Linforth, Ivan (L)
Ivan Linforth (1879-1976) was a renowned American Hellenist scholar, who was Professor of Greek Studies at the University of California. In his Solon the Athenian[045] he controversially expressed the view that Plato himself brought the Atlantis story back to Athens and that the introduction of Solon into the provenance of the tale was “a literary device”.
To me, this seems highly improbable, as it would require Plato to lie and then implicate the highly regarded Solon in the same untruth. Then, for good measure, claim that his own family was complicit in transmitting this account from Solon to him. If this is the best that a scholar could come up with, I despair. Plato wrote Timaeus and Critias in his old age, not a time when a highly respected person normally resorts to lying.
Compounding this is the fact that the late Antonis Kontaratos identified an unprecedented twenty-two instances in the Atlantis narrative where Plato, directly or indirectly, claims the story to be true.