Jonathan Yardley- March 5, 2006 The golden city of Timbuktu, like the lost city of Atlantis, occupies a large place in the world's mythology, but resemblances pretty much end there. Atlantis was Plato's metaphor for the ideal society that began to deteriorate as idealism was corrupted by greed, and its disappearance into the sea was punishment for its sins; but even though people have sought for centuries to recover it (and some have claimed to have done so), Atlantis was almost certainly a figment of Plato's imagination -- a.http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/~r/wp-dyn/rss/linkset/2005/03/25/LI2005032502370_xml/~3/24... |