up the idea of an epic upon Atlantis to his advanced age rather than to want of leisure; but there is nothing to show that he had any evidence beyond Plato that Solon ever thought of such a poem, and Plato does not say that Solon began the poem, though Plutarch appears to have so understood him.[396] Thus it seems more probable that all the references to Atlantis by ancient writers are derived from the story in Plato than that they are independent and corroborative statements. With the decline of the Platonic school at Alexandria even the name of Atlantis readily vanished from literature. It is mentioned by Tertullian,[397] and found a place in the strange system of Cosmas Indicopleustes,[398] but throughout the Middle Ages little or nothing was known of it. That it was not quite forgotten appears from its mention in the _Image du Monde_, a poem of the thirteenth century, still in MS., where it is assigned a location in the _Mer Betée_ (= coagulée).[399] Plato was printed in Latin in 1483, 1484, 1491, and in Greek in 1513, and in 1534 with the commentary of Proclus on the Timaeus.[400] The _Timaeus_ was printed separately five times in the sixteenth century, and also in a French and an Italian translation.[401]