I think what

Plato is trying to do with this whole story, the underlying motive, is a desire not just because he's done the ideal state, that's what we've had in the Republic. What he's interested in here, and it does link again with this idea of fiction, it's putting the ideal into concrete form, into embodied form, into a landscape, into all the physical aspects of a state. It's environment. I think that's what the bottom is going on here. It's embodiment and of course it's very important that this whole story is located within the creation story. The creation story of the timeus, because we have the timeus, first of all, which summarizes the story, then this enormous creation story, and then the critties, and the creation story is all about putting the ideal into concrete form. So I think that's what makes the Atlantis story different, or different at least from the Republic, though perhaps less different from

the laws. I

believe that Atlantis represents the contemporary Athenian democracy of the late fifth century. I think that the Atlanteans are sort of one perspective on Athens, and the early Athenians are another. The main reason I say that is that the big difference between the prehistoric Atlanteans and prehistoric Athenians is actually militarily. The prehistoric Athenians are an inland, he actually managed to make Athens an inland state by saying that it'd be a lot of erosion since. With a land infantry army that makes them like the Spartans, they had no ships, they had no sailors. The Atlanteans are a massive seapower, what the ancient Greeks called a thalassocracy, right? That means a constitution based on the sea. From that point of view, they're identical to the Periclesian Athenian Empire, and it's their seagoing power that makes them fall. But the point of Arcritius is that he is deeply, deeply associated with being against the sailors of Athens, and I think we need to get this on the table very quickly. So the most radical members of the Athenian democracy lived in the harbor town of Piraeus. Aristotle says they are far more democratic than anybody else because they know they make the money. They're very poor, they've mostly only got one slave maximum each, they're poor but free, and they are the big voting power in the democracy. And Aristotle says that they have this extremely fervent democratic spirit. Now, Kritius actually went when he did the coup with the Thirty Tyrants and staked out Piraeus and took on the navy and was actually killed in Piraeus. He was actually killed there by the then victorious democrats who reinstated the democracy. Guess where the republic is set in the Piraeus? Why do we go down to the Piraeus to think out the navy-free Calipolis, beautiful city of the republic, right? It's all to do with Kritius' opposition to the Thalisocratic Athenian democracy ruled by working-class sailors.

So can we just develop that?