Atlantis

• 1. Introduction

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  Atlantis begins with a warning. Plato invented the island in the fourth century BC not as a travel destination but as a philosophical trap, a story designed to expose the dangers of naval ambition and political hubris. He introduced it in Timaeus, written in 360 BC, in the mouth of a character named Critias who claims the tale came from the Athenian statesman Solon, who had heard it from Egyptian priests during a visit between 590 and 580 BC. The passage Critias delivers is striking: a mighty host advancing from the Atlantic Ocean, conquering Europe and Asia, stopped only by a fictionalized Athens that fought alone after its allies fell away. Then, in a single day and night, warlike men sank into the earth and the island disappeared into the sea.

  For most of the two and a half millennia since Plato wrote those words, readers have been arguing about what they actually mean. Was Atlantis a cautionary fiction, a garbled memory of a real catastrophe, or something invented wholesale? The answer mainstream scholars now give is clear: Plato made it up. But the question of why he made it up, what he borrowed to do so, and why the story refused to stay fictional turns out to be one of the stranger threads in Western intellectual history. From Renaissance utopians to nineteenth-century racial theorists to Nazi party ideologists, Atlantis became a mirror in which each era saw exactly what it wanted to find.

• 2. Plato's Original Design

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  Critias, speaking in the dialogues, claims that 9,000 years before his own lifetime a great war divided the world. The Atlanteans had conquered the parts of Libya within the Pillars of Hercules as far as Egypt, and the European continent as far as Tyrrhenia. Athens stood against them alone and won. Plato set this up as a deliberate contrast with the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the great land-based power ruling the east in his own day. By making Atlantis a naval empire from the west, he created a symmetrical moral fable: Athens, embodying his ideal state from the Republic, triumphs over a militarized sea power that has lost divine favor.

  The physical description of the island in Critias is elaborate and precise in the way allegories often are. Poseidon fell in love with a mortal woman named Cleito, daughter of Evenor and Leucippe, and had five pairs of male twins with her. The eldest, Atlas, became king of the island and gave his name to the Atlantic Ocean. The island itself featured a central mountain enclosed by three circular moats of increasing width, with bridges and tunnels carved through the rock, walls covered in brass, tin, and the precious metal orichalcum. The plain to the south was described as extending roughly 555 kilometers in one direction and 370 kilometers inland. These measurements are Plato's, and they are specific enough to feel like documentation. That specificity is part of the literary technique: Aristotle, who was Plato's student, believed his teacher had invented the island precisely to teach philosophy, and then sunk it because he was done with it.

  The character Critias says that Solon had intended to turn the story into an epic poem that would have surpassed the works of Hesiod and Homer. He never finished it. Modern classicists deny that this poem ever existed or that any oral tradition underlies the Atlantis account, and consider Plato the sole inventor of the story in the form we know it.

• 3. Ancient Readers Divided

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  Crantor, a student of Plato's student Xenocrates and the first known commentator on the Timaeus, is cited often as a writer who believed the story was historical fact. His commentary is lost, but the Neoplatonist Proclus, writing in the fifth century AD, quotes from it in ways that have generated centuries of debate. One passage suggests Crantor either visited Egypt himself or learned from others who had, and that Egyptian priests confirmed the story through hieroglyphs inscribed on pillars. But the key pronoun in the passage is ambiguous. Scholars Alan Cameron and others argue that the sentence does not say what later interpreters claimed, and that Proclus was actually treating Crantor's historical reading as one of two unacceptable extremes.

  Strabo and Posidonius were among the ancient historians who leaned toward believing in Atlantis. Diodorus Siculus located the Atlanteans in North Africa and described them as having gone to war with the Amazons. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus, drawing on a first-century BC writer named Timagenes, recorded that Druids of Gaul claimed part of their population had migrated from distant islands. Some later writers read this as a reference to Atlantis refugees, but Ammianus's actual text says the immigrants came from the north, from Britain, the Netherlands, or Germany, not from any Atlantic location to the southwest.

  Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, writing in the early first century, cited Atlantis in his On the Eternity of the World. The theologian Tertullian believed Atlantis was once real. The sixth-century writer Cosmas Indicopleustes used Plato's island to support his argument that the world was flat and surrounded by water. These early Christian responses were mixed: some writers treated Atlantis as a pagan fable, while others tried to absorb it into Biblical geography, linking the island's destruction to Noah's flood.

