The Truth about Atlantis

If you are like most Americans, chances are, you probably believe that Atlantis or another civilization like it once existed. A survey conducted by Chapman University in October 2014 found that, at that time, roughly 63% of people in the United States agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “ancient, advanced civilizations, such as Atlantis, once existed.”

These numbers do not seem to be rapidly falling away either; when Chapman University conducted the same survey again in October 2018, they found that, this time around, 57% of people in the United States agreed or strongly agreed with the exact same statement. In other words, they seem to fairly consistently find that roughly six in ten people in the United States believe in the existence of Atlantis or another highly technologically advanced civilization like it.

These numbers are absolutely astounding considering that Atlantis is pure fiction; we know exactly where the story comes from, who made it up, and where he drew his inspiration from. This would be like if, in 2,500 years, 57% of people in some futuristic civilization believe that Westeros once existed. It is truly astonishing. Nonetheless, it seems there is just something so romantic about the idea of a lost, highly advanced civilization that no one wants to accept the reality that Atlantis is totally made up.

The real story of Atlantis

The story of Atlantis originates from a series of dialogues written by the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BC), probably near the very end of his life. The first dialogue in the series is titled Timaios. It begins with Socrates having a conversation with three famous individuals: the Pythagorean philosopher Timaios, the Athenian politician Kritias, and the Syracusan general Hermokrates.

Socrates remarks that his discussion the previous day about the nature of the ideal state has left him eager to learn more about what the ideal state would be like in action and how it would interact with other states. He proposes that, for the sake of entertainment, someone should tell a story about this state and its interactions. Hermokrates remarks that Kritias happens to know just such a story and entreats him to share it with Socrates and Timaios.

Kritias claims that the story he is about to tell is “certainly true,” because he heard it from his grandfather Kritias, who learned the story from his father Dropidas, who learned the story from his friend, the renowned lawgiver Solon (lived c. 638 – c.  558 BC), who had been composing an epic poem on the subject that he never finished. Kritias claims that Solon heard the story from the Egyptian priests in the city of Saïs, which is located in the Nile River Delta, and that those priests knew the story because they had access to historical records in their temples going back at least nine thousand years.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of Plato, based on an earlier Greek original, based on an earlier Greek original by the sculptor Silanion, dating to c. 370 BC or thereabouts

After expounding this long and rather convoluted backstory of how he supposedly came to know everything he is about to say, Kritias proceeds to tell the story of Atlantis, as it was supposedly told to Solon by one of the Egyptians priests. Here is the story, straight from Plato’s own Timaios, as translated by Benjamin Jowett:

“For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city [i.e., Athens] put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Herakles [i.e., the Strait of Gibraltar]; the island was larger than Libya [i.e., Africa] and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Herakles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.”

“Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Herakles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country [i.e., Egypt] and yours [i.e., Greece] and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country [i.e., Athens] shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes.”

“And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.”

There is more discussion of the story of Atlantis in the Timaios, but the story is primarily continued in the sequel dialogue, titled Kritias, in which Kritias gives a long speech describing the government and society of Atlantis in great detail. Unfortunately, the surviving text of the Kritias ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence. It is widely believed that Plato died before he could finish it.

Plato is also thought to have been planning a third dialogue in the series, titled Hermokrates after the third member of the conversation, but there is no evidence that he ever even started writing it.

ABOVE: Medieval manuscript of Calcidus’s Latin translation of Plato’s Timaios, the dialogue in which Atlantis is first introduced

Oh, but Plato would never just make stuff up!

Now that we know what Plato himself actually says about Atlantis, what do we make of it? People who claim that Atlantis really existed often try to insist that Plato was a “serious” philosopher and that he would never have just made up a story out of whole cloth and tried to pass it off as true. For instance, the bestselling book Ancient Mysteries by Peter James and Nick Thorpe, which was first published in 1999 by Ballantine Books, insists on page 32:

“While Plato always added his own slant to traditional material, he has never been shown to be guilty of wholesale fabrication. It is worth giving him the benefit of the doubt and, for the sake of argument, investigating his claim…”

The problem with this argument is that the people making it clearly know nothing at all about Plato or his philosophical style. Making up elaborate stories like the one about Atlantis is exactly the sort of thing Plato is known for. Plato was not just a brilliant philosopher; he was also a brilliant storyteller. This is the same man who, at least according to Diogenes Laërtios’s less-than-reliable biography of him in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, originally wanted to become a tragic playwright before he met Socrates; he had the soul of a poet.

