Atlantis

The story of Atlantis comes from two dialogues by the Athenian philosopher Plato, the Timaeus and the Critias, written around 360 BCE. In the Timaeus, the Athenian Critias recounts a tale he says was handed down in his family from the statesman Solon, who heard it from Egyptian priests at Saïs in the sixth century BCE. The priests told Solon that nine thousand years earlier Athens had been a great and virtuous city that defeated the invading power of Atlantis, an island larger than Libya and Asia together, lying in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Heracles, the Strait of Gibraltar.

The unfinished Critias describes Atlantis in detail. The sea god Poseidon fell in love with a mortal woman, Cleito, and enclosed her home on a hill within alternating rings of land and water. Their ten sons became the first kings, and the eldest, Atlas, gave his name to the island and the ocean. Plato pictures a rich and ordered state with canals, harbours, temples plated with precious metals, ritual bull hunts and laws inscribed on a pillar of orichalcum. Over time the kings’ divine nature was diluted, and they grew greedy and arrogant.

The Timaeus says that after the war came violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single dreadful day and night the island of Atlantis sank beneath the sea, leaving impassable shoals of mud. The Critias breaks off just as Zeus gathers the gods to decide the Atlanteans’ punishment, so the story stops in mid-sentence.

There is no reference to Atlantis in any source earlier than Plato, Greek or Egyptian, and no archaeological or geological evidence for a sunken continent in the Atlantic. Studies of the ocean floor and of plate tectonics show that no large landmass could have sunk there within the span of human history. Most classicists therefore read Atlantis as a philosophical myth, a story invented to make an argument, like other myths in Plato’s dialogues.

The argument is fairly clear from context. The Timaeus and Critias follow a discussion of the ideal state, similar to that in Plato’s Republic, and the Atlantis story shows such a state, primeval Athens, in action, triumphing over a wealthy, imperial sea power that has lost its virtue. Many readers have seen in Atlantis a reflection on Athens’s own naval empire and its disastrous ambitions in Plato’s lifetime. Ancient readers were already divided: the commentator Proclus reports that Crantor, one of the first interpreters of the Timaeus, took the story as history, while others read it as allegory.

Modern attempts to find a historical core have proposed locations from the Azores to Antarctica. The most discussed is the Minoan civilisation of Crete and the island of Thera (Santorini), devastated by a huge volcanic eruption in the second millennium BCE, a link first suggested by K. T. Frost in 1909 and later championed by the archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos. The eruption was real, but its date, location and scale do not match Plato’s account, and most scholars see at most a distant echo of real catastrophes.

Atlantis gained new life in the age of exploration. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (published 1626) borrowed the name for a utopia devoted to scientific research, and some Renaissance writers wondered whether the Americas were Plato’s lost lands. In 1882 the American politician Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, arguing that Atlantis was the source of all civilisations; it became a bestseller and launched the modern Atlantis industry.

Esoteric movements adopted the story. Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophists described Atlantis as the home of an earlier “root race” of humanity, and the American psychic Edgar Cayce claimed in trance readings to recall its advanced technology. Such ideas were sometimes put to harmful use: racial theorists, including some in Nazi Germany, imagined Atlanteans as ancestors of a supposed Aryan master race. Historians and archaeologists reject these claims for lack of evidence, and point out that they often deny the real achievements of ancient peoples.

In popular culture Atlantis is everywhere, from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) to comics, films and video games, including Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). For readers of Plato it remains what it was at first: a powerful story about pride, power and the fragility of human achievement.