Saros

who in turn had heard it directly from the great Athenian lawmaker Solon, who heard it nearly 200 years earlier from priests in Egypt, who told him that Greece itself had forgotten a war fought 9,000 years before Solon's own time.

The exact family relationship between these two men named Critias is itself something classical scholars still debate, but the shape of the story is not in question.

Even within Plato's own text, the account arrives secondhand through multiple tellers before it ever reaches the page.

a detail scholars have long pointed to as exactly the kind of narrative distancing a writer uses when he wants a fictional story to feel like inherited memory rather than invention.

Here's what makes the whole framing so clever and so easy to mistake for something more credible than it is.

Solon's trip to Egypt wasn't invented for this story.

It's independently attested elsewhere in ancient sources as a real journey.

According to this account, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the strait we now call Gibraltar, there once lay an island larger than Libya and Asia combined, as the ancient world understood those regions.