Making up elaborate stories to illustrate philosophical points is something Plato does absolutely all the time. For instance, in the Republic alone, Plato tells three very famous and elaborate fictional stories: the story of the ring of Gyges (Republic 2:359a–2:360d), the Allegory of the Cave (Republic 514a–520a), and the Myth of Er (Republic 10.614–10.621). None of these stories are attested in any earlier or independent sources, indicating that Plato probably made them up.

In his Symposium 189d–193a, Plato has the comic playwright Aristophanes tell a hilarious tale about how humans were supposedly originally round creatures with two heads, four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitals. He says that some humans had two penises, some had one penis and one vagina, and some had two vaginas. Then, he says that, in extremely ancient times, humans tried to rebel against the gods, so Zeus split them all in half. The story concludes as follows, in Harold N. Fowler’s translation:

“Each of us, then, is but a tally of a man, since every one shows like a flat-fish the traces of having been sliced in two; and each is ever searching for the tally that will fit him. All the men who are sections of that composite sex that at first was called man-woman are woman-courters; our adulterers are mostly descended from that sex, whence likewise are derived our man-courting women and adulteresses. All the women who are sections of the woman have no great fancy for men: they are inclined rather to women, and of this stock are the she-minions.”

“Men who are sections of the male pursue the masculine, and so long as their boyhood lasts they show themselves to be slices of the male by making friends with men and delighting to lie with them and to be clasped in men’s embraces; these are the finest boys and striplings, for they have the most manly nature. Some say they are shameless creatures, but falsely: for their behavior is due not to shamelessness but to daring, manliness, and virility, since they are quick to welcome their like.”

I don’t know of anyone who thinks that this story is literally true. It’s clearly just supposed to be a clever story to explain why some people are attracted to people with the same genitals and other people are attracted to people with different genitals. It’s also not attested in any earlier or independent sources, which suggests that Plato himself probably made it up.

ABOVE: Depiction of the “primeval man” according to Aristophanes in Platon’s Symposion

Not only is it common for Plato to make up stories, but the story of Atlantis in particular shares a lot of common themes with other stories that Plato probably made up. For instance, like the story about Zeus splitting primeval humans in two from Plato’s Symposium, the story of Atlantis is set in extremely ancient times—supposedly nine thousand years before the time when Plato himself was writing. Plato seems to have had an intense fascination with the idea of remote antiquity and it is a theme that recurs throughout many of his stories.

Now, it is true that, in Plato’s Timaios, Kritias insists that the story of Atlantis is “certainly true” and Socrates agrees with him. This doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that Plato believed the story was true or that he intended his readers to believe it as true, since we have to remember that none of the speakers in the dialogue necessarily represents Plato himself.

Furthermore, the entire narrative context in which the story of Atlantis is told is probably fictional. There is no evidence that the conversation between Socrates, Kritias, Timaios, and Hermokrates Plato describes in the Timaios ever took place in any form. Indeed, although we know that Kritias, Hermokrates, and Socrates were all real people because they are attested in other sources outside of Plato’s own writings, we can’t be sure if Timaios was a real person, since there are no independent mentions of him outside of Plato.

How, then, can we be expected to take seriously a claim about a story being true when the claim itself is probably fictional?

ABOVE: Mosaic of Plato’s Akademia from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in the Roman city of Pompeii

Plato’s alleged “sources”

Now, in response to problems like these, believers in Atlantis may try to point to Plato’s alleged sources and argue that, because Plato tells us where he heard the story, this gives him credibility. This line of argumentation, however, has several serious flaws. The first major problem is the fact that Plato doesn’t tell us his sources. He never says anything at all about how he learned the story of Atlantis, because, in the dialogue, the entire story of Atlantis is told by Kritias.

It is, however, worth thinking about the chain of retelling for the Atlantis myth described in the Timaios, because it can be quite revealing. Kritias was not just a random politician; he was also the cousin of Plato’s mother Periktione and, like Plato himself, a member of one of Athens’ most prominent aristocratic families.

