Plato's Atlantis

Myth and legends usually come from many sources that are mixed together. But the myth of Atlantis can be traced to one source. The ancient civilization that was said to have been sunk into the sea comes from Plato.

Plato told the story of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias around 360 BC. He didn't mean it to be history or real. It was an allegory for corruption and the decay and fall of a civilization. But it took on mythic proportions and many people in the centuries to follow actually tried to find Atlantis. 

One reason that it took on a kind of reality is that Plato was very detailed in his writing. He gave the island a history, geography, and people who lived there. 

Plato didn't say it was his own story. He set the story back in time and from far away. The story of Atlantis, the “island of Atlas” is told by Critias, an aged character in both dialogues. Critias says he heard the story from Solon who was “not only the wisest of men, but also the noblest of poets.” Solon brought the story from Egypt, where he had heard it told by a priest in a city called Sais.

Surely, after nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato's Atlantis with its 10,000 chariots, advanced technologies, vast numbers of elephants and bulls, and a series of complex canals must be known as a myth. No. In a new documentary, a U.K.-based group claims to have discovered the ruins of this once-flourishing society on what is now the Atlantic coast of Spain.

As an article on Discover.com, "Where Is the Lost City of Atlantis — and Does It Even Exist?" states right off "We're sorry to report that Atlantis is indeed fictional. But that hasn’t stopped people from seeking it out for thousands of years."

Atlantis was no small island. In Timaeus it is “larger than Libya and Asia put together.” Its location is “the Pillars of Heracles.” Good old Socrates declares that this tale is not like his imaginary republics and “has the very great advantage of being fact not fiction.”

Islands do disappear after earthquakes or volcanoes erupt. Atlantis disappeared into Plato's imagination. He wanted a civilization to rival Athens as a way to talk about the divine versus human nature, ideal societies, the gradual corruption of human society.

Francis Bacon and Thomas More wrote about their own New Atlantis and Utopia, but knew that Atlantis was a philosophical allegory, no more real than their own invented societies. 

It was later amateur scholars, adventurers, explorers, and treasure hunters who decided there must be some truth in the tale.

1500 BC volcano that destroyed Atlantis

Here is an explanation that was posted along with the map shown above which has many references to sources "proving" that a volcano in 1500 BC destroyed the mythical Atlantis. For example, the eruption of Thera (or Santorini) in the Bronze Age (dated via radiocarbon dating of one sample to 1630-1600 BC was the most famous single event in the Aegean Sea before the fall of Troy. Detractors of the theory say that Santorini and Crete combined would not be the size of Plato's Atlantis, and the date of the Minoan collapse does not match Plato's dates for the fall of Atlantis. Oh, well, so much for that.