• 4. Renaissance Reinvention

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  Francisco Lopez de Gomara was the first to state formally that Plato had been describing America. Francis Bacon agreed, as did Alexander von Humboldt. In 1663, Janus Joannes Bircherod put it as a Latin phrase: orbe novo non-novo, the New World is not new. The Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius, believed to be the first person to imagine continental drift, wrote in the 1596 edition of his Thesaurus Geographicus that the island of Gadir or Gades might be the remaining portion of Atlantis, and that the matching outlines of Europe, Africa, and America showed where the rupture had occurred.

  Sir Thomas More coined the word "utopia" from the Greek for "no place" in his sixteenth-century fiction of that name. Inspired by Plato's Atlantis alongside travelers' accounts of the Americas, More described an imaginary land in the New World. Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, written around 1623, placed an ideal society off the western coast of America, and included a character who gives a history of Atlantis closely resembling Plato's version. By this point, some readers had begun believing that Mayan and Aztec ruins might be the physical remains of the lost continent.

  This connection between Atlantis and indigenous American civilizations carried a dark charge. European scholars who proposed the link typically assumed that the indigenous people were incapable of building what the ruins showed, and that a racially superior lost civilization must have been responsible. The French scholar Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, renowned for his translations of Mayan texts including the sacred book Popol Vuh, eventually lost his academic credibility when he claimed the Maya had descended from Toltecs who were themselves survivors of a racially superior Atlantean civilization. His work, combined with the romantic illustrations of Jean Frederic Waldeck, created what one might describe as an authoritative fantasy that excited popular interest across two continents.

• 5. Donnelly and the Myth's Popularization

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  Ignatius L. Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in 1882, and the book changed the conversation. Donnelly argued that all known ancient civilizations were descended from Atlantis, which he saw as technologically sophisticated and culturally advanced beyond anything that had come after. He drew parallels between creation stories in the Old World and the New, and he located the Biblical Garden of Eden on the lost island. His title signaled his belief that Atlantis had been destroyed by the same Great Flood described in Genesis.

  Donnelly is credited as the father of the nineteenth-century Atlantis revival. He promoted what became a lasting alternative to academic history: the idea that myths contain hidden information accessible to anyone who approaches them with sufficiently ingenious interpretation. Augustus Le Plongeon, inspired by Donnelly's predecessor Brasseur de Bourbourg, traveled to Mesoamerica and performed some of the first excavations of famous Mayan ruins. He invented the kingdom of Mu saga, drawing romantic connections between himself and his wife Alice, Egyptian deities Osiris and Isis, and Heinrich Schliemann, who had recently excavated Troy from Homer's poetry.

  Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophists, took up Donnelly's interpretations in The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888. She claimed the book was originally dictated in Atlantis. In her account, the Atlanteans were the fourth root race in a scheme of racial evolution, succeeded by the fifth, which she called the Aryan race, identified with modern humanity. She placed the peak of Atlantean civilization between one million and 900,000 years ago, with its destruction coming through internal warfare fueled by dangerous psychic powers. Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools, and Annie Besant both elaborated on this framework.

• 6. Atlantis and Nazi Ideology

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  Blavatsky had drawn on the work of the eighteenth-century astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who had reshaped the Atlantis myth around a mythical northern continent called Hyperborea, derived from Greek myths about a godlike race living in northern Europe. Dan Edelstein has argued that her reshaping of this theory in The Secret Doctrine provided the Nazis with a mythological precedent for their racial ideology. The contradiction is notable: Blavatsky's own writings described the Atlanteans as olive-skinned peoples with Mongoloid traits who were the ancestors of modern Native Americans, Mongolians, and Malayans, not a Nordic race.

  The idea that Atlanteans were Hyperborean Nordic supermen from the Northern Atlantic became popular in the German ariosophic movement around 1900, propagated by Guido von List and others. It gave its name to the Thule Gesellschaft, an antisemitic Munich lodge that preceded the German Nazi Party. By 1928, writers in this tradition were speaking of a Nordic-Atlantean or Aryan-Nordic master race that had spread from Atlantis across the Northern Hemisphere. Party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg incorporated this into The Myth of the Twentieth Century in 1930, and SS-leader Heinrich Himmler made it part of official Nazi doctrine. Julius Evola in 1934 and Miguel Serrano in 1978 continued the tradition under the heading of Esoteric Nazism.