In 404 BC, after the Spartans defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, they forced Athens to give up its democratic government and imposed a pro-Spartan oligarchic regime on the city whose members were selected from Athens’ most prominent aristocratic families. The highest ranking members of the regime belonged to a group of thirty oligarchs, who later became known as οἱ τριάκοντα τύραννοι (hoi triákonta týrannoi), which means “the Thirty Tyrants.” Kritias was the ringleader of this group.

During their eight-month reign of terror over Athens, the Thirty Tyrants, under Kritias’s leadership, are reported to have brutally executed somewhere around 1,500 Athenian citizens without trial. They executed anyone whom they suspected of plotting treason against the regime, but also executed many wealthy Athenians just so they could confiscate their properties.

Plato himself records in his Seventh Epistle—his only surviving non-dialogue work—that he was initially sympathetic to the regime of the Thirty Tyrants on account of the fact that his relatives were members of it, but that he was so horrified by the violence the regime enacted that he quickly turned against it. He writes, as translated by J. Harward:

“Some of these [i.e., the Thirty] were relatives and acquaintances of mine, and they at once invited me to share in their doings, as something to which I had a claim. The effect on me was not surprising in the case of a young man. I considered that they would, of course, so manage the State as to bring men out of a bad way of life into a good one. So I watched them very closely to see what they would do.”

“And seeing, as I did, that in quite a short time they made the former government seem by comparison something precious as gold—for among other things they tried to send a friend of mine, the aged Socrates, whom I should scarcely scruple to describe as the most upright man of that day, with some other persons to carry off one of the citizens by force to execution, in order that, whether he wished it, or not, he might share the guilt of their conduct; but he would not obey them, risking all consequences in preference to becoming a partner in their iniquitous deeds—seeing all these things and others of the same kind on a considerable scale, I disapproved of their proceedings, and withdrew from any connection with the abuses of the time.”

Some scholars have expressed doubts about whether the Seventh Epistle was really written by Plato, but, even if it is a forgery under Plato’s name, it is certainly a very early one made by someone who knew Plato’s writings extremely well and the view of the Thirty Tyrants expressed in it certainly resonates well with how they are portrayed in the dialogues that are universally accepted as as authentic works of Plato. (In particular, Plato portrays Socrates as making unfavorable comments about the Thirty in his Apologia.)

In 403 BC, a group of pro-democracy counter-revolutionaries led by the esteemed general Thrasyboulos overthrew the Thirty. Kritias was killed in battle and democracy was restored. By the time Plato was writing the Timaios, Kritias had been dead for many decades. Plato most likely remembered him as a relative who could have become a great statesman, but whose greed and cruelty led him astray.

In the Timaios, Kritias claims that he heard the story of Atlantis from his grandfather, who heard it from his father. We don’t know much about either of them, but we do know a decent amount about the person Kritias’s great-grandfather supposedly heard it from: Solon, who was one of the most famous social and political reformers in all of Athenian history.

The Athenians revered Solon as almost a god-like figure for his immense wisdom and his forward-thinking reforms—similar to how modern-day Americans might think of Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt. He was also one of Plato’s ancestors on his mother’s side. A number of lyric poems attributed to him have survived to the present day, but none of them mention anything about Atlantis.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait bust of the great Athenian lawgiver Solon, based on a Greek original dating to around the late second century BC

According to Kritias in the Timaios, Solon, in turn, supposedly learned the story of Atlantis in Saïs from the Egyptian priests, who supposedly read about it in their 9,000-year-old records. Egypt in Plato’s time was seen by the Greeks as a far-off, exotic place where people could go to learn great wisdom and mystical secrets, sort of like their equivalent of Timbuktu.

Stories about Solon visiting Egypt go back to a time much earlier than Plato. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) records that Solon visited Egypt in his Histories 1.30. Stories about other famous philosophers and sages having supposedly studied in Egypt were also quite rampant. For instance, Plato’s contemporary, the Athenian orator Isokrates (lived 436 – 338 BC) claimed that none other than the great sage Pythagoras of Samos (lived c. 570 – c. 495 BC) had studied there.

Ultimately, even if we assume that Plato didn’t just make the story of Atlantis up himself and that he really heard some version of it from Kritias at some point, Kritias could just as easily have made it up as Plato. For that matter, Kritias’s grandfather could have made it up, or his great-grandfather, or Solon, or the Egyptian priests, or whoever supposedly wrote about Atlantis in the priests’ records. The line of transmission is so long and convoluted that there are literally more than a half dozen different people who could have plausibly made the story up.

