Nearly all the gods of Greece are connected with Atlantis.  We have seen the twelve principal gods all dwelling on the mountain of Olympus, in the midst of an island in the ocean in the far west, which was subsequently destroyed by a deluge on account of the wickedness of its people.  And when we turn to Plato’s description of Atlantis (p. 13, ante) we find that Poseidon and Atlas dwelt upon a mountain in the midst of the island; and on this mountain were their magnificent temples and palaces, where they lived, separated by great walls from their subjects.

It may be urged that Mount Olympus could not have referred to any mountain in Atlantis, because the Greeks gave that name to a group of mountains partly in Macedonia and partly in Thessaly.  But in Mysia, Lycia, Cyprus, and elsewhere there were mountains called Olympus; and on the plain of Olympia, in Elis, there was an eminence bearing the same designation.  There is a natural tendency among uncivilized peoples to give a “local habitation” to every general tradition.

“Many of the oldest myths,” says Baldwin (” Prehistoric Nations,” p. 376), “relate to Spain, North-western Africa, and other regions on the Atlantic, such as those concerning Hercules, the Cronidae, the Hyperboreans, the Hesperides, and the Islands of the Blessed.  Homer described the Atlantic region of Europe in his account of the wanderings of Ulysses. . . .  In the ages previous to the decline of Phoenician influence in Greece and around the AEgean Sea, the people of those regions must have had a much better knowledge of Western Europe than prevailed there during the Ionian or Hellenic period.”

The mythology of Greece is really a history of the kings of Atlantis.  The Greek heaven was Atlantis.  Hence the references to statues, swords, etc., that fell from heaven, and were preserved in the temples of the different states along the shores of the Mediterranean from a vast antiquity, and which were regarded as the most precious possessions of the people.  They were relics of the lost race received in the early ages.  Thus we read of the brazen or bronze anvil that was preserved in one city, which fell from heaven, and was nine days and nine nights in falling; in other words, it took nine days and nights of a sailing-voyage to bring it from Atlantis.

The modern theory that the gods of Greece never had any personal existence, but represented atmospheric and meteorological myths, the movements of clouds, planets, and the sun, is absurd.  Rude nations repeat, they do not invent; to suppose a barbarous people creating their deities out of clouds and sunsets is to reverse nature.  Men first worship stones, then other men, then spirits.  Resemblances of names prove nothing; it is as if one would show that the name of the great Napoleon meant “the lion of the desert” (Napo-leon), and should thence argue that Napoleon never existed, that he was a myth, that he represented power in solitude, or some such