History of atlantis

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P a g e
 
THE 
HISTORY OF ATLANTIS 
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 archaeologist. 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 
flour- ished, 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.