The colorful reputations of all the people and places supposedly involved in the transmission of the Atlantis story further call into question its veracity. Imagine if a modern storyteller told you, “Hey, I heard this story about a lost continent from my mother’s cousin, a vicious mass-murderer, who heard it from his grandfather, who heard it from his father, who heard it from his close, personal friend Abraham Lincoln, who heard it from a scholar in Timbuktu, who read about it in a 9,000-year-old manuscript.” Would you believe him? No, of course not!

But yet that is literally the exact same level of credibility we are talking about here and, for some reason, people are more willing to take Plato at his word than they would be if someone else tried to pull this sort of crazy story today. This is a clear example of people being willing to believe something that is inherently incredible just because a famous philosopher said it.

ABOVE: Map by Athanasius Kircher showing the alleged location of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean

In all likelihood, though, Plato actually intended the whole source-chain framing narrative in the Timaios as merely a literary backdrop for his story and never meant for it to be taken seriously. Using extremely elaborate framing narratives, with one account nested inside another account nested inside another account ad infinitum, is also highly characteristic of Plato.

Most famously, Plato’s entire Symposium is veritable a Russian nesting doll of framing narratives. The dialogue itself is narrated not by Plato, but rather by a man named Apollodoros, who claims that he heard about the drinking party he describes from a man named Aristodemos, who was supposedly present at the party. The core of the dialogue consists of a series of speeches delivered by various guests. At one point, Socrates gives a speech in which he describes a conversation he supposedly had with the philosopher Diotima of Mantineia.

In other words, we’re hearing from Plato what Apollodoros supposedly heard from Aristodemos, who supposedly heard it from Socrates, who supposedly heard it from Diotima. This is nearly as elaborate as the framing narrative we see for the story of Atlantis in the Timaios. I don’t know why Plato loved giving these kinds of elaborate framing stories, but it’s quite apparent that he did it for literary reasons.

ABOVE: Plato’s Symposium, painted in 1869 by the German Academic painter Anselm von Feuerbach

What about other accounts of Atlantis from ancient times?

Given how unreliable Plato is as a source on his own, Atlantis supporters have sought references to Atlantis in other ancient sources, hoping to verify Plato’s account. These searches have all been in vain.

It is true that Plato’s account of Atlantis in his dialogues Timaios and Kritias is not the only surviving account of Atlantis from ancient times, but it is the earliest. Moreover, we can be quite certain that all the other surviving ancient accounts of Atlantis are derived—in one way or another—from Plato’s. This means that, even though Plato’s story is not technically the only surviving account of Atlantis we have, it is the only account of Atlantis we have that actually matters for historical purposes.

Some Atlantis supporters have tried to claim that there is another account of Atlantis from before Plato. These people have pointed to a poem written in around the late fifth century BC by the Greek poet Hellanikos of Lesbos titled Atlantis. This poem is now almost completely lost, but we know it existed because there are references to it in surviving ancient sources.

Plato’s dialogues Timaios and Kritias are both generally thought to have most likely been written in around the middle of the fourth century BC, near the very end of Plato’s life. This means that Hellanikos of Lesbos’s poem most likely predates both the Timaios and the Kritias by at least half a century. If Hellanikos of Lesbos’s poem were really about the lost island of Atlantis, it would provide powerful confirmation that the story of the island and its destruction existed before Plato.

Unfortunately, the people who claim that Hellanikos of Lesbos wrote a poem about the lost city of Atlantis have not fully done their research. All evidence indicates that Hellanikos of Lesbos’s poem was not about the lost city described by Plato at all, but rather about an entirely different subject.

ABOVE: Photograph of Oxyrhynchos Papyrus 11, 1359, which may be a portion of Hellanikos of Lesbos’s mostly-lost poem Atlantis, which was not actually about the legendary lost city of that name, but rather about the daughters of the Titan Atlas in Greek mythology

The confusion here arises from the fact that the Greek name Ἀτλαντίς (Atlantís) comes from Ἄτλας (Átlas), the name of a Titan in Greek mythology who is said to have held up the sky in the far west. (In modern times, Atlas is often interpreted as holding up the earth, but, as I explain in this article I originally published in February 2017, this is not what the ancient Greeks believed, but rather a misconception that has arisen from the misinterpretation of Atlas’s traditional iconography.)

