THE HISTORY OF ATLANTIS

Description

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

 

A HISTORY OF ATLANTIS must differ from all other histories,

for the fundamental reason that it seeks to record

the chronicles of a country the soil of which is no longer

available for examination to the Arachnologist. If, through

some cataclysm of nature, the Italian peninsula had been

submerged in the green waters of the Mediterranean at

a period subsequent to the fall of Rome, we would still

have been in possession of much documentary evidence

concerning the growth and ascent of the Roman Empire.

At the same time, the soil upon which that empire flourished,

the ponderable remains of its civilisation and its

architecture, would have been for ever lost to us save as

regards their colonial manifestations. We should, in a

great measure, have been forced to glean our ideas of

Latin pre-eminence from those institutions which it

founded in other lands, and from those traditions of it

which remained at the era of its disappearance among

the unlettered nations surrounding it.

But great as would be the difficulties attending

such an enterprise, these would, indeed, be negligible

when compared with the task of groping through the

mists of the ages in quest of the outlines of chronicle

and event which tell of a civilisation plunged into thenew