  In deliberate counterpoint, Viktor Ullmann and the poet Petr Kien wrote the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis, The Emperor of Atlantis, in 1943 while both were inmates at the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. The Nazis refused to allow it to be performed, recognizing the Emperor of Atlantis as a satirical figure for Hitler. Both Ullmann and Kien were murdered in Auschwitz. The manuscript survived and received its first performance in Amsterdam in 1975.

• 7. Where Scholars Look

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  Since Donnelly's time, dozens of specific locations have been proposed for Atlantis, to the point where the name has become detached from Plato's original description. Proposals range across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, northern Europe, the Caribbean, Antarctica, and Indonesia. Most historically proposed sites lie in or near the Mediterranean: islands such as Sardinia, Crete, Santorini, Sicily, Cyprus, and Malta; land-based cities including Troy, Tartessos, and Tantalis in the province of Manisa, Turkey; and northwestern Africa, including the Richat Structure in Mauritania.

  The Thera eruption, dated to the seventeenth or sixteenth century BC, caused a large tsunami that some researchers believe devastated the Minoan civilization on Crete, and scholars have suggested this catastrophe may have provided the kernel of Plato's story. In 2011, a team led by Professor Richard Freund from the University of Hartford, working on a documentary for the National Geographic Channel, claimed to have found possible evidence of Atlantis in the marshlands of the Donana National Park in southwestern Andalusia. Spanish scientists dismissed the claim; anthropologist Juan Villarias-Robles, working with the Spanish National Research Council, described Freund's conclusions as fanciful and said Freund had been a newcomer to the project pursuing his own controversial theory about King Solomon's search for ivory and gold in Tartessos.

  Swedish physiographist Ulf Erlingsson proposed in 2004 that the description of Atlantis matches Ireland's geography with a 99.8 percent probability, while also stating that he does not believe Atlantis ever existed. The director of the National Museum of Ireland noted there was no archaeological evidence supporting the hypothesis. As continental drift became widely accepted during the 1960s, and plate tectonics demonstrated that a continent could not have sunk in the geologically recent past, most lost-continent theories lost scholarly credibility. Julia Annas, Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, has argued that Plato was using the standard fictional device of stressing historicity as a signal that what follows is invented, and that readers who search the seabed have missed the point entirely.

• 8. Atlantis in Art and Literature

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  Plato's allegory generated a long tradition of utopian and dystopian fiction that reached well beyond academic debate. Delarivier Manley's The New Atalantis in 1709 used a fictional Mediterranean island to satirize the hypocrisy of Whig Party politicians, making sexual violence a metaphor for political exploitation. David Maclean Parry's The Scarlet Empire in 1906 set its satire of Socialism in a sunken Atlantis. The Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov's The Fall of Atlantis in 1912 imagined a future rationalist dystopia that had discovered immortality and lost touch with the past; when its high priest murders a slave girl in an act of irrational passion, a second flood follows.

  Catalan author Jacint Verdaguer retold the myth in L'Atlantida in 1877, in which Hercules travels east across the Atlantic after Atlantis sinks to found the city of Barcelona, and a shipwrecked mariner hearing the tale is inspired to sail west in his tracks. That mariner is Christopher Columbus. The Spanish composer Manuel de Falla worked on a dramatic cantata based on Verdaguer's poem during the last twenty years of his life. The opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis aside, the name has been attached to symphonies by Janis Ivanovs, whose Symphony 4 was written in 1941, Richard Nanes, and Vaclav Buzek. Alan Hovhaness composed his Fanfare for the New Atlantis, designated Op. 281, in 1975.

  In painting, Léon Bakst's Ancient Terror of 1908 is described as the most dramatic visual depiction of the catastrophe, though it does not name Atlantis directly. Vyacheslav Ivanov identified it as an Atlantis scene in a public lecture given in 1909. The sculptor Einar Jonsson completed The King of Atlantis between 1919 and 1922; it now stands in the garden of his museum in Reykjavik. Robert Smithson's Hypothetical Continent, a photographic project created in Loveladies, New Jersey, in 1969 and later recreated as a broken-glass gallery installation, includes a conceptual drawing placing the lost continent off the coast of Africa at the straits into the Mediterranean, where Plato's own account placed it.