The reason why Plato’s lost city of Atlantis is named after Atlas is because, according to Plato, it was located in the far west, in what we now call the “Atlantic Ocean,” which is also named after Atlas. The earliest reference to the Atlantic Ocean in association with Atlas comes from the book The Histories, written in around the 420s BC by the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos. Furthermore, according to Plato’s account, the first prince of the city of Atlantis, the son of the god Poseidon and the mortal woman Kleito, was named Atlas—presumably after the Titan of the same name.

Hellanikos of Lesbos’s poem Atlantis bore that title not because it had anything at all to do with Plato’s supposed lost city, but rather because it had something very particular to do with the Titan Atlas. We know from ancient references to the poem and from a possible surviving fragment of it recovered from the rubbish dump of the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt that it was about the mythological daughters of Atlas. There is no evidence to indicate that Hellanikos of Lesbos’s poem ever said anything at all about the lost city described by Plato. Anyone who claims that the poem was about the lost city of Atlantis has not done their research.

ABOVE: Farnese Atlas, a second-century AD Roman marble sculpture of Atlas holding up the sky, which is represented in this sculpture as a sphere with representations of the constellations on it

Why Plato’s story cannot possibly be historically true

So far I have primarily been arguing that Plato’s story of Atlantis is not credible for literary and historical reasons, but there are also several quite compelling scientific reasons to believe that the story is fiction. Most notably, Plato’s description of Atlantis as a gigantic island located in the Atlantic Ocean just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar is incompatible with the modern scientific understanding of plate tectonics.

Let’s go back to Plato’s description of Atlantis’s size and location from the Timaios. In case you’ve forgotten, this is what he says, as translated by Benjamin Jowett:

“This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Herakles; the island was larger than Libya [i.e., Africa] and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Herakles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.”

The “Pillars of Herakles” is the name the ancient Greeks used for the Strait of Gibraltar, which lies between the continents of Europe and Africa in the western Mediterranean. According to Plato, then, the city of Atlantis was located on an enormous island located just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar that was bigger than the known parts of Africa and Asia combined.

In Plato’s time, there was no scientific evidence to disprove this story. Now, however, we know, thanks to the theory of continental drift, which was first proposed in 1915 by the German meteorologist Alfred Wegner and has since been supported by mountains of geological evidence, that all the continents were once joined together in a massive supercontinent known as Pangaea.

In this supercontinent, the coasts of Europe and Africa were joined with the coasts of North and South America. Later, Pangaea broke apart and the continents separated. If you look at a map, you will find that the coasts of Europe and Africa line up with the coasts of North and South America almost perfectly, meaning there is not enough space for there to have ever been a massive lost continent in the Atlantic like the one Plato describes.

ABOVE: Animation from Wikimedia Commons illustrating the breakup of Pangaea

Plato also claims that the Strait of Gibraltar is impassable because there is a huge mud shoal just beyond it from where Atlantis sank into the ocean. This is verifiably untrue. The mud shoal Plato describes simply does not exist. Modern ships much bigger than any ships that existed in Plato’s time pass through the Strait of Gibraltar easily every day.

Indeed, scientists have mapped the floor of the ocean in the area just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar and they have found absolutely no geological or archaeological evidence of any kind to support the claim that there was once an enormous island or continent located in this area.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of modern ships easily passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. The mud shoal that Plato claims prevents ships from passing simply does not exist and never has.

Atlantis in the Americas?

Some defenders of Atlantis may try to argue that Plato could have been talking about the Americas, but this is not plausible, since the Americas do not fit Plato’s description of Atlantis in any way. For one thing, Plato claims that Atlantis was located just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar—so close to the strait that the sea beyond the strait might be considered merely a “harbor.”

The Americas, on the other hand, are located far on the opposite end of a vast ocean. According to Google, the distance from Gibraltar to Virginia is roughly 6,349 kilometers. It takes an outrageous stretch of the definition of the word “harbor” to apply it to 6,349 kilometers of open ocean.

Moreover, in the Kritias, Plato claims that Atlantis was shaped like a circle and he describes its capital city as being composed of a ring of three circular islands in the middle of the Atlantic continent, with one island in the middle with a harbor around it, another island around that harbor, then a harbor around that island, then another island around that harbor, surrounded by another harbor, which is surrounded by the continent itself with a canal leading out to the ocean beyond.

None of this sounds at all like a description of the Americas.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons of the capital of Atlantis, as it is described by Plato in the Kritias

A different Atlantis?

There is no reasonable doubt about the fact that Atlantis as described by Plato could not have possibly existed. Nonetheless, some people are so desperate to claim that Atlantis might have existed in some form that they have tried to argue that maybe Plato’s account was muddled and he was really talking about something other than what it sounds like he was talking about.

One of the most popular claims is that maybe, when he wrote his story about Atlantis, Plato was really thinking of the Minoan civilization, which flourished in the Aegean Islands from around 2700 BC until around 1100 BC and was at its height during the Neopalatial Period, which lasted from around 1750 BC to around 1490 BC or thereabouts.

The Minoan civilization seems to have been primarily centered on the island of Krete, the largest of all the Aegean Islands, where modern archaeologists have uncovered the ruins of sprawling building complexes. Archaeologists typically refer to these complexes as “palaces,” but this term is somewhat misleading, since modern people generally associate it with royal residences and it is not known whether there was ever actually a monarch who lived in any of these so-called “palaces.” All we can say about them is that they seem to have served some sort of administrative function.

These so-called “palaces” usually include architectural features such as large central courts, multiple stories, exterior and interior staircases, storage areas, large columns, lightwells, and elaborate frescoes. They are clearly evidence that a thriving and advanced civilization existed on the island during the Bronze Age, a thousand years before Plato’s time.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the entrance to the Minoan “palace” at Phaistos on the island of Krete

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruins of the Minoan “palace” at Phaistos, showing a portion of the so-called “theatral area”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of more ruins at Phaistos on Krete

The idea that the Minoan civilization was Atlantis was first proposed in 1909 by a young classical scholar named K. T. Frost in a letter to The Times, a London newspaper. In 1939, the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos gave this theory a massive boost when he published his conclusions from his excavations of the Minoan settlement at Amnisos on the northern coast of the island of Krete.

Marinatos concluded that the Minoan civilization had been cataclysmically destroyed by the devastating eruption of the tiny, volcanic island of Thera, located in the Kyklades just north of Krete. This eruption is believed to have occurred sometime between roughly 1642 and roughly 1540 BC, roughly 1,200 years or so before Plato wrote his dialogues Timaios and Kritias.

Marinatos expanded on his theory over the subsequent decades. In 1967, he excavated the Minoan settlement at the site of Akrotiri on the island of Thera itself, which was remarkably well-preserved due to the volcanic eruption, making it essentially the Minoan equivalent of Pompeii.

Two years later, a massive number of publications issued forth arguing that Thera was none other than the lost city of Atlantis itself. These publications asserted all kinds of parallels between Thera and Atlantis, ranging from the smallest to the very largest scale.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ongoing archaeological excavation of the Minoan settlement on Thera at the site of Akrotini

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of more ruins at Akrotiri

ABOVE: Photograph of a remarkably well-preserved Minoan fresco of ships in a harbor from the site of Akrotiri on Thera

ABOVE: Photograph of another remarkably well-preserved Minoan fresco from Akrotiri, Thera, showing women gathering saffron

Startling differences between Thera and Plato’s Atlantis

Unfortunately, as popular as this notion that Thera was the “real” Atlantis has become, it is highly improbable that Plato’s story of Atlantis was really inspired by the destruction of Thera in any significant way. For one thing, virtually all of the parallels suggested by Marinatos and his successors between Thera and Atlantis are weak, do not hold up to scrutiny, or have been disproven by later scholarship.

Perhaps the most devastating news for Marinatos’s “Minoans-as-Atlantis” hypothesis is the fact, which has been known since the 1980s, that his central contention that the Thera eruption spelled the end for the Minoan civilization as a whole has been proven dead wrong. In other words, the grandiose disaster that Marinatos thought had utterly destroyed the Minoans really did no such thing.

Sure, the eruption destroyed the Minoan settlement on Thera, but, as you may recall, the main centers of the Minoan civilization were all on the island of Krete—not Thera. Although the Minoan palatial centers on Krete do seem to have been damaged by the Thera eruption, they were almost immediately rebuilt and they continued to thrive for roughly another century or so afterwards before the Minoans really hit their decline.

This decline was slow and gradual, not at all like the cataclysmic downfall Marinatos and his devotees envisioned. Ultimately, the Minoan “palaces” were eventually taken over by Mycenaeans from the Greek mainland. The Thera eruption did not spell the end of Minoan power any more than hurricane Katrina spelled the end of the power of the United States. The eruption was undeniably devastating, but the Minoans survived.

Furthermore, there are also obvious, insurmountable differences between Plato’s Atlantis and the Minoan settlement on Thera that vastly overwhelm whatever vague, minor similarities we might see between them.

For instance, as you may recall from earlier, Plato describes Atlantis as a massive continent the size of what was then known of Africa and Asia combined located in the Atlantic Ocean just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. Thera, on the other hand, is only seventy-three square kilometers (twenty-eight square miles) in total land area and it is located in the Kykladic island group in the southern Aegean Sea.

Likewise, as I mentioned above, Plato says that the destruction of Atlantis happened around nine thousand years before his own time. The eruption of the Thera volcano, on the other hand, happened sometime between roughly 1642 and roughly 1540 BC—only around 1,200 years before Plato’s time.

Finally, the Minoan settlement on Thera wasn’t even destroyed in the same manner that Plato says Atlantis was destroyed in. Plato says that the entire island of Atlantis sank into the ocean, leaving only a mud shoal behind, but the Minoan settlement on Thera was actually destroyed by a volcanic eruption and most of the island is still above water, including most of the Akrotiri settlement.

ABOVE: Satellite photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Greek island of Thera as it appears today

Dallying around the difficulties

Marinatos tried to dally around the chronology issue by claiming that “9,000 years” was just an exaggeration by the Egyptian priests. The problem is that when the place someone is claiming as the “real” inspiration for the story of Atlantis bears none of the essential features of Atlantis as described by Plato and that person has to make up elaborate explanations to make it fit, they are no longer tailoring their hypothesis to the evidence, but rather the evidence to their hypothesis. That is not how history is supposed to work.

As a simple matter of fact, Thera and Atlantis have very little at all in common. They have so little in common that there is no reason to suppose that Thera inspired the story of Atlantis—unless, of course, we resort to special pleading.

Finally, Plato certainly knew what Thera was, where it was, and what the island was like in his own time. Indeed, the Athenians of Plato’s time even had some vague memories of Minoan civilization itself. The Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BC) gives what appears to be an account of the Minoan civilization and its colonization of the Kyklades in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.4. Here is what he writes, as translated by Richard Crawley:

“And the first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Kyklades, into most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Karians and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.

There is almost no realistic possibility that Plato could have heard a story that was genuinely about the tiny island of Thera, only around two hundred kilometers away from the Greek mainland, and somehow thought it was about a massive continent in the Atlantic Ocean. That would be like me hearing about Angel Mounds, a Mississippian town located near Evansville, Indiana, and somehow mistaking it for a massive nation-state in the midst of the Brazilian rainforest.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a plaster cast of a Roman-era copy of an early fourth-century BC Greek bust of the historian Thoukydides

Where Plato really got the story from

The most parsimonious conclusion based on all the available evidence is that Plato made the whole story of Atlantis up as an allegory about the hubris of nations, drawing influence from various events and happenings from within his own lifetime and from recent history. We can actually trace some of the specific events that Plato almost certainly drew inspiration from when he was writing the story of Atlantis.

One aspect of Plato’s account that Atlantis supporters often overlook is that it is more about Athens than it is about Atlantis. Athens, not Atlantis, is the “ideal state” in Plato’s story. As far as Plato is concerned, Atlantis is only relevant because it was a mighty, highly sophisticated non-Greek empire and Athens played a crucial role in repulsing its military advances.

In this, Plato was clearly drawing inspiration from the Greco-Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC. Just like Atlantis in Plato’s story, the Achaemenid Persian Empire was a mighty, highly sophisticated non-Greek empire. In 480 BC, the Achaemenid šāhanšāh Xerxes I led a massive army into Greece, seeking to conquer it, but the Persian forces were repulsed by a coalition of Greek city-states, of which Athens was arguably the most prominent.

The Athenians thereafter set about “liberating” the Greek city-states of Asia Minor from Achaemenid rule. In 478 BC, they established the Delian League, an alliance of Greek city-states dedicated to preventing the Persians from ever invading again and seeking vengeance against the Persians for having invaded in the first place.

The conclusion that the Achaemenid Empire’s defeat had come a result of its own hubris was axiomatic in the Greek world during Plato’s time. The famed Athenian tragedian Aischylos (lived c. 523 – c. 455 BC) wrote a tragedy about the defeat of Xerxes titled The Persians. In it, the ghost of Xerxes’s father, the Achaemenid king Darius, gives a speech predicting the causes of his son’s defeat. He declares, as translated by James Romm:

“For those who went to Greece were not ashamed
to rob the shrines of the gods and burn their temples.
Altars have been destroyed, and sacred buildings
have been wrenched up and toppled from their bases.
And so the doers of wrong shall suffer wrongs
no less than they inflict. More are to come.
The bricks that build our doom are still being laid.
[…]
For pride will flower and bear the fruit of folly,
from which one reaps a much-bemoanèd harvest.
Look on the punishments you see before you,
remember Athens, remember Greece. Let no one
allow his thoughts to pass his present fortune,
or, lusting for others’ wealth, let slip his own.
For Zeus, the grim chastiser, will be at hand,
with recompense for over-boastful minds.”

With his Atlantis story, Plato essentially just takes the story of the Greco-Persian Wars, transplants it back in time nine thousand years, and replaces the Achaemenid Empire with the Atlantean Empire. He does all of this deliberately. He’s not confused or relying on unreliable reports; he is writing deliberate fiction, based very loosely on recent history, with the intention to convey a philosophical message.

ABOVE: Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 480 BC depicting a Greek hoplite slaying a Persian soldier

We can detect other significant influences on Plato’s story aside from just the Greco-Persian Wars, however. For instance, in the Kritias, Plato gives a lengthy description of the government and political structure of Atlantis. According to classical scholar Rodney Castleden, the government Plato describes resembles that of the Greek city-state of Syracuse in Sicily, which Plato is known to have visited.

Plato’s experience in Syracuse wasn’t exactly positive. At least according to Diogenes Laërtios, the tyrant Dion actually sold Plato into slavery and he only managed to escape from a lifetime of servitude because the Cyrenaic philosopher Annikeris bought him at the price of twenty minae and set him free. This story may not necessarily be true, but it does at least reflect a historical reality that Plato and the tyrant of Syracuse didn’t get along. It therefore makes sense that Plato portrays Atlantis with the government of Syracuse as a malevolent aggressor.

Finally, Plato’s description of Atlantis’s final, catastrophic destruction may have been inspired, at least indirectly, by the destruction of the Greek city of Helike in 373 BC by an earthquake and tsunami, an event which occurred within Plato’s lifetime and of which he was almost certainly aware. At the very least, this catastrophic event could have implanted in Plato’s mind the idea that there may have been similar catastrophic floods and natural disasters in the distant past.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the excavated portion of the ruins of the ancient Greek city of Helike, which was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 373 BC, perhaps providing part of Plato’s inspiration for his fictional story of Atlantis

Plato’s real message

Perhaps the thing that annoys me the most about all these attempts to identify Atlantis with various real-world locations is that it actually distracts from the whole philosophical point Plato was trying to make in the first place. One of Plato’s most famous doctrines is the theory of forms. Plato held that everything in the world as we see it is a reflection of an ideal, eternal, incorporeal form or idea. Thus, for him, everything—even reality itself—was, in some sense, symbolic.

If you want to know what the “real” Atlantis was, Atlantis symbolically represents every society that has ever destroyed itself through its own hubris, or, more generally, every culture that has ever perished from the earth. It is an allegory representing every empire, every nation, every tribe that has ever been but no longer is.

In this way, Atlantis does indeed represent the civilization of the Minoans, but it also represents classical Athens, the empire of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and all the other dozens upon dozens of empires whose laws and statutes are no longer enforced, whose kings’ bodies have returned to the dust from whence they came, and whose treasured idols lie forgotten and buried in the earth like sacrifices to the chthonic gods of old.

And one day, when our government institutions have all been dissolved, when our great nation-states of today are at best merely a vague and distant memory, when our cities and our monuments lie in ruins, when the world is so utterly different from the one we live in now that we would not even recognize it, in that far-off, distant time, that aion ton aionion, Atlantis will